What are the coolest, flashiest, best-named, most nifty weapons dreamed up by sci-fi writers or prop crews? I mean, you’ve got your classic phaser/blaster/ray gun/1920s-style “death ray,” the lightsaber archetype of “it’s just like a regular weapon…ONLY MADE OF PURE ENERGY!”, the remote-controlled matter de-matterifier…
But my sci-fi grounding is sadly lacking, and I’m having some trouble coming up with any REALLY COOL weapons. Ones that make you go “ohmygod he did NOT just do that with that shiny pointy-looking thing” or “ooh, excellent name” or “PIO PIO! [other energy-bolt-like sounds, fired from the first-finger-and-thumb hand gun]”.
So…what are your favorite really neat sci-fi weapons?
The “Tissue Compression Eliminator” used by the Master in Doctor Who.
A really cool weapon which kills people by compressing them to the size of a doll. Which given the BBC’s special effects budget in the 70’s was exactly what they used.
Not sure if it quite qualifies as a weapon, but one of my favourite SF devices is Larry Niven’s Tasp - it’s a device that, at a distance, can induce a small electrical current in the brain’s pleasure centre; this can be used to reward, incapacitate or enslave the ‘victim’.
The Culture’s Lazyguns… when fired, they didn’t directly kill the target. Instead, they caused something to happen to obliterate the target. Or, as described…
I doubt any other weapon could have a description that tickles me so merrily…
The SOL orbiting laser from Akira. (I’ve always had a soft spot for orbital death rays designed to be used against ground targets)
The Focusing Disintigrator Ray from Teenagers from Outer Space—it instantly reduces it’s victims to skeletons. (Which stay attached, and still in the pose the victim was in at death, for a few seconds)
The Genesis Device from Star Trek II/III. The ultimate terraforming tool (albeit one that still needs the bugs worked out), and the ultimate weapon. A few of these things could have ended the Dominion War in about a week.
Phasers. With their settings between “stun” (light, medium, and heavy); “burn”; “kill”; and “vaporize.” (In my opinion, “burn” and “vaporize” get used far too infrequently) And the classic phaser has a “wide beam” setting. Most new ones seem to just have the "fire a single energy packet at 60 feet per second, with a rate of fire of 40 rounds per minute.)
The WSTE-M Combat Shotgun, from Marathon.
And of course, the United States Colonial Marine Corps’ M56Smartgun.
I always like the inertialess planets in the works of EE “Doc” Smith. Go grab a couple of spare planets lying around, install some inertaless drives on them, then position them juuuust so… Turn off the drives simultaneously, and BOOM! Your target gets squished between two (or more!) planets suddenly hurtling toward it.
There’s the “Dr. Device” from Ender’s Game. It was formally called the D-R Device, although I can’t remember what the letters stand for. It worked by suppressing the forces binding atoms together on a large scale, large enough to destroy planets.
Lightsabers are a classic. Can’t go wrong with two of those, one yellow, one purple, with different crystals to give you a well rounded set of special abilities - ahem, sorry, having KOTOR flashbacks there.
If you were very lucky, you could find the Alien Pistol in Fallout. More powerful than a standard plasma rifle, lighter, and it could reduce your enemies to a pair of eyes that blinked once before falling into the puddle of goo that used to be the rest of them.
Warren and Smith’s versions of the “Dirty Pair” anime borrowed this idea, but gave it the snazzier name of the XTC gun. It was supposed to be used for riot control!
Not really a weapon, but the same series had a sedative patch like a nicotine patch for slapping onto unruly prisoners. The brand name for the thing was “Drug a Thug”, which gets cool name points from me.
Niven had a number of rather nasty weapons in his Known Space - the solar-flare-powered laser from Ringworld, the electron-charge-suppressing disintegrator from the same (causes matter to fly apart into its individual atoms from eletrostatic repulsion), variable swords (a wire blade one molecule wide held rigid by a field that stops time), and a beam weapon that transforms matter to antimatter, to name a few. He never succeeded in making me care about any of his characters, though.
Wasn’t there an episode where they found a radio telescope technician in his own lunchbox? Gave me the creeps.
Yes there was, I think it was in “Logopolis”, where incidentally a policeman and an old lady were also turned into Ken and Barbie.
As an additional Doctor Who weapon (sorry about the geekiness) there was the DMAT gun which erased someones whole timleline so that they never existed.
The “Weirding Module” from the 1st Dune movie. What’s better than a zap gun? A zap gun that works by the user saying “zap” into it! Wait…actually that is kind of sucky and stupid. Never mind.
