Your favorite Sci-fi WMD?

[The Dark]

For easiest-to-use WMD, Honorverse missiles. They're not really planetbusters, but each missile will strike with 14,200 megatons of TNT equivalent kinetic energy. There's a reason they're not allowed to use them around planets.

[Chris OFarrell]

Currently I'm a big fan of the Mark IX Horizon weapons delivery system in Stargate Atlantis.

Hardly the most powerful WMD, even in that show, but man does it look cool when it MIRV's and gigantic mushroom clouds push out past the atmosphere....

[Admiral Valdemar]

I would add RKVs to the list of KE weapons then. A system targetable weapon that can be used for strategic strikes on planets with the aim of wiping all life off their faces with very little warning or countermeasures makes more sense than getting up close with rocks.

Even if your target planet throws up clouds of particulates or has EW stations and interceptors, you are likely capable of throwing cluster munitions out instead and no one gets a 100% hit ratio. Think ICBM with MIRVs, only simply guided solid pieces of iron, DU or tungsten going at high relativistic velocities.

All the energy put into achieving that velocity had transformed the Intruder into a kinetic storage device of nightmarish design. If it struck a world, every gram of the vessel’s substance would be received by that world as the target in a linear accelerator receives a spray of relativistic buckshot. Someone, somewhere, had built and was putting to use a relativistic bomb -- a giant, roving atom smasher aimed at worlds...

The gamma-ray shine of the decelerating half was also detectable, but it made no difference. One of the iron rules of relativistic bombardment was that if you could see something approaching at 92 percent of light speed, it was never where you saw it when you saw it, but was practically upon you...

In the forests below, lakes caught the first rays of the rising Sun and threw them back into space. Abandoning the two-dimensional sprawl of twentieth-century cities, Sri Lanka Tower, and others like it, had been erected in the world’s rain forests and farmlands, leaving the countryside virtually uninhabited. Even in Africa, where more than a hundred city arcologies had risen, nature was beginning to renew itself. It was a good day to be alive, she told herself, taking in the peace of the garden. Then, looking east, she saw it coming -- at least her eyes began to register it -- but her optic nerves did not last long enough to transmit what the eyes had seen.

It was quite small for what it could do -- small enough to fit into an average-sized living room -- but it was moving at 92 percent of light speed when it touched Earth’s atmosphere. A spear point of light appeared, so intense that the air below snapped away from it, creating a low-density tunnel through which the object descended. The walls of the tunnel were a plasma boundary layer, six and a half kilometers wide and more than 160 deep -- the flaming spear that Virginia’s eyes began to register -- with every square foot of its surface radiating a trillion watts, and still its destructive potential was but fractionally spent.

Thirty-three kilometers above the Indian Ocean, the point began to encounter too much air. It tunneled down only eight kilometers more, then stalled and detonated, less than two-thousandths of a second after crossing the orbits of Earth’s nearest artificial satellites.

Virginia was more than three hundred kilometers away when the light burst toward her. Every nerve ending in her body began to record a strange, prickling sensation -- the sheer pressure of photons trying to push her backward. No shadows were cast anywhere in the tower, so bright was the glare. It pierced walls, ceramic beams, notepads, and people -- four hundred thousand people. The maglev terminal connecting Sri Lanka Tower to London and Sydney, the waste treatment centers that sustained the lakes and farms, all the shops, theaters, and apartments liquefied instantly. The structure began to slip and crash like a giant waterfall, but gravity could not yank it down fast enough. The Tower became vapor before it could fall half a meter. At the vanished city’s feet, the trees of the forest were no longer able to cast shadows; they had themselves become long shadows of carbonized dust on the ground.

In Kandy and Columbo, where sidewalks steamed, the relativistic onslaught was unfinished. The electromagnetic pulse alone killed every living thing as far away as Bombay and the Maldives. All of India south of the Godavari River became an instant microwave oven. Nearer the epicenter, Demon Rock glowed with a fierce red heat, then fractured down its center, as if to herald the second coming of the tyrant it memorialized. The air blast followed, surging out of the Indian Ocean -- faster than sound -- flattening whatever still stood. As it slashed north through Jaffna and Madurai, the wave front was met and overpowered by shocks rushing out from strikes in central and southern India.

Across the face of the planet, without warning, thousands of flaming swords pierced the sky...

Then out of no where -- out of the deep impersonal nowhere -- came a bombardment that even the science fiction writers had failed to entertain.

Just nine days short of America’s tricentennial celebrations, every inhabited planetary surface in the solar system had been wiped clean by relativistic bombs. Research centers on Mars, Europa, and Ganymede were silent; even tiny Phobos and Moo-kau were silent. Port Chaffee was silent. New York, Colombo, Wellington, the Mercury Power Project and the Asimov Array. Silent. Silent. Silent.

A Valkyrie rocket’s transmission of Mercury’s surface had revealed thousands of saucer-shaped depressions where only hours before had existed a planet-spanning carpet of solar panels. The transmission had lasted only a few seconds -- just long enough for Isak to realize there would be no more of the self-replicating robots that had built the array of panels and accelerators, just long enough for him to understand that humanity no longer possessed a fuel source for its antimatter rockets -- and then the transmission had ceased abruptly as the Valkyrie disappeared in a silent white glare.

Presently, most of the station’s scopes and spectrographs were turning Earthward, and Isak found it impossible to believe what they revealed. The Moon rising over Africa from behind Earth was peppered with new fields of craters. The planet below looked like a ball of cotton stained grayish yellow. The top five meters of ocean had boiled off under the assault, and sea level air was three times denser than the day before -- and twice as hot...

The sobering truth is that relativistic civilizations are a potential nightmare to anyone living within range of them. The problem is that objects traveling at an appreciable fraction of light speed are never where you see them when you see them. Relativistic rockets, if their owners turn out to be less than benevolent, are both totally unstoppable and totally destructive. A starship weighing in at 1,500 tons (approximately the weight of a fully fueled space shuttle sitting on the launchpad) impacting an earthlike planet at "only" 30 percent of lightspeed will release 1.5 million megatons of energy -- an explosive force equivalent to 150 times today's global nuclear arsenal...

The most humbling feature of the relativistic bomb is that even if you happen to see it coming, its exact motion and position can never be determined; and given a technology even a hundred orders of magnitude above our own, you cannot hope to intercept one of these weapons. It often happens, in these discussions, that an expression from the old west arises: "God made some men bigger and stronger than others, but Mr. Colt made all men equal." Variations on Mr. Colt's weapon are still popular today, even in a society that possesses hydrogen bombs. Similarly, no matter how advanced civilizations grow, the relativistic bomb is not likely to go away...

[Geodd]

Buster Machine 3

It was awesome, used a compressed jupiter as a warhead and blew up a good chunk of the milky way

[ThatGuyFromThatPlace]

Solar Trumpet, the Sun Crusher may be able to destroy entire solar systems, but it just doesn't have the same 'flare' as turning a sun into an interstellar flamethrower, torching however many solar systems as you can reach.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Solar Trumpet, the Sun Crusher may be able to destroy entire solar systems, but it just doesn't have the same 'flare' as turning a sun into an interstellar flamethrower, torching however many solar systems as you can reach.

Are you serious. I'd have more belief in a neighbouring Supernova or a Magnetar emitting high power gamma ray bursts torching nearby systems than a star turned into some high emission photon weapon. To do so practically requires the sun to burn all its fuel and collapse all in one go.

[Argosh]

I am the Lexx, I am the most powerful testicles in the two universes.

Another vote for Lexx, the conviniently squishy bioship planetkiller.

[Peptuck]

You know, the Liquid Tiberium Bomb from C&C3 was pretty cool.

Sure, it lacks the firepower of the vast majority of the other stuff in this thread, but the LT explosion in TW had to be accompanied by Kane doing the mambo in joy at GDI screwing themselves over.

[The Yosemite Bear]

how about the "Snooze Alarm Clock" for the great old ones?

or HHTG balls?

[Vanas]

Two that sprung to mind that I quite liked:

The Dweller planet-killer from the Algebraeist: A planet surreounded by a swarm of moons, each surrounded by a swarm of asteroids, each surrounded by a swarm of rocks and so on, all going at about 99% light speed, giving the average person on the target planet enough time to say "What the f-"

The Firstborn's planet killer (Sunstorm): Chuck super-Jupiter into distant sun. Wait a while. Then revel in the target planet getting hosed with a planet-grade flamethrower. Like the previously mentioned one, but on longer time scales and easier to fire, if you get the maths right.

[Vendetta]

The Dweller planet-killer from the Algebraeist: A planet surreounded by a swarm of moons, each surrounded by a swarm of asteroids, each surrounded by a swarm of rocks and so on, all going at about 99% light speed, giving the average person on the target planet enough time to say "What the f-"

The best bit of that is that the Dwellers simply don't care that it will take tens of thousands of years to arrive (no FTL in The Algebraist), they just launch the thing and consider the problem "dealt with".

[Admiral Valdemar]

The Dweller planet-killer from the Algebraeist: A planet surreounded by a swarm of moons, each surrounded by a swarm of asteroids, each surrounded by a swarm of rocks and so on, all going at about 99% light speed, giving the average person on the target planet enough time to say "What the f-"

The best bit of that is that the Dwellers simply don't care that it will take tens of thousands of years to arrive (no FTL in The Algebraist), they just launch the thing and consider the problem "dealt with".

Having still yet to read the damn book, that sounds like Banks went "Hey, relativistic kill vehicles are fun. Now let's make one as if the Culture decided to do it one day". The result seems to be a planet from hell. A rocket going a good portion of c = good. A planet with moons going high c = godly.

Solar Trumpet, the Sun Crusher may be able to destroy entire solar systems, but it just doesn't have the same 'flare' as turning a sun into an interstellar flamethrower, torching however many solar systems as you can reach.

Are you serious. I'd have more belief in a neighbouring Supernova or a Magnetar emitting high power gamma ray bursts torching nearby systems than a star turned into some high emission photon weapon. To do so practically requires the sun to burn all its fuel and collapse all in one go.

If he means the Inhibitor Singer device, then it wouldn't torch nearby systems (the distances between systems are orders of magnitude more than between celestial bodies in system), since the venting stream of plasma from the core, even going half of lightspeed and very tightly focused, would disperse over distance and become less useful the further out it was (not that it matters too much for planets as far out as Pluto, since they wouldn't be holding much life anyway being outside the Goldilocks zone). The beam is more than enough to hit Earth like targets and slag all the top fifth of the surface making even the best bunkers useless.

Course, this was only the 15th and newest way to kill a star. A less exotic way would be to spin the star via an encircled particle accelerator quadrupole and have collectors on the poles collect sloughed plasma and redirect and accelerate it to a target.

[Civil War Man]

I must add, even though my favorite is the Death Star, the Vogon Constructor Fleet and Krikket Bomb from the Hitchhiker's Guide series do compete for second.

[Ariphaos]

RKVs are for retarded civilizations. Defenses against them can take several forms (gravity tugs, solar array, make sure your home system lies in a gas cloud, put most of your production in space...), while the ISM imposes a speed limit.

Starstrafing for the win - aim your sun at the target star system and sweep over it.

Since that's actually physically feasible, I'm going with sunshine and happiness over the Death Star.

[SirNitram]

The Little Doctor. Yes, it's awesome in a can for planetbusting. Yes, it can be used in fleet battles. But the reason I love it is it inverts all previous understanding of tactics; to survive it, you must avoid bunching up your assets.

[Starglider]

The Photino Birds, nothing says overkill like tossing an entire galaxy at your enemy.

This isn't all that effective for taking out the enemy. The blast from the central black holes colliding will only be dangerous near the galactic cores. The number of actual stellar collisions likely to occur from the Milky Way and the Andromea galaxy colliding will be about six. Some stars will get flung off into space and a few will get cooked in stellar nurseries, but it all happens so tortously slowly that it won't do anything serious to an interstellar civilisation (in fact you may actually be giving them more resources).

Of course the Photino Bird's normal mode of attack, turning stars into red giants, is quite effective on low-to-medium tech interstellar civilisations (though it's not a serious threat to Culture grade and above). The galaxy-tossing was an attack specifically intended to disrupt an extremely large structure with gravitic effects, not kill planets.

[Admiral Valdemar]

RKVs are for retarded civilizations. Defenses against them can take several forms (gravity tugs, solar array, make sure your home system lies in a gas cloud, put most of your production in space...), while the ISM imposes a speed limit.

Starstrafing for the win - aim your sun at the target star system and sweep over it.

Since that's actually physically feasible, I'm going with sunshine and happiness over the Death Star.

It's a little overboard to throw stars though. We can defend against anti-tank missiles today, doesn't mean we don't use them, hence we will always have RKVs for making someone think twice.

As for stellar collisions, the other handy trick the Inhibitors had was throwing two neutron stars together and getting a big ol' beam of intense gamma rays saturate a few hundred systems in the way. Induced hypernovae might not be all that accurate, but they get the job done.

[Starglider]

The Dweller planet-killer from the Algebraeist: A planet surreounded by a swarm of moons, each surrounded by a swarm of asteroids, each surrounded by a swarm of rocks and so on, all going at about 99% light speed, giving the average person on the target planet enough time to say "What the f-"

The best bit of that is that the Dwellers simply don't care that it will take tens of thousands of years to arrive (no FTL in The Algebraist), they just launch the thing and consider the problem "dealt with".

Exactly how do they get this mess up to 0.99c?

The Little Doctor. Yes, it's awesome in a can for planetbusting. Yes, it can be used in fleet battles. But the reason I love it is it inverts all previous understanding of tactics; to survive it, you must avoid bunching up your assets.

Since when was 'dispersal' is some radically new concept?

I'm surprised no one mentioned the stellar laser from the Ringworld series; the superconducting grid in the ringworld makes a huge solar flare, then forces it to lase, forming a laser canon many times bigger than the Earth.

[Jawawithagun]

Battlelords of the 23rd Century had this nice little Matrix power - Space Fold. Take two points in space, any two points, up to 100pc apart. Bring them together, just like that. Everything inbetween ceases to exist.
And you'll be never late for dinner too!

[Rye]

I've been thinking about ridiculously powerful tractor beams recently, given the requisite technology, you could cause all sorts of havoc; fuck up a planet's tectonics, yank apart the crust exposing the mantle, or target a city and yank it against the rotation of the planet, or fling it into space as fast as you can. One idea I had was targetting Earth then throwing it at Jupiter to see what happens. Alternatively, drag Jupiter towards the Earth's orbit, I imagine that would be pretty fucking apocalyptic from our vantage point.

Essentially, it'd be like the gravgun from half life only taken to sickening extremes.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I've been thinking about ridiculously powerful tractor beams recently, given the requisite technology, you could cause all sorts of havoc; fuck up a planet's tectonics, yank apart the crust exposing the mantle, or target a city and yank it against the rotation of the planet, or fling it into space as fast as you can. One idea I had was targetting Earth then throwing it at Jupiter to see what happens. Alternatively, drag Jupiter towards the Earth's orbit, I imagine that would be pretty fucking apocalyptic from our vantage point.

Essentially, it'd be like the gravgun from half life only taken to sickening extremes.

Not new. Centerpoint and the Repulsors on the worlds of Corel are of equal power.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

EDIT: I meant the repulsors are of equal power, not with the Centerpoint.

[Ford Prefect]

It's a little overboard to throw stars though. We can defend against anti-tank missiles today, doesn't mean we don't use them, hence we will always have RKVs for making someone think twice.

Starstrafing isn't actually throwing the star itself, it's pointing your star's energy in one direction using a Dyson Swarm. It's basically the logical extreme of any sort of solar energy based weapons.

However, I do have a soft spot for RKKVs, if only because The Killing Star made them seem so very frightening. Silent. Silent. Silent.

[Beowulf]

The Little Doctor. Yes, it's awesome in a can for planetbusting. Yes, it can be used in fleet battles. But the reason I love it is it inverts all previous understanding of tactics; to survive it, you must avoid bunching up your assets.

Since when was 'dispersal' is some radically new concept?

Ditto. Defense against arrow volleys: disperse. Defense against explosive artillery: disperse. Defense against nuclear SAMs/AAMs: disperse.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the stellar laser from the Ringworld series; the superconducting grid in the ringworld makes a huge solar flare, then forces it to lase, forming a laser canon many times bigger than the Earth.

Isn't useful against targets not in the same system. Probably. And if they are in the same system, they probably already know about it.

[Drooling Iguana]

I'll have to toss in another vote for the Death Star. No wanktastic chain-reaction technobabble that takes a page and a half to explain, just a big, giant gun in space that makes planets asplode.