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[iceball3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
Here's a cool one. Bomb-pumped lasers.

I hadn't read through that page. The way that they talk about throwing a nuclear reactor at an incoming nuke is rather alarming, and in my opinion, impractical, reactors are heavy, and one should not conceive of throwing them at things unless they're sure it's going to work.


I'm still convinced that there aren't better theoretical weapons than gray goo, because ultimately, utter habitat annihilation is quite a large stick to shake at someone. I'm also convinced that it probably isn't possible to generalize it to spread through inorganic matter, or all organic matter, or do so at a fast enough rate.


I'm still just impressed by the much more realistic possibility of dropping asteroids on people.

You may have misread or not read enough on the wiki page, then.

Also, in terms of habitat destroying weapons? We already have enough nuclear firepower or enough producible by our global industrial capacity to do anything from render the entire surface of the world uninhabitable for centuries, to turning significant portioms of the crust inside out. See: Tsar Bomba.

If we want to get more exotic and more larger scale for sci fi, we can implicate something new: antimatter synthesis.
On the lower end of the scale availability, there could be antimatter-boosted nuclear warheads. On the higher end, pure antimatter warheads. Truly devastating stuff.

[Amperzand]

Or, alternatively, high-relativistic KKVs. Anything above .85c is more effective than antimatter, per-mass, with the added benefit of penetrating any conceivable armor.

Also, read this. I feel the entire website is an immensely useful source of information to base a discussion like this one off of.

[H4zardZ1]

Or, alternatively, high-relativistic KKVs. Anything above .85c is more effective than antimatter, per-mass, with the added benefit of penetrating any conceivable armor.

Also, read this. I feel the entire website is an immensely useful source of information to base a discussion like this one off of.

Ahh, reminds me of space-rod-dropping. Gravity is something you can play with.

[Insanegame27]

I dont like the idea of the space rods. Sounds like the government is 'gaming' Real Life.

[Amperzand]

Not... Really? I mean, yes, they're exploiting physics to destructive effect, but that's basically every weapon ever.

Spoiler: BARELY-RELEVANT QUIBBLING (click to show/hide)

As far as I understand orbital mechanics, that sort of thing isn't so much using a planet's gravity to accelerate something towards it, as it is having something already accelerated, presumably artificially, to the (Usually extremely high) velocity required to maintain orbit around the planet, then slowing it down enough that its orbit intersects a point on the planet's surface.  You could get away with just dropping things, however, if the planet had very, very high gravitational acceleration, instead of our planet's reasonably measly 9.81m/s² and thick, terminal-velocity-dropping atmosphere. If you drop a marble onto a neutron star from a meter up, you'd get a helluva bang. Drop it on earth, and it maybe chips a little.

[Virex]

You're right. If you put a rod in orbit, it will stay in orbit until the stars die. Especially for a heavy rod you need to put in quite a lot of energy to deorbit it, but luckely not as much as it would take to get it into orbit. The nice part about rod-dropping is not that it's efficient but that it's hard to defend against. A normal anti-missile system that could intercept missiles would do little against a lump of metal falling from the sky.

[Amperzand]

Yep. It's also really good for extremely hard targets, like nuclear bunkers and the like, since they've got really silly amounts of energy, and can apply all of it to a very small area.

[Dirst]

I know, plasma cutters and water-jet cutters are very, very effective as cutting tools, but they only reach a foot or something before their cutting power drop off. However, if we were able to confine plasma at long distances well enough to use it as a beam weapon, using it as a beam weapon would be a pretty trivial apllication compared to, say, building an open-air fusion reactor.

You don't need to extend the rand that far.  Just two or three feet should suffice.  A religious order of knights from the Old Republic will come along and form a whole new style of fencing around it.

[ChairmanPoo]

I know, plasma cutters and water-jet cutters are very, very effective as cutting tools, but they only reach a foot or something before their cutting power drop off. However, if we were able to confine plasma at long distances well enough to use it as a beam weapon, using it as a beam weapon would be a pretty trivial apllication compared to, say, building an open-air fusion reactor.

You don't need to extend the rand that far.  Just two or three feet should suffice.  A religious order of knights from the Old Republic will come along and form a whole new style of fencing around it.

[wierd]

Gravitational waves meet tesla's resonant bridge smasher.

Or, how perfectly placed and calibrated spinning dumbells could have scary consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_resonance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave#Sources_and_signal_interpretation

My work here is dung.

[Parsely]

So let's start with a simple one, an incendiary grenade who's main purpose is to burn up the oxygen in a room rather than burn those inside. It would be like a canister full of gas that would release into the room and after a few moments a mechanism in the canister would spark an ignition of sorts to burn the gas

You're better off just throwing a fragmentation grenade inside. It'll kill or maim anyone in that room you don't like.

Your goal in any story is believability (this is NOT the same as realism). As a rule, the first thing you should do when making up weapons for a setting is to ask yourself: what's the weapon's purpose? If the answer is: to be cool, then you should stop. If there's an existing weapon that does the same job just as well you should use that instead. That's less work on your part and the reader is less likely to groan when he reads the story.

[Insanegame27]

GUNIN, he already said he wanted no structural damage. Frag grenades tend to do that. Frag grenade thrown into a room with Computers that have sensitive data? Congratulations, that data was just destroyed.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Frankly, chemical warfare is the best bet for this sort of weapon. Anything else is going to be ineffective or causes structural damage.

[Jimmy]

Agreed. A nerve gas that paralyzes the lungs is far easier to manufacture and administer than a non-explosive non-thermogenic deoxygenating agent. Why go to all the trouble of sucking the oxygen out of the room when you can just stop the enemy's lungs from working instead?

[Parsely]

GUNIN, he already said he wanted no structural damage.

Frag grenades tend to do that. Frag grenade thrown into a room with Computers that have sensitive data? Congratulations, that data was just destroyed.

I don't see where he said that. He seems interested in "burning the oxygen in a room rather than those inside" (by "those" I assume he means people) and "igniting surroundings". He's got three posts in this thread and it didn't take long for me to closely read them. Doesn't seem he's concerned at all with the state of the room afterward, since there are better ways to leave a room intact than by setting it on fire.

An SSD, as long as it's inside a tower, has a pretty good chance of surviving a fragmentation grenade, but that's a risk you might not take in some cases.

Agreed. A nerve gas that paralyzes the lungs is far easier to manufacture and administer than a non-explosive non-thermogenic deoxygenating agent. Why go to all the trouble of sucking the oxygen out of the room when you can just stop the enemy's lungs from working instead?

An explosive would probably incapacitate everyone instantly with only seconds to react. AFAIK people who've been hit with nerve gas are still conscious for up to ten minutes but I won't assume they'd be in any shape to perform any last minute acts of spite, like firing a gun or triggering an explosive. It seems someone would still have time to do things while they're suffocating. Not to mention you have to worry about yourself being contaminated by the nerve agent after you've put it into the environment. That could be a hassle to keep your own side from taking casualties from the gas, plus you have to decontaminate yourselves and any sensitive items afterward.