If we’re talking Powered Armor, I want (RAH forgive me. Yours was my first, but…) Mike’s suit from John Ringo’s A Hymn Before Battle.
In the realm of hand-held projectile weapons, give me a SHAAK from John Barnes’ Timeline Wars. The sucker even Makes its own ammo. Just add raw materials to the hopper, and it will spit out hyper-velocity projectiles that head for center of mass when they hit something. Shoot a finger, and the target likely loses an arm. It even shoots around corners.
Edged Weapon goes to Oscar’s “sabre” from Heinlein’s Glory Road.
The Sandman gun from Logan’s Run, as noted above. With my dad’s help, I even made one out of wood to play with when I was a kid!
Finally, the Ark, a 30-km-long, immensely powerful Imperial Earth military starship with the technology to create plagues, viruses, spores, molds and other toxins to create planetary ecological disasters, and to clone dinosaurs, other huge carnivores and all manner of smaller but still nasty critters (from George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging).
At what point do we disqualify things as “weapons?” The Death Star makes the cut, because that’s its primary function. Dahak slides in under the wire as well. But Ark? I don’t think so. It can be used as a weapon, surely. But that wasn’t what it was designed for.
I nominate any incarnation of the hand-wieldable gatling gun (as seen in Terminator 2, Predator, Doom, etc.) The one that can fire 100 rounds per second, for two full minutes.
I protest. Martin is very specific: Ark is bristling with weapons and is a military starship, “a biowar seedship of the Ecological Engineering Corps” (Tuf Voyaging, chapt. 1, p. 23, and chapt. 2, p. 103). Says one character, “This is a warship, after all” (chapt. 1, p. 39). Other, similar references are scattered throughout.
If the Death Star qualifies, Ark certainly does. It has peaceful applications but was first intended, and still most definitely can serve, as a warship.
Well that one isn’t entirely fictional: GE XM214 minigun. It holds 1000 rounds, so you could get over 2 minutes at 400 rpm, or 15 seconds at 4000 rpm. You have to figure that if your target doesn’t go down after being hammered with 1000 standard NATO rounds, you probably should have been using something else to begin with.
For use on other people? The Exsexive Machine, from Barbarella. No need to be cruel.
For my own personal use? Either an amped up Gravity Gun from Half-Life, the Staff of One from Runaways, or a Sinestro Corps ring (I like the bad guys…). Maybe Quantum Bands, no Guardians looking over your shoulder…
I believe we’re quite well aware of that, and you’re off on a key factor–it will not destroy itself, it will try to trick you into destroying it. There is no indication that it can change its own settings or trigger itself, so the defense is simply to ignore everything it says, or (better still) just avoid the computer setting entirely. That leaves the slug-thrower, the plasma jet, the sonic gun, the nullifier, and the annihilator functions available (plus any I forgot).
Also, you’re assuming the Slaver/Tnuctipun war was real. The possibility has been considered that it’s actually part of the most elaborate hoax in the history of the universe. Of course, either way, the weapon would consider it real, so that makes no practical difference in this case.
While nostalgic bbs2k would like to have been the first to mention the BFG 9000, the out-of-left-field bbs2k would like to introduce the Cotton Candy Ray Gun from Killer Clowns from Outer Space.
Yes, a ray gun that encapsulated it’s victims into giant woven bundles of cotton candy all the while turning thier bodies into gelatinized liquid to be sucked down with party straws.
