Mom on Futurama. “Oh, hang on, I’m out of power. Where’s the charger for this thing?”
ST Phasers ran out all the time.
In Star Wars, at least, the guns are supposed to be plasma/particle weapons, not lasers. I assume that refills for his blaster are what were on Han Solo’s jacket. (Unless they are Imperial [del]ball point pens[/del] “code cylinders” for some reason.)
And an episode in Firefly didn’t show a reload either, but low battery warning. It was the episode’s asshole so it turned out okay.
Then there’s the time Jayne tried to shoot a door lock with an Alliance sonic weapon with negligible results. Grumbling about “high-tech crap” he bashed it open with the gun stock.
My humanoid robot has .50 Desert Eagle tattooed on his forehead.
But seriously. What do they need a V-K machine for? The Blade Runner cops HAD MUG SHOTS!!
Not too long ago I started this thread discussing the flaws inherent to designing future robots as either “giant sarcastic robots” or “weaponized sex dolls”. There is literally no user experience value in creating killer robots that either drop a clever one liner before they kill you or that most straight males would want to fuck if they weren’t on a psychotic rampage.
Yeah…well. Tell that to the crew of the Executor.
On a serious note, since the ships in Star Wars use anti gravity, they don’t need to actually be in a stable orbit. If the star destroyer in Empire was using its anti gravity for station keeping, it could very well get pulled to the surface by Hoth’s gravity once those engines became disabled.
How is it any different from picking up a regular knife or sword or even a blowtorch? I assume most people manage to do that without slicing off a limb.
Yes, if that ceremony involves presenting it to some Starfleet captain who just boarded your ship with a platoon of Federation Security troops or Marines or whatever they use.
It turns the shooter into a bomb too. or just kills both shooter and target, it’s not predictable.
The anti-fighter missiles in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith that behaved like normal heat-seeking missiles except when they exploded instead of an explosive charge they instead deployed a bunch of small baseball size droids that latch onto your spacecrafts wings and deploy lasers to cut into your wings and tear them apart.
I don’t care what the limits to explosions are in space, anything would be more useful to pack in that missile warhead then small droids that have to take a significant amount of time to do damage to the spacecraft as opposed to instantly knocking it out.
Peter David, in his ST:TNG novel, Strike Zone conceptualized a weapon which would vaporize whatever it was aimed at. Unfortunately, the beam continued past the target, hugging the curvature of the ground, until it completely traveled around whatever world the user was standing on, and hit him in the back. It was labeled, appropriately enough, “Remarkably Stupid Weapon. Do Not Use.”