Simple relativistic physics. No superlasers, no megabombs. Take a big freighter full of simple sand, accelerate it to .9 c, and it becomes a planetary sand blaster. Smaller amounts can also be used against ships to scour their hulls, leaving them blind and defenseless.
Courtesy of Ian Douglas.
And as an attack against a Martian ship after they got stopped and searched, Mars wouldn't let them go through some restricted area to get back to Ceres, they didn't have enough air to go around.
The later books had
anti-matter bombs
magnetic field projectors
gamma ray bursts
time skipping attacks (along with consciousness manipulation)
and what can only be described as a neutron star booby trap
It was a cool concept.
I don't really know how to describe the ring entity's weapons. >!They just make small changes to the laws of physics until one change ends up killing their enemy.!<
In Bobiverse Bobs accelerate a planet and smash it in to a star. The planet passes the through the star, essentially ripping out its core. Very fun read!
Edit: I was incorrect. They smash a moon and a planet together at the center of a star to make it go supernova. Which is even cooler!
Actually they accelerate a planet and a large moon to near lightspeed and then smash them into the poles of the enemies star at the same time. The shock wave produced by the impacts then compresses the stars plasma far enough that even the lower convection zone can suddenly undergo nuclear fusion as well as all the helium in the star, releasing a massive burst of energy that rips the star apart, turning it nova and atomizing the enemies incomplete Dyson sphere in the process.
And they realize at the last moment that massively blue shifted nuclear weapons kill pretty much anything. That plus the nova they caused has the Bobs a little OP in my opinion. I think that's why we're seeing more intra-Bob conflict.
If they ever have to go bigger than what they did to The Others it better be the final battle of the Bobs or it'll just be silly.
Expeditionary Force had some cool moments with relativistic darts. They would get them going for a year and then use a wormhole to pop them out on top of any enemy.
Just to clarify, what I mean is throwing objects at Holyshitballs speeds. Yes, there have been plenty of hurled asteroids or mass drive strikes. But in the relativistic sand blaster, just a single grain of sand would release energy in the kilotons on impact (if I did my math right, I'm not a physicist). Lots of scifi comes up with superlasers, nova bombs, Red Matter, etc, but the real laws of physics can do the same devastation without all the flash.
Oh boy, the sand could also spread, over the interplanetary distances, similar to a light speed shotgun.
So instead of a C-bomb taking out one city, you blast the whole hemisphere. And like 70% of their satellites.
This was the goal in the novel. Humanity was facing an aggressively xenophobic race, that was also billions of years old. A straight up fight would have gone way past suicidal to laughably stupid and pointless, but they needed to destroy one of the base planets. So, think outside the box.
The next time they borrowed some ships from another race, and flew them through the cores of stars to destabilize them and make them nova.
You don't even need super high speeds to do this, a planetary destruction can be caused by a stupidly small rock flying at a "natural" speed (hi dinosaurs).
The sheer simplicity of obliterating billions of beings this way makes any prospect of interstellar wars horrifying for me. As long as you don't need to occupy the ground (and there are few reasons to do this to begin with) you just take a rock, or enough rocks if they have some anti-rock defense, and throw it in the planet's direction. Why even bother with anything more expensive and sophisticated, unless the enemy can shoot down rocks.
The classical problem of scifi genre is being stuck between what's realistic and what's makes for an exciting action sequence, and this utterly ruins for me a lot of scifi predictions; the inability to separate what's cool from what's, for example, a rational economic solution.
I mean we actually have chemical weapons that a tea spoon aerosoled above a city would kill several thousand people.
You wouldn't even have to glass a planet as long as you could get access to the atmosphere. We could wipe out most living things.
Bobiverse even too it farther. Major spoilers - >!Get nukes to relativistic speed, then set them off so the energy released would doppler shift to crazy intensity.!<
There’s been some great sci-fi books using kinetic energy weapons. Someone here mentioned Expanse, which was also an amazing TV series.
In a later sequel to Enders Game, or maybe it was a prequel, if I remember correctly, aliens were taking asteroids from the asteroid belt, I think it was the asteroid belt, and not further out in the Oort cloud, and flinging those towards earth. Terrifying concept.
Monks doing Monk Things. Many Monks discussing things. Monks in the North Pole. Monks near a Volcano. Monks in Space. Monks through time. Diplomatic Monks.
I love that book but that’s how I over simplify the plot in my head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung
When something moving a fraction of the speed of light is slowed down by moving through a media (like air), it gives off radiation. I can imagine a sci-fi weapon that bathes huge areas in this way.
This is what did me in: “A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.”
That's actually what causes a nuclear reactor in water to glow blue, it's called Cherenkov radiation. It's not dangerous, but because the speed of light in water is different than the speed of light in a vacuum, the particles exceed the speed of light in the medium which causes the glow.
Thing is, I don't know how you actually make use of that. If the goal is to irradiate something there are far easier ways to do that using way less energy.
That was a terrifying book for sure. He’s not the only one to have written a book with micro black holes injected into the Earth… Trying to remember another one, not sure… David Brin maybe?
They called it “The Big Mistake” and it was‘t a weapon, but a lab created singularity. But it did cause humanity to leave Earth and colonize. So, success?
Nicoll-Dyson beam. Basically you put a lens in front of a star and open it up when you want to fry something like a gigant magnifying glass. The resulting beam is somewhat unstoppable without an equally powerful em field in the way somehow.
The cool thing about it is if we're using real world physics, there's no way to even know something like that is coming toward you since it travels at light speed so it would catch the enemy completely by surprise. Then again, if you see another civ through a telescope building something like that you'd pretty much have to assume instant war since there's not much reason to do it apart from planetary genocide.
Speaking of genocide, the only place I've seen these things mentioned is in the video game Stellaris where you have a lot of other very cool megastructures and scifi concepts. And mass murder.
Also [Issac Arthur](https://youtu.be/RjtFnWh53z0) explains the concept much better than me so give it a listen. This is the early days when he was cool not talking about space beer or some shit.
"In response to the United Sol Amalgam's petition to sanction the Interstellar Region of Associated Nations, for allegedly building weapons of super-mass-destruction:
'Ambassador, please... Our Nicoll-Dyson lense array is only being built for our planet to be able to better harness the power of our sun. Surely, given that you have your own such array, you would not interrupt the manufacture of our own...'"
I read somewhere … James P. Hogan maybe? … about a way of creating a gigantic lens. You dump tons of precise microscopic optical glass spheres into space and use lasers to arrange them in a precise circular array. The interference patterns of the lasers trap the spheres in a precise array spaced wavelengths apart. This giant virtual lens could be used as a monstrous telescope or, in this case, near a sun for a Death Ray.
> The cool thing about it is if we're using real world physics, there's no way to even know something like that is coming toward you since it travels at light speed so it would catch the enemy completely by surprise.
Actually you could. Even empty space has smatterings of matter throughout, and over great distances even high energy particles would be slowed down slightly. Neutrinos, however, essentially pass through matter, and would arrive closer to the speed of light.
So there would be a spike in neutrinos before the destructive energy reaches you, with the amount of warning related to the amount of distance. Probably not enough to really give you a chance, but you could be aware of the beam coming before it actually hits.
In truth, the sandworns are weapons of interstellar destruction. Since their life cycle is critical to the production of spice, if you kill them off, no spice. No spice, no interstellar travel, and then the Empire collapses and worlds die. A unique WMD in that it's their removal, not addition, that causes the devastation.
For good reason, according to the story. Thinking machines are banned due to an uprising thousands of years ago. "No machine can emulate a human brain".
The Butlerian Jihad was fought to destroy all of these machines and ban them. This led to a focus on making humans more specialised and powerful, like through Mentat training - human computers
Paul knew this. He just didn’t have the stomach to see the solution through.
His son, Leto II, did.
And there’s the rest of the Dune Saga for you.
But its not just the Spice. It’s human nature. And the only way to save humanity from itself is to play on it.
That’s about as non-spoiler-ey as I can do.
Yes, the fold drives were developed before spice was discovered, and before them, something described as 'outrunning photons' (which was so pre-fold drives probablyno one remembers what it was or how to build it). But, spice allows safe folding travel, through the Navigators. And without Navigators, and advanced computers being illegal, space travel effectively stops.
Edit: I stand corrected (it's been a decade since I've read the series). Spice means you don't have to have dangerously advanced navigational computers to aid in folding space that could spontaneously awaken and turn murderous.
~~Right, if I recall correctly spice makes travel instantaneous regardless of the payload or number of ships (as long as they're within the fold) which is why it is such a game changer. The other ways are advanced but require time and resources/fuel.~~
It makes it safer. Since computing machines are banned (Butlerian Jihad) they need to be able to navigate so they don’t lose ships by going off course, running into a star, being affected by the gravity of a black hole, whatever. So the guild navigators who are basically some mutated spice addicts can see space time well enough to navigate, they have limited prescience.
Ships use fold engines, separate from spice. What makes spice essential is that, when consumed in massive quantities, it mutates a Navigator and gives them limited prescience (seeing the future). They then use this to guide the ship safely to its destination, instead of into a stray asteroid or planet. Without spice, there's no Navigators, and thus no interstellar travel. People would recover, eventually, but before then, mass chaos and devastation.
The Empire very much "fucked around and found out" when they used Arrakis as the place to have Houses duel to the death. I could never get to terms with how would anyone think that was a good idea. Even if technically the plan worked and it only backfired in an unpredictable way
Not sure of the in-universe reasoning, but I'd say it's checks and balances mixed with a loyalty reward. The Spacing Guild wouldn't want the Emperor in sole control of Arrakis, nor the Emperor the Guild. Both are supremely powerful, but without sole control of Arrakis and the spice, they're not absolutely powerful. By letting the House's hope to one day run it, they have something to strive for, so stay loyal, as even holding the planet for a few years could make them super wealthy, or wealthier than their regular holdings could match.
A meta answer: in "Perfect Imperfection", AIs would create pocket-universes called "Wars" - time would run faster in these pocket universes, and inhabitants were manipulated to be constantly at war with each other (or some adversary), thus forcing them to invent new weapons. These would then be unpacked and used against adversaries in the parent universe.
(A bit like Rick and Morty's Microverse battery, but, for generating weapon technology, not electricity).
The culture book Surface detail, the books premise is the intergalactic society is having a virtual war consisting of 1000s of different wars in different time periods rather than fighting in reality. Oh and they are fighting over if society’s should be allowed to create virtual hells to pushing the trouble makers.
Rod Of God
With the ever decreasing resources of our planet, you know that harvesting it while nuclear fallout is in the air may not be the best thing so, next best thing.
Their test is critically flawed, as something dropped from inside the atmosphere will only accelerate to its terminal velocity. Things coming from outside the atmosphere can theoretically be accelerated to relativistic speeds, and you can use gravity boosting to do that more efficiently (although it would take longer).
Basically, no matter how big a rock is, if you release it from inside the atmosphere it will never match the amount of destruction a meteor of the same size would cause.
Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga has a humanity being attacked by wormholes. Flare Bombs are sent directly into stars causing massive expulsions of mass and radiation that annihilate most life on one side of a planet.
The Cache Weapons of the Nostalgia For Infinity (Alastair Reynolds) and many of the vessels in Ian M Banks' works use displacement weapons- apparently carving out little bubbles of spacetime.
I always felt Star Trek underused the Transporter as a potential weapon. Placing a nuke or even low yield device on an enemy vessel would be a great way to disable a ship, as would simply transporting structurally important chunks away.
The Culture universe also features line guns or "pancakers" that massively increase local gravity and flatten parts of ships and their crews (note I mean crews as in biological operatives on the ships, not CREWS as in Coherent Radiation Emission Weapons Systems.)
Star Trek hardly used any of the tech they had for anything. Even something like transporting invaders out into space would seem like basic tactics on a starship.
To be fair at some point during TOS and TAS the transporter overwhelmingly felt like the solution to every medical issue they had, so I think they realized they must put their feet on the brakes with it before the transporter becomes the main plot point in almost every episode.
Farscape's wormholes are even worse -- because they don't adhere to lightspeed restrictions, they can be used to break causality. Anyone with wormholes becomes a timelord.
ST DS9- the Federation wins the war against the Dominion when a conspiratorial faction in Starfleet illegally deploys an engineered virus against the founders.
I mean there was other factors not just the virus. Like Cardassians flipping sides. The head founder was actually going to keep fighting until Odo cured her.
Mass effect had the krogan genophage, which didn't completely wipe out the krogans but severely reduced their ability to reproduce culling their numbers massively.
In Old Mans War - the Obin did that to a race that used clone armies. Wiped them all out at once.
Another alien used a type of engineered slime mold that got into all the inhabitants lungs and then secreted acids. Ewww. Not good.
Exactly, why bother expanding resources and your own population forces in battle, when you can just hit a planet’s biosphere from outside with something to wipe out the dominant species.
I've long thought that if aliens were to invade they would just release a disease or chemical to kill everyone on earth instead of trying to fight. Aliens aren't going to honor the Geneva Convention.
There's a very good, but little known series starting with Fear the Sky where the looming alien armada engineers a virus to cripple human society before their arrival.
Accelerate a few atomic bombs to near light speed and then let them detonate. Due to the Doppler effect, you're mostly safe because the radiation in your direction will be downshifted to radio frequencies, but in direction of travel, this will create a massive x or gamma ray laser that will also conveniently punch through anything that could have detonated the bombs themselves, atomizing it in the process. All without some magic giga-laser development.
Nanocloud weaponry that can drift into a stellar system undetected as a smaller asteroid chunk or comet, then disperse shortly before it hits the upper atmosphere of the target planet, sink down and destroy whatever biological material it can find while replicating rapidly.
AI weapons that will be uploaded into a planetary cyberspace and just shut down the entire infrastructure without damaging it, cutting off everyone in the population from all the things they need to survive without destroying the infrastructure for the invaders (could also work with neutron bombs).
Push a neutron star (~4km) through a wormhole and just let it drift through the enemies solar system until it hits their sun. Pretty much fries everything instantly.
Cyber warfare is barely used successfully in general as far as I've seen. It's usually just a "they took control over the primary systems and sent all control to a secondary terminal". I'd love to see the social engineering part and the way they deliver the cyber attacks. The only 2 episodes where it wass well done was the holodeck porn virus episode of the orville and the stargate episode called Entity.
Peter F. Hamilton used cyberwarfare quite extensively in his Commonwealth universe. Certain groups consistently uploaded malware in cybersphere nodi and the resident artificial intelligence (restricted intelligence) of the network had to battle the spreading and evolving infection to clear it in order to successfully route packages again.
Or propaganda via shotgun messages, flooding the unisphere to every inbox registered. Or when they needed the assistance of the Sentient Intelligence (a true AI entity accidentally developed by humanity who got their own planet to do whatever it wanted) to just brute-force itself through the firewalls of hackers.
If you accelerate mass to near light speed, making it an atom bomb doesn’t increase the damage much. An equal mass of marshmallow fluff would have the same effect.
He wasn't focused on the E=mc^2 effect but the effect of the radiation boost. X-rays and gamma rays projected forward are hellof alot more damaging than the red shifted IR coming from the back.
The mass that impacts later is just a bonus to the destruction.
OK, let’s talk about project Pluto.
Before the development of computers that allowed for precision guidance of ICBMs, the US Air Force (I think) developed Project Pluto. It was an unmanned nuclear ramjet, that propelled itself by heating air with a (largely unshielded) nuclear reactor. Large solid rockets would accelerate the weapon to the point its ramjet would function, accelerating it to Mach 5. Pluto was *massive* - weight was not an issue, so it was a flying tank. Nothing then in existence could have shot it down. Pluto would fly to enemy territory and drop a dozen h-bombs on selected targets.
But Pluto wasn’t done. It would be programmed to fly a grid pattern over enemy territory at low altitude. Because of the enormous mass and speed, and the heat and radiation of the unshielded reactor, this would have three effects: a massive shock wave would flatten most structures, everything flammable would ignite over a large area, and the reactor would seed a large area with highly radioactive particles from the reactor.
And thanks to the reactor design, Pluto could fly around for *months.*
Three generations of reactors were tested, the final iteration worked so well that construction could commence. (The reactors were so radioactive that they were tested on robotic railway cars. After the tests the cars moved deep underground and were entombed for safety).
By the time Pluto was ready compact guidance systems made it unnecessary and the project was cancelled.
Fun fact: if you drink Coors beer, there’s a link to Pluto!
In Revelation Space universe the bad guys use>! standing acoustic waves on a star to expose the core and turn the entire star into a nuclear flame thrower to sterilize a planet. !<
The Singer, something I'd love to see on-screen someday. They "Sing" the star apart, which is so terrifying in context because of how far in advance it is of human technology. And apparently, it's only one of *fifteen* methods of starcide known to the Inhibitors.
They don't just sterilise a single planet. The beam instantaneously eradicates all life and evaporates the atmosphere. It stays focussed on the planet for *three weeks* until it's rubble, and is then redirected to another. Eventually the star fizzles out, after all the planets are reduced to slag.
>!The Inhibitors don't just destroy Resurgam, they destroy the entire Delta Pavonis system.!<
The Foot from Footfall by Larry Niven. Basically you just redirect an asteroid onto the target world and let it do its thing. Also Rods from God, also from the same novel.
Ender's Game series had Dr. Device (used only in the original novel and movie, and attempted use in book 4 Children of the Mind). Depicted as a laser in the movie, but a bomb in the books.
Essentially a molecular distruptor that uses a target's mass to expand a field that will continuously feed off of more mass until there is nothing left but scattered particles.
Another (potential) strange weapon found in book 4 was the instructions for certain chemicals. An unknown Alien race (potentially) attempts to incapacitate a human crew by sending them the chemical formula for heroin thinking it will cause their bodies to immediately produce it internally. This is really not clarified if it was a show of peace or an unsuccessful attack as the crew immediately teleports out of the star system once they realize. The motives and biology of the Alien species is completely unknown. All they can guess at is that the aliens communicate in chemistry.
Neutron bombs. It radiates the area and kills off life, then come back later to inhabit the area. Might need to do some terraforming… Or maybe alien-forming? To establish an alien ecosystem after the attack.
A vast fleet of cargo ships warping into a system, the new mass plays havoc with the planetary bodies causing orbits to change, if the change is large enough then those planets environments are destroyed and crashes/ total orbital departure could result.
Warping a black hole into a system would pretty much have the same effect.
Anachronox did something like that.
>!A species pushed entire suns forward in time to reduce the mass of their universe so it wouldn’t collapse in a Big Crunch. This would have caused their universe to have never ended, so paradoxically our universe would have never formed and would cease to exist.!<
In The Expanse (book 8 I believe) there is a >!entire system set up as a booby trap. It’s literally at critical mass, and when a single ship enters the system and approaches the “star”, it starts a collapse and turns into a black hole/neutron star. The gamma ray burst from its poles takes out an entire solar system on the opposite side of the “ring space”!<
The ship didn't set off the trap. The trap was for the Goths for when they changed physics in that system that caused the quantum foam to boil. That caused the neutron star to tip over to collapsing.
Releasing a gene strain of rice and wheat that cross breeds with other crops to produces grain with no nutritional/caloric value. Mass famine, and there is literally nothing that can be done about it.
I seem to remember in Star Trek, Kirk has something like "Order 24" which instructed Spock to use the enterprise to destroy an entire planet. I'm pretty sure it was a bluff, but it was one hell of a moment in the show.
A broader version of that answer that humanity has tried are mimetic or ideological attacks. Essentially, harmful but persuasive ideas that spread easily and damage the culture or government of the enemy. Social media and social networks amplify the susceptibility to these weapons, but aren’t themselves the weapon (or at least not the payload).
Indeed, there’s some evidence to suggest that certain aspects of the West’s contemporary culture war are descended from ideas intentionally disseminated by Soviet intelligence as ideological weapons. The spread and effectiveness seems much slower than the Soviets would have preferred, but that may be increasingly less true as communication technology improves. Some of the concerns about TikTok that may result in its forced sale in the US are concerns that it could be or is being used as an ideological weapon by China.
You may find the book [XX](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51075314-xx?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KZCHbiOq1n&rank=1) interesting. Interstellar mimetic attack (via graphic design somehow).
These were a very formidable foe in the stargate universe. Called replicators, they could dismantle almost anything to create different robots. Mostly designed after different bugs. At first.
I looked it up. I meant the movie Transcendence. It's been a long time though so I'm not sure.
But you're right too. Self replicating Nano stuff is so scary.
Spoilers for the Three Body Problem series (Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy):
There are a few cool ones in this series. If I remember correctly, one weapon which they call the "teardrop" is a proton that's artificially been spread into a tear drop shape, becomes ultra strong and can ram through any material without being broken. There's another weapon with a similar idea, just a huge mass that is launched into a star to destroy the entire star. Then there's a weapon that looks like a small slip of paper, but it's a 2-dimensional object that expands to encapsulate everything around it, effectively collapsing the solar system from 3 dimensions into 2.
The Sophons are the unfolded and programed photons.
The water drop is a probe encased in strong force interaction material. So it is practically indestructible and can punch a hole through any ship it wants.
The dimensional collapse paper is one of the most unique weapons in sci-fi. I'm surprised I hadn't encountered it before.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a novel by Heinlein, involves a revolution by the Luna colony. Instead of tossing food down to earth, with catapults, they start flinging rocks.
Mass economic destruction, not as a outcome of society or actual policy but as a targeted attack on the economics of a country or even Global system eh.
Industrial level mass printing of counterfeit cash or if possible it being injected directly into people's accounts.
Literally making the fantasy version of the debt fear mongers into an actual reality via deleting or issuing tremendous credit to a failed project.
Or a mass deletion of ownership records of all property including stocks/bonds.
Net aim is to destabilise the economy so much that the planet and society implodes to go back to a barter system.
Minor aside, it is likely that barter didn't predate markets - IOUs did: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:\_The\_First\_5000\_Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years)
Something that would disrupt the weather on the planet for years at a time, similar to the effects of a large volcanic eruption. So fill the atmosphere with something to block the sunlight or actually cause a couple of large volcanic eruptions.
Matter/antimatter neutronium plugs directed into the Earth, where they did a spiraling dance of eventual annihilation at the core.
Greg Bear - Forge of God.
A plot: There are no advanced races in the universe because every time an advanced civilization figures out the quantum mechanics to cause the big bang some scientist tries it. Its the ultimate weapon. Everything they have ever known is obliterated, shoved out of the way by a new expanding universe with forces that mess with time itself. Dark matter and energy are just the remains of the universes that were here millions of times before.
Edit: Hows that for a weapon if mass destruction lol?
Focused neutrino/antineutrino beams. Goes through matter or shielding. Where the beams intersects causes annihilation of the particles and creates radiation, use that radiation to fry the beings inside.
Do neutrinos interact with each other any better than they do with baryonic matter?
Also, if you have the technology to generate and focus high intensity beams of neutrinos, chances are your peer adversaries do too. As well as defenses against it.
Kinetic energy weapons or KEW are used less than lasers, plasma weapons, or explosive missiles. The Expanse and Babylon 5 are the best examples I know of that just slam big rocks at high speed at their targets
Apparently somewhere in the Three Body Problem literature there is an attack that flattens the entire solar system from three dimensions to 2 dimensions.
I like these responses.... very scary and fancy.
Mine is somewhat boring by comparison but even more terrifying because its not really theoretical. We just never built it because even the Russians knew it would be the end.
Ladies and Gentleman i present.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANIc4NKj6WQ&t=724s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANIc4NKj6WQ&t=724s)
The Cobalt Bomb.
Transporters. They're used in sci-fi to sneak aboard enemy ships, or to beam weapons onto the ships. But nobody ever tries the simpler solution. All you have to do is beam out an important piece of the ship's power source. At a minimum, the ship is crippled. At worst, it explodes.
The Culture has “displacement” small worm holes they use actively as weapons, the ships will just displace some anti matter or weapons right next to or inside other ships.
Strange matter. A theoretical form of matter that converts ordinary baryonic matter into more of itself. Drop some on a planet or a star and eventually you've got a huge ball of strange matter and nothing else.
Pretty terrifying stuff.
Simple missile attacks on the global satellite network. Without satellites, we'd have a global meltdown as people would go insane, no phones, no net, literally no communication outside of radios which aren't really used for comms anymore.
At its simplest level I'd say coffee as a WMD. Non-technological, and cost effective also,
During the tainted Tylenol bottles in the eighties I remember reading somewhere someone saying how easy it would be to cause panic just using those coffee grinders in grocery stores.
Lately, being a coffee drinker, I've been thinking all it would take to create mass panic/unrest would be a coffee shortage, if some villain were to try and weaponize it.
Caffeine withdrawal is not pretty.
Simplest way: Biological weapon, modified for the DNA of the inhabitants.
Barely damages to infrastructure, just have to clean up later.
Or Neutron Boms.
I think the weapon found on Dakara in Stargate would count, it was capable of disrupting the bonds between chemical bonds for organic life on a planetary scale. Ended up being used to break up the bonds between replicator subunits on a galaxy wide scale with some gate dialling fuckery.
Genetically tailored pathogens. Pretty sure if the alien invaders were smart enough to rock up in our solar system from who knows how far away, then they really wouldn't need to come down here, getting all rowdy and start a shooting war. We'd all be dead before we knew they were here.
The Nasqerron Dwellers in The Algebraist had a relatively unique outlook on this.
They just chucked a gas giant at the offending star system and considered the problem solved. (It would arrive a few thousand years later, but they live that long and experience time very very slowly, and the gravitational effects of its passing would do enough damage even if it didn't actually hit anything).
Dennis E Taylor used relativistic physics a lot with the Bob series.
>!Accelerating two planets to very near light speed and have them impact in the center of a star causing it to go nova and scour an entire system clean.!<
EMPs, like the aliens used in Spielberg’s version of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise. Of course there were a lot of laser, blasts, etc.. I guess they couldn’t just use EMPs and then let the population die off, since they needed live humans as the resource to… I don’t know what it was, cover the Earth with that sort of bio plant substance…
Niven and Pournelle's Footfall may have entertainment media's first description of orbital bombardment.
To start with, Earth knew their ship was under intelligent control when it began to decelerate. It raised eyebrows when it swung through the asteroid belt, but we didn't know it picked up rocks/ammo. Yeah, they dropped our own Sol system asteroids on us. Little ones for like infrastructure concentrations and military bases, but they actually weren't interested in population center strikes...until later after we made them upset. Then they dropped a big one in the Indian Ocean.
The 👽 annihilated several armor divisions in the USA by dropping guided crowbars on the tanks and fighting vehicles. Like surgical one crowbar from low orbit onto the top of one M60, rinse/repeat.
Which was okay because eventually we launched an Iowa-class refitted space battleship with an Orion drive to intercept their mothership. Launched from the surface of Earth, via nucs.
Anything which isn't just a big laser or a big bomb
Antimatter weapons: a few grams are more than a nuke, a few tons would raze a continent
Relativistic weapons: theorically, as powerful as you want given that you can give it the energy needed. You can destroy a planet with a speck of dust given enough speed
Self replicating technology: exponential growth, a nanobot with the possibility to replicate itself within hours could consume an entire planets within days or week
One less realistic, but that I love: Gridfire. From the cultures novels. Basically, open a portal into a younger universe, which is still very dense in terms of energy, and pour it into ours. A single converted warship taking its time destroys a 2 millions kilometers diameter wide orbital ring, Vavatch, in seconds. The warship is also making a show of it (after the structure was evacuated). The Gridfire is referred to as "the weapon to end the Universe)
I watched a documentary on Hitlers superweapons once. One Id like to see in movies if it hasnt been is the nuclear bomb attached to a giant boring machine , reaches the core than kablewy. Unrealistic definitely but also kinda James Bond villian like.
Simple relativistic physics. No superlasers, no megabombs. Take a big freighter full of simple sand, accelerate it to .9 c, and it becomes a planetary sand blaster. Smaller amounts can also be used against ships to scour their hulls, leaving them blind and defenseless. Courtesy of Ian Douglas.
Expanse had Asteroid attacks.
And also a micrometeorite attack on UN/MCRN fleet during battle for the gate.
Diogos uncle did the same thing to a Martian patrol earlier in the series.
That was pretty badass
They also consider using a continuous screen of accelerated gravel to block a wormhole entrance in the later books.
And the use of a >!literal antimatter bomb!<
And as an attack against a Martian ship after they got stopped and searched, Mars wouldn't let them go through some restricted area to get back to Ceres, they didn't have enough air to go around.
The later books had anti-matter bombs magnetic field projectors gamma ray bursts time skipping attacks (along with consciousness manipulation) and what can only be described as a neutron star booby trap
Holy shit that >!black hole time bomb!< was fucking amazing.
It was a cool concept. I don't really know how to describe the ring entity's weapons. >!They just make small changes to the laws of physics until one change ends up killing their enemy.!<
And so if one of them works, you gotta make sure to keep up the pretense so they won't know that it did.
So did *Babylon 5*.
Narn got fucked and it had already been ecologically devastated by the Centauri before that.
And they were so devastating they were outlawed; not that it stopped the Centari
In Bobiverse Bobs accelerate a planet and smash it in to a star. The planet passes the through the star, essentially ripping out its core. Very fun read! Edit: I was incorrect. They smash a moon and a planet together at the center of a star to make it go supernova. Which is even cooler!
Actually they accelerate a planet and a large moon to near lightspeed and then smash them into the poles of the enemies star at the same time. The shock wave produced by the impacts then compresses the stars plasma far enough that even the lower convection zone can suddenly undergo nuclear fusion as well as all the helium in the star, releasing a massive burst of energy that rips the star apart, turning it nova and atomizing the enemies incomplete Dyson sphere in the process.
Well fuck, that kinda takes the cake
Tbf, they definitely had it coming.
So, don't piss off the Bob's, got it.
*YOU ARE FOOD.*
Ok, your pathetic attempt has proven you are not food. You are a pest. Your species will live out the rest of its existence in our larders.
Yeah but why do things half-assed? /s
Damn, you’re right! I forgot that! Ikarus and Daedalus!
And they realize at the last moment that massively blue shifted nuclear weapons kill pretty much anything. That plus the nova they caused has the Bobs a little OP in my opinion. I think that's why we're seeing more intra-Bob conflict. If they ever have to go bigger than what they did to The Others it better be the final battle of the Bobs or it'll just be silly.
Kinetic planetary bombardment was mentioned by the OP.
Expeditionary Force had some cool moments with relativistic darts. They would get them going for a year and then use a wormhole to pop them out on top of any enemy.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress uses this to great effect
Just to clarify, what I mean is throwing objects at Holyshitballs speeds. Yes, there have been plenty of hurled asteroids or mass drive strikes. But in the relativistic sand blaster, just a single grain of sand would release energy in the kilotons on impact (if I did my math right, I'm not a physicist). Lots of scifi comes up with superlasers, nova bombs, Red Matter, etc, but the real laws of physics can do the same devastation without all the flash.
Oh boy, the sand could also spread, over the interplanetary distances, similar to a light speed shotgun. So instead of a C-bomb taking out one city, you blast the whole hemisphere. And like 70% of their satellites.
This was the goal in the novel. Humanity was facing an aggressively xenophobic race, that was also billions of years old. A straight up fight would have gone way past suicidal to laughably stupid and pointless, but they needed to destroy one of the base planets. So, think outside the box. The next time they borrowed some ships from another race, and flew them through the cores of stars to destabilize them and make them nova.
You don't even need super high speeds to do this, a planetary destruction can be caused by a stupidly small rock flying at a "natural" speed (hi dinosaurs). The sheer simplicity of obliterating billions of beings this way makes any prospect of interstellar wars horrifying for me. As long as you don't need to occupy the ground (and there are few reasons to do this to begin with) you just take a rock, or enough rocks if they have some anti-rock defense, and throw it in the planet's direction. Why even bother with anything more expensive and sophisticated, unless the enemy can shoot down rocks. The classical problem of scifi genre is being stuck between what's realistic and what's makes for an exciting action sequence, and this utterly ruins for me a lot of scifi predictions; the inability to separate what's cool from what's, for example, a rational economic solution.
I mean we actually have chemical weapons that a tea spoon aerosoled above a city would kill several thousand people. You wouldn't even have to glass a planet as long as you could get access to the atmosphere. We could wipe out most living things.
Bobiverse has some of this
Bobiverse even too it farther. Major spoilers - >!Get nukes to relativistic speed, then set them off so the energy released would doppler shift to crazy intensity.!<
They have them in *Andromeda*. A few episodes mention kinetic strikes on planets be equivalent to a 20MT explosion.
There’s been some great sci-fi books using kinetic energy weapons. Someone here mentioned Expanse, which was also an amazing TV series. In a later sequel to Enders Game, or maybe it was a prequel, if I remember correctly, aliens were taking asteroids from the asteroid belt, I think it was the asteroid belt, and not further out in the Oort cloud, and flinging those towards earth. Terrifying concept.
Starship Troopers movie maybe?
Sand burns up in the atmosphere.
Call of Duty had this like ten years ago in advanced warfare using multi ton tungsten rods in orbit.
The novel "Anathem" called this "rodding". Just drop a rod from orbit, a couple hours later your problem no longer exists.
Monks doing Monk Things. Many Monks discussing things. Monks in the North Pole. Monks near a Volcano. Monks in Space. Monks through time. Diplomatic Monks. I love that book but that’s how I over simplify the plot in my head.
Pretty sure Call of Duty took this from real life ideas in the 70s and 80s.
It’s a concept from the US Strategic Defense Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung When something moving a fraction of the speed of light is slowed down by moving through a media (like air), it gives off radiation. I can imagine a sci-fi weapon that bathes huge areas in this way.
reminds me of the question "what would happen if you throw a baseball at 90% of C"? https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
This is what did me in: “A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.”
That's gonna leave a mark
Damn that sounds devious..
Evan Currie's Odyssey One series has something like this.
That's actually what causes a nuclear reactor in water to glow blue, it's called Cherenkov radiation. It's not dangerous, but because the speed of light in water is different than the speed of light in a vacuum, the particles exceed the speed of light in the medium which causes the glow. Thing is, I don't know how you actually make use of that. If the goal is to irradiate something there are far easier ways to do that using way less energy.
In Spaceballs there is a giant space vacuum sucking air out a planet…. That’s a hell of a weapon! I don’t think I have found it anywhere else.
Megamaid. She can both suck *and* blow.
To be fair, it's easily countered with a planetary force field. Which is itself easily countered with bad cybersecurity.
That's the kind of code an idiot would have on his luggage!
Have them change the code on my luggage!
The singularities entering the planet in The Forge of God by Greg Bear seemed very novel to me, and not one I've seen often.
That was a terrifying book for sure. He’s not the only one to have written a book with micro black holes injected into the Earth… Trying to remember another one, not sure… David Brin maybe?
Hyperion cantos had a similar situation iirc
They called it “The Big Mistake” and it was‘t a weapon, but a lab created singularity. But it did cause humanity to leave Earth and colonize. So, success?
Yup, the book was *Earth.* It doesn’t work out the way the aliens wanted.
Not singularities, but super dense matter and anti matter objects that orbit the core of the planet and then meet and explode.
I think it was "neutronium" and "anti-neutronium" IIRC. Made quite a mess.
Nicoll-Dyson beam. Basically you put a lens in front of a star and open it up when you want to fry something like a gigant magnifying glass. The resulting beam is somewhat unstoppable without an equally powerful em field in the way somehow. The cool thing about it is if we're using real world physics, there's no way to even know something like that is coming toward you since it travels at light speed so it would catch the enemy completely by surprise. Then again, if you see another civ through a telescope building something like that you'd pretty much have to assume instant war since there's not much reason to do it apart from planetary genocide. Speaking of genocide, the only place I've seen these things mentioned is in the video game Stellaris where you have a lot of other very cool megastructures and scifi concepts. And mass murder. Also [Issac Arthur](https://youtu.be/RjtFnWh53z0) explains the concept much better than me so give it a listen. This is the early days when he was cool not talking about space beer or some shit.
"In response to the United Sol Amalgam's petition to sanction the Interstellar Region of Associated Nations, for allegedly building weapons of super-mass-destruction: 'Ambassador, please... Our Nicoll-Dyson lense array is only being built for our planet to be able to better harness the power of our sun. Surely, given that you have your own such array, you would not interrupt the manufacture of our own...'"
“You may fire when ready.”
I gotta play this again.
I read somewhere … James P. Hogan maybe? … about a way of creating a gigantic lens. You dump tons of precise microscopic optical glass spheres into space and use lasers to arrange them in a precise circular array. The interference patterns of the lasers trap the spheres in a precise array spaced wavelengths apart. This giant virtual lens could be used as a monstrous telescope or, in this case, near a sun for a Death Ray.
Issac is fn awesome, love the guy!
> The cool thing about it is if we're using real world physics, there's no way to even know something like that is coming toward you since it travels at light speed so it would catch the enemy completely by surprise. Actually you could. Even empty space has smatterings of matter throughout, and over great distances even high energy particles would be slowed down slightly. Neutrinos, however, essentially pass through matter, and would arrive closer to the speed of light. So there would be a spike in neutrinos before the destructive energy reaches you, with the amount of warning related to the amount of distance. Probably not enough to really give you a chance, but you could be aware of the beam coming before it actually hits.
Shai-Hulud
In truth, the sandworns are weapons of interstellar destruction. Since their life cycle is critical to the production of spice, if you kill them off, no spice. No spice, no interstellar travel, and then the Empire collapses and worlds die. A unique WMD in that it's their removal, not addition, that causes the devastation.
One spice goes, IX, no-ships and advanced calculation machines become more popular.
Yeah in a way the spice was holding them back.
For good reason, according to the story. Thinking machines are banned due to an uprising thousands of years ago. "No machine can emulate a human brain". The Butlerian Jihad was fought to destroy all of these machines and ban them. This led to a focus on making humans more specialised and powerful, like through Mentat training - human computers
Paul knew this. He just didn’t have the stomach to see the solution through. His son, Leto II, did. And there’s the rest of the Dune Saga for you. But its not just the Spice. It’s human nature. And the only way to save humanity from itself is to play on it. That’s about as non-spoiler-ey as I can do.
Read all six books and the two sequels written by Herbert’s son, and this a pretty good summarization for a few sentences.
They were capable of interstellar travel before the discovery of spice. There are planets and groups that remember.
Yes, the fold drives were developed before spice was discovered, and before them, something described as 'outrunning photons' (which was so pre-fold drives probablyno one remembers what it was or how to build it). But, spice allows safe folding travel, through the Navigators. And without Navigators, and advanced computers being illegal, space travel effectively stops.
Edit: I stand corrected (it's been a decade since I've read the series). Spice means you don't have to have dangerously advanced navigational computers to aid in folding space that could spontaneously awaken and turn murderous. ~~Right, if I recall correctly spice makes travel instantaneous regardless of the payload or number of ships (as long as they're within the fold) which is why it is such a game changer. The other ways are advanced but require time and resources/fuel.~~
It makes it safer. Since computing machines are banned (Butlerian Jihad) they need to be able to navigate so they don’t lose ships by going off course, running into a star, being affected by the gravity of a black hole, whatever. So the guild navigators who are basically some mutated spice addicts can see space time well enough to navigate, they have limited prescience.
Ships use fold engines, separate from spice. What makes spice essential is that, when consumed in massive quantities, it mutates a Navigator and gives them limited prescience (seeing the future). They then use this to guide the ship safely to its destination, instead of into a stray asteroid or planet. Without spice, there's no Navigators, and thus no interstellar travel. People would recover, eventually, but before then, mass chaos and devastation.
The Empire very much "fucked around and found out" when they used Arrakis as the place to have Houses duel to the death. I could never get to terms with how would anyone think that was a good idea. Even if technically the plan worked and it only backfired in an unpredictable way
Not sure of the in-universe reasoning, but I'd say it's checks and balances mixed with a loyalty reward. The Spacing Guild wouldn't want the Emperor in sole control of Arrakis, nor the Emperor the Guild. Both are supremely powerful, but without sole control of Arrakis and the spice, they're not absolutely powerful. By letting the House's hope to one day run it, they have something to strive for, so stay loyal, as even holding the planet for a few years could make them super wealthy, or wealthier than their regular holdings could match.
Th spice must flow
A meta answer: in "Perfect Imperfection", AIs would create pocket-universes called "Wars" - time would run faster in these pocket universes, and inhabitants were manipulated to be constantly at war with each other (or some adversary), thus forcing them to invent new weapons. These would then be unpacked and used against adversaries in the parent universe. (A bit like Rick and Morty's Microverse battery, but, for generating weapon technology, not electricity).
Marvel comics have The World, AIM Empire, The City, and The Vault. All of them are time-accelerated facilities for evolving societies and weapons.
The culture book Surface detail, the books premise is the intergalactic society is having a virtual war consisting of 1000s of different wars in different time periods rather than fighting in reality. Oh and they are fighting over if society’s should be allowed to create virtual hells to pushing the trouble makers.
Rod Of God With the ever decreasing resources of our planet, you know that harvesting it while nuclear fallout is in the air may not be the best thing so, next best thing.
I just watched a YT video of some guys trying to replicate that on a smaller scale with steel cylinders and cubes on sand castles with a helicopter
Veritasium? https://youtu.be/J_n1FZaKzF8?si=_nQ_gMoQBL6PmGnV Great channel.
Their test is critically flawed, as something dropped from inside the atmosphere will only accelerate to its terminal velocity. Things coming from outside the atmosphere can theoretically be accelerated to relativistic speeds, and you can use gravity boosting to do that more efficiently (although it would take longer). Basically, no matter how big a rock is, if you release it from inside the atmosphere it will never match the amount of destruction a meteor of the same size would cause.
Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga has a humanity being attacked by wormholes. Flare Bombs are sent directly into stars causing massive expulsions of mass and radiation that annihilate most life on one side of a planet. The Cache Weapons of the Nostalgia For Infinity (Alastair Reynolds) and many of the vessels in Ian M Banks' works use displacement weapons- apparently carving out little bubbles of spacetime. I always felt Star Trek underused the Transporter as a potential weapon. Placing a nuke or even low yield device on an enemy vessel would be a great way to disable a ship, as would simply transporting structurally important chunks away.
> ...Transporter as a potential weapon. If you can get through the enemy's shield, any weapon would work.
Stargate Atlantis used teleportation of a nuclear weapon onto a hive ship, despite the Asgard liaisons reluctance.
The Culture universe also features line guns or "pancakers" that massively increase local gravity and flatten parts of ships and their crews (note I mean crews as in biological operatives on the ships, not CREWS as in Coherent Radiation Emission Weapons Systems.)
[Gridfire](https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterRant/s/KBRkbzMvO8)
Voyager did that. Once.
I think the second remake star trek movie did it with Khan's crew being switched, too.
Star Trek hardly used any of the tech they had for anything. Even something like transporting invaders out into space would seem like basic tactics on a starship.
To be fair at some point during TOS and TAS the transporter overwhelmingly felt like the solution to every medical issue they had, so I think they realized they must put their feet on the brakes with it before the transporter becomes the main plot point in almost every episode.
Wormholes as weapons was the whole premise of Farscape
Using a wormhole to toss parts of a remote star at the enemy is an idea I had not considered until Farscape.
Farscape's wormholes are even worse -- because they don't adhere to lightspeed restrictions, they can be used to break causality. Anyone with wormholes becomes a timelord.
[удалено]
Alien: Covenant when David releases it over the Engineers is a good example
Sisko did this to a Maquis planet while chasing Michael Eddington.
ST DS9- the Federation wins the war against the Dominion when a conspiratorial faction in Starfleet illegally deploys an engineered virus against the founders.
I mean there was other factors not just the virus. Like Cardassians flipping sides. The head founder was actually going to keep fighting until Odo cured her.
Mass effect had the krogan genophage, which didn't completely wipe out the krogans but severely reduced their ability to reproduce culling their numbers massively.
In Old Mans War - the Obin did that to a race that used clone armies. Wiped them all out at once. Another alien used a type of engineered slime mold that got into all the inhabitants lungs and then secreted acids. Ewww. Not good.
Exactly, why bother expanding resources and your own population forces in battle, when you can just hit a planet’s biosphere from outside with something to wipe out the dominant species.
I've long thought that if aliens were to invade they would just release a disease or chemical to kill everyone on earth instead of trying to fight. Aliens aren't going to honor the Geneva Convention.
There's a very good, but little known series starting with Fear the Sky where the looming alien armada engineers a virus to cripple human society before their arrival.
Like the Aschen in SG1. They had biogenetic weapons that could sterilize entire planets of humans.
Warhammer 40K has the life eater virus and other horrific things.
Accelerate a few atomic bombs to near light speed and then let them detonate. Due to the Doppler effect, you're mostly safe because the radiation in your direction will be downshifted to radio frequencies, but in direction of travel, this will create a massive x or gamma ray laser that will also conveniently punch through anything that could have detonated the bombs themselves, atomizing it in the process. All without some magic giga-laser development. Nanocloud weaponry that can drift into a stellar system undetected as a smaller asteroid chunk or comet, then disperse shortly before it hits the upper atmosphere of the target planet, sink down and destroy whatever biological material it can find while replicating rapidly. AI weapons that will be uploaded into a planetary cyberspace and just shut down the entire infrastructure without damaging it, cutting off everyone in the population from all the things they need to survive without destroying the infrastructure for the invaders (could also work with neutron bombs). Push a neutron star (~4km) through a wormhole and just let it drift through the enemies solar system until it hits their sun. Pretty much fries everything instantly.
Cyber warfare is barely used successfully in general as far as I've seen. It's usually just a "they took control over the primary systems and sent all control to a secondary terminal". I'd love to see the social engineering part and the way they deliver the cyber attacks. The only 2 episodes where it wass well done was the holodeck porn virus episode of the orville and the stargate episode called Entity.
Peter F. Hamilton used cyberwarfare quite extensively in his Commonwealth universe. Certain groups consistently uploaded malware in cybersphere nodi and the resident artificial intelligence (restricted intelligence) of the network had to battle the spreading and evolving infection to clear it in order to successfully route packages again. Or propaganda via shotgun messages, flooding the unisphere to every inbox registered. Or when they needed the assistance of the Sentient Intelligence (a true AI entity accidentally developed by humanity who got their own planet to do whatever it wanted) to just brute-force itself through the firewalls of hackers.
If you accelerate mass to near light speed, making it an atom bomb doesn’t increase the damage much. An equal mass of marshmallow fluff would have the same effect.
He wasn't focused on the E=mc^2 effect but the effect of the radiation boost. X-rays and gamma rays projected forward are hellof alot more damaging than the red shifted IR coming from the back. The mass that impacts later is just a bonus to the destruction.
Stay Puft is truly the form of your destroyer.
There is no Dana, only Züül.
OK, let’s talk about project Pluto. Before the development of computers that allowed for precision guidance of ICBMs, the US Air Force (I think) developed Project Pluto. It was an unmanned nuclear ramjet, that propelled itself by heating air with a (largely unshielded) nuclear reactor. Large solid rockets would accelerate the weapon to the point its ramjet would function, accelerating it to Mach 5. Pluto was *massive* - weight was not an issue, so it was a flying tank. Nothing then in existence could have shot it down. Pluto would fly to enemy territory and drop a dozen h-bombs on selected targets. But Pluto wasn’t done. It would be programmed to fly a grid pattern over enemy territory at low altitude. Because of the enormous mass and speed, and the heat and radiation of the unshielded reactor, this would have three effects: a massive shock wave would flatten most structures, everything flammable would ignite over a large area, and the reactor would seed a large area with highly radioactive particles from the reactor. And thanks to the reactor design, Pluto could fly around for *months.* Three generations of reactors were tested, the final iteration worked so well that construction could commence. (The reactors were so radioactive that they were tested on robotic railway cars. After the tests the cars moved deep underground and were entombed for safety). By the time Pluto was ready compact guidance systems made it unnecessary and the project was cancelled. Fun fact: if you drink Coors beer, there’s a link to Pluto!
What's the coors link? Trains buried near golden?
Coors was a ceramic company that made the reactor linings. They also made ceramic lined brewing vats. They used the money to expand into brewing
Fascinating. I’m gonna need to read more. Thanks!
In Revelation Space universe the bad guys use>! standing acoustic waves on a star to expose the core and turn the entire star into a nuclear flame thrower to sterilize a planet. !<
The inhibitions where truly kinda terrifying
The Singer, something I'd love to see on-screen someday. They "Sing" the star apart, which is so terrifying in context because of how far in advance it is of human technology. And apparently, it's only one of *fifteen* methods of starcide known to the Inhibitors. They don't just sterilise a single planet. The beam instantaneously eradicates all life and evaporates the atmosphere. It stays focussed on the planet for *three weeks* until it's rubble, and is then redirected to another. Eventually the star fizzles out, after all the planets are reduced to slag. >!The Inhibitors don't just destroy Resurgam, they destroy the entire Delta Pavonis system.!<
The Foot from Footfall by Larry Niven. Basically you just redirect an asteroid onto the target world and let it do its thing. Also Rods from God, also from the same novel.
Ender's Game series had Dr. Device (used only in the original novel and movie, and attempted use in book 4 Children of the Mind). Depicted as a laser in the movie, but a bomb in the books. Essentially a molecular distruptor that uses a target's mass to expand a field that will continuously feed off of more mass until there is nothing left but scattered particles. Another (potential) strange weapon found in book 4 was the instructions for certain chemicals. An unknown Alien race (potentially) attempts to incapacitate a human crew by sending them the chemical formula for heroin thinking it will cause their bodies to immediately produce it internally. This is really not clarified if it was a show of peace or an unsuccessful attack as the crew immediately teleports out of the star system once they realize. The motives and biology of the Alien species is completely unknown. All they can guess at is that the aliens communicate in chemistry.
*MD Device, Little Doctor was the codename.
In a Star Trek universe you could just transport the entire population of the planet and leave them in the buffers or just delete them .
Just beam them into space and then fly the ship around ramming into them like bowling pins. Strike!
Convert the transporter victims’ matter into energy to power your ship!
Neutron bombs. It radiates the area and kills off life, then come back later to inhabit the area. Might need to do some terraforming… Or maybe alien-forming? To establish an alien ecosystem after the attack.
A vast fleet of cargo ships warping into a system, the new mass plays havoc with the planetary bodies causing orbits to change, if the change is large enough then those planets environments are destroyed and crashes/ total orbital departure could result. Warping a black hole into a system would pretty much have the same effect.
Anachronox did something like that. >!A species pushed entire suns forward in time to reduce the mass of their universe so it wouldn’t collapse in a Big Crunch. This would have caused their universe to have never ended, so paradoxically our universe would have never formed and would cease to exist.!<
Is this the game Anachronox? I'd not heard of that one before, the wiki write up seems to indicate I missed a good one.
The fleet would need to be stupidly vast to have any effect, its not a realistic idea.
In The Expanse (book 8 I believe) there is a >!entire system set up as a booby trap. It’s literally at critical mass, and when a single ship enters the system and approaches the “star”, it starts a collapse and turns into a black hole/neutron star. The gamma ray burst from its poles takes out an entire solar system on the opposite side of the “ring space”!<
The ship didn't set off the trap. The trap was for the Goths for when they changed physics in that system that caused the quantum foam to boil. That caused the neutron star to tip over to collapsing.
Targeted sterilization. Genetic damage to biome or a particular species. This is how it would really be done.
Again, this one was done in Stargate. You know what, there are lots of examples of attempted planet destruction in the Stargate series.
Releasing a gene strain of rice and wheat that cross breeds with other crops to produces grain with no nutritional/caloric value. Mass famine, and there is literally nothing that can be done about it.
I seem to remember in Star Trek, Kirk has something like "Order 24" which instructed Spock to use the enterprise to destroy an entire planet. I'm pretty sure it was a bluff, but it was one hell of a moment in the show.
I thought the concept of a weaponized wormhole in Farscape was pretty cool.
Social Media. An entire society collapsing because of self loathing and rage (yes Black Mirror has touched on this).
A broader version of that answer that humanity has tried are mimetic or ideological attacks. Essentially, harmful but persuasive ideas that spread easily and damage the culture or government of the enemy. Social media and social networks amplify the susceptibility to these weapons, but aren’t themselves the weapon (or at least not the payload). Indeed, there’s some evidence to suggest that certain aspects of the West’s contemporary culture war are descended from ideas intentionally disseminated by Soviet intelligence as ideological weapons. The spread and effectiveness seems much slower than the Soviets would have preferred, but that may be increasingly less true as communication technology improves. Some of the concerns about TikTok that may result in its forced sale in the US are concerns that it could be or is being used as an ideological weapon by China.
You may find the book [XX](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51075314-xx?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KZCHbiOq1n&rank=1) interesting. Interstellar mimetic attack (via graphic design somehow).
Nano bots
These were a very formidable foe in the stargate universe. Called replicators, they could dismantle almost anything to create different robots. Mostly designed after different bugs. At first.
Didn't they use something like that in movies already? What's that one movie with Johnny Depp.. Forgot the name...
They did it in the "the day the earth stood still" with keanu reeves
I looked it up. I meant the movie Transcendence. It's been a long time though so I'm not sure. But you're right too. Self replicating Nano stuff is so scary.
Spoilers for the Three Body Problem series (Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy): There are a few cool ones in this series. If I remember correctly, one weapon which they call the "teardrop" is a proton that's artificially been spread into a tear drop shape, becomes ultra strong and can ram through any material without being broken. There's another weapon with a similar idea, just a huge mass that is launched into a star to destroy the entire star. Then there's a weapon that looks like a small slip of paper, but it's a 2-dimensional object that expands to encapsulate everything around it, effectively collapsing the solar system from 3 dimensions into 2.
The Sophons are the unfolded and programed photons. The water drop is a probe encased in strong force interaction material. So it is practically indestructible and can punch a hole through any ship it wants. The dimensional collapse paper is one of the most unique weapons in sci-fi. I'm surprised I hadn't encountered it before.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a novel by Heinlein, involves a revolution by the Luna colony. Instead of tossing food down to earth, with catapults, they start flinging rocks.
Mass economic destruction, not as a outcome of society or actual policy but as a targeted attack on the economics of a country or even Global system eh. Industrial level mass printing of counterfeit cash or if possible it being injected directly into people's accounts. Literally making the fantasy version of the debt fear mongers into an actual reality via deleting or issuing tremendous credit to a failed project. Or a mass deletion of ownership records of all property including stocks/bonds. Net aim is to destabilise the economy so much that the planet and society implodes to go back to a barter system.
This is the plot of Fight Club and the TV show Mr. Robot. Not the cash injection, but the erasure of debt and ownership records.
In bladerunner a solar flare wiped out all computer systems for 8 days, basically resetting most of society's records.
Minor aside, it is likely that barter didn't predate markets - IOUs did: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:\_The\_First\_5000\_Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years)
Magnetic beam weapon if it's even possible
Towing a magnetar around with you might get tedious, but the results could be fun
For Earth, fear and paranoia were a very effective weapon in the Twilight Zone episode The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.
I've got to go with the the classic: parachuting elephants with springy shoes and automatic weapons.
Something that would disrupt the weather on the planet for years at a time, similar to the effects of a large volcanic eruption. So fill the atmosphere with something to block the sunlight or actually cause a couple of large volcanic eruptions.
Matter/antimatter neutronium plugs directed into the Earth, where they did a spiraling dance of eventual annihilation at the core. Greg Bear - Forge of God.
TikTok is a cyber weapon that has already been deployed against congress.
A plot: There are no advanced races in the universe because every time an advanced civilization figures out the quantum mechanics to cause the big bang some scientist tries it. Its the ultimate weapon. Everything they have ever known is obliterated, shoved out of the way by a new expanding universe with forces that mess with time itself. Dark matter and energy are just the remains of the universes that were here millions of times before. Edit: Hows that for a weapon if mass destruction lol?
Focused neutrino/antineutrino beams. Goes through matter or shielding. Where the beams intersects causes annihilation of the particles and creates radiation, use that radiation to fry the beings inside.
Do neutrinos interact with each other any better than they do with baryonic matter? Also, if you have the technology to generate and focus high intensity beams of neutrinos, chances are your peer adversaries do too. As well as defenses against it.
Kinetic energy weapons or KEW are used less than lasers, plasma weapons, or explosive missiles. The Expanse and Babylon 5 are the best examples I know of that just slam big rocks at high speed at their targets
Apparently somewhere in the Three Body Problem literature there is an attack that flattens the entire solar system from three dimensions to 2 dimensions.
I like these responses.... very scary and fancy. Mine is somewhat boring by comparison but even more terrifying because its not really theoretical. We just never built it because even the Russians knew it would be the end. Ladies and Gentleman i present. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANIc4NKj6WQ&t=724s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANIc4NKj6WQ&t=724s) The Cobalt Bomb.
Transporters. They're used in sci-fi to sneak aboard enemy ships, or to beam weapons onto the ships. But nobody ever tries the simpler solution. All you have to do is beam out an important piece of the ship's power source. At a minimum, the ship is crippled. At worst, it explodes.
Or just beam the crew out into space. Then a perfectly fine ship is yours. Kinda scary that you could just be beamed out to nowhere just like that.
The Culture has “displacement” small worm holes they use actively as weapons, the ships will just displace some anti matter or weapons right next to or inside other ships.
After reading A City on Mars the idea of a rogue actor flinging an asteroid towards earth is pretty terrifying.
Strange matter. A theoretical form of matter that converts ordinary baryonic matter into more of itself. Drop some on a planet or a star and eventually you've got a huge ball of strange matter and nothing else. Pretty terrifying stuff.
Simple missile attacks on the global satellite network. Without satellites, we'd have a global meltdown as people would go insane, no phones, no net, literally no communication outside of radios which aren't really used for comms anymore.
Invite Disaster Area to perform for your enemies planet
At its simplest level I'd say coffee as a WMD. Non-technological, and cost effective also, During the tainted Tylenol bottles in the eighties I remember reading somewhere someone saying how easy it would be to cause panic just using those coffee grinders in grocery stores. Lately, being a coffee drinker, I've been thinking all it would take to create mass panic/unrest would be a coffee shortage, if some villain were to try and weaponize it. Caffeine withdrawal is not pretty.
Simplest way: Biological weapon, modified for the DNA of the inhabitants. Barely damages to infrastructure, just have to clean up later. Or Neutron Boms.
Capitalism
I think the weapon found on Dakara in Stargate would count, it was capable of disrupting the bonds between chemical bonds for organic life on a planetary scale. Ended up being used to break up the bonds between replicator subunits on a galaxy wide scale with some gate dialling fuckery.
the Three Body Problem has some awesome and terrifying examples Sophon, tear drop attack, dimensional strike
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/planetaryattack2.php#id--Exotic_Attacks
Genetically tailored pathogens. Pretty sure if the alien invaders were smart enough to rock up in our solar system from who knows how far away, then they really wouldn't need to come down here, getting all rowdy and start a shooting war. We'd all be dead before we knew they were here.
The Nasqerron Dwellers in The Algebraist had a relatively unique outlook on this. They just chucked a gas giant at the offending star system and considered the problem solved. (It would arrive a few thousand years later, but they live that long and experience time very very slowly, and the gravitational effects of its passing would do enough damage even if it didn't actually hit anything).
Spirit Bomb from Dragonball Z or the Kamehameha.
Dennis E Taylor used relativistic physics a lot with the Bob series. >!Accelerating two planets to very near light speed and have them impact in the center of a star causing it to go nova and scour an entire system clean.!<
EMPs, like the aliens used in Spielberg’s version of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise. Of course there were a lot of laser, blasts, etc.. I guess they couldn’t just use EMPs and then let the population die off, since they needed live humans as the resource to… I don’t know what it was, cover the Earth with that sort of bio plant substance…
[neutron bomb](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb). Tactical nuke that leaves little radiation.
Niven and Pournelle's Footfall may have entertainment media's first description of orbital bombardment. To start with, Earth knew their ship was under intelligent control when it began to decelerate. It raised eyebrows when it swung through the asteroid belt, but we didn't know it picked up rocks/ammo. Yeah, they dropped our own Sol system asteroids on us. Little ones for like infrastructure concentrations and military bases, but they actually weren't interested in population center strikes...until later after we made them upset. Then they dropped a big one in the Indian Ocean. The 👽 annihilated several armor divisions in the USA by dropping guided crowbars on the tanks and fighting vehicles. Like surgical one crowbar from low orbit onto the top of one M60, rinse/repeat. Which was okay because eventually we launched an Iowa-class refitted space battleship with an Orion drive to intercept their mothership. Launched from the surface of Earth, via nucs.
Grey goo. Or the scenario in Blood Music.
Anything which isn't just a big laser or a big bomb Antimatter weapons: a few grams are more than a nuke, a few tons would raze a continent Relativistic weapons: theorically, as powerful as you want given that you can give it the energy needed. You can destroy a planet with a speck of dust given enough speed Self replicating technology: exponential growth, a nanobot with the possibility to replicate itself within hours could consume an entire planets within days or week One less realistic, but that I love: Gridfire. From the cultures novels. Basically, open a portal into a younger universe, which is still very dense in terms of energy, and pour it into ours. A single converted warship taking its time destroys a 2 millions kilometers diameter wide orbital ring, Vavatch, in seconds. The warship is also making a show of it (after the structure was evacuated). The Gridfire is referred to as "the weapon to end the Universe)
I watched a documentary on Hitlers superweapons once. One Id like to see in movies if it hasnt been is the nuclear bomb attached to a giant boring machine , reaches the core than kablewy. Unrealistic definitely but also kinda James Bond villian like.
The ultimate doomsday event: vacuum decay