@@kaileynolan1534 40k's Exterminatus is great, but not really a super-weapon per se in a series that has it happen so frequently. Probably the Titans would be the closest, even though there's so many of them as well.
The Planet Killer from Warhammer 40,000 is an interesting one - that fact that in-universe, its said that it couldn’t be built in our universe, which is a great bit of lore
You know... I am kind of surprised Farscape wasn't mentioned in here. The entire series was a build up to it's superweapon, which was a giant wormhole that was basically weaponized to be a massive singularity that would eat and eat until everything was destroyed. Basically the weapon everyone wanted to use for themselves and when they got to see it outside of any control they thought they could have over it, made sure peace happened.
Came into the comments to say this. Video is great. Some great picks. But nothing I've seen in scifi beats Farscape's wormhole weapon both for being an incredibly dramatic plot device and just pure destruction.
Farscape's Wormhole doomsday weapon is probably the only one that terrifies me. All the others are flashy and cool, but Farscape has a weapon that could conceivably wipe out the universe, given enough time to keep on doubling. We don't know if it would stop growing after destroying our galaxy, after all. It's also virtually unstoppable, if you don't have the wormhole math to understand what it is and what's going on, there's no off switch.
The good old grey goo type of solution to a problem. Or alternatively the, "they can defeat an armada, but can the defeat an armada a minute for the foreseeable future?" Approach
I love the Yamato's Wave Motion Gun for being a stupidly simple idea that you don't see very often. Specifically: "Hey, the FTL engine on this ship outputs a LOT of energy. What if we redirected that energy into a big fuck-off gun instead? So we shoot something with the power that is able to send things past light speed. That'd probably hurt a bunch."
As I understood it, the wave motion gun was not in the plans that came from plans from Queen Starsha - humans invented it based on what they learned from the plans - I can't remember if this idea is from the OG Star Blazers or from the anime remake or what - but it was in interesting point.
That's not that uncommon. Even in Star Trek, they can redirect the full output of their warp core through their main deflector dish, into a focused beam. They don't do it very often because it disables the ship for several hours afterward, but there are some instances where they attempt to punch through a particularly difficult enemy hardpoint with this method, and one where they try to overload an energy sucking spacial anomaly with it so that they can escape.
The “little doctor” or Molecular Disruptor (M.D.) from Ender’s Game has to be my favorite. It’s the most tense a single button push can be, while also functioning thematically appropriately instead of being cliche
The terrifying thing is it has no limited yield, it uses a chain reaction that as long as there is matter for the explosion to consume it'll keep on going until the whole planet is molten rock.
The final deployment is a big part of why that one stuck with me. Everyone knew what had to be done, but no one had the willpower to do it... so they manipulated a child into doing it for them.
I dont even know if this counts but the Star Forge is probably my favourite. I just love any super weapon that isn't just a big gun. It eats suns to rapidly produce entire fleets of starships kitted out for minimal crew. Its a genius idea that they totally should have used for the First Order in the newer films instead of the slightly bigger death star planet thing.
Speaking of Star Wars "superweapons". Centerpoint Station. Not a weapon by itself, but it can move planets around, which open a lot of creative opportunities.
I recommend the Ultimate Weapon from the third book in Douglas Adams' Hitchikers guide 5 part trilogy. The original Ultimate Weapon was described as "a very, very small bomb". The final one was said to be about the same colour, weight, size, and shape as a cricket ball. It worked by connecting the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously and, when activated, turning the entire Universe into one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.
And it actually delivers on the name of "ultimate weapon." While the word "ultimate" has also come to describe the greatest, best, or most extreme example of something, the original meaning of the word is "final" or "last," and nobody's going to be shooting back if you just blew up the entire universe. Though it's been a long time since I've read the HGttG books I want to think that bit of linguistic clarification was at the center of the joke about the "ultimate weapon."
It has the primary purpose of creating new planets, but it can easily be used as a super-weapon first. Truly unique dual purpose device with so much potential.
that is essentially that the Votanis COllective terraforming devices from DEFIANCE did to Earth when triggered. THus Saint Louis is now surrounded by mountains.. those devices didnt just affect life.. they LITERALLY reshaped the surface of the planet.
I always thought it was weird that the Genesis device was never mentioned ever again on any of the Trek series. Was knowledge of the technology locked away at the Daystrom institute and Starfleet forbade anyone to speak of it, again?
@@AVClarke You have to believe Starfleet deep-sixed it as hard as possible. Completely aside from causing a WMD arms race if it ever got out, what neighboring power would allow the Federation to have such a weapon? I think there was also some stuff about it not working entirely properly (the subsequent created stuff being unstable due to protomatter). I personally like to think that Section 31 was secretly funding the research and has a hidden stockpike just in case the Federation is ever truly up against the wall and they need that ace in the hole.
A friend of mine recently got me into SG1. Honestly, the idea of just dropping a nuke into a Stargate and into your enemy's lap is terrifying. (oh yeah, and making the gates explode, too)
You can even take the drop a nuke to an extreme by sending a gate buster nuke through a gate. Not only do you have the destruction of a super mega nuke but you have the secondary explosion of a gate blowing up.
In the Atlantis series, they just teleport nukes onboard Wraith ships. While a nuclear blast outside your ship might be shrugged of... a nuclear blast inside it is just awful. Simple, down to earth, practical and effective. Why dont Star Trek take a note of that? Beam a nuke onto a Borg cube?
@@user-mk8kx1rr1g They did beam a torpedo into a borg cube in one episode. I think the main problem is that you have to lower your sheilds to beam anything, so you might deliver the bomb, but then they send drones over to your ship to start infecting people. The Stargates, on the other hand, can only be opened one way at any given time.
@@user-mk8kx1rr1g The short answer: if you want to use your shields, you cannot use transporters, and if the enemy has any shields raised at all, you also cannot use transporters until you open up their shields long enough to beam something in. The long answer: Starfleet officers are not stupid and when the opportunity presents itself, they do that exactly, but instead of a fission or fusion bomb, it's an antimatter bomb worth at least as much as the Tsar Bomba in megatons. In one episode of Voyager, but it's a photon torpedo onto a smaller Borg ship, which makes it frankly more destructive. Instead of a nuclear bomb, it was an antimatter bomb. Usually, this approach cannot work against much of anything, because as a general rule of thumb, any ship in Star Trek that has its shields up cannot beam anything out or have things beamed on, so if you want to transport a nuke onto a Borg cube, a) if you don't detonate it fast enough the Borg can just assimilate the nuke and it doesn't go off, and b) you have to have lowered your own shields to do so, meaning that your ship is crawling with Borg drones. Borg ships make use of a vastly different type of shielding system that allow them to adapt to almost any attack, given enough data to do so, but this technically means it isn't a conventional type of shield, but knowing the Borg, they'd have installed transporter inhibition systems to compensate for this glaring weakness once they realized that this tactic is possible, and let's be honest, this tactic is so easily accessible to species in the Trek universe that the Borg have probably seen it thousands of times, tried at least once by each species that resists them (we are assuming of course that these species are smart and desperate enough to employ this tactic regardless of honor codes, but it is possible the species is dumb enough to not be worth assimilating except for their physical prowess as tactical drones, so maybe some people wouldn't have thought of this). I think it took very specific circumstances in the Voyager episode for the crew to get away with beaming a torpedo onto a Borg ship, but there are some merits to using a photon torpedo rather than a nuke: many photon torpedoes have their own shields, last time I checked, making it more difficult for the WMD to be just beamed out of the ship before it can explode, and making it harder to tamper with once armed.
You missed the best bit about the Cache weapons from Revelation Space. In the book there's a several page sequence of a crewmember having to explain to one of these sentient superweapons what the stakes are and why it needs to be used, despite not having the proper authorisation. It's a fantastic dialogue
„Hey, I am really low in hierarchy and you do not know me. But could you please destroy that fleet over there? I swear it's for humankind or something.”
They did a "best armour/suit" video with all the usual picks and i remember saying the spacesuits from Revelation Space should be on it ...i mean damn for a spacesuit they packed a hell of a punch(i also mentioned the Biononics from peter f hamiltons commonwealth books though technically their not armour)
Hell yeah, the cache weapons were the coolest! I loved that they were filled with seeming glee when finally were convinced to go off and fire! I too, loved the suits in that series. Quite a deadly and amazing tech! Also shocked to see Peter F. Hamilton's biononics in the replies here. Gotta bring up solar flare bombs, nova bombs and quantum busters! He also wrote the Alchemist into existence in another trilogy!
I really feel like the Molecular Disruption (M.D.) Device from Ender's Game should be a part of this conversation. It blows the OG Death Star out of the water in terms of narrative importance. Connecting back to the computer games Ender and the other kids played at Battle School, to the strategies Ender developed in the Battle Room first as a "foot soldier" and then as a team leader, to the strategies they developed at Command School... It bakes in the culture of the humans, which are independent and decentralized, and the Formics, which are a centralized hive mind. It's so much more than "we point this at a cluster of things close to each other and they all go boom". It's the entire book, all the backstories of the characters and the cultures that have been introduced, baked into a single press of a button at precisely the right moment.
No way have you read deaths end by xin Lou that 2D folder I think that’s a devastating weapon it literally destroyed a whole solar system and there was no way out 😢
Kind of a shame Card never followed up on the MASSIVE cultural ramifications of the Formic's resurrection and the revelation that the Xenocide and the original Speaker were one and the same.
I absolutely love Stellaris' super weapons. Assimilator Machine Super weapons are really unique and the Star Eater of the Crisis would be extra... great.
The Assimilator is my favourite super weapon ever but the one that encases a planet in a force field, essentially isolating it forever, is so messed up when you think about it but is the weapon of the pacifists... love it
I enjoyed the Death Star II picking off ships more than the Death Star I blowing up Alderaan. I liked the idea of you not knowing which capital ship was going to get blown up next, and it happened with such frequency that you were worried that the Rebels were going to lose too many ships and be defeated.
In the Rebels situation at the time, a large decentralised fleet, a weapon that can one-shot a capital ship every few minutes is far worse than a weapon that can one-shot a single planet once a day
I understand where the video is coming from in a narrative sense, but I agree with you. I think it makes the Death Star more interesting that if it fires lower power shots, it can fire more rapidly, making it a fleet killer as well as a planet killer.
There's a Legends novel where some starts to design a "pulsar" Station where its a smaller Death Star with multiple firing ports designed to take on fleets. (spoiler it was a ruse and not really designed beyond what would be needed for a trap)
@@amandajas6287 Indeed. As far as I know that was a feature added to the Death Star II, in addition to its regular planet-killing mode, and likely in response to the previous Death Star's loss.
Happy to see the cache weapons from the Nostalgia for Infinity mentioned here, so iconic. The superweapon that takes the cake for me is the dimensional "envelope" bomb that is used in the Three-Body Problem series. I remember being awestruck in horror at the level of destruction and the casual nature in which it is used.
the fact that the annihilation of countless civilizations is seen as a low-rated job worthy of contempt is one of the most horrifying things about 3-body's setting
I like the slipspace bomb from Halo Reach. While not necessarily a superweapon given it was a makeshift solution, it's visually impressive and frankly, devastating. You literally just opened up a portal to gods-know-where in the middle of an enemy ship. I guess the Nova Bomb also gets an honorable mention, since it's just a nuke, but horrifyingly devastating to the point of destroying entire planets with a device that's not even the size of a spacecraft.
Not jus a nuke, a cluster of nukes designed to well, make a even bigger nuke. right now and in Halo, they use shaped charges to compress nuclear material to the point where it goes critical and explodes. we use regular old Chemical Explosives to do this. the Nova bomb does the same thing, but uses other Nukes. IIRC its described as a solar system killer.
Based on one Halo Infinites armor coatings description it was not only a slip space portal but also an interdenominational one as well Jorge ligit stranded himself and a bunch of covenant over Reach of an alternate universe in a 1/3 super carrier in low orbit
The slipspace bomb literally just opens a hole into slipspace and then closes. It's not transporting anything to another universe, it's moving it to slipspace, which is another dimension in the sense that you normally move through space in 3 or 4 and slipspace has 11 dimensions of space. Same universe, just a different "layer" of it. I'm personally more of a fan of the scene in halo wars where they use a slipspace reactor to cause a small sun to collapse in on itself and cause a super nova. Even though the scene doesn't make much sense logically, it's still a much more cost effective use of a slipspace engine. I'm definitely not a fan of the Nova bomb though. It makes literally no logical sense and doesn't fit in the universe. The UNSC have no business having a weapon that basically breaks the laws of physics and creates energy out of thin air. The idea that the UNSC also have nukes that are 1/900th the yield, and decided to waste 9 of them on a nuke with 0 practical benefit just makes them sound like morons.
@James Ortiz not trying to cause an arguement but, you got any better ideas? Because I've always been a fan of the Nova bomb. It always made me think that it was the pinnacle of UNSC technology up to that point. And I sincerely hope the UNSC start investing in slipspace-related weaponry, I can only imagine how extremely overpowered it would become after being researched by a capable scientist 😁.
So glad to see Revelation Space getting a shout out. The Cache Weapons were so mysterious and in a way, the imperfect descriptions of them just made them more terrifying as your imagination filled in the gaps. I have to say though, the chilling descriptions of the stately construction of whatever it was that killed Resurgam (again) still take the cake.
I've always loved the Yamato device on Terran battlecruisers in the Starcraft universe: "I just focus this entire big nuclear blast in your specific direction ... catch"
My only regret about the Yamato cannon is that the aftermath of the shot is kinda underwhelming, mostly because of the limits of game balance. It doesn't *feel* like it does a lot of damage unless it destroys the target, it just kinda lands and fades out, no massive explosion or anything like that.
I kind of loved the implications that, when it came to blowing up the sun in SG1, Samantha Carter *IS* the Superweapon, because she really was just a walking WMD by the end of the series.
When you said the weapon had no footage, I was so excited because I thought you were about to mention the tecoma gamma ray burst in tiamats wrath (or the magetar cruisers, or the ring gates themselves) 😔
I loved the Krenim Timeship weapon from the ST Voyager episodes ‘Year of Hell’. The idea of literally wiping objects/people/species out of time itself was great, and the way the consequences were shown was really well done.
Shame he didn't mention the Seraphim experimental bomber, a weapon so dangerous it almost kills itself every time it fires. Its payload is large enough to wipe out an entire base, which almost always results in an ACU going nuclear, which almost always hits the bomber, as it maneuvers so slowly that it can't really get out of the blast radius.
So glad for the Revelation Space name drop. Love the tech and the names of the lighthugger vessels. It really does a great job making massive ships truly feel massive while also very very small in the void of space.
@@borttorbbq2556 Technically it is superweapon since is specially design to destroy all sentient life capable of space flight from the galaxy is just work in much more circutuous way to accomplish is mass extinction. This sadly why Reaper are both smarter but less powerful than other Sci fi equivalent. They don't level up and get more powerful toys over time. They just cheat by making sure nobody get close to there level so they never need to adapt to situation. They rigged the board but it mean they don't have to evolve. A luxury there equivalent don't get which is why I don't consider them a weapon of mass death. They are the bullet and the mass relay is the gun.
SOOO happy to see an Alastair Reynolds IP get some love here. I personally think he's come up with a whole host of amazing superweapons: the Cache Weapons, of course, but also the Hypometric Weapons, Century Rain, that one star that the Wolves turned into a flamethrower, and - unintentionally - the inertial dampener that... erases people from history when turned up to 11.
One of my favourites from SG1 is them "using" the vortex of the Supergate to melt thought an otherwise unstoppable Ori ship...because they happened to nuked a ship in another galaxy around a black hole at the right time... That was a feel good moment!
I think my personal favorite super weapon would be the "Sheet of Paper" (Duel Vector Foil) from Death's End. The simplicity of it paired with the sheer terror of how inescapable it truly is makes it an amazing plot element and unique weapon overall. Collapsing three dimensions into two was something that no one could defend against
Another interesting superweapon from Yamato is the Magna Flame Gun, a sort of miniaturized wave motion gun with a twist. It fires directly into a teleporter, with the other end opening directly next to the target! It's incredibly dangerous because it can basically always get off the first strike from well out of return fire range, and even got to be the villain ship for one of the films!
Yamato had a ton of killer ultimate weapons. I loved the exploding wave motion guns the 2nd generation space battleships used. They didn't have as strong a wave motion generator so the shots were underpowered compared to the Yamato', but then again what is t? They made up for it by creating a wave motion "warhead" for lack of a better term that was propelled at the enemy and would then explode in a shotgun like bust of mini-wave motion beams right before it hit the target. It was a fleet killer against enemies that weren't prepared for it. It the later series they found a way to amplify this by seeding enemy formations with wave motion batteries that would explode when hit with the beam making for some spectacular fire works and done thrilling dog fights as the Yamato's fighter launched containers of the batteries into the middle of enemy formations.
@@masterofthelag8414 AFAIK a concept behind Ginga is more or less inspired by Leiji Matsumoto's Time Sweeper Mahoroba (and aborted anime project named Super Dreadnought Mahoroba). this 'Mahoroba' is a fictional ship and begun its career as a superdreadnought--a successor to Yamato class, and DID join Battle of Samar, but not Operation Ten Go. (Mahoroba was hidden somewhere in a secret base, and no one awared of its existence until several decades later when the ship became a site where Time Machine is being built, not even American search party ever located one), later Mahoroba became a spaceship at some point, and even as that it is a kind of Chronosphere in space !!. It is possibly that 2202 storywriter might have read Time Sweeper Mahoroba before. but since the ship's name is 'owned', the name 'Ginga' (Milky Way) is used instead.
As someone who loves Homeworld, Sajuuk's Phased Cannon Array from the second game could have gotten a mention for being an unstoppable force with no known immoveable object to contest it
The Dreadnaught's cannon was more memorable as you actually got to deploy it before the final mission. Likewise the Siege Cannon in Homeworld Cataclysm needs a special mention too!
Both games are among my absolute favorits. Not only in scale, but in the feeling of gameplay. And those superweapons feel strong, without beeing totally overpowered, that is what makes them special in my book.
Since you mentioned the Wave Motion Gun from Space Battleship Yamato, I will mention the Grand Cannon from Macross. It had a six-kilometre deep shaft built into the Earth and a lengthy firing sequence. It managed to vaporize thousands of Zentradi vessels, but was vulnerable to enemy bombardment and was thus destroyed after one shot.
What about the non miniaturized version of the Dimension Eater on Gallia 4, almost literary a black hole generator bomb that impressively miniaturized as a fighter carrier "anti ship" missile or airburst nuke to an irl equivalent
The weaponized wormhole from Far Scape has got to be one of my favorites. The whole show is about trying to keep the tech away from the BBEG and when it gets used you're like "oh that's why" does not disappoint.
Personally, I think the sun crushing element of the Sun Crusher is pretty silly, but the idea of a single small craft that essentially impregnable is actually one of my favorite super-weapon concepts. A little ship you can’t kill is just a really interesting narrative conceit for me.
Another fun thing about the Independence Day city destroys is that they are essentially just flying saucers, but with a more modern feel that doesn’t take away from the classic saucer feel.
Siege Cannon from Homeworld Cataclysm. The elaborate quests you do to aquire it, then retrofit to your mothersip and finally slow and akward aiming and fireing sequense. Its great.
I loved the Sun crusher! Back when the essential guides series was first released, I spent hours and hours and hours pouring over the ships, and the sun crusher caught my imagination most.
As far superweapons go, I'm quite fond of all the variants used in Macross, from the main cannon of the eponymous ship class, to the Dimension Eater weaponry. Notably, with the latter, it is scalable, with the appropriate warheads being mountable to interceptor sized ships. Similarly, Dark Eldar weaponry in 40k always has a place in my heart, for the vitrifying Glass Plague, Planet-devouring singularities in a portable box, to focused solar ejections.
I'm so glad you showed the Transphasic torpedoes. That's my idea of a superweapon that isn't quite a superweapon. Very cool, and not completely overpowered. I'm sure the Borg could adapt to it over time.
The Planet Killer from TOS' "The Doomsday Machine should've been on this list as it's one of the first visually realized, iconic planet buster weapons in Sci-Fi.
I've been trying to find the name of the sun crusher for years. I loved that ship! I loved the idea of an indestructible that you could just repeatedly just punch through enemy ships.
Its "indestructible" nature was what I did not like about it. To paraphrase vader: The ability to destroy a ship by flying through it is insignificant next to the power of being able to wipe out entire starsystems! Drop out of Hyperspace, fire your torpedo, jump into hyperspace... No indestructible ship needed!!!
Dont know if it counts but one of mine is the belters use of MCRN stealth tech coated meorites in the expanse, their using space matter againsts their enemies which is thematic its a very hard sci fi aproach to a super weapon. they put them too great use and the sequence on the beach were a man watches on fall into the planet from the ground
I wanna mention Thor's Hammer / Iserlohn Station from Legend of the Galactic Heroes. What makes it different from many other superweapons, is that while it is immobile, it's strategic placement influences big parts of the story. It is around until the end and more than just a generic threat.
I like the Sun Crusher in the sense of the idea of a small hard ship that can just smash through anything like a piece of weaponized space debris is terrifying. Kinda like the drone ship from the 3 Body Problem. 3 Body Problem, as much as a personally don't like the story, is a fascinating sci-fi horror story, and I'll fight anybody who says it's not horror
Another really good super weapon that's got a really cool build up and pay off is the Drej Mothership's beam from Titan A.E., where it causes the Target planet, in this case Earth, to spin so fast it rips apart
I personally like the System-∀99 ∀ Gundam from Turn A Gundam and it's signature Moonlight Butterfly. It was incredibly powerful to the point that it singlehandedly destroyed the entirety of civilization on Earth by sending nanomachines into weather systems and creating ionic storms that would ravage it. Said nanomachines were capable of disintegrating any matter and were used to destroy much of the Earth's surface. Yet despite this, it's often shown on-screen as horrifying yet also majestic. Also iirc, it could cover the ENTIRE Solar System.
I've really liked some small weapons with big effects. Tsutomu Nihei loves those, with the GBE from _Blame!_ packing enormous firepower into a package as small as a handgun and doing so in a way that makes sense in context. The weapons in _Biomega_ aren't quite as insane but there are some very nice scenes. An extreme example is the Deterrence Fleet from Peter F Hamilton's _Void_ books, won't spoil it for people who haven't read it yet but it's good competition for Culture ships.
I am so happy to see Sins of a Solar Empire get some representation on this list! While I love the Visari designs, the Advent really have the doomsday feel to them (especially when combined with their lore).
I think the gravity weapons from The Final Architecture book series by Adrian Tchaikovsky deserves an honourable mention. Turning planets into works of art is something that really needs putting to film
I love them, but I HATE the writing in the series. The characters are so unrelatable and awkward. I only really feel sympathy for one of the characters. Still, the Architects themselves are rad, and I too would love to see something like that on film
Man, I do love that you pull examples from all media. I mean, movies, tv shows, games, anime, and even books. We don't get to see this broad of a list everyday. Also, big props for showing one of SBY's most powerful shots. That thing took out a Jupiter size construct. Oops... spoilers. Oh, and nicely done with the Carter Starkiller. LOL. And one more thing, if I may put forward another example, the Ark of Destruction from SBY is fair game for this list.
I'll toss in the Genesis Device from Wrath of Khan (reformat a planet's biosphere) and Farscape's wormhole weapons (your choice of "pipe mass from a star's core to wherever you want" or "open a galaxy-eating black hole").
"The moment" from Doctor Who is possibly one of the best super weapons I've seen in sci-fi. In classic DW style it's sentient, the thing has the power to rip apart the fabric of the universe across time and space and comes with it's own consciousness to try to convince people not to use it.
Droplets are small unmanned spaceships that originate from the alien planet Trisolaris and they are featured in the Three-Body Problem sci-fi novel trilogy.
The Almighty from Destiny 2 is cool, even if it didn't really get to be shown off properly. A massive ship that uses planets as fuel to destabilize a systems star, causing it to go super nova. The leviathan gets an honorable mention, but I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a weapon since it's primary purpose was to gather resources rather than targeted destruction
So nice to see Sins of a Solar Empire mentioned, always loved that game. Still wish for a sequel too. When it comes to my favorite super weapon, though, it'll have to be the Gravitational Beam Emitter from various works by Tsutomu Nihei. Admittedly, most of them are hand held weaponry, in the Blame! manga specificially, but there is a ship mounted variant in Knights of Sidonia (that goes by a slightly different name of Graviton Radiation Emitter). They aren't world destroying weaponry, but they're still fun. Speaking of which, you might find the ship from Knights of Sidonia an interesting design. Built like a tower that they've laid down afterward, extending out of an asteroid that they actively mine for raw resources, and is covered in a few meter thick layer of ice that serves as impact armor.
The Cache weapons are great. As for my own favourite superweapons I have to give a shout out to the World Engine from 40k, which is literally a planet sized Necron ship that goes on a rampage and destroys almost an entire sector fleet, many space marine battle barges (27 chapters were involved in the battle) and the entire Astral Knights chapter. Less explained but still fun ones from 40k include the Celestial Orrery, a map of the galaxy that the Necrons can edit and remove stars, planets and whatever else they don't want, whatever the hell Hive Fleet Tiamat is building, The Pariah Nexus which literally creates areas of space that suppress your soul until you die, the Fireheart an old Eldar solar system editor and construction device that works remotely, the entire Eldar race and their gods were made into weapons by the Old Ones as well as were the Krork (now Orks), and we can't forget our good old friend Exterminatus from Vortex Shells to Virus Bombs to good old fashioned orbital bombardment.
Well I'll be... A 40K fan who actually states a superweapon rather than just going "muh Exterminatus is the best and is totally not just basic weaponry for ships in basically every other sci-fi universe"
Favourite superweapon? This is tricky. Going to give a couple of examples from a few pieces of media. From destiny, oryxs nuke is probably my favourite. It's got a short firing sequence, and looks very very cool. But the lore surrounding it is what makes it the best, as it draws from bassically the core of hive lore, esspecially the unique nature of the dreadnought, and offers the intriguing option of someone surviving it by just saying "no, i do exist", and being able to back it up. The next is pocket infinity, an incredibly meta superweapon which works by crashing the game, thus literally removing the person your looking at from existence. Next game is starcraft. 3 superweapons here. 1 is the second overmind. We see the raw power of the overmind in the original starcraft campagin, and the sheer power of the UED terran zerg combo in the UED campagin makes us truly respect the overmind as the superweapon it is, whilst still being a fightable enemy. Then we have the Odin. The big daddy himself, the final answer to the zerg threat, in both wings of liberty and heart of the swarm. Javing an AoE ability to crush maxed out armies, HP to tank the damage from the strongest fortifications, and giant cannons to dish out more pain than a suped up seige tank, there is nothing outside of CoOp that matches it. And even in CoOp a completely unchanged odin is the ultimate ability of 1 of the commanders, speaking volumes as to how absurd it is. And finally, the xanthos. Basically just big odin TBF, but it's diverse weapons make it extremely fun to fight, and the fact exploiting its weak point only bring us in for a final fight against its most powerful weapon yet is amazing. Then we have advanced wars. Several superweapons in this one, all being some variation of a big laser. But my actual favourite is the ultimate ability of a lot of the final bosses, which is invariably a big meteor that kills all your stuff. Throwing meteors at armies is just very cool.
My favourite superweapon is the Breen Energy-Dampener from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It comes as a big surprise and completely reverses the tide of the Dominan war, it shows how the collaboration of the different allies technologies is so important, and it gives a great opportunity for the main characters to figure out how to overcome it. You get to see it evolve from surprise battle ending terror to obsolete over the course of a season.
I love the Sun Crusher because it's just so darn juvenile. "oh yeah? Well mine can blow up suns, and is so invulnerable Han can fly it through a star destroyer!" xD
I love the Sun Crusher, but that is almost definitely due to nostalgia. I hated reading as a kid, until I discovered Star Wars books. Jedi Search was one of the first books I read for fun, and it largely launched my love for reading.
The Sun Crusher was pretty dumb. It's like they asked a twelve-year-old to design a superweapon. Sadly, it often gets used as a strawman by Disney canon apologists to write off the Expanded Universe outright, conveniently forgetting that Starkiller Base was a thing.
Macross/Robotech had two of my favorite super weapons. The SDF-1's main gun would wipe out tons of ships, but it was dwarfed by The Grand Canon, a massive energy weapon located in Alaska. It turned the tables on the typical sci-fi super weapon since it was on the planet instead of being on a ship.
The Culture gun described in the first short story in State of the Art was pretty amazing. It sounds very similar to one of the Lazy Guns in one of Iain M Banks' other novels Against a Dark Background.
Finally got round to Excession. Killing Time’s attack was legendary as well. The capabilities of ships in The Culture series extend beyond weaponry too, being able to control matter and influence biology, which could be considered weaponry in itself, in a way. Even drones can be ridiculously effective. Ships of The Culture are just absolutely and bizarrely powerful godlike entities that are probably my favourite characters in the series.
There's The Culture's Gridfire from Ian M. Banks' novels. It's essentially ripping open a hole in the universe, exposing the pure energy that keeps universes separate, and letting the energy bleed do the rest.
I think the most powerful/terrifying superweapon I've seen in Sci-fi was Star Trek Voyager's Krenim Temporal Weapon- a weapon that not only makes you cease to exist, but makes it so that you never even existed in the first place. Terrifying.
Probably the best time related episode ever, because it does take into account the fact, that changing the past, affects the future and no one even realizes the change has been made. Only Kess has some type of "temporal" memory, that allows Voyager to determine that they are in the middle of a Temporal conflict, because without her, Voyager just thinks they are in their respective time frame, yet everything is different than it "should" be.
I always liked the cache weapons, as they were capable of so much - I also generally liked how most of the conjoiners weaponry in absolution gap and inhibitor phase where basically superweapons because that was the only way to deal with the inhibitors
The various super weapons from the Gundam series are some of my favourites, though I would have to say that Gryps II is probably the best. The empty shell of a colony filled with the mechanisms to convert it into a 6.5km diameter laser cannon powered by the sun is an extremely cool concept.
Lexx! Both the titular ship's Weapon, with magnificently beautiful firing sequence and the Megashadow, a ship that, when unfolded into huge mechanical web, can cast energy projections of that web onto the surface of unlucky target planet. First one very much inspired by Yamato's Wave Motion Gun, down to mimicking the circumstances of the first combat use of their respective weapons.
I have a soft spot for the Solar System from the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It's an array of 4 million mirrors which redirect the sun's rays to form a big melting beam. It makes for a very cool and original visual in that it doesn't have a single barrel or emitter. It's also used by the protagonists' faction and it never blows up in their face or anything. I kept expecting it to backfire somehow but no, the Federation admiral uses it to very good effect and it pretty much wins them the Battle of Solomon, although it does get destroyed later while in transit. Also I wasn't expecting to see R-Type in this video, but it absolutely fits ! The R-Type setting is surprisingly interesting for a shmup, and it has some bonkers weaponry.
Uhh, in terms of favorite weapons? Clearly, *_Knights of Sidonia_* is for you ^-^ I especially like the *massive* variant of the Heigus Particle Cannon, mounted on the outer hull of Sidonia itself (For this weapon, I recommend the "official" Netflix-mix version). I just adore the military grit and expertly crafted ship that is everywhere in this anime. An itch I rarely can scratch (Edit: Spelling)
@@acarrillo8277 Isn't "Sidonia no Kishi: Ai Tsumugu Hoshi" OAV the final of the series ? Also I prefer the portable version ie the GBE (Graviton Beam Emittor) held by Killy in Blame !
Doctor Who had some pretty cool super weapons. The Demat Gun, the Dalek Crucible. Plus, I’ve always felt from how we’ve seen the Master use his Tardis in the classic series, that a Tardis itself would be not only a powerful but also very adaptable super weapon.
I was looking for someone to mention the Crucible, though that’s only the planetoid housing the real superweapon: the reality bomb, bar none the most overpowered weapon in all sci-fi.
My favourite superweapons are usually ones that rule by reputation alone, rather than their actual power. Those ones where the characters have to be really careful about what they do otherwise they draw its attention. Unfortunately, the only ones that really fit this criteria in a major way (that I know of) are Cortana's Guardians from Halo and the Eternal Fleet from Star Wars, and both are infamously pretty silly and ironically lose a lot of their presence when they actually arrive. That was the whole concept of the Death Star, but the only time they actually used this in a story was at the end of Rogue One.
There's a fair supply of superweapons in the various Gundam shows, aside from the mobile suits themselves. From Colony Lasers, solar reflector arrays, micro-wave cannons (people go pop!) to the Moonlight Butterfly, there is something for everyone (assuming everyone wants an inordinate amount of death & property damage). There's also the School of the Undefeated of the East.
I agree, Stargate has a ton super weapons. One of the coolest is indeed the exploding sun, but you forgot to mention the even cooler part. They throw into the sun a portal that was connected to P3W-451. The little thing on P3W-451 is used on multiple occasions as an offensive weapon. That and Buster Machine 3 are one of my favorite super weapons.
I think that gate address is also the first one they gave to a group of aliens who turned out to be hostile. "The first one leads to a black hole and they get progressively darker from there"
Death Blossom, The last Star Fighter. 1) only the prototype can do it 2) has a start up sequence 3) leaves the ship spent after firing. 4) could be considered Overkill
Really missed the blackstone fortresses from WH40K and the planet killer (though the nova cannons are pretty cool as well), all the stuff from the Homeworld series, whatever the heck the protomolecule uses to sterilize full systems in The Expanse, and in literature: the pandora dyson sphere in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Trilogy as well as the Deterrence Fleet in the Void Trillogy also from Hamilton. Those are just the first that come to mind, I'm thinking there could be a pretty cool video series on all of these and more. :)
I feel like one honourable mention that absolutely was missed here was the shielded planet dreadnought from stellaris. It was such a twist that one of the ways you could "blow up" a planet given in the game was, in fact, shielding the planet in such a way that they were completely isolated from space for the rest of time. It's like... on one hand, they get to live the rest of the planet's life out in peace, but on the other hand, they know about space travel. they've visited other planets. they have the technology. and they are stuck, alone, by themselves forever. ... honestly don't know which is worse.
The Soliton Wave and the Genesis Device are two potential superweapons from Star Trek that hardly ever get mentioned. Also, a trilithium torpedo (that literally *any* warp capable nation can produce) means a single starship has the power to destroy hundreds of entire star systems.
Given you talked about Supreme Commander, I'm surprised you never made mention the Black Sun supper weapon. The idea of building an absolutely massive and highly destructive but imobile weapon, then using it to blow up numerous planets in a single shot by manipulating your own FTL gate network was something rather clever in my opinion.
Two suggestions from Gundam - The 'Colony laser', an O'Neill Cylinder that's been depopulated and converted into a massive laser gun, which brings in the added element of displacing a whole colony's worth of people (assuming you don't just gas them all to death) on top of the "shooting a massive gun at something" aspect, and the Moonlight Butterfly, a cloud of nanomachines that converts everything manmade into dust, and has a (potential) range that spans from the Earth to Jupiter.
Or just drop the whole colony. It's tradition at this point. And speaking of Gundam: The Statue of Liberty Cannon from G Gundam. Fires a deadly beam of concentrated FREEDOM.
Few things have as chilling an implied aftermath as the Moonlight Butterfly. Sure, it kills a lot of people directly (and I'm not just talking in ships or space colonys) but the amount of deaths from the sudden dusting of literally everything artificially worked across the entire inner system? That's horror man. It achieves the classical war goal of 'remove the enemies ability to fight' and the devastation is both near impossible to picture and all to understandable. After all, how long would you survive if a wave of white dust took away everything, even your clothes and the foundation of your house? Tools, Books, Glasses, Medicines, ROADS, all gone in seconds.
"That time Carter blew up a star." Is a moment I frequently cite whenever I make my case that she is by far the most badass character in that show. She not only blew up a star, she defeated a system lord that had been consolidating power over the entire galaxy over the course of several seasons, and was about to eradicate the Tok-Ra. It was especially good since it abused the black hole that they encountered in earlier seasons.
@@hulmhochberg8129 except that McKay did it by accident. After recklessly causing the death of one of his researchers. And after being warned in various ways against attempting to operate the facility.
Along the same lines, the stealth rocks from The Expanse. Sometimes throwing rocks actually does do the most damage, and all you really need is enough thrust to get them going in the right direction (and state-of-the-art stealth coatings to hide them from your enemy's defenses)
@@techmage89 Throwing rocks doesn't necessarily do the most damage (replacing a rock with a custom projectile will increase the damage - for example, throwing an equal mass of TNT will add the explosive force of that much TNT going off to the impact), but the kinetic energy of a high-speed impact is orders of magnitude greater than the energy of complete chemical explosion - a chunk of TNT impacting at 30kps (asteroids have an average impact speed of 18kps; comets 50kps) would have pretty close to 100 times as much kinetic energy as explosive energy. It's a lot easier to take an unaltered rock and divert it than it is to mass produce specific chemicals or create intricate devices on a large scale and then aim the resulting mass, so, for what amounts to a rounding error in the deivered energy, it's not worth the effort.
@@rmsgrey I mean, yes, nuclear weapons or engineered kinetic impactors will do more damage for their mass, but building them large enough to match just accelerating a dense asteroid up to moderate speeds is a lot harder. In terms of damage for engineering effort, it's hard to beat an accelerated rock, especially when you have really efficient engines (like they do in The Expanse).
It's a bit generic but I really like the Thor Hammer from Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's just a straightforward giant energy cannon on a space fortress but I feel as though the way that it's used within the story can be pretty creative at times. Since it can take out thousands of ships with a single shot, every time we see someone attempting to capture Iserlohn Fortress, they're forced to come up with cunning strategies of avoiding it.
Agree Its definitely better than the death star 1 and much better than DS2 like, The defense is better The weapons are better It can be an FOB for like 15k warships It can self sustain, so no need for supply
I like the sun crusher because its silly that it has weapons and the developer was like "No its for mining... the emperor told me it was for mining! not for mass murder... why would a ship with sun exploding missiles and impenetrable armor be for anything other than mining!"
I dislike anything which is indestructible like that. It's fine if you can dismantle the thing piece by piece, as then you can have a hard fought tactical battle where your working through how to dismantle the thing whilst also trying to retain the capacity to dismantle it, bit like the xanthos from nova covert ops in SC2. but otherwise it's always bassically just going to be either a death star situation where there just 1 random weak spot and a special team must go and hit that weak spot and everyone is already asleep. Or it's just going to run through everything, as it doesn't matter what the enemy has because as long as you can't die, you'll win eventually.
@@Santisima_Trinidad I agree, though I will offer the slight counterpoint that at least they had to think outside the box to get rid of it That said, it would have worked better in a different setting, it's OP for SW
@@Santisima_Trinidad I get what you mean, I personally would have used the concept of nearly indestructible differently, keep the Hull and downgrade the armaments, instead of annihilating entire systems, make it a capital ship killer with limited munitions and let the heroes find a sci-fi way to destabilise the indestructible Hull or something like that
@@ponyperson7513 thats a good idea, sound a lot like the blockats from stellaris gigastructures, whos super sheikd you deactivate by detonating a super nuke that damages reality enough to make jump drives work better, and also obliterates the super shield. And thats nice, as its going at the dismantling thing i was talking about. Without that, there's really no way to make it engaging as a thing you fight. They can be great as a story device (death star, it killing andor sets up the empire as the baddies, and it teaches us a bit about the force with luke in the trench) but a teaspoon can be great as a story device if you write it correctly, so thats not condoning anything.
My favorit got to be the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator from Stellaris's popular Gigastructural Engineering mod: A death laser of literally astronimical scale as it is build around the super massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Completly bonkers
Get #TheSojourn here!
www.thesojournaudiodrama.com/
@@existentialselkath1264 That is absolutely a super weapon.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
The Eclipse Cannon From Sonic Adventure 2 And Shadow The Hedgehog.
Still Responsible For Some Of The Best Moments In The Franchise.
No Warhammer 40k, so many crazy superweapons like the virus bombs on Isstvan III.
@@kaileynolan1534 40k's Exterminatus is great, but not really a super-weapon per se in a series that has it happen so frequently.
Probably the Titans would be the closest, even though there's so many of them as well.
The Planet Killer from Warhammer 40,000 is an interesting one - that fact that in-universe, its said that it couldn’t be built in our universe, which is a great bit of lore
You know... I am kind of surprised Farscape wasn't mentioned in here. The entire series was a build up to it's superweapon, which was a giant wormhole that was basically weaponized to be a massive singularity that would eat and eat until everything was destroyed. Basically the weapon everyone wanted to use for themselves and when they got to see it outside of any control they thought they could have over it, made sure peace happened.
Yeah, this one would have been my suggestion, it's basically a galactic MAD weapon.
"This is insane, Crichton" - Scorpius :D
@@GottHammer "God, four years on and you're just now figuring that out?!"
Came into the comments to say this. Video is great. Some great picks. But nothing I've seen in scifi beats Farscape's wormhole weapon both for being an incredibly dramatic plot device and just pure destruction.
Farscape's Wormhole doomsday weapon is probably the only one that terrifies me. All the others are flashy and cool, but Farscape has a weapon that could conceivably wipe out the universe, given enough time to keep on doubling. We don't know if it would stop growing after destroying our galaxy, after all. It's also virtually unstoppable, if you don't have the wormhole math to understand what it is and what's going on, there's no off switch.
The Star Forge from KOTOR was a neat twist on the superweapon format with the whole limitless factory thing it had going on.
A nod to real wars depending on logistics more than tactics victories.
@@robertb6889 as the saying goes "Tactics win battles, logistics win wars."
@@3dpyromaniac560 "amateurs talk tactics Pros talk Logistics" - Sun Tzu The Art of War
The good old grey goo type of solution to a problem. Or alternatively the, "they can defeat an armada, but can the defeat an armada a minute for the foreseeable future?" Approach
I love the Yamato's Wave Motion Gun for being a stupidly simple idea that you don't see very often.
Specifically: "Hey, the FTL engine on this ship outputs a LOT of energy. What if we redirected that energy into a big fuck-off gun instead? So we shoot something with the power that is able to send things past light speed. That'd probably hurt a bunch."
Yea no for how dope and dump sby is wish it would be more well known
As I understood it, the wave motion gun was not in the plans that came from plans from Queen Starsha - humans invented it based on what they learned from the plans - I can't remember if this idea is from the OG Star Blazers or from the anime remake or what - but it was in interesting point.
That's not that uncommon. Even in Star Trek, they can redirect the full output of their warp core through their main deflector dish, into a focused beam. They don't do it very often because it disables the ship for several hours afterward, but there are some instances where they attempt to punch through a particularly difficult enemy hardpoint with this method, and one where they try to overload an energy sucking spacial anomaly with it so that they can escape.
@@melkior13 You've got the source and adaptation backwards.
They use the same thing in another life.
The “little doctor” or Molecular Disruptor (M.D.) from Ender’s Game has to be my favorite. It’s the most tense a single button push can be, while also functioning thematically appropriately instead of being cliche
The scariest part of it was the fact that it was on fighters. Planet killer on a fighter! Mass produced one at that.
@@wikimody5013 definitely one of those solutions that create more issues with the hope that you live long enough to see if they become problems
The terrifying thing is it has no limited yield, it uses a chain reaction that as long as there is matter for the explosion to consume it'll keep on going until the whole planet is molten rock.
The final deployment is a big part of why that one stuck with me. Everyone knew what had to be done, but no one had the willpower to do it... so they manipulated a child into doing it for them.
I dont even know if this counts but the Star Forge is probably my favourite. I just love any super weapon that isn't just a big gun. It eats suns to rapidly produce entire fleets of starships kitted out for minimal crew. Its a genius idea that they totally should have used for the First Order in the newer films instead of the slightly bigger death star planet thing.
Speaking of Star Wars "superweapons". Centerpoint Station. Not a weapon by itself, but it can move planets around, which open a lot of creative opportunities.
A weapon of mass construction
Star Forge is great!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@ThePandoraGuy Had not heard of that one... Will have to check it out!
Although i do like solar system destroying things
Because DAMN that is powerful
I recommend the Ultimate Weapon from the third book in Douglas Adams' Hitchikers guide 5 part trilogy.
The original Ultimate Weapon was described as "a very, very small bomb". The final one was said to be about the same colour, weight, size, and shape as a cricket ball.
It worked by connecting the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously and, when activated, turning the entire Universe into one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.
And it was developed to take out a weapon depot.
And it actually delivers on the name of "ultimate weapon." While the word "ultimate" has also come to describe the greatest, best, or most extreme example of something, the original meaning of the word is "final" or "last," and nobody's going to be shooting back if you just blew up the entire universe. Though it's been a long time since I've read the HGttG books I want to think that bit of linguistic clarification was at the center of the joke about the "ultimate weapon."
Lovely, a pocket sized big bang.
You could also mention the Genesis Device. While it was not intended to be a weapon, you can theoretically destroy all life on a planet with it.
It has the primary purpose of creating new planets, but it can easily be used as a super-weapon first. Truly unique dual purpose device with so much potential.
The Genesis Device was even better than that, you could reformat the planet in to what you wanted with your enemy's ashes.
that is essentially that the Votanis COllective terraforming devices from DEFIANCE did to Earth when triggered. THus Saint Louis is now surrounded by mountains.. those devices didnt just affect life.. they LITERALLY reshaped the surface of the planet.
I always thought it was weird that the Genesis device was never mentioned ever again on any of the Trek series. Was knowledge of the technology locked away at the Daystrom institute and Starfleet forbade anyone to speak of it, again?
@@AVClarke You have to believe Starfleet deep-sixed it as hard as possible. Completely aside from causing a WMD arms race if it ever got out, what neighboring power would allow the Federation to have such a weapon?
I think there was also some stuff about it not working entirely properly (the subsequent created stuff being unstable due to protomatter). I personally like to think that Section 31 was secretly funding the research and has a hidden stockpike just in case the Federation is ever truly up against the wall and they need that ace in the hole.
The Dalek's Reality Bomb from Doctor Who is probably one of the most ridiculously OP superweapons out there, capable of destroying the multiverse.
A friend of mine recently got me into SG1. Honestly, the idea of just dropping a nuke into a Stargate and into your enemy's lap is terrifying.
(oh yeah, and making the gates explode, too)
You can even take the drop a nuke to an extreme by sending a gate buster nuke through a gate. Not only do you have the destruction of a super mega nuke but you have the secondary explosion of a gate blowing up.
In the Atlantis series, they just teleport nukes onboard Wraith ships. While a nuclear blast outside your ship might be shrugged of... a nuclear blast inside it is just awful. Simple, down to earth, practical and effective. Why dont Star Trek take a note of that? Beam a nuke onto a Borg cube?
@@user-mk8kx1rr1g They did beam a torpedo into a borg cube in one episode. I think the main problem is that you have to lower your sheilds to beam anything, so you might deliver the bomb, but then they send drones over to your ship to start infecting people.
The Stargates, on the other hand, can only be opened one way at any given time.
@@user-mk8kx1rr1g The short answer: if you want to use your shields, you cannot use transporters, and if the enemy has any shields raised at all, you also cannot use transporters until you open up their shields long enough to beam something in.
The long answer: Starfleet officers are not stupid and when the opportunity presents itself, they do that exactly, but instead of a fission or fusion bomb, it's an antimatter bomb worth at least as much as the Tsar Bomba in megatons.
In one episode of Voyager, but it's a photon torpedo onto a smaller Borg ship, which makes it frankly more destructive. Instead of a nuclear bomb, it was an antimatter bomb. Usually, this approach cannot work against much of anything, because as a general rule of thumb, any ship in Star Trek that has its shields up cannot beam anything out or have things beamed on, so if you want to transport a nuke onto a Borg cube, a) if you don't detonate it fast enough the Borg can just assimilate the nuke and it doesn't go off, and b) you have to have lowered your own shields to do so, meaning that your ship is crawling with Borg drones.
Borg ships make use of a vastly different type of shielding system that allow them to adapt to almost any attack, given enough data to do so, but this technically means it isn't a conventional type of shield, but knowing the Borg, they'd have installed transporter inhibition systems to compensate for this glaring weakness once they realized that this tactic is possible, and let's be honest, this tactic is so easily accessible to species in the Trek universe that the Borg have probably seen it thousands of times, tried at least once by each species that resists them (we are assuming of course that these species are smart and desperate enough to employ this tactic regardless of honor codes, but it is possible the species is dumb enough to not be worth assimilating except for their physical prowess as tactical drones, so maybe some people wouldn't have thought of this). I think it took very specific circumstances in the Voyager episode for the crew to get away with beaming a torpedo onto a Borg ship, but there are some merits to using a photon torpedo rather than a nuke: many photon torpedoes have their own shields, last time I checked, making it more difficult for the WMD to be just beamed out of the ship before it can explode, and making it harder to tamper with once armed.
“Into the black and white!”
Nobody has seen Black Friday have they…
You missed the best bit about the Cache weapons from Revelation Space. In the book there's a several page sequence of a crewmember having to explain to one of these sentient superweapons what the stakes are and why it needs to be used, despite not having the proper authorisation. It's a fantastic dialogue
„Hey, I am really low in hierarchy and you do not know me.
But could you please destroy that fleet over there?
I swear it's for humankind or something.”
They did a "best armour/suit" video with all the usual picks and i remember saying the spacesuits from Revelation Space should be on it ...i mean damn for a spacesuit they packed a hell of a punch(i also mentioned the Biononics from peter f hamiltons commonwealth books though technically their not armour)
Hell yeah, the cache weapons were the coolest! I loved that they were filled with seeming glee when finally were convinced to go off and fire!
I too, loved the suits in that series. Quite a deadly and amazing tech!
Also shocked to see Peter F. Hamilton's biononics in the replies here. Gotta bring up solar flare bombs, nova bombs and quantum busters!
He also wrote the Alchemist into existence in another trilogy!
So these weapons basically have a "Prove that you're not a robot" as their safety? Awesome.
I really feel like the Molecular Disruption (M.D.) Device from Ender's Game should be a part of this conversation. It blows the OG Death Star out of the water in terms of narrative importance. Connecting back to the computer games Ender and the other kids played at Battle School, to the strategies Ender developed in the Battle Room first as a "foot soldier" and then as a team leader, to the strategies they developed at Command School... It bakes in the culture of the humans, which are independent and decentralized, and the Formics, which are a centralized hive mind. It's so much more than "we point this at a cluster of things close to each other and they all go boom". It's the entire book, all the backstories of the characters and the cultures that have been introduced, baked into a single press of a button at precisely the right moment.
Remember, the enemy's gate is down
Agreed. The Little Doctor needs some respect here!
No way have you read deaths end by xin Lou that 2D folder I think that’s a devastating weapon it literally destroyed a whole solar system and there was no way out 😢
Kind of a shame Card never followed up on the MASSIVE cultural ramifications of the Formic's resurrection and the revelation that the Xenocide and the original Speaker were one and the same.
I prefer the book version over the movie version myself
I absolutely love Stellaris' super weapons. Assimilator Machine Super weapons are really unique and the Star Eater of the Crisis would be extra... great.
I like Star Eater because it's not even a weapon, it's a tool. But for the unfortunate ones on receiving end, it's an apocalyptic level of threat.
The Assimilator is my favourite super weapon ever but the one that encases a planet in a force field, essentially isolating it forever, is so messed up when you think about it but is the weapon of the pacifists... love it
I like the neutron beam. If I'm playing a machine race I call it the "Meatbag Melter"
Aquatic Colossus weapon: just flood the whole planet
I enjoyed the Death Star II picking off ships more than the Death Star I blowing up Alderaan. I liked the idea of you not knowing which capital ship was going to get blown up next, and it happened with such frequency that you were worried that the Rebels were going to lose too many ships and be defeated.
And the extra brown-trousers factor of "oh crap I didn't know it could do that"
In the Rebels situation at the time, a large decentralised fleet, a weapon that can one-shot a capital ship every few minutes is far worse than a weapon that can one-shot a single planet once a day
I understand where the video is coming from in a narrative sense, but I agree with you. I think it makes the Death Star more interesting that if it fires lower power shots, it can fire more rapidly, making it a fleet killer as well as a planet killer.
There's a Legends novel where some starts to design a "pulsar" Station where its a smaller Death Star with multiple firing ports designed to take on fleets. (spoiler it was a ruse and not really designed beyond what would be needed for a trap)
@@amandajas6287 Indeed. As far as I know that was a feature added to the Death Star II, in addition to its regular planet-killing mode, and likely in response to the previous Death Star's loss.
Happy to see the cache weapons from the Nostalgia for Infinity mentioned here, so iconic. The superweapon that takes the cake for me is the dimensional "envelope" bomb that is used in the Three-Body Problem series. I remember being awestruck in horror at the level of destruction and the casual nature in which it is used.
the fact that the annihilation of countless civilizations is seen as a low-rated job worthy of contempt is one of the most horrifying things about 3-body's setting
I like the slipspace bomb from Halo Reach. While not necessarily a superweapon given it was a makeshift solution, it's visually impressive and frankly, devastating. You literally just opened up a portal to gods-know-where in the middle of an enemy ship. I guess the Nova Bomb also gets an honorable mention, since it's just a nuke, but horrifyingly devastating to the point of destroying entire planets with a device that's not even the size of a spacecraft.
Not jus a nuke, a cluster of nukes designed to well, make a even bigger nuke. right now and in Halo, they use shaped charges to compress nuclear material to the point where it goes critical and explodes. we use regular old Chemical Explosives to do this. the Nova bomb does the same thing, but uses other Nukes. IIRC its described as a solar system killer.
Based on one Halo Infinites armor coatings description it was not only a slip space portal but also an interdenominational one as well
Jorge ligit stranded himself and a bunch of covenant over Reach of an alternate universe in a 1/3 super carrier in low orbit
The slipspace bomb literally just opens a hole into slipspace and then closes. It's not transporting anything to another universe, it's moving it to slipspace, which is another dimension in the sense that you normally move through space in 3 or 4 and slipspace has 11 dimensions of space. Same universe, just a different "layer" of it.
I'm personally more of a fan of the scene in halo wars where they use a slipspace reactor to cause a small sun to collapse in on itself and cause a super nova. Even though the scene doesn't make much sense logically, it's still a much more cost effective use of a slipspace engine.
I'm definitely not a fan of the Nova bomb though. It makes literally no logical sense and doesn't fit in the universe. The UNSC have no business having a weapon that basically breaks the laws of physics and creates energy out of thin air. The idea that the UNSC also have nukes that are 1/900th the yield, and decided to waste 9 of them on a nuke with 0 practical benefit just makes them sound like morons.
@James Ortiz not trying to cause an arguement but, you got any better ideas? Because I've always been a fan of the Nova bomb. It always made me think that it was the pinnacle of UNSC technology up to that point.
And I sincerely hope the UNSC start investing in slipspace-related weaponry, I can only imagine how extremely overpowered it would become after being researched by a capable scientist 😁.
@@leonelimalevu2199 slip-space Bomb x Nova bomb = something the forerunners wish they had
So glad to see Revelation Space getting a shout out. The Cache Weapons were so mysterious and in a way, the imperfect descriptions of them just made them more terrifying as your imagination filled in the gaps. I have to say though, the chilling descriptions of the stately construction of whatever it was that killed Resurgam (again) still take the cake.
I've always loved the Yamato device on Terran battlecruisers in the Starcraft universe:
"I just focus this entire big nuclear blast in your specific direction ... catch"
My only regret about the Yamato cannon is that the aftermath of the shot is kinda underwhelming, mostly because of the limits of game balance. It doesn't *feel* like it does a lot of damage unless it destroys the target, it just kinda lands and fades out, no massive explosion or anything like that.
Hear, hear!!! :)
@@kevingriffith6011 I alway used about 10 of them. Watch 'em go when they fire together. Lol!!!
@@kevingriffith6011 absolutely game balance, as in the Cinematics it did absolutely roast shit.
That moment when you meant to click on broodlord and misclick the 'ling instead.
I kind of loved the implications that, when it came to blowing up the sun in SG1, Samantha Carter *IS* the Superweapon, because she really was just a walking WMD by the end of the series.
And the running gag that everyone brings up the casual destruction of a sun
'You blow up ONE sun and never hear the end of it...'
She basically was Reed Richards
Warhammer...everything.
When you said the weapon had no footage, I was so excited because I thought you were about to mention the tecoma gamma ray burst in tiamats wrath (or the magetar cruisers, or the ring gates themselves) 😔
Right? I was sure he'd mention the USMFP! Although I do realize that this superweapon needs a nickname
I loved the Krenim Timeship weapon from the ST Voyager episodes ‘Year of Hell’. The idea of literally wiping objects/people/species out of time itself was great, and the way the consequences were shown was really well done.
And let's not forget the time gun created by the time lords of galifray used by Tom Baker's doctor who!!! 🤠👍
Super duper props for mentioning the super weapons in Supreme Commander!
Shame he didn't mention the Seraphim experimental bomber, a weapon so dangerous it almost kills itself every time it fires. Its payload is large enough to wipe out an entire base, which almost always results in an ACU going nuclear, which almost always hits the bomber, as it maneuvers so slowly that it can't really get out of the blast radius.
So glad for the Revelation Space name drop. Love the tech and the names of the lighthugger vessels. It really does a great job making massive ships truly feel massive while also very very small in the void of space.
Mass relays make a good Super weapon. Throw a big asteroid at it and it’ll explode and wipe out an entire star system.
Weapons are meant to kill people and batarians are not people
It's primary function is not being weapon so it's not a supermarket it is an item that can be used this one but it's not one
@@borttorbbq2556 Technically it is superweapon since is specially design to destroy all sentient life capable of space flight from the galaxy is just work in much more circutuous way to accomplish is mass extinction. This sadly why Reaper are both smarter but less powerful than other Sci fi equivalent. They don't level up and get more powerful toys over time. They just cheat by making sure nobody get close to there level so they never need to adapt to situation. They rigged the board but it mean they don't have to evolve. A luxury there equivalent don't get which is why I don't consider them a weapon of mass death. They are the bullet and the mass relay is the gun.
@@borttorbbq2556 It is indeed not a supermarket.
@@atracin _"Do you have an Air Miles card for your asteroid purchase?"_
SOOO happy to see an Alastair Reynolds IP get some love here. I personally think he's come up with a whole host of amazing superweapons: the Cache Weapons, of course, but also the Hypometric Weapons, Century Rain, that one star that the Wolves turned into a flamethrower, and - unintentionally - the inertial dampener that... erases people from history when turned up to 11.
One of my favourites from SG1 is them "using" the vortex of the Supergate to melt thought an otherwise unstoppable Ori ship...because they happened to nuked a ship in another galaxy around a black hole at the right time... That was a feel good moment!
"We destroyed an Ori ship..."
"...by destroying a Wraith ship."
"The Pegasus Project" is such a good episode.
That was a truly beautiful payoff after the absolute hatred the Ori drew from me and, I assume, the audience.
Ori ark was epic. If only it could've been longer
I would have loved to have seen the Ori fight the Wraith
I think my personal favorite super weapon would be the "Sheet of Paper" (Duel Vector Foil) from Death's End. The simplicity of it paired with the sheer terror of how inescapable it truly is makes it an amazing plot element and unique weapon overall. Collapsing three dimensions into two was something that no one could defend against
But the Dual Vector Foil isn't a weapon, just a cleaning tool. It's no different from a bottle of bug spray or Lysol.
@@moss550 toward the right targets & with the right technique, anything could be a weapon
Another interesting superweapon from Yamato is the Magna Flame Gun, a sort of miniaturized wave motion gun with a twist. It fires directly into a teleporter, with the other end opening directly next to the target! It's incredibly dangerous because it can basically always get off the first strike from well out of return fire range, and even got to be the villain ship for one of the films!
Yamato had a ton of killer ultimate weapons. I loved the exploding wave motion guns the 2nd generation space battleships used. They didn't have as strong a wave motion generator so the shots were underpowered compared to the Yamato', but then again what is t? They made up for it by creating a wave motion "warhead" for lack of a better term that was propelled at the enemy and would then explode in a shotgun like bust of mini-wave motion beams right before it hit the target. It was a fleet killer against enemies that weren't prepared for it. It the later series they found a way to amplify this by seeding enemy formations with wave motion batteries that would explode when hit with the beam making for some spectacular fire works and done thrilling dog fights as the Yamato's fighter launched containers of the batteries into the middle of enemy formations.
@@Scudboy17 Yeah 2202 was pretty wacky, Andromeda's shotgun, Ginga's wave motion support gun, the Eaters + really big red eater, Golem...
@@masterofthelag8414 AFAIK a concept behind Ginga is more or less inspired by Leiji Matsumoto's Time Sweeper Mahoroba (and aborted anime project named Super Dreadnought Mahoroba). this 'Mahoroba' is a fictional ship and begun its career as a superdreadnought--a successor to Yamato class, and DID join Battle of Samar, but not Operation Ten Go. (Mahoroba was hidden somewhere in a secret base, and no one awared of its existence until several decades later when the ship became a site where Time Machine is being built, not even American search party ever located one), later Mahoroba became a spaceship at some point, and even as that it is a kind of Chronosphere in space !!.
It is possibly that 2202 storywriter might have read Time Sweeper Mahoroba before. but since the ship's name is 'owned', the name 'Ginga' (Milky Way) is used instead.
As someone who loves Homeworld, Sajuuk's Phased Cannon Array from the second game could have gotten a mention for being an unstoppable force with no known immoveable object to contest it
The Dreadnaught's cannon was more memorable as you actually got to deploy it before the final mission. Likewise the Siege Cannon in Homeworld Cataclysm needs a special mention too!
Absolutely overjoyed to see both Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire get some screentime. Absolutely fantastic RTS series.
Lets hope the Sins sequel is better than the SupCom sequel.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Both games are among my absolute favorits. Not only in scale, but in the feeling of gameplay.
And those superweapons feel strong, without beeing totally overpowered, that is what makes them special in my book.
@@hoojiwana Did you just says sins sequel
@@doggo6517 Yeah they are making Sins 2. Stand by for a link.
@@doggo6517 Yes it was recently announced! Theres a trailer for it and everything.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
the combo of the ancients disintegration thingy on dakara and the stargates to wipe out the replicators on a galxy wide scale is probably my favorite.
Kinda like the Stargate version of the halo Rings
Since you mentioned the Wave Motion Gun from Space Battleship Yamato, I will mention the Grand Cannon from Macross. It had a six-kilometre deep shaft built into the Earth and a lengthy firing sequence. It managed to vaporize thousands of Zentradi vessels, but was vulnerable to enemy bombardment and was thus destroyed after one shot.
What about the Macross Cannons? Even the Macross Quarter managed to be an impressive weapon for its size...
Yea I forgot about the grand cannon yea now that's a deadly weapon
Thousands is an understatement
What about the non miniaturized version of the Dimension Eater on Gallia 4, almost literary a black hole generator bomb that impressively miniaturized as a fighter carrier "anti ship" missile or airburst nuke to an irl equivalent
Sounds a bit like Requiem from Gundam
The weaponized wormhole from Far Scape has got to be one of my favorites. The whole show is about trying to keep the tech away from the BBEG and when it gets used you're like "oh that's why" does not disappoint.
That was one of the best sponsor segments I’ve ever seen. If I wasn’t already a fan, I definitely would be now.
The Jovian Cannon from the Captain Harlock Space Pirate movie was awesome! Massive particle beam using Jupiter as a ammo cache was just so cool
Personally, I think the sun crushing element of the Sun Crusher is pretty silly, but the idea of a single small craft that essentially impregnable is actually one of my favorite super-weapon concepts. A little ship you can’t kill is just a really interesting narrative conceit for me.
Another fun thing about the Independence Day city destroys is that they are essentially just flying saucers, but with a more modern feel that doesn’t take away from the classic saucer feel.
Siege Cannon from Homeworld Cataclysm. The elaborate quests you do to aquire it, then retrofit to your mothersip and finally slow and akward aiming and fireing sequense. Its great.
You know you're no longer a mining vessel when a frigate exiting the hangar at the wrong timing can kill everything in your general vicinity
“Burn you monster, burn”
I love that SG made puns about the star blow even in the spin-offs. It was so bonkers, yet pretty plausible.
As more of an odd example the Attero device from Stargate Atlantis has always been a favorite weapon of mine.
I loved the Sun crusher! Back when the essential guides series was first released, I spent hours and hours and hours pouring over the ships, and the sun crusher caught my imagination most.
As far superweapons go, I'm quite fond of all the variants used in Macross, from the main cannon of the eponymous ship class, to the Dimension Eater weaponry.
Notably, with the latter, it is scalable, with the appropriate warheads being mountable to interceptor sized ships.
Similarly, Dark Eldar weaponry in 40k always has a place in my heart, for the vitrifying Glass Plague, Planet-devouring singularities in a portable box, to focused solar ejections.
I think the weapon that destroyed humanity in deaths end is the best weapon so far the 2D paper
I'm so glad you showed the Transphasic torpedoes. That's my idea of a superweapon that isn't quite a superweapon. Very cool, and not completely overpowered. I'm sure the Borg could adapt to it over time.
Scrin Mothership from Tiberium Wars is probably my favorite. The way you can just end a game in one shot is absolutely glorious.
The Planet Killer from TOS' "The Doomsday Machine should've been on this list as it's one of the first visually realized, iconic planet buster weapons in Sci-Fi.
I've been trying to find the name of the sun crusher for years. I loved that ship! I loved the idea of an indestructible that you could just repeatedly just punch through enemy ships.
Its "indestructible" nature was what I did not like about it.
To paraphrase vader: The ability to destroy a ship by flying through it is insignificant next to the power of being able to wipe out entire starsystems! Drop out of Hyperspace, fire your torpedo, jump into hyperspace... No indestructible ship needed!!!
Dont know if it counts but one of mine is the belters use of MCRN stealth tech coated meorites in the expanse, their using space matter againsts their enemies which is thematic its a very hard sci fi aproach to a super weapon. they put them too great use and the sequence on the beach were a man watches on fall into the planet from the ground
I wanna mention Thor's Hammer / Iserlohn Station from Legend of the Galactic Heroes. What makes it different from many other superweapons, is that while it is immobile, it's strategic placement influences big parts of the story. It is around until the end and more than just a generic threat.
Gotta give it to the Low Orbit Atmosphere Deprivation Weapon from Homeworld. "Kharak is burning" is a moment that's seared into my memory.
I like the Sun Crusher in the sense of the idea of a small hard ship that can just smash through anything like a piece of weaponized space debris is terrifying. Kinda like the drone ship from the 3 Body Problem. 3 Body Problem, as much as a personally don't like the story, is a fascinating sci-fi horror story, and I'll fight anybody who says it's not horror
Another really good super weapon that's got a really cool build up and pay off is the Drej Mothership's beam from Titan A.E., where it causes the Target planet, in this case Earth, to spin so fast it rips apart
I personally like the System-∀99 ∀ Gundam from Turn A Gundam and it's signature Moonlight Butterfly. It was incredibly powerful to the point that it singlehandedly destroyed the entirety of civilization on Earth by sending nanomachines into weather systems and creating ionic storms that would ravage it. Said nanomachines were capable of disintegrating any matter and were used to destroy much of the Earth's surface. Yet despite this, it's often shown on-screen as horrifying yet also majestic. Also iirc, it could cover the ENTIRE Solar System.
I've really liked some small weapons with big effects. Tsutomu Nihei loves those, with the GBE from _Blame!_ packing enormous firepower into a package as small as a handgun and doing so in a way that makes sense in context. The weapons in _Biomega_ aren't quite as insane but there are some very nice scenes.
An extreme example is the Deterrence Fleet from Peter F Hamilton's _Void_ books, won't spoil it for people who haven't read it yet but it's good competition for Culture ships.
The GBE is such a ridiculous and cool weapon!
The gbe reminded me of the xeelee starbreaker beam, also said to be handheld and power scalable
I am so happy to see Sins of a Solar Empire get some representation on this list! While I love the Visari designs, the Advent really have the doomsday feel to them (especially when combined with their lore).
I think the gravity weapons from The Final Architecture book series by Adrian Tchaikovsky deserves an honourable mention. Turning planets into works of art is something that really needs putting to film
I love them, but I HATE the writing in the series. The characters are so unrelatable and awkward. I only really feel sympathy for one of the characters.
Still, the Architects themselves are rad, and I too would love to see something like that on film
Man, I do love that you pull examples from all media. I mean, movies, tv shows, games, anime, and even books. We don't get to see this broad of a list everyday.
Also, big props for showing one of SBY's most powerful shots. That thing took out a Jupiter size construct. Oops... spoilers. Oh, and nicely done with the Carter Starkiller. LOL.
And one more thing, if I may put forward another example, the Ark of Destruction from SBY is fair game for this list.
I'll toss in the Genesis Device from Wrath of Khan (reformat a planet's biosphere) and Farscape's wormhole weapons (your choice of "pipe mass from a star's core to wherever you want" or "open a galaxy-eating black hole").
"The moment" from Doctor Who is possibly one of the best super weapons I've seen in sci-fi. In classic DW style it's sentient, the thing has the power to rip apart the fabric of the universe across time and space and comes with it's own consciousness to try to convince people not to use it.
^ this!
Droplets are small unmanned spaceships that originate from the alien planet Trisolaris and they are featured in the Three-Body Problem sci-fi novel trilogy.
The unfolded protons (was it protons?) could very well be a superweapon in their own right.
Oh, don't forget the duel vector foil, not from trisolaris, but same series
5:17 Revelation Space! Wooh! Nobody ever talks about these books and they were one of my favorite sci-fi's
The Almighty from Destiny 2 is cool, even if it didn't really get to be shown off properly. A massive ship that uses planets as fuel to destabilize a systems star, causing it to go super nova. The leviathan gets an honorable mention, but I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a weapon since it's primary purpose was to gather resources rather than targeted destruction
So nice to see Sins of a Solar Empire mentioned, always loved that game. Still wish for a sequel too.
When it comes to my favorite super weapon, though, it'll have to be the Gravitational Beam Emitter from various works by Tsutomu Nihei. Admittedly, most of them are hand held weaponry, in the Blame! manga specificially, but there is a ship mounted variant in Knights of Sidonia (that goes by a slightly different name of Graviton Radiation Emitter). They aren't world destroying weaponry, but they're still fun.
Speaking of which, you might find the ship from Knights of Sidonia an interesting design. Built like a tower that they've laid down afterward, extending out of an asteroid that they actively mine for raw resources, and is covered in a few meter thick layer of ice that serves as impact armor.
The Cache weapons are great. As for my own favourite superweapons I have to give a shout out to the World Engine from 40k, which is literally a planet sized Necron ship that goes on a rampage and destroys almost an entire sector fleet, many space marine battle barges (27 chapters were involved in the battle) and the entire Astral Knights chapter.
Less explained but still fun ones from 40k include the Celestial Orrery, a map of the galaxy that the Necrons can edit and remove stars, planets and whatever else they don't want, whatever the hell Hive Fleet Tiamat is building, The Pariah Nexus which literally creates areas of space that suppress your soul until you die, the Fireheart an old Eldar solar system editor and construction device that works remotely, the entire Eldar race and their gods were made into weapons by the Old Ones as well as were the Krork (now Orks), and we can't forget our good old friend Exterminatus from Vortex Shells to Virus Bombs to good old fashioned orbital bombardment.
Well I'll be... A 40K fan who actually states a superweapon rather than just going "muh Exterminatus is the best and is totally not just basic weaponry for ships in basically every other sci-fi universe"
Revelation space!! Such an incredible hard sci-fi! Absolutely my favorite book this year.
Favourite superweapon? This is tricky. Going to give a couple of examples from a few pieces of media.
From destiny, oryxs nuke is probably my favourite. It's got a short firing sequence, and looks very very cool. But the lore surrounding it is what makes it the best, as it draws from bassically the core of hive lore, esspecially the unique nature of the dreadnought, and offers the intriguing option of someone surviving it by just saying "no, i do exist", and being able to back it up.
The next is pocket infinity, an incredibly meta superweapon which works by crashing the game, thus literally removing the person your looking at from existence.
Next game is starcraft. 3 superweapons here. 1 is the second overmind. We see the raw power of the overmind in the original starcraft campagin, and the sheer power of the UED terran zerg combo in the UED campagin makes us truly respect the overmind as the superweapon it is, whilst still being a fightable enemy.
Then we have the Odin. The big daddy himself, the final answer to the zerg threat, in both wings of liberty and heart of the swarm. Javing an AoE ability to crush maxed out armies, HP to tank the damage from the strongest fortifications, and giant cannons to dish out more pain than a suped up seige tank, there is nothing outside of CoOp that matches it. And even in CoOp a completely unchanged odin is the ultimate ability of 1 of the commanders, speaking volumes as to how absurd it is.
And finally, the xanthos. Basically just big odin TBF, but it's diverse weapons make it extremely fun to fight, and the fact exploiting its weak point only bring us in for a final fight against its most powerful weapon yet is amazing.
Then we have advanced wars. Several superweapons in this one, all being some variation of a big laser. But my actual favourite is the ultimate ability of a lot of the final bosses, which is invariably a big meteor that kills all your stuff. Throwing meteors at armies is just very cool.
It’s not a spaceship, but the Giant Death Robot from the Civilization games is just amazing.
„But, but it's a big target and impossible to hide?”
`Who said anything about hiding? '
My favourite superweapon is the Breen Energy-Dampener from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It comes as a big surprise and completely reverses the tide of the Dominan war, it shows how the collaboration of the different allies technologies is so important, and it gives a great opportunity for the main characters to figure out how to overcome it. You get to see it evolve from surprise battle ending terror to obsolete over the course of a season.
I love the Sun Crusher because it's just so darn juvenile. "oh yeah? Well mine can blow up suns, and is so invulnerable Han can fly it through a star destroyer!" xD
I love the Sun Crusher, but that is almost definitely due to nostalgia.
I hated reading as a kid, until I discovered Star Wars books. Jedi Search was one of the first books I read for fun, and it largely launched my love for reading.
This is the only legit reason.
I'm beginning to realize my love for it is also mostly due to nostalgia... This makes me sad.
The Sun Crusher was pretty dumb. It's like they asked a twelve-year-old to design a superweapon.
Sadly, it often gets used as a strawman by Disney canon apologists to write off the Expanded Universe outright, conveniently forgetting that Starkiller Base was a thing.
@@jaffarebellion292 Niether the sun crusher or starkiller base are dumb ideas, just poorly executed
Thats a really nice little story, thanks for sharing!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Macross/Robotech had two of my favorite super weapons. The SDF-1's main gun would wipe out tons of ships, but it was dwarfed by The Grand Canon, a massive energy weapon located in Alaska. It turned the tables on the typical sci-fi super weapon since it was on the planet instead of being on a ship.
Shoutout to The Culture series for giving most military ships batshit insane capabilities
Especially the Sleeper Service in Excession. Shows up to the finale and suddenly unleashes 80,000 warship drones. Then things take a swerve.
The Culture gun described in the first short story in State of the Art was pretty amazing. It sounds very similar to one of the Lazy Guns in one of Iain M Banks' other novels Against a Dark Background.
Finally got round to Excession.
Killing Time’s attack was legendary as well.
The capabilities of ships in The Culture series extend beyond weaponry too, being able to control matter and influence biology, which could be considered weaponry in itself, in a way. Even drones can be ridiculously effective.
Ships of The Culture are just absolutely and bizarrely powerful godlike entities that are probably my favourite characters in the series.
There's The Culture's Gridfire from Ian M. Banks' novels. It's essentially ripping open a hole in the universe, exposing the pure energy that keeps universes separate, and letting the energy bleed do the rest.
I think the most powerful/terrifying superweapon I've seen in Sci-fi was Star Trek Voyager's Krenim Temporal Weapon- a weapon that not only makes you cease to exist, but makes it so that you never even existed in the first place.
Terrifying.
Probably the best time related episode ever, because it does take into account the fact, that changing the past, affects the future and no one even realizes the change has been made.
Only Kess has some type of "temporal" memory, that allows Voyager to determine that they are in the middle of a Temporal conflict, because without her, Voyager just thinks they are in their respective time frame, yet everything is different than it "should" be.
I always liked the cache weapons, as they were capable of so much - I also generally liked how most of the conjoiners weaponry in absolution gap and inhibitor phase where basically superweapons because that was the only way to deal with the inhibitors
The various super weapons from the Gundam series are some of my favourites, though I would have to say that Gryps II is probably the best.
The empty shell of a colony filled with the mechanisms to convert it into a 6.5km diameter laser cannon powered by the sun is an extremely cool concept.
It is brilliant, logical and utterly terrifying.
Lexx! Both the titular ship's Weapon, with magnificently beautiful firing sequence and the Megashadow, a ship that, when unfolded into huge mechanical web, can cast energy projections of that web onto the surface of unlucky target planet. First one very much inspired by Yamato's Wave Motion Gun, down to mimicking the circumstances of the first combat use of their respective weapons.
I have a soft spot for the Solar System from the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It's an array of 4 million mirrors which redirect the sun's rays to form a big melting beam. It makes for a very cool and original visual in that it doesn't have a single barrel or emitter. It's also used by the protagonists' faction and it never blows up in their face or anything. I kept expecting it to backfire somehow but no, the Federation admiral uses it to very good effect and it pretty much wins them the Battle of Solomon, although it does get destroyed later while in transit.
Also I wasn't expecting to see R-Type in this video, but it absolutely fits ! The R-Type setting is surprisingly interesting for a shmup, and it has some bonkers weaponry.
Makes sense it wouldn't back fire, its really just the same principal as a magnifying glass.
Hell yeah, a Revelation Space shoutout! Yeah, those Cache Weapons were sick.
Uhh, in terms of favorite weapons? Clearly, *_Knights of Sidonia_* is for you ^-^ I especially like the *massive* variant of the Heigus Particle Cannon, mounted on the outer hull of Sidonia itself (For this weapon, I recommend the "official" Netflix-mix version). I just adore the military grit and expertly crafted ship that is everywhere in this anime. An itch I rarely can scratch (Edit: Spelling)
So angry they didn't finish that series
@@acarrillo8277 so so angry!
@@acarrillo8277 Yeah, a real shame in my opinion. It's as always, Netflix does what they can do best -.-
@@acarrillo8277 Isn't "Sidonia no Kishi: Ai Tsumugu Hoshi" OAV the final of the series ?
Also I prefer the portable version ie the GBE (Graviton Beam Emittor) held by Killy in Blame !
"You blow up one sun and Spacedock calls you a superweapon."
Doctor Who had some pretty cool super weapons. The Demat Gun, the Dalek Crucible. Plus, I’ve always felt from how we’ve seen the Master use his Tardis in the classic series, that a Tardis itself would be not only a powerful but also very adaptable super weapon.
Not to mention The Moment, a super weapon so advanced it has a conscience and tries to persuade the user not to fire it
I was looking for someone to mention the Crucible, though that’s only the planetoid housing the real superweapon: the reality bomb, bar none the most overpowered weapon in all sci-fi.
Come to think of it, there was also the Silver Nemesis, the Movelan Nova Device. And I recon the Omega Device.
World Engine from "Man of Steel". The idea of it and the audio effects were fantastic.
My favourite superweapons are usually ones that rule by reputation alone, rather than their actual power. Those ones where the characters have to be really careful about what they do otherwise they draw its attention. Unfortunately, the only ones that really fit this criteria in a major way (that I know of) are Cortana's Guardians from Halo and the Eternal Fleet from Star Wars, and both are infamously pretty silly and ironically lose a lot of their presence when they actually arrive.
That was the whole concept of the Death Star, but the only time they actually used this in a story was at the end of Rogue One.
There's a fair supply of superweapons in the various Gundam shows, aside from the mobile suits themselves. From Colony Lasers, solar reflector arrays, micro-wave cannons (people go pop!) to the Moonlight Butterfly, there is something for everyone (assuming everyone wants an inordinate amount of death & property damage).
There's also the School of the Undefeated of the East.
I agree, Stargate has a ton super weapons. One of the coolest is indeed the exploding sun, but you forgot to mention the even cooler part. They throw into the sun a portal that was connected to P3W-451. The little thing on P3W-451 is used on multiple occasions as an offensive weapon. That and Buster Machine 3 are one of my favorite super weapons.
I think that gate address is also the first one they gave to a group of aliens who turned out to be hostile. "The first one leads to a black hole and they get progressively darker from there"
@@filanfyretracker The Aschen
Death Blossom, The last Star Fighter.
1) only the prototype can do it
2) has a start up sequence
3) leaves the ship spent after firing.
4) could be considered Overkill
Really missed the blackstone fortresses from WH40K and the planet killer (though the nova cannons are pretty cool as well), all the stuff from the Homeworld series, whatever the heck the protomolecule uses to sterilize full systems in The Expanse, and in literature: the pandora dyson sphere in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Trilogy as well as the Deterrence Fleet in the Void Trillogy also from Hamilton. Those are just the first that come to mind, I'm thinking there could be a pretty cool video series on all of these and more. :)
I feel like one honourable mention that absolutely was missed here was the shielded planet dreadnought from stellaris. It was such a twist that one of the ways you could "blow up" a planet given in the game was, in fact, shielding the planet in such a way that they were completely isolated from space for the rest of time. It's like... on one hand, they get to live the rest of the planet's life out in peace, but on the other hand, they know about space travel. they've visited other planets. they have the technology. and they are stuck, alone, by themselves forever.
... honestly don't know which is worse.
The Soliton Wave and the Genesis Device are two potential superweapons from Star Trek that hardly ever get mentioned.
Also, a trilithium torpedo (that literally *any* warp capable nation can produce) means a single starship has the power to destroy hundreds of entire star systems.
My favourite has to be the Magnetar Class from the Expanse, I love how totally implacable it is while also conveying this feeling of fragility.
Given you talked about Supreme Commander, I'm surprised you never made mention the Black Sun supper weapon. The idea of building an absolutely massive and highly destructive but imobile weapon, then using it to blow up numerous planets in a single shot by manipulating your own FTL gate network was something rather clever in my opinion.
Two suggestions from Gundam - The 'Colony laser', an O'Neill Cylinder that's been depopulated and converted into a massive laser gun, which brings in the added element of displacing a whole colony's worth of people (assuming you don't just gas them all to death) on top of the "shooting a massive gun at something" aspect, and the Moonlight Butterfly, a cloud of nanomachines that converts everything manmade into dust, and has a (potential) range that spans from the Earth to Jupiter.
Or just drop the whole colony. It's tradition at this point.
And speaking of Gundam: The Statue of Liberty Cannon from G Gundam. Fires a deadly beam of concentrated FREEDOM.
Few things have as chilling an implied aftermath as the Moonlight Butterfly. Sure, it kills a lot of people directly (and I'm not just talking in ships or space colonys) but the amount of deaths from the sudden dusting of literally everything artificially worked across the entire inner system? That's horror man. It achieves the classical war goal of 'remove the enemies ability to fight' and the devastation is both near impossible to picture and all to understandable. After all, how long would you survive if a wave of white dust took away everything, even your clothes and the foundation of your house? Tools, Books, Glasses, Medicines, ROADS, all gone in seconds.
"That time Carter blew up a star." Is a moment I frequently cite whenever I make my case that she is by far the most badass character in that show. She not only blew up a star, she defeated a system lord that had been consolidating power over the entire galaxy over the course of several seasons, and was about to eradicate the Tok-Ra. It was especially good since it abused the black hole that they encountered in earlier seasons.
and mckay blew up a solar system too. kinda ironic that they togheter only destroyed a planet then. lol
Ah yes. The TRUE Suncrusher
@@hulmhochberg8129 except that McKay did it by accident. After recklessly causing the death of one of his researchers. And after being warned in various ways against attempting to operate the facility.
and she managed to make the whole earth disappear while in an alternate reality
I think the Centauri mass drivers from Babylon 5 were portrayed really well.
Full credit to Peter Jurasik - there's a reason that reaction shot sat in the opening titles for the remaining seasons.
Along the same lines, the stealth rocks from The Expanse.
Sometimes throwing rocks actually does do the most damage, and all you really need is enough thrust to get them going in the right direction (and state-of-the-art stealth coatings to hide them from your enemy's defenses)
@@techmage89 Throwing rocks doesn't necessarily do the most damage (replacing a rock with a custom projectile will increase the damage - for example, throwing an equal mass of TNT will add the explosive force of that much TNT going off to the impact), but the kinetic energy of a high-speed impact is orders of magnitude greater than the energy of complete chemical explosion - a chunk of TNT impacting at 30kps (asteroids have an average impact speed of 18kps; comets 50kps) would have pretty close to 100 times as much kinetic energy as explosive energy.
It's a lot easier to take an unaltered rock and divert it than it is to mass produce specific chemicals or create intricate devices on a large scale and then aim the resulting mass, so, for what amounts to a rounding error in the deivered energy, it's not worth the effort.
@@rmsgrey I mean, yes, nuclear weapons or engineered kinetic impactors will do more damage for their mass, but building them large enough to match just accelerating a dense asteroid up to moderate speeds is a lot harder. In terms of damage for engineering effort, it's hard to beat an accelerated rock, especially when you have really efficient engines (like they do in The Expanse).
It's a bit generic but I really like the Thor Hammer from Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's just a straightforward giant energy cannon on a space fortress but I feel as though the way that it's used within the story can be pretty creative at times. Since it can take out thousands of ships with a single shot, every time we see someone attempting to capture Iserlohn Fortress, they're forced to come up with cunning strategies of avoiding it.
Agree
Its definitely better than the death star 1 and much better than DS2 like,
The defense is better
The weapons are better
It can be an FOB for like 15k warships
It can self sustain, so no need for supply
I like the sun crusher because its silly that it has weapons and the developer was like "No its for mining... the emperor told me it was for mining! not for mass murder... why would a ship with sun exploding missiles and impenetrable armor be for anything other than mining!"
Props for mentioning Revelation Space! That's how I know you're a real one.
I actually like the sun crusher, its just not used right, the almost indestructible Hull armour is a very interesting concept in itself
I dislike anything which is indestructible like that. It's fine if you can dismantle the thing piece by piece, as then you can have a hard fought tactical battle where your working through how to dismantle the thing whilst also trying to retain the capacity to dismantle it, bit like the xanthos from nova covert ops in SC2. but otherwise it's always bassically just going to be either a death star situation where there just 1 random weak spot and a special team must go and hit that weak spot and everyone is already asleep. Or it's just going to run through everything, as it doesn't matter what the enemy has because as long as you can't die, you'll win eventually.
A brave stance to take!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@Santisima_Trinidad I agree, though I will offer the slight counterpoint that at least they had to think outside the box to get rid of it
That said, it would have worked better in a different setting, it's OP for SW
@@Santisima_Trinidad I get what you mean, I personally would have used the concept of nearly indestructible differently, keep the Hull and downgrade the armaments, instead of annihilating entire systems, make it a capital ship killer with limited munitions and let the heroes find a sci-fi way to destabilise the indestructible Hull or something like that
@@ponyperson7513 thats a good idea, sound a lot like the blockats from stellaris gigastructures, whos super sheikd you deactivate by detonating a super nuke that damages reality enough to make jump drives work better, and also obliterates the super shield. And thats nice, as its going at the dismantling thing i was talking about. Without that, there's really no way to make it engaging as a thing you fight. They can be great as a story device (death star, it killing andor sets up the empire as the baddies, and it teaches us a bit about the force with luke in the trench) but a teaspoon can be great as a story device if you write it correctly, so thats not condoning anything.
The Death Star 2 was firing at low power, low power was just enough to destroy a entire capital ship.
My favorit got to be the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator from Stellaris's popular Gigastructural Engineering mod: A death laser of literally astronimical scale as it is build around the super massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy.
Completly bonkers
Ah yes the "That sector is a problem, I do not want to see it anymore" button, gotta love it