# Coolest sci-fi weapons?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [December 20, 2004, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763 "2004-12-20T08:38:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Tracy\_Lord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tracy_Lord)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/1 "2004-12-20T08:38:26Z")
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?
---
### Author:  [@Walker\_in\_Eternity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walker_in_Eternity)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/2 "2004-12-20T08:54:09Z")
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.
---
### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 9:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/3 "2004-12-20T09:01:55Z")
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’.
---
### Author:  [@Seven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Seven)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/4 "2004-12-20T09:08:03Z")
The Illudiom Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
---
### Author:  [@Seven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Seven)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 9:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/5 "2004-12-20T09:13:36Z")
Or is it the The Alludium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator?
Whatever. Marvin’s ray gun was **teh roxors** (as those crasy kids say today)
---
### Author:  [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/6 "2004-12-20T09:25:39Z")
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…
> [@](#):
>
> If you had aimed at a person, a spear might suddenly materialise and pierce them through the chest, or some snake’s spit fang might graze their neck, or a ship’s anchor might appear falling above them, crushing them, or two enormous switch-electrodes would leap briefly into being on either side of the hapless target and vaporise him or her.
>
> If you had aimed the gun at something larger, like a tank or a house, then it might implode, explode, collapse in a pile of dust, be struck by a section of a tidal wave or a lava flow, be turned inside out or just disappear entirely, with or without a bang.
>
> Increasing scale seemed to rob a Lazy Gun of its eccentric poesy; turn it on a city or a mountain and it tended simply to drop an appropriately sized nuclear or thermonuclear fireball onto it. The only known exception had been when what was believed to have been a comet nucleus had destroyed a city-sized berg-barge on the water world of Trontsephori.
>
> Rumour had it that some of the earlier Lazy Guns, at least, had shown what looked suspiciously like humour when they had been used; criminals saved from firing squads so that they could be the subjects of experiments had died under a hail of bullets, all hitting their hearts at the same time; an obsolete submarine had been straddled by depth charges; a mad king obsessed with metals had been smothered under a deluge of mercury.
>
> The braver physicists - those who didn’t try to deny the existence of Lazy Guns altogether - ventured that the weapons somehow accessed different dimensions; they monitored other continua and dipped into one to pluck out their chosen method of destruction and transfer it to this universe, where it carried out its destructive task then promptly disappeared, only its effects remaining. Or they created whatever they desired to create from the ground-state of quantum fluctuation that invested the fabric of space. Or they were time machines.
I doubt any other weapon could have a description that tickles me so merrily…
---
### Author:  [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/7 "2004-12-20T09:40:13Z")
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’ [M56](http://members.tripod.com/~Corpral_Hicks/M56.html)[Smartgun](http://www.geocities.com/area51/dungeon/3169/infosmartgun.html).
---
### Author:  [@Mini-Thud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mini-Thud)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/8 "2004-12-20T10:05:04Z")
While not having the best name, but certainly making up for it with the ability to destroy the universe.
The wormhole weapon in Farscape. Nasty Damage 😃
---
### Author:  [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 10:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/9 "2004-12-20T10:18:39Z")
A board with a nail in it, as wielded by Moe.
---
### Author:  [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 10:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/10 "2004-12-20T10:28:54Z")
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.
---
### Author:  [@paulberserker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/paulberserker)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 10:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/11 "2004-12-20T10:55:20Z")
Phased-plasma rifle in the forty watt range.
Them remote sentry guns from the Aliens Directors Cut would come in handy for my garden too.
---
### Author:  [@sturmhauke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sturmhauke)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/12 "2004-12-20T11:05:55Z")
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.
---
### Author:  [@matt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 11:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/13 "2004-12-20T11:51:31Z")
> [@Mangetout](#):
>
> 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’.
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.
> [@Stryfe](#):
>
> 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.
Wasn’t there an episode where they found a radio telescope technician in his own lunchbox? Gave me the creeps.
---
### Author:  [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 11:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/14 "2004-12-20T11:58:46Z")
The [TR-116](http://www.phasers.net/2370/tr-116.htm).
---
### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/15 "2004-12-20T12:40:16Z")
For vehicle-mounted weapons, nothing beats the Yamato/Argo’s Wave Motion Gun.
Blow 'em up _REAL GOOD!_😃😃🆒🆒
---
### Author:  [@Earthworm\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earthworm_Jim)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/16 "2004-12-20T12:40:26Z")
The main gun of the [SDF-1](http://www.kent.net/robotech/ships/rdf/sdf-1.shtml). The Veritechs were pretty cool too.
---
### Author:  [@Walker\_in\_Eternity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walker_in_Eternity)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/17 "2004-12-20T13:18:41Z")
> [@matt](#):
>
> 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.
---
### Author:  [@stegon66](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stegon66)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/18 "2004-12-20T13:24:42Z")
I’m partial to the killer flying spheres in the _Phantasm_ movies…
---
### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/19 "2004-12-20T13:29:50Z")
> [@stegon66](#):
>
> I’m partial to the killer flying spheres in the _Phantasm_ movies…
Not Science Fiction. :mad:
---
### Author:  [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)
#### Post date: [December 20, 2004, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763/20 "2004-12-20T13:30:03Z")
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.
[Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coolest-sci-fi-weapons/280763.md?page=2)