I’m a huge fan of the weapons they have on that quirky game advertised for PlayStation 2 (I can’t remember the game’s name!). You know, the Sheepinator (that turns your enemies into sheep) and the Chicken gun. Those are hysterical.
Space 1999 stun guns here were very cool.
The monomolecular whip and needle gun from “Johny Mnemonic”.
Darth Maul’s Light Saber, even though it is completely impractical.
Aliens sentry gun.
The Supernova Bomb from HHGTTG, it’s a very small bomb that just might have the ability to destroy the universe
the talking bomb from Adams’ Starship Titanic video game, the one that sounds suspiciously like John Cleese and doesn’t like to be touched…
“i don’t like being touched, please stop, recommencing countdown”
after you touch it a few times it almost loses it…
<angry> Excuse me, but saying “please don’t touch me” does NOT mean “okay, do it again!!” recommencing countdown…
and after you touch it one too many times…
LOOK, NO MEANS NO, GOT IT!! …recommencing countdown
another vote for John Crichton’s wormhole weapon, starts small but will grow to the point where it could engulf the universe
THIS is a Mech, short for BattleMech. The pilot rides in the head. king of the battlefield.
And HERE are two guys with too much free time. But very, very cool ideas.
Well, hell, if you’re into talking bombs, watch Dark Star sometime (John Carpenter’s first movie, before he got infatuated with vampires and shit). link.
If we’re talking video games, I’ll nominate the BFG 9000 from the original Doom. Intimidating size, neat effect, massively destructive, kewl sounds, and a really fun name, all in one package.
[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
[li]Battle Android Troopers[/li][/quote]
Only the first version for me – the later ones all look like ass.
IIRC it was “Molecular Disruption Device” = “MD Device” = “Dr Device.”
And it wasn’t the scale exactly, it was a chain reaction, so you can use it on anything which gets close enough together. Interesting tactics.
I don’t think anyone ever considered what’d happen if you aimed it at a sun, but perhaps you couldn’t get close enough, or perhaps it wouldn’t have any effect as the sun is already a fusion explosion.
Yeah, much better than my answer The annoying thing is that by the third or fourth book it was a missle. But I forgive them because of the exchange after they abort a launch:
I’m glad to see you didn’t have any of that nonsense about pressing the buttons in the right order to turn it off…
No, it’s easy. There’s instructions on how to do it all over the thing. Now, turning it on, that’s hard.
Nitpicks: 1) the Lazy Guns are from Against a Dark Background, which isn’t a Culture novel … the Culture goes in for more pedestrian devices, like gridfire, intelligent knife missiles, electromagnetic effectors, and people who suddenly disassemble themselves into clouds of killer nanobots.
The guy who winds up inside his own lunchbox is in “Terror of the Autons”.
As for weapons … I want one of the Xeelee devices from the Stephen Baxter stories. Fired at a sun, it destabilizes it, rendering any habitable planets around it pretty much uninhabitable. What’s particularly cool about this particular device? It’s a handgun …
Though for close-quarter fighting, and a great ominous hum, I’d have to go for a BH-209i plasma cannon.
All the Klingon blade weapons seem totally impractical to me. If the batleth were a practical weapon for humanoids, wouldn’t some human culture have invented something in roughly that shape by now? And that knife with short spring-loaded prongs on each side – what good is that? The prongs would just dissipate the force of the main blade’s thrust – and maybe make it harder to draw the knife back out. But they all look totally cool, which I guess is the point.
If we’re going by visual coolness, I remember some old SF movie or Japanese monster movie – or maybe it was some schlocky TV show like Ultraman – with a weapon that emitted a series of light-rings, like angels’ haloes. That looked, you know, weird and otherwordly.
In Logan’s Run (the book, not the movie or TV series), the Sandmen used a kind of handgun with six specialized rounds – one shot a wire-net that tangled up the target, one shot fire, the “Homer” was a missile that targeted body heat, and so on. In retrospect it seems too contrived and gimmicky, but it seemed really cool when I read the book as a teenager.
Slight hijack: What the fuck is the point of a Star Wars lightsaber? I can see the Klingons fighting with batleths, just as people now practice fencing and kendo, as a cultural holdover from pre-firearms times. But, in a civilization that has the technology to make a lightsaber, why would anybody invent one? Swords became obsolete on Earth because firearms have so many advantages over them, including longer range, and ease of use with minimal training. And an ordinary lead-slug-throwing rifle or pistol, let alone a blaster, is superior in exactly the same respects to a caged-laser-beam (or whatever it is) weapon with a range of, at most, three feet.
I second Dr. Device from Ender’s Game. However, it was not originally D-R device. It was originally M D Device. M D stood for molecular disassociation.
