Non-standard weaponry/tactics in SF

[Patrick Degan]

Herewith a discussion on certain weapons or devices and tactics which are somewhat unusual to the familiar methodology of space warfare as depicted in popular SF. To start things rolling, there are two entries from Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato to have a look at:

SMITE (Space-Matter Instant Transporting Equipment) —used by Gen. Lysis against the Star Force at the Battle of the Rainbow Cluster, SMITE consisted of a pair of external emitters which fired beams to a focal point, opening a short-range space warp. Lysis used SMITE to teleport whole bomber squadrons to attack the Argo with complete surprise, inflicting very heavy damage on the Earth battleship. Would have won barring one particular stroke of bad luck. The flagship of Leader Desslok was also equipped with SMITE emitters which he used to teleport mines surrounding the Argo in his showdown against the Star Force during the Comet Empire War.

Magna Flame Gun a.k.a. Burst-Energy Instant Transport Canon —a Comet Empire weapon which essentially combined a wave-motion gun with SMITE. Gen. Bleek unleashed this nasty surprise on the Earth Defence Fleet at Saturn. With it, he was able to blast Capt. Gideon's battleships while still fully five minutes beyond firing range of the Earth fleet's wave-motion guns and forced a retreat into Saturn's ring system. Bleek's arrogance lost him that battle and his life.

To my knowledge, no other SF production has featured either of these ideas.

[Tasoth]

The Farcaster portals in Hyperion. Clear out an area, drop them on the surface and then just disgorge troops and supply en mass. Of course, you have to lock down the surrounding area so your troops don't get cut down as they come pouring out.

Most FTL weaponry. Sitting far, far away from your target and throwing warheads at them without fear of retaliation and with a great deal of accuracy completely dominates a fight.

[loomer]

A primitive weapon I thought up for a group of space pirates could be defined as non-standard. Essentially a large artillery shell, designed to penetrate the otuer hull of most ships, launched from a railgun. However, once inside, much like a bolter, it explodes, revealing it to be packed with several substances. Napalm, and large amounts of bits of jagged, rusty metal, and possibly several anti-tank missiles.

The base plan was, as the pirates could never hope to take any serious resistance in a normal fight, to eliminate the crew using the shrapnel and napalm, and damage critical systems using the anti-tank missiles. If the napalm burns long enough, the air quality will start to decrese, allowing the pirates to harry the ship until the crew die, like hyenas will do to gazelle. Simply jog after until they drop to the ground of exhaustion.

[Tasoth]

Oh, another one I had recently. Using flechettes during boarding actions. If you're being boarded, vent the atmosphere and just try to put cuts in their suit. Use the environment against them.

[Steel]

To my knowledge, no other SF production has featured either of these ideas.

Eeer... you mean you have never seen a scifi series that uses teleporters? Even Star trek has used transporters to attack with surprise.
And in stargate they have fired weapons through a stargate which is identical in principle to firing beam weapons through a wormhole...

[Patrick Degan]

To my knowledge, no other SF production has featured either of these ideas.

Eeer... you mean you have never seen a scifi series that uses teleporters? Even Star trek has used transporters to attack with surprise.
And in stargate they have fired weapons through a stargate which is identical in principle to firing beam weapons through a wormhole...

Oh I'm not saying no other series didn't use teleportation for military purposes. But usually it's always been the of landing troops or boarding parties rather than formations of spacecraft. The Stargate series example I did not know of, so I stand corrected.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Acts of Conscience had teleportation weapons that could reach across intergalactic distances, and the Culture uses displacers to teleport nastiness as well.


There's the weird "reality hacking" weapon in The Anvil of Stars, and the somewhat similar ones seen in Moving Mars, both by Greg Bear.


There's Zinder Nullifiers from Chalker's Well World books. Most of the matter and energy in that universe is actually artificially created and maintained by the Well World; the Nullifiers create a zone ahead of them where everything is literally erased by overriding the Well World locally. A very universe specific weapon.


Something I've only seen twice; in Have Spacesuit Will Travel and the Belisarius books; "rotating a planet around it's axis" and tipping it out of the universe.


Bobble based/assisted warfare as seen in The Peace War, The Ungoverned, and Marooned in Real Time by Vernor Vinge. Bobbles are spheres of stopped time that exist for a pre-specified time; they protect you or your weapons from anything, but of course prevent you from doing anything, so you basically try to hit your enemy while his is down and then pop yours up before his attack hits. Or if he lacks bobble suppressors, you just seal him in one for as long as you like.

[Steel]

To my knowledge, no other SF production has featured either of these ideas.

Eeer... you mean you have never seen a scifi series that uses teleporters? Even Star trek has used transporters to attack with surprise.
And in stargate they have fired weapons through a stargate which is identical in principle to firing beam weapons through a wormhole...

Oh I'm not saying no other series didn't use teleportation for military purposes. But usually it's always been the of landing troops or boarding parties rather than formations of spacecraft. The Stargate series example I did not know of, so I stand corrected.

Actually, now i think about it, what is the difference between telepotring ships and jumping there via hyperspace/warp/other means of FTL?

As far as i can see both hyperspacing and teleporting get you somewhere undetected in transit and near instantaneously, so i cant see a difference other than in name here.

[Agent Fisher]

Here is definitely a non standard tactic. Jumping a capital ship into a planet's atmosphere so it can launch its figthers below the orbiting ships and defenses. The Adama Maneuver.

[Starglider]

And in stargate they have fired weapons through a stargate which is identical in principle to firing beam weapons through a wormhole...

Stargate also had intergalactic teleportation of starships (by supergates); this was never used tactically but teleporters were used to deliver nukes on several occasions. We also know that the beaming tech on the Prometheus could beam something equivalent to its own mass (the naquada-bomb-skyscraper), so Asgard designed or equipped ships teleporting each other tactically might be plausible in that universe, subject to jamming limitations (the beaming tech is nowhere near as flakey as Trek transporters but it is jammable at short ranges by dedicated devices).

As far as i can see both hyperspacing and teleporting get you somewhere undetected in transit

Hyperspace travel is detectable and/or blockable in many universes. Ships can be tracked in hyperspace in Stargate and they can be blocked by planetary shields in SW. Note that in Stargate a fighter hyperdrive was actually used to microjump through a shield, which counts as a novel tactic in my book.

and near instantaneously,

Hyperspace travel may not be anywhere near the same thing as 'instantaneous', depending on setting. Culture ship battles take place largely in infraspace and ultraspace, at thousands to millions of c, but still unfold at a fairly leisurely pace from a Mind's point of view. B5 hyperspace travel certainly isn't instantaneous even over short relatively distances.

[General Zod]

Babylon 5 - The Bonehead Maneuver. Tactic used against vessels with a vastly greater power advantage, not recommended unless the ship doing so is fucking fast. It basically involves opening up a jump gate inside a jump gate, creating some rather nasty feedback that results in a powerful explosion. Big enough to take out a Shadow Vessel at least.

[Jawawithagun]

The Rhodanverse's Transform Cannons, teleporters solely designed for the delivery of warheads.

[Patrick Degan]

Babylon 5 - The Bonehead Maneuver. Tactic used against vessels with a vastly greater power advantage, not recommended unless the ship doing so is fucking fast. It basically involves opening up a jump gate inside a jump gate, creating some rather nasty feedback that results in a powerful explosion. Big enough to take out a Shadow Vessel at least.

A manoeuver which was impossible, or at the least suicidal, before the creation of the White Stars.

[General Zod]

Babylon 5 - The Bonehead Maneuver. Tactic used against vessels with a vastly greater power advantage, not recommended unless the ship doing so is fucking fast. It basically involves opening up a jump gate inside a jump gate, creating some rather nasty feedback that results in a powerful explosion. Big enough to take out a Shadow Vessel at least.

A manoeuver which was impossible, or at the least suicidal, before the creation of the White Stars.

Even then when they first pulled it off the White Star got a nasty bit of shockwave from the explosion. They barely managed to clear it.

[Spice Runner]

While blowing up stars is not so rare in Scifi, In an episode of SG 1, Colonel Carter suceeded with the unique plan of dialing a black hole and throwing the stargate into a star to destabilize it and destroy much of Aphophis's fleet in system.

[Master of Cards]

The little Doctor using the enemys own ships as reaction matter to futher the range of it. Lighting chain gun of space.

[Stile]

From The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven

The Wunderland Treatymaker was used only once. It was a gigantic version of what is commonly a mining tool: a disintegrator that fires a beam to suppress the charge on the electron. Where a disintegrator beam falls, solid matter is rendered suddenly and violently positive. It tears itself into a fog of monatomic particles.

Wunderland built, and transported into the Warhead system, an enormous disintegrator firing in parallel with a similar beam to suppress the charge on the proton.

The two beams touched down thirty miles apart on Canyon's surface. Rock and kzinti factories and housing spewed away as dust, and a solid bar of lightning flowed between the two points. The weapon chewed twelve miles deep into the planet, exposing magma throughout a region the size and shape of Baja California on Earth.

[Lord Insanity]

From Titan A.E., the Titan using the Drej's weapon blast (and sucking up the whole ship) as fuel was a fairly non-standard defensive act.

[White Haven]

Iron-bombing Moscow's star in Iron Sunrise. Blip the core of a star into a constructed pocket universe for a flicker of time. Time in said construct universe is accelerated by many, many orders of magnitude, so that when the star's core reintegrates with normal spacetime, it's run up to the iron limit, and the rest of the star collapses in against a sphere of iron. Stross is a nut.

[Uraniun235]

While blowing up stars is not so rare in Scifi, In an episode of SG 1, Colonel Carter suceeded with the unique plan of dialing a black hole and throwing the stargate into a star to destabilize it and destroy much of Aphophis's fleet in system.

Wait. That doesn't make sense. I thought you had to dial to another stargate.

[Spice Runner]

My mistake, I didn't clarify. Carter dialed to a planet with a stargate that was in a decaying orbit around a black hole.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Project WorldBomb from Aliens and Allies by Roger McBride Allen; luring an enemy fleet in near to a smallish dead planet, then blowing it up just to kill the fleet. The idea being that explosions normally don't work well in space due to the lack of air to carry a shockwave; so they blew up a planet to produce all the shrapnel they needed. Blowing up planets isn't that rare in sci-fi, but generally the planet is the target.

From The Forge of God, dropping two neutronium helices, one of matter, another of antimatter into the Earth. They orbit each other inside the planet in a decaying orbit until they meet, then BOOM !

From one of the ler novels by M.A. Foster, launching a near-c starship with an instant-acceleration drive that will give the ship a relativistic mass of 2.5 solar masses while still on the surface of the planet.

From The Bully and the Crazy Boy, Vernor Vinge. Sending in multiple unarmed research ships into a battle between nasty aliens and the outgunned & doomed human fleet, on converging near-c courses that cause them to all impact each other simultaneously in the middle of the battle, creating an energy release strong enough to kill both sides. "Let's see your damned shields stand up to that !"

[Dahak]

The Neutronium Alchemist is a pretty unique weapon in its setting, using commonly available tech that is combined in a inventive, creative way to create a deadly result.

[darthbob88]

The Neutronium Alchemist is a pretty unique weapon in its setting, using commonly available tech that is combined in a inventive, creative way to create a deadly result.

Elaborate, sir. What is this weapon, and how does it work? It sounds like a fascinating device, but you have said very little about it, other than its name and the fact that it combines commonly available technology in a creative manner.

[Dahak]

The Neutronium Alchemist is a pretty unique weapon in its setting, using commonly available tech that is combined in a inventive, creative way to create a deadly result.

Elaborate, sir. What is this weapon, and how does it work? It sounds like a fascinating device, but you have said very little about it, other than its name and the fact that it combines commonly available technology in a creative manner.

Well, it isn't completely obscure knowledge and should be quite known around, but anyway...
It combines a patterning node, a mechanism used for FTL in the Night's Dawn univery, and a Zero-Tau field (like a stasis-field).
The node gets powered up and when the node approaches or reaches singularity and forms a wormhole(depending on the setting), the Zero-Tau field freezes the node in time. In the first setting, the singularity will eat up all mass of the sun, rendering the system uninhabitable. In the second, more violent setting, the node will be frozen just before it becomes a singularity. Every mass this very dense object then comes into contact will be turned into neutronium. In the end, the star goes nova.