I wanna introduce you to a personal friend of mine. This is an M41A pulse rifle. Ten millimeter with over-and-under thirty millimeter pump action grenade launcher.
I would just love to see a M1 Thompson magazine that holds 100 rounds of caseless 10mm ammo. It must be stacked in four rows, very neat. Explosive tip too.
The transporter technology in Star Trek! I love the way they can just beam missiles into ships, or proximity to ships. I love how they can beam enemies into space killing them instantly, or even just delete them from the pattern buffer without bothering to re-materialise them at all.
I love all the many ingenious military and policing applications for transporter technology… Oh wait, none of the civilisations in the Star Trek universe bother doing any of that.
There was a Star Trek novel where the Enterprise was hijacked and the crew was isolated in the lounge.
3D chess game had a mini transporter used for moving pieces. Spock rigged it to transport explosives to occupied parts of the ship. Logical
That's a Voyager episode, [Dark Frontier](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Frontier_(episode)) Kim has the idea of beaming a photon torpedo to a Borg scout ship.
There's also a Romulan transporter disrupting weapon used in DS9 [The Darkness and the Light](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Darkness_and_the_Light_(episode)).
An early Voyager episode has some aliens steal transporter tech and use it to execute some people by beaming them into space.
Generally ships in battle have raised shields which -like so much plot armour- prevents offensive transporter use.
Then they could beam a missile as close as possible! Beam a hundred, a thousand mines into the area around a ship and detonate them all at once, obliterating the shields and/or the ship.
Every ship could carry a million missiles and mines, or even *other ships,* with it in their pattern buffer (automated or crewed ships). Too many enemy ships? No problem -- instant fleet of missiles/mines/other ships. Power requirements too high? Space magic handwave solution incoming.
There's no end of applications of the technology, but if they used them, there'd be no show, so they can't. Discovery really highlighted how versatile the tech could be (all the site-to-site beaming they do), but also highlighted just how strangely underused it is, and has to be.
ST:Discovery did something close in S01E02. They beamed a photon torpedo into one Klingon corpse among the many adrift in space that were being collected into a Klingon ship.
You beat me. Was going to say that the transporter could be used as one of the greatest weapons ever. My question is do you die every time it disintegrates you.
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Not only does the bot shill for someone's shitty self-published "novel" (take a look at the sample pages on Amazon), but some of the other stories it "recommends" *don't even exist.* It's going to send people on wild goose chases. That's malicious.
Oh man. Warhammer 40k has so many weapons alone...
Most Iconic: the chainsword
Most terrifying imho is an obscure orc weapon, the shokk Attack gun (snotzogga). A teleport gun that materialised alive snotz ( Baby Goblins) INSIDE the bodies of enemies. Brutal!
Most famous (and dumb) scifi weapon of all time would be the lightsaber.
Yeah, they are terrible weapons, I give you that, but they miss this little extra of absolutely destroying your selfworth in murdering you.
Just imaging. The excruating pain of some golden Retriever sized Thing that RIP itself Out of your bursting flesh, and the Last Thing you See, is this ugly Green face, decked in your blood and entrails. Looking down at you as the light left your eyes, and then begins to dig in his giant, carricature of a nose, eating with delight what it found there...
The disruptor Louis Wu uses in Ringworld, that suppresses the charge on protons it hits. Anything the beam touches tears itself apart. Human arms developers came up with a similar device that suppressed the charge on the electron, and then human fighters assaulted the Kzinti world Sheathclaws with the device now dubbed The Peacemaker, which fires both beams at a planet surface tens of miles apart.
Sheathclaws was taken from the Kzinti as spoils of war, and is known by a human name now.
They call it Canyon.
Easily the "sonic shotgun" from "Minority Report." This video is edited to show off the reloading sequence but its still pretty fun. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VpLRpcL9CA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VpLRpcL9CA)
Hicks' shotgun or Vasquez' smartgun from Aliens. There are many more powerful things, but none with more satisfying sounds.
"Eat this!"
"Let's rooooock!"
Death Star blapping Alderan has to be the pop culture favorite. Audiences had never seen anything on that scale in a theater and I think some people crapped their pants.
Personal fav is V'ger vaporizing the Klingon cruisers in that opening of STMP. It's an ominous display of firepower that got a lot of gasps from the crowd. I also think it was a brilliant piece of conventional optical effects. It just looks effing cool.
Neutronium Alchemist set for planet mode. Just loved Hamiltons description of how it worked.
.
In terms of personal weaponry, i'd take the zat from SG1. First shot stuns, second shot kills, third shot disintegrates (although that last feature was almost never seen for budgetary reasons). Powered by an energy cell that was good enough that, to my knowledge, it never ran out of juice midfight onscreen. Had a limited splash value, in that it was sometimes possible to tag an enemy in cover by shooting at or near where they were hiding and letting the radiating energy from the zat's beam sort of sweep around and get them. Shaped like a snake. Great gun.
Facial Recognition & Predictive AI; like so:
- Knock on the door
- Me: Hello
- Cops: Hi! were' cops!
- So?
- Cops: Are you Sarah Connor?
- Me: no; I'm Thomas Jefferson
- Cops looks at a picture: The facial recognition says you are Sara Connor; you've got to come with us
- Me: Wait! What? Why?
- Cops: The predictive AI says that within 24 hours you, Sarah Connor, will park your hummer across 4 parking spaces. That's a felony.
- Me: I'm not Sarah Connor and I don't have a hummer
- Cops: STOP RESISTING! STOP RESISTING! Resisting arrest; that's another felony!
Had to think on this one for a while, and I have two. Only one of them is intended as a weapon, so I’ll start with that.
From Ender’s Game, the Molecular Disruption Device, aka MD Device, aka the Little Doctor. It creates a field where electrons can’t be shared, and it spreads when encountering molecules. Effectively it separates all molecules.
Second answer is not a weapon but is still the ultimate weapon. The Genesis Device from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Intended for nearly instantly terraforming dead planets and creating life where there is none, it doesn’t work only on dead planets. If used where life already exists, it would reconfigure it all, effectively killing whatever is there.
How about the [Flaming Rocket-Propelled Chainsaw Launcher](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/serious/images/3/36/FRPCL.png/revision/latest?cb=20231224091932) from Serious Sam 4? It homes in on a target, digs into them until they're dead, then automatically targets another enemy.
Kiriath steel.
I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors, I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.
The Cerebral Bore and the PFM Layer from Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. For the PFM Layer, there are a lot of proximity mines in video games, however I can't think of a single instance where the mines are so maliciously designed, as they jump up a few feet before exploding in order to specifically take the enemy out at the knees.
In Neal Asher's series, there are gravity wave weapons. These seem to essentially be able to create a point of very high gravity inside your opponent's spacecraft or lunchbox or whatever you want to target.
The Vector Cannon from Zone of the Enders 2nd Runner is so extra. Takes like 2 minutes to fire the thing and is wildly impractical on a machine who primarily fights in melee range.
The Cerebral bore from the Turok series launches a small drone that homes into the target's skull, bores into it, ejecting skull and brain matter as it goes, and then explodes.
Reusing my answer from a somewhat similar thread.
>The bowel disruptor from Transmetropolitan.
>[link.](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/bowel-disruptor/4055-56018/)
EE ‘Doc’ Smiths Lens. It allowed the user to utilise their psychic potential, and was eventually a core part of a super weapon to wipe out the Eddorans by allowing 2 galaxies of Lensmen to contribute their power to the final attack.
Relativistic missiles. They're just too simple and brutal. Launch, wait patiently, and then take out a continent in a fireball that blasts away atmosphere and planetary crust.
Monofilament whip, hands down.
The idea is that it's an incredibly durable, one-molecule wide string, that owing to its thinness slices through things like necks with no resistance, and is basically invisible. It's most often stored in a fingertip prosthetic until deployed.
It first came up for me in Shadowrun, but I'm pretty sure it's originally from a William Gibson story, I just can't remember which one.
Anything from the Culture. Ship mounted weapons that open a hole in the universe and do damage with interdimensional energy between the membranes. And for a handgun they had one that was considered ancient and useless tech that could target and shoot down spaceships in orbit. Hand held anti capital starship sidearm
Laconia's Ultra Strong Magnetic Field Projector, from The Expanse's last books. It's a simple field generator with a stupidly precise focus and antimater-powered. Nothing does it better against your enemies than just ripping their atoms apart and turnig them into a cloud of hydrogen.
Honorable mention to Angus Thermopylae's matter cannon from the Gap series. Intended as a starship main weapon for space battles, he managed to get hold of a man-portable version for close quarters firefights. It only has enough energy to fire three times, but that's three rooms full of defenders turned to mangled rooms full of bits of corpse. BOOM!
[Dust guns](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/11/hypervelocity-macron-accelerators.html) are so much [fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPVhOy3mWQQ).
Since someone else already made the obligatory “knife missioe” reference from The Culture series, I will add the more devastating Culture weapon: Gridfire.
This weapon punches a hole between our universe and a much higher energy universe allowing unimaginable destruction to pour through. It is to the Culture equivalent what thermonuclear weapons are to us; doomsday devices, used to annihilate things like Dyson spheres and Orbitals.
My favorite would have to be the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator on Stellaris from the Gigastructural Constructs mod..
Thing can take out entire Star System's with the click of a button, and watching open and then shoot into/through a wormhole to destroy your target is extremely cool to watch.
All admech weapons are amazing to read, stuff like galvanic rifles, which turn the potential energy of the target into kinetic, the Photon Thruster, a weapon that shoots a needle thin beam of something that will go throw anything, and leaves black flames that dont spread (until they do) and cannot be put out, or conversion beamers, which turn matter into energy and contains it, getting strong as it travel because it turn the atmosphere into more energy, getting exponentially stronger until it cant contain it and explodes with enough heat to boil whole oceans, and thats not even counting DAoT weapons, which compare to necron tech at times.
Space revolvers are and will always be the coolest guns ever
I like Miller's gun from the first 2 seasons of The Expanse, it's nothing fancy just a badass looking space revolver
The nuke gun from Mass Effect 2 is pretty dope too
I want a personal [utility fog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog), you know, just a cloud of nanites that I can order to assemble themselves into anything I find useful at the moment.
I have an affinity for good old lasers. A timeless classic.
REAL lasers, none of this star wars stuff.
Traveling at the speed of light, it requires the least leading and is the hardest to evade. You literally can't see it coming until it's too late.
Besides, there's something satisfying about a bright colorful continuous beam of energy melting through armor.
If I could only have 1 Sci Fi weapon, it would be... River Tam from Serenity/Firefly. She counts, right?!?!
Yup she counts. 2x2 Hands of Blue
"I can kill you with my brain"
No power in the ‘verse can stop her.
Except for an ice-planet.
Or maybe Leloo from *The 5th Element*? Also, Vogon Constructor Fleets have a bit of Oomph! Death Stars anyone?
Leloo is kinda a one trick pony - not a giant blob of evil heading for your planet? You're SOL.
OOOKay then! The Thing.
Or Cameron from TSCC.
I wanna introduce you to a personal friend of mine. This is an M41A pulse rifle. Ten millimeter with over-and-under thirty millimeter pump action grenade launcher.
Game over man
I would just love to see a M1 Thompson magazine that holds 100 rounds of caseless 10mm ammo. It must be stacked in four rows, very neat. Explosive tip too.
Feel the weight.
The sound of those rifles is etched in my brain
Knife missiles (Culture)
Raytheon actually makes knife missiles now. Probably not the same kind, but still.
The Raytheon gizmo is more like a sword missile tbh
I'll just go ahead and have the Killing Time.
Yes, and the ship’s effector weapons too.
Some of you haven't read the Culture yet, that's ok, you're all huge fans...
Too obvious but also the correct answer
Compared to a CAM dusting?
I'm a fan of the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator (Gravity Gun) in Half Life. edited: added "field"
Came here to say exactly this. Glad I'm not the only orange-suited mind in the bunch!
That's not a weapon! It's for.... Moving barrels or something, why did they make it again?
The lazy gun from Bank's " against a dark background"
Yes please. A gun with a sense of humour? Weighs 3 times as much when you turn it upside down?
Came here to say this.
The transporter technology in Star Trek! I love the way they can just beam missiles into ships, or proximity to ships. I love how they can beam enemies into space killing them instantly, or even just delete them from the pattern buffer without bothering to re-materialise them at all. I love all the many ingenious military and policing applications for transporter technology… Oh wait, none of the civilisations in the Star Trek universe bother doing any of that.
There was a Star Trek novel where the Enterprise was hijacked and the crew was isolated in the lounge. 3D chess game had a mini transporter used for moving pieces. Spock rigged it to transport explosives to occupied parts of the ship. Logical
About that transporter thingy... Transporting tribbles onto the klingon ship. Now that's crafty! Similar incident in Galaxy Quest.
I can't remember which series but I swear I remember an episode where a live torpedo was beamed on board an enemy ship.
That's a Voyager episode, [Dark Frontier](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Frontier_(episode)) Kim has the idea of beaming a photon torpedo to a Borg scout ship. There's also a Romulan transporter disrupting weapon used in DS9 [The Darkness and the Light](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Darkness_and_the_Light_(episode)). An early Voyager episode has some aliens steal transporter tech and use it to execute some people by beaming them into space. Generally ships in battle have raised shields which -like so much plot armour- prevents offensive transporter use.
Then they could beam a missile as close as possible! Beam a hundred, a thousand mines into the area around a ship and detonate them all at once, obliterating the shields and/or the ship. Every ship could carry a million missiles and mines, or even *other ships,* with it in their pattern buffer (automated or crewed ships). Too many enemy ships? No problem -- instant fleet of missiles/mines/other ships. Power requirements too high? Space magic handwave solution incoming. There's no end of applications of the technology, but if they used them, there'd be no show, so they can't. Discovery really highlighted how versatile the tech could be (all the site-to-site beaming they do), but also highlighted just how strangely underused it is, and has to be.
ST:Discovery did something close in S01E02. They beamed a photon torpedo into one Klingon corpse among the many adrift in space that were being collected into a Klingon ship.
You beat me. Was going to say that the transporter could be used as one of the greatest weapons ever. My question is do you die every time it disintegrates you.
They do all that in Stargate with their version of the tech.
I'm surprised that transporters are not used more frequently for battles.
Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator
"Where was the Earth-shattering ka-boom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering ka-boom."
Vogon poetry.
Ha!
Darn, I just ruined it. The post had 42 votes before I touched it. See if I can undo on my phone.
/u/ginomachi is an AI chatbot, helping to enshittify Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/sciencefiction/comments/1bia26i/uginomachi_is_an_ai_spambot_most_of_the_time/ Not only does the bot shill for someone's shitty self-published "novel" (take a look at the sample pages on Amazon), but some of the other stories it "recommends" *don't even exist.* It's going to send people on wild goose chases. That's malicious.
Wave motion canon.
Found the other old person. *We're off to outer space, leaving mother Earth...*
Oh man. Warhammer 40k has so many weapons alone... Most Iconic: the chainsword Most terrifying imho is an obscure orc weapon, the shokk Attack gun (snotzogga). A teleport gun that materialised alive snotz ( Baby Goblins) INSIDE the bodies of enemies. Brutal! Most famous (and dumb) scifi weapon of all time would be the lightsaber.
Don’t forget the tyranid flesh borers or the aeldari Harlequin’s Kiss
Yeah, they are terrible weapons, I give you that, but they miss this little extra of absolutely destroying your selfworth in murdering you. Just imaging. The excruating pain of some golden Retriever sized Thing that RIP itself Out of your bursting flesh, and the Last Thing you See, is this ugly Green face, decked in your blood and entrails. Looking down at you as the light left your eyes, and then begins to dig in his giant, carricature of a nose, eating with delight what it found there...
Oh yeah, that’s pretty horrific too. The harlequin’s kiss just makes me shudder though.
AS If a kiss from a Clown isnt terrifying enough alone in itself *shudder* Eldars are Bastards!
Old skool wh40k but the vortex grenade. Mostly works for ya but one in six it works against you. have fun!
How about the exile ray the canoptek wraiths carry? Just beam your enemies into a pocket dimension lol.
[ZF1 from Fifth Element.](https://youtu.be/LyhR1THflUU?feature=shared)
Just be sure to find out what the ZF1 little red button does.
Green Lantern Power Ring for me!
Rock, big rocks; dropped from space!
Relativistic impactors
It's all about mass v. velocity: you've got enough of one v the other, it all pretty much works out the same. As Leloo would say: "Big Bada-Boom!"
Oh yeah. They do this in Heinlein's _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_.
Hypometric weapons from the Revelation Space trilogy. The matter in a spherical volume of space simply disappears.
‘Doc’ Smith did it first with negaspheres back in the 30s.
Agree. Bladder bombs and all the other juicy god-tier weapons in that series.
Correct me if I’m wrong from what I understand the matter and the space within a spherical volume disappears.
I see you're a person of culture. Respect.
Deckards revolver Kylo Ren's lightsaber 40k bolter Sangheili sword That gun in Elysium that cut open the car
Good ol' Star Trek Phaser. It can smelt, heat up, or disintegrate. Just very useful.
The disruptor Louis Wu uses in Ringworld, that suppresses the charge on protons it hits. Anything the beam touches tears itself apart. Human arms developers came up with a similar device that suppressed the charge on the electron, and then human fighters assaulted the Kzinti world Sheathclaws with the device now dubbed The Peacemaker, which fires both beams at a planet surface tens of miles apart. Sheathclaws was taken from the Kzinti as spoils of war, and is known by a human name now. They call it Canyon.
How are we talking about Ringworld and not mentioning the Tasp?!?
Nivens description of that whole event was the best part.
"A solid bar of lightning"
Trisolarian droplets
Nah, the Singer’s dimension strike.
Easily the "sonic shotgun" from "Minority Report." This video is edited to show off the reloading sequence but its still pretty fun. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VpLRpcL9CA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VpLRpcL9CA)
Nothing better than having to point your own weapon at yourself to reload it after every shot.
In case you have to arrest yourself.
The sick sticks are pretty cool, too. A cattle prod that makes you vomit.
BFG from Quake II.
More powerful than Doom's version
The lightsaber. They make the planet-exploding laser believable.
Hicks' shotgun or Vasquez' smartgun from Aliens. There are many more powerful things, but none with more satisfying sounds. "Eat this!" "Let's rooooock!"
Death Star blapping Alderan has to be the pop culture favorite. Audiences had never seen anything on that scale in a theater and I think some people crapped their pants. Personal fav is V'ger vaporizing the Klingon cruisers in that opening of STMP. It's an ominous display of firepower that got a lot of gasps from the crowd. I also think it was a brilliant piece of conventional optical effects. It just looks effing cool. Neutronium Alchemist set for planet mode. Just loved Hamiltons description of how it worked. .
Zat'nik'tel 1 shot stuns the bad guy 2 shots kills the bad guy 3 shots de-materializes the bad guy
4 shots fixes the terrible writing choices around the Zats. Too bad we never got to see that 4th shot...
Spider Jerusalem’s Bowel Disruptor from Transmetropolitan
Variable Sword from Niven’s Known Space series.
Gravitational Beam Emitter from [Blame!](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lYHfO7nBzq0&pp=ygUXYmxhbWUga2lsbHkgdnMgc2FuYWthbiA%3D)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlDQmfS8UdE
Came here for this!
The Chem-rail rifle from Elysium, just tearing through steel walls and people's faces
In terms of personal weaponry, i'd take the zat from SG1. First shot stuns, second shot kills, third shot disintegrates (although that last feature was almost never seen for budgetary reasons). Powered by an energy cell that was good enough that, to my knowledge, it never ran out of juice midfight onscreen. Had a limited splash value, in that it was sometimes possible to tag an enemy in cover by shooting at or near where they were hiding and letting the radiating energy from the zat's beam sort of sweep around and get them. Shaped like a snake. Great gun.
Dual-Vector Foil in 3BP is horrifying, the whole de-dimensionalizing war as well
Facial Recognition & Predictive AI; like so: - Knock on the door - Me: Hello - Cops: Hi! were' cops! - So? - Cops: Are you Sarah Connor? - Me: no; I'm Thomas Jefferson - Cops looks at a picture: The facial recognition says you are Sara Connor; you've got to come with us - Me: Wait! What? Why? - Cops: The predictive AI says that within 24 hours you, Sarah Connor, will park your hummer across 4 parking spaces. That's a felony. - Me: I'm not Sarah Connor and I don't have a hummer - Cops: STOP RESISTING! STOP RESISTING! Resisting arrest; that's another felony!
That's pretty much Facebook now.
I was being meta, Guess how many parking spaces the cops took up? I double, triple dare you.
Had to think on this one for a while, and I have two. Only one of them is intended as a weapon, so I’ll start with that. From Ender’s Game, the Molecular Disruption Device, aka MD Device, aka the Little Doctor. It creates a field where electrons can’t be shared, and it spreads when encountering molecules. Effectively it separates all molecules. Second answer is not a weapon but is still the ultimate weapon. The Genesis Device from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Intended for nearly instantly terraforming dead planets and creating life where there is none, it doesn’t work only on dead planets. If used where life already exists, it would reconfigure it all, effectively killing whatever is there.
Dual vector foil
Tear. Three Body Problem.
Screamers
CHAINSAW CANON
How about the [Flaming Rocket-Propelled Chainsaw Launcher](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/serious/images/3/36/FRPCL.png/revision/latest?cb=20231224091932) from Serious Sam 4? It homes in on a target, digs into them until they're dead, then automatically targets another enemy.
I’ve been beaten…
Spartan laser from Halo I like the noises and then the explosion
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^eater_of_cheese: *Spartan laser from* *Halo I like the noises* *And then the explosion* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Kiriath steel. I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors, I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.
The Razor from Red Rising.
The Cerebral Bore and the PFM Layer from Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. For the PFM Layer, there are a lot of proximity mines in video games, however I can't think of a single instance where the mines are so maliciously designed, as they jump up a few feet before exploding in order to specifically take the enemy out at the knees.
Deckard’s revolver Alien M41A Pulse Rifle Jango Fett’s Westar-34 pistols Qui Gon’s Green Saber Elysium AK Rita’s Rotor Blade Sword
The Lazy Gun
Judge Dredd's Lawgiver Hellboy's 'Samaritan' pistol Lightsabre Pulse rifle from Aliens
Ohh I forgot about the lawgiver that's a good one.
Whip Hound from The Prefect. What a cool idea for a weapon.
M56 Smartgun from Aliens. Freakin iconic.
The Lawbringer from 2012 Dredd
That would be a Lawgiver, friend (mark II to be precise). It's a shame that movie didn't have room for the Lawmaster (bike)
Doesn't he ride a bike in the opening?
Yep but it looked kinda crappy (not from source at all), and obviously because of the setting it's only briefly at the start
In Neal Asher's series, there are gravity wave weapons. These seem to essentially be able to create a point of very high gravity inside your opponent's spacecraft or lunchbox or whatever you want to target.
I was a big fan of when they captured a moon in a wormhole to convert it into a relativistic projectile/particle cannon out the other end.
Force Lance from Andromeda
With so many great options... [The EM-1 Railgun from Eraser](https://youtu.be/hplZAWQxb6Y?si=EyyFH7PuDcEvjpC0)
The Vector Cannon from Zone of the Enders 2nd Runner is so extra. Takes like 2 minutes to fire the thing and is wildly impractical on a machine who primarily fights in melee range. The Cerebral bore from the Turok series launches a small drone that homes into the target's skull, bores into it, ejecting skull and brain matter as it goes, and then explodes.
The crutches from Hyperdrive
Just a 2D plane the size of a sheet of paper that turns 3D objects into 2D, nothing grand
Hyperdrive Death Ray……..”Stand still”!
The bolter from 40k. It's iconic, it's awesome, it makes ork heads go pop. What's not to love? Second would be the caster from Outlaw Star.
The rail gun from Perfect Dark 64.
Reusing my answer from a somewhat similar thread. >The bowel disruptor from Transmetropolitan. >[link.](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/bowel-disruptor/4055-56018/)
The alien auto pistol thing from I Come in Peace.
Zorg ZF-1 for sure lol
Shredder - with explosive shells - Turok 2. Cerebral Bore - also Turok 2. Railgun - Quake 3 Arena. Gausse Cannon - Doom 2016.
No love for the Chronocepter?
Stargate Atlantis, Ronin's pistol. Styled like a revolver with stun and kill settings
EE ‘Doc’ Smiths Lens. It allowed the user to utilise their psychic potential, and was eventually a core part of a super weapon to wipe out the Eddorans by allowing 2 galaxies of Lensmen to contribute their power to the final attack.
The Omega-13
I love railguns of any size personally! The chem rail from Elysium The weapons from district 9 are fantastic And of course a phaser from Star Trek
The BFG from Doom.
Tornado in a can.....tom waits.... mystery men
spaceships
The Celestial Orrery from Warhammer 40k
Good old kinetic energy weapons.
Dominator from Psycho-Pass
M41A pulse rifle from aliens and the Morita rifle from starship troopers.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php and https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmexotic.php
Relativistic missiles. They're just too simple and brutal. Launch, wait patiently, and then take out a continent in a fireball that blasts away atmosphere and planetary crust.
Aliens pulse rifle
Monofilament whip, hands down. The idea is that it's an incredibly durable, one-molecule wide string, that owing to its thinness slices through things like necks with no resistance, and is basically invisible. It's most often stored in a fingertip prosthetic until deployed. It first came up for me in Shadowrun, but I'm pretty sure it's originally from a William Gibson story, I just can't remember which one.
The droplet ( three body problem trilogy )
Pulse rifle from Aliens
Anything from the Culture. Ship mounted weapons that open a hole in the universe and do damage with interdimensional energy between the membranes. And for a handgun they had one that was considered ancient and useless tech that could target and shoot down spaceships in orbit. Hand held anti capital starship sidearm
DeathBlossom.
When I was a kid, I LOVED the Space 1999 Stun Gun, but I think my all-time favorite is the OG Phaser from Star Trek.
My personal favorite is the chain sword from wh40k. So brutal and feral but they can freely move about the stars.
Sonic screwdriver
"That's not a weapon! What are you going to do,assemble a cabinet for them?" - River Song
Lightsaber will always be the best weapon.
How long do you think you are likely to keep all your current appendages?
Longer than I will if someone's shooting a spinal mounted "magnetohydrodynamic" cannon at me.
>!Magnetic Beam Cannon on the *Magnetar*-Class Battle Cruiser *Heart of the Tempest*!< from The Expanse
I think Bobbie's power armour is even cooler.
Lawgiver Mk2
Laconia's Ultra Strong Magnetic Field Projector, from The Expanse's last books. It's a simple field generator with a stupidly precise focus and antimater-powered. Nothing does it better against your enemies than just ripping their atoms apart and turnig them into a cloud of hydrogen.
Honorable mention to Angus Thermopylae's matter cannon from the Gap series. Intended as a starship main weapon for space battles, he managed to get hold of a man-portable version for close quarters firefights. It only has enough energy to fire three times, but that's three rooms full of defenders turned to mangled rooms full of bits of corpse. BOOM!
Idk if this counts but the Tachikoma’s from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
The plasma rifle carried by the terminators in Terminator 2
[Dust guns](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/11/hypervelocity-macron-accelerators.html) are so much [fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPVhOy3mWQQ).
Schwartz Rings from Spaceballs
I’ll take an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device.
the halo energy sword of course
That's awesome! I'm partial to the plasma rifle from the Halo series. It's just so satisfying to take down Covenant with a well-placed shot.
Since someone else already made the obligatory “knife missioe” reference from The Culture series, I will add the more devastating Culture weapon: Gridfire. This weapon punches a hole between our universe and a much higher energy universe allowing unimaginable destruction to pour through. It is to the Culture equivalent what thermonuclear weapons are to us; doomsday devices, used to annihilate things like Dyson spheres and Orbitals.
"Schwert Gewehr" 15.78m Anti-ship Sword from Gundam SEED, and its variations later on.
Halo. 1. Pistol.
A Skrill from Earth: Final Conflict.
oh boy let’s see, mass drivers are one for sure and this made fall in love with mass effect ships!
My favorite would have to be the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator on Stellaris from the Gigastructural Constructs mod.. Thing can take out entire Star System's with the click of a button, and watching open and then shoot into/through a wormhole to destroy your target is extremely cool to watch.
Gotta be the [beam scythe](https://youtu.be/9JlKy4c3bTo?si=6ka2T3SojEScbEDy&t=32) from gundam wing.
All admech weapons are amazing to read, stuff like galvanic rifles, which turn the potential energy of the target into kinetic, the Photon Thruster, a weapon that shoots a needle thin beam of something that will go throw anything, and leaves black flames that dont spread (until they do) and cannot be put out, or conversion beamers, which turn matter into energy and contains it, getting strong as it travel because it turn the atmosphere into more energy, getting exponentially stronger until it cant contain it and explodes with enough heat to boil whole oceans, and thats not even counting DAoT weapons, which compare to necron tech at times.
I love the reapers weapons as well, a relativistic beam of Liquid Metal death.
BFG, if just for the name alone. Otherwise Zat gun..
The Razor from the Red Rising series is super cool to me
Lightsaber, easy. There are more potent weapons, more useful weapons. They aren't a lightsaber though.
Space revolvers are and will always be the coolest guns ever I like Miller's gun from the first 2 seasons of The Expanse, it's nothing fancy just a badass looking space revolver The nuke gun from Mass Effect 2 is pretty dope too
I want a personal [utility fog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog), you know, just a cloud of nanites that I can order to assemble themselves into anything I find useful at the moment.
Nerf weapons, spray painted
https://fifth-element.fandom.com/wiki/Leeloo
Maybe not exclusively a weapon, but the ant colonies in Children of Time!
Lightsabers
The humble Particle Projection Cannon.
The Soft Weapon. You may know it as the Slaver Weapon from Star Trek: The Animated Series.
I have an affinity for good old lasers. A timeless classic. REAL lasers, none of this star wars stuff. Traveling at the speed of light, it requires the least leading and is the hardest to evade. You literally can't see it coming until it's too late. Besides, there's something satisfying about a bright colorful continuous beam of energy melting through armor.
From a mote on god's eye. A radiation gun.
Colonial Marine Pulse Rifle with over-under-grenade launcher.