Scifi Doomsday weapons

[CaptainChewbacca]

Aside from the generic "death beams" I was wondering what sort of high-tech doomsday weapons people had seen and felt were plausible. I was just flipping through "1001 scifi weapons" the other day (found it on limewire) and found a really interesting doomsday weapon:

Gravitic Implosion Bomb

A simple and elegant weapon, it consists of a shielded vacuum tube with a wormhole connecting the bottom of the tube to the top. A few drops of liquid are released into the tube, and allowed to fall. In a vaccum it continually accelerates. In a few days it approaches lightspeed and the mass of the drops increase until they distort and implode the device. When that happens, it'll pop the planet like a zit.

As a bonus, before the chamber ruptures you'll have 12-24 hours of wonderful earthquakes and all sorts of natural disasters from the gravitational warping.

Anyone else got a favorite weapon?

[TimothyC]

The Little Doctor Device. AKA The Molecular Disruption Device. Atoms Stop sharring electrons. Molecules breakdown. All that's left of the target is a cloud of atoms. Use it on a planet and you end up with a cloud of Iron, that starts trying to form a new planet.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Gravitic Implosion Bomb

A simple and elegant weapon, it consists of a shielded vacuum tube with a wormhole connecting the bottom of the tube to the top. A few drops of liquid are released into the tube, and allowed to fall. In a vaccum it continually accelerates. In a few days it approaches lightspeed and the mass of the drops increase until they distort and implode the device. When that happens, it'll pop the planet like a zit.

As a bonus, before the chamber ruptures you'll have 12-24 hours of wonderful earthquakes and all sorts of natural disasters from the gravitational warping.

Sounds like someone reads his Niven; he wrote about that trick in an old article on teleportation, including the wormhole variety ( although he didn't use the word, it not being invented ).

Some of my favorites :

From Have Spacesuit Will Travel and the Belisarius series, "rotating a planet about it's axis"; in other words, "tipping" a planet out of the universe. Everything dies, since it's now utterly isolated, in it's own private universe. No sun and no place to run . . .

From The Forge of God, dropping two chunks of neutronium ( large enough to be stable, I assume ), into the Earth, one matter and one antimatter on converging orbits. When they converge inside the planet; BOOM !

Just for the name : Total Existence Failure. Just wait and wait and wait, and some ridiculous times the age of the universe the planet will spontaneously dissipate, thanks to quantum probability.

Using a large mass, like a gas giant moved by one of Niven's "double ended fusion candles" to divert the planet into an impact with it's own Sun. Slow, but satisfyingly complete.

Relevant to this thread, How to Destroy the Earth.

[Stofsk]

Aside from the generic "death beams" I was wondering what sort of high-tech doomsday weapons people had seen and felt were plausible.

On the cheap: an asteroid. If it worked for the Dinosaurs then it can work for you.

If you've got the cash: an antimatter bomb (or bombs).

That's pretty much as plausible as it gets.

[AMX]

Gravitic Implosion Bomb

A simple and elegant weapon, it consists of a shielded vacuum tube with a wormhole connecting the bottom of the tube to the top. A few drops of liquid are released into the tube, and allowed to fall. In a vaccum it continually accelerates. In a few days it approaches lightspeed and the mass of the drops increase until they distort and implode the device. When that happens, it'll pop the planet like a zit.

As a bonus, before the chamber ruptures you'll have 12-24 hours of wonderful earthquakes and all sorts of natural disasters from the gravitational warping.

Just for the record, this wouldn't work.
The drop accelerates while falling outside the wormhole, then decelerates while going through it, since it is going up the gravity well now (whether it does this over a distance of x cm or zero doesn't matter).

Wormholes give you a shortcut through space, but they can't avoid conservation of energy.

[Solauren]

May I ask where those two doomsday weapons are from?

Especially the 'stop sharing electrons' weapon

[dragon]

The gravitic bomb from Dahak series. The one that creates a microscopic black hole for a short period. It sucks mass in and then releases it in a big explosion. The super bomb from Heirs of Empire had a blast radius of 100,000km.

[NecronLord]

Just for the record, this wouldn't work.
The drop accelerates while falling outside the wormhole, then decelerates while going through it, since it is going up the gravity well now (whether it does this over a distance of x cm or zero doesn't matter).

Wormholes give you a shortcut through space, but they can't avoid conservation of energy.

Perhaps one could get around that by some extradimensional shenannigants that mean that while it moves, it moves through an area with no gravity acting on it, and then returns to the real world with the same momentum it left with. Also, after about two years, a one kilo weight dropped by such a method, (ignoring energy needed to make it go uphill) in terrestrial suface gravity would travel at .8 C, and have 92.8 petajoules - twenty two megatons. Hardly world-shattering. You'd need to wait for a very long time for it to have much of an effect.

Of course, for plain mass destruction with wormholes, I'm fond of opening one in the planet's core, to an anchor that orbits the planet in a polar orbit, with the receiving wormhole oriented down (if possible). Then let the pressure do bad things™.

[NecronLord]

Especially the 'stop sharing electrons' weapon

Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game' book.

[Master of Cards]

The Little Doctor Device. AKA The Molecular Disruption Device. Atoms Stop sharring electrons. Molecules breakdown. All that's left of the target is a cloud of atoms. Use it on a planet and you end up with a cloud of Iron, that starts trying to form a new planet.

only works on iron and eacjh iron atom increases the range

[18-Till-I-Die]

Well in ExoSquad i recall that Phaeton had what amounted to a fucking huge antimatter bomb so powerful it would make Mars go Base Delta Zero if it went off. That would probably take a huge, huge amount of antimatter but it's well within what is scientifically possible, assuming you had that much antimatter.

[TimothyC]

The Little Doctor Device. AKA The Molecular Disruption Device. Atoms Stop sharring electrons. Molecules breakdown. All that's left of the target is a cloud of atoms. Use it on a planet and you end up with a cloud of Iron, that starts trying to form a new planet.

only works on iron and eacjh iron atom increases the range

No, it's been shown to work on space ships, so unless you are saying that the Formic ships were made of Iron, you're wrong.

[Lost Soal]

I liked the two Farscape Wormhole weapons, and while the Monster Black Hole of Doom one is certainly fun and impressive, I think I prefer the Shooting A Sun At The Planet method.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Personally, if you want total domination of space, you can't go wrong with berserker probes. If you have von Neumann machines with hostile intent, then you get a nice OCP scenario for anyone who didn't reach that tech level first. Even with no FTL in a realistic story, you could have these things simply spread like a macrovirus across vast gulfs of space. Enable them to carry technical drawings of every weapon you've ever thought of, and then let them consume as they advance, leaving any suitable planets for colonisation without too much hassle, free of harm.

I also like the idea of CAM, that is, Collapsed Anti-Matter, so you can get more bang for your buck with regards to volume. Be better used as a bomb rather than dusting on any target, that way you can keep the M/AM atoms as a specific element to avoid the nasty problem of losing containment (though if you've managed to compress AM like a neutron star would, I doubt a decent Penning trap container would be hard).

[NecronLord]

I also like the idea of CAM, that is, Collapsed Anti-Matter, so you can get more bang for your buck with regards to volume.

To be fair, Banks seems to describe a few Kg of it as having significant power, so it's something more exotic than that.

[Admiral Valdemar]

How so? Having antimatter compressed so as to form a more compact explosive would be "significant power" in my mind. A few kilos will give you megatonnes worth of TNT in just a football sized sphere. If you can pack it in like the atoms on most dense stars or gas giants, you can multiply that to get a big badda boom.

How much of a boom is arbitrary and unknown, but it's obviously decent enough for the Culture to use in warheads.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

On the cheap: an asteroid. If it worked for the Dinosaurs then it can work for you.

If you've got the cash: an antimatter bomb (or bombs).

That's pretty much as plausible as it gets.

Rocks are NOT 'free', citizen.

Firstly, you must manoeuvre the Emperor's naval vessel within the asteroid belt, almost assuredly sustaining damage to the Emperor's ship's paint from micrometeoroids, while expending the Emperor's fuel.

Then the Tech Priests must inspect the rock in question to ascertain its worthiness to do the Emperor's bidding. Should it pass muster, the Emperor's Servitors must use the Emperor's auto-scrapers and melta-cutters to prepare the potential ordnance for movement. Finally, the Tech Priests finished, the Emperor's officers may begin maneuvering the Emperor's warship to abut the asteroid at the prepared face (expending yet more of the Emperor's fuel), and then begin boosting the stone towards the offensive planet.

After a few days of expending a prodigious amount of the Emperor's fuel to accelerate the asteroid into an orbit more fitting to the Emperor's desires, the Emperor's ship may then return to the planet via superluminous warp travel and await the arrival of the stone, still many weeks (or months) away.

After twiddling away the Emperor's time and eating the Emperor's food in the wasteful pursuit of making sure that the Emperor's enemies do not launch a deflection mission, they may finally watch the ordnance impact the planet (assuming that the Emperor's ship does not need to attempt any last minute course correction upon the rock, using yet more of the Emperor's fuel).

Given a typical (class Bravo-CVII) system, we have the following:

Two months, O&M, Titan class warship: 4.2 Million Imperials
Two months, rations, crew of same: 0.2 MI
Two months, Tech Priest pastor: 1.7 MI
Two months, Servitor parish: 0.3 MI
Paint, Titan class warship 2.5 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.9 MI
Total: 9.8 MI

Contrasted with the following:

5 warheads, magna-melta: 2.5 MI
One day, O&M, Titan class warship: 0.3 MI
One day, rations, crew of same: 0.0 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.1 MI
Total: 2.9 MI

Given the same result with under one third of the cost, the Emperor will have saved a massive amount of His most sacred money and almost a full month of time, during which His warship may be bombarding an entirely different planet.

The Emperor, through this - His Offfice of Imperial Outlays - hereby orders you to attend one (1) week of therapeutic accountancy training/penance. Please report to Areicon IV, Imperial City, Administratum Building CXXI, Room 1456, where you are to sit in the BLUE chair.

For the Emperor,
Bursarius Tenathis,
Perser Level XI,
Imperial Office of Outlays

[SylasGaunt]

Well since nobody's mentioned it...

Buster Machine 3. Just look what it did to the Milky Way.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Hmm, how could I forget gridfire? I've been avoiding the more fanciful SF stories lately, so I'm forgetting the more advanced (magical) weapons. Gridfire would be a superweapon to most, if only it wasn't negated by other tech in the 'verse it exists within.

[andrewgpaul]

I always pictured CAM as being antimatter at neutron-star densities. That sounds 'collapsed' enough for me.

As we're not talking mutuall annihilation weapons here, I'll go with the Inhibitor weapon from Revelation Space; over the course of a couple of months, it distorts the star, poking a hole in it until the fusing matter at the core is exposed. It uses a directional jet of this stuff as a 'flamethrower' with a range of billions of miles.

[Vanas]

I'm always a fan of the Atmospheric Deprivation Weapon.

A small missile (it's not visible on the scene it's deployed in), that, within 5 seconds of detonation turns your planet into an attractive ball of glass, with 1700 degree firestorms rushing across the surface.
Perhaps less effective against higher tech civs, but still a useful little bit of kit.

[OmegaGuy]

The Skylark Duquesne.

[Patrick Degan]

Doctor Who: "The Creature From The Pit" —neutron star. Basic brute-force weapon of the Tythonians, who simply set a neutron star on a collision-course with any planet they wish to destroy and just wait for time and momentum to do the work.

[Zor]

From my Steller Dominions Universe, a Kinetic Strikeship. A warship that uses momentum, booster rockets and a linier accelerator to Launch a 300,00 Tonne shaft of Depleted Uranium at 0.3c at the Planet.

And an honorable metion to the UC Gundam superweapon, the Colony Drop (drop a thirty six kilometer O'neill Clyinder type orbital onto the planet).

Zor

[Dahak]

The Death Bomb from Hyperion has a certain appeal to it, if you want to keep the real estate for yourself.