So what with war being on, and TNN showing the James Bond movies of late, I’ve been thinking about supervillians and their technology (and how the real bad guys are lame in comparison). If there were real supervillians, like in the Bond films, what do you suppose they’d have, technologywise? Nuclear weapons seem to be a possibility, of course, but seeing as how the real bad guys haven’t been able to get any (other than North Korea), are probably unlikely. The Supergun developed by Gerald Bull seems to be a possibility. Still, there has to be other things out there, in the high tech world, which would be likely for use by a supervillian. Any thoughts as to what they might be (besides sharks with laser beams)?
Windows.
Elliot Carver: Mr. Jones, are we ready to release our new software?
Jones: Yes, sir. As requested, it’s full of bugs, which means people will be forced to upgrade for years.
Elliot Carver: Outstanding!
(007: Tomorrow Never Dies)
http://www.villainsupply.com/ can fullfill all of your supervilliany needs.
Nanotech.
One nanotechnology virus could be used to hold the whole planet hostage.
Likewise, bioengineered plant life; weeds designed to be hyper-resistant to everything, and destroy land wherever they root.
That’s right… the supervillains of tomorrow will be armed with kudzu. Beware!
Pah! I just release my rabbits. 
Supervillia sounds like a nasty place… 
::cough:: USSR ::cough::
[ul]
[li]The Pyramid of Darkness–a devive that shut down energy sources over vast ranges of the Earth.[/li][li]The Weather Dominator—self-explanitary[/li][li]The MASS Device–strategic range teleportation[/li][li]BATS–Battle Android Trooper Systems. Robotic infantry[/li][li]Neo-Vipers–genetically enhanced soldiers.[/li][/ul]
That’s quite a nasty cough, you know. Perhaps you should go see a doctor?
Ack! SARS!!!
There’s always the potential for laser-equiped sealife…
Really catchy jingles.
Razor wielding pink bunnys. I don’t know why them being pink would make them more nefarious and evil but it just would.
Any common item with “OF DOOM” added at the end. A normal pancake could become a pancake OF DOOM instilling fear into all but the most hardened of foes.
Ya know, folks, I was trying to be serious with this. If you’ll notice the link for the supergun goes to a site which has a serious discussion about Gerald Bull and his efforts to build a supergun (an effort which got him assassinated by Israel). Can we try it again?
You want serious, Tuck? You got it.
Find a junk freighter. A real rust-tub.
Load it with the chemical fertilizer Ammonium Nitrate. Deck cargo is giant industrial rolls of twine, & boxes of nails. All of these are found in every port city in the world.
Bring 1 dozen thermite bombs, on timers. 1kg each.
Set sail for an American port.
Just offshore, pump oil all over the Ammonium Nitrate, & all over the deck load of twine.
Enter the port.
Set timers on thermite bombs.
Tie down the wheel to keep it on course.
Abandon ship in motor launches.
In 1949, a community named Texas City was destroyed utterly by a blast from an accidental explosion of a ship loaded with Ammonium Nitrate. The blast rivaled the Hiroshima atom bomb blast.
More recently, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a bomb created from Ammonium Nitrate.
And that bomb was a lot smaller than our hypothetical ship bomb.
Pleasant dreams…
Well, that’s one, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be weapons technology. After all, a supervillian can employ researchers and isn’t going to be bogged down by all kinds of red tape or safety regulations, so he might might be able to come up with something on the “quick and dirty” side of things that would take a legitimate research lab considerably longer to develop.
Well, to toot my own horn a bit, this thread mentions a few canadates for real-life supervillains, so you can get an idea of the level of technology available to each. (The esteemed Dr. Bull is on there too, as I recall)
A budding Mad Scientist might find something of use at Evil Genius Hoaxes.
After that, I’d defer to the old adage, “If you need some new technology, take it off the Nazis,” and refer you to Luft '46 and the Japanese counterpart, Hikoki '46, both of which feature quite a bit of Axis aeronautical technology that never made it off the drawing board. Like a piloted ICBM, and a coal-fired ramjet fighter. :eek: A supervillain might use one of those as a starting-off point. Impractical, maybe. But it would sure have a lot of pizzazz.
And I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the VJ-101c VTOL Supersonic Interceptor. It’s just so “Johnny Quest,” how could anyone NOT love it?
The Ekranoplan seemed promising, too. And versitile. With a little more development…who knows?
In fact, there are a lot of finished but unused aircraft-and spacecraft-designs that a supervillain might make use of. Just check out http://www.astronautix.com and look under the “Spacecraft-Manned” listing. Everything there from orbital-parachutes, to Soviet space-interceptors, to the infamous POLYUS “battle station” that the Ruskies actually launched.
Happy hunting!
What kind of standards are we looking at here? It strikes me that “conventional” military technology is pretty much useless. The need for a big infrastructure to support it and the fact that it’s exactly what the governments of the world are prepared to face put pretty strict limits on its usefulness for supervillainy.
It’s got to be something portable, so they don’t just drop a large bomb on it, and it’s got to have some kind of effect that’s beyond what can be achieved by other conventional means. Many groups are capable of inflicting large casualties, to get noticed you’d probably want to be able to mess up the infrastructure and bring things to a halt over a large area, threatening the power base of the people you’re villaining against (say by threatening to use a large EMP to scramble the computers handling the stock markets in New York and London), it’s got to be demonstrable so they’ll take you seriously and re-usable so it remains a threat.
I just can’t think of anything that meets the supervillain criteria.
Well, there are EMP bombs, which the US has threatened to use in Iraq, but hasn’t so far. Gerald Bull went to the Iraqi’s because he had an idea for putting satellites into orbit, but couldn’t get anybody else interested in it. Surely there’s other technology out there, which is possible, but no one’s been willing to devote the money to develop it, for whatever reason.