Nimzabaat said:
Star Wars: Blasters in Star Wars turn out to be as effective as the projectile firearms we use, not even today, but at the time the film was made. They are actually less effective because every weapon fires the equivalent of tracer ammunition and tracers point both ways. Princess Leia is shown getting shot in the shoulder and it is only a minor injury. Lightsabers are pretty cool but, since Jedi seem to be awful at multi-tasking, a fully automatic weapon or area of effect is all you need. It is terribly convenient that nobody uses those in Star Wars. Don't even get me started on Stormtrooper armor, though I once had an idea of re-writing Star Wars and making the white Stormtrooper armor refractive so only a direct hit in a black area would hurt them.
Yep, pretty much all the tech from Star Wars fall into the categories of
Cool, but Inefficient and [link"http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AwesomeButImpractical"]Awesome but Impractical[/link]. Now granted Star Wars is closer to Science Fantasy that regular old Science Fiction so the tech's not designed on actual scientific principles, but seriously, did no one think about any of the tech in this franchise!? A Jedi is supposed to be a psychic space knight with literally superhuman abilities, and yet a single squad of Vietnam-era US army grunts could kick their ass through simple application of concentrated fire.
Heck there's even an in canon lampshade of the whole mess that is Star Wars tech. Roughly paraphrased, since blaster bolts and lightsabers and such go straight through in universe armor, most people stopped wearing it because all it effectively did was make them a easy target for anyone who used such weapons. This meant that projectile weapons (called slugthrowers) suddenly became a viable weapon again because hot lead never lost effectiveness versus unprotected flesh. Add to this the facts that blasters and other high tech weapons and equipment tend to falter in adverse weather conditions, and that slugthrowers could be silenced and were generally cheaper to buy, build and maintain, suddenly the slugthrower becomes the epitome of
Boring, but Practical.
So yeah, even the Star Wars canon knows its tech is stupid.
But I digress.
Lets talk about some cool Sci-Fi weapons, and I personally can't think of a better example than the Empire from the Ashes book series by David Weber, so let's sound off in an ascending order of firepower.
First up is the grav gun. It uses small gravity-altering fields to fire a 10mm dart at supersonic speeds, which explodes on entering the target. To the 5th Empire, it's a simple backup sidearm. To anyone who doesn't have the 5th Empire's biotechnic enhancement capabilities, it's a two-handed, shoulder-slung heavy weapon. In other words, the people in this universe use bolters as pistols (and no not bolt pistols, these things are full auto)
"But TheHeik" you cry "that's just a fancy version of a regular gun! Where's my space laser?"
Well fear not my friend, next up is the energy gun. The mainstay infantry firearm on the 5th Empire, this weapon shoots a near invisible wave of energy (think the ripples you see above hot asphalt) that literally shreds its targets on impact. Just one of these (with a couple of grav guns for support and flavour) managed to rip apart a heavily fortified base in the span of a few seconds and the dudes they were firing it at had no clue what was going on. To those poor schmucks, everything just exploded and they got splattered all over the rubble as a garnish. And not even the 5th Empire's own armor can take that hit from an energy for more than a fraction of a second. That's how powerful it is.
But even an energy gun has been done before, and I think someone with such discerning tastes as yours would prefer something more.......
exotic
Thus, I give you the Warp Gun, my personal vote for "scariest handheld Sci-fi gun ever". To explain how this gun works, I first have to set up a little context. In the EftA universe there's a dimension called hyperspace, a place containing an effectively infinite amount of pure energy, which gets used not only as a power source but also as one of the methods for FTL. The warp gun weaponizes this dimension, and it doesn't simply fire it out at the enemy. Oh no, this weapon is far more surgical. The Warp gun projects a field which opens up a portal to hyperspace for the merest fraction of a second, effectively teleporting everything within the target field to hyperspace, where they are instantaneously ripped apart/blown up on a subatomic level.
And the scariest thing about this gun? There is effectively no defence against it. You can't dodge it, you can't hide from it behind cover, armor won't stop it, and it the field can be dialed in size to destroy an entire tank or just zap the driver and leave only his hands wrapped around the controls. Even in universe, the only countermeasure against it requires that the other side put up a blanket jamming field, effectively blinding their own side and shutting off all of their communications in a fairly large area, all just to stop just one gun. You know how it's said that the sniper rifle is one of the most cost effective weapons out there because it can stop entire platoons in their tracks? Well the warp gun takes that concept and dials it up to 11.
So have I sufficiently scared you shitless? Well hold on to your britches, because now it's time to move onto capital ship weaponry.
Now the Imperium's ships are not what you'd call "conventional". In fact, you'd be hard pressed to call them "ships", as the Imperium's standard for spacetravel is a man-made planetoid about the size of Earth's moon. As such their guns are both large and numerous, so lets do a rough overview of their main weapons, again in ascending order of the Pant Browning Effect.
First up are the planetoid's beam weapons. Now these beams aren't your usual directed energy weapon, as they induce a subatomic reaction in anything they hit, turning their targets' own mass into an explosion. Think the Dr Device from Ender's Game, minus the potential backfire. This is the 5th Empire's knife-fighting weapon (and yes, ships the size of planets can have a knife-fighting range), and it only gets used when things get very close and personal.
The mainstay weapon of a planetoid is the Hyper Missile. These missiles use hyperspace as a loophole around the lightspeed barrier, traveling to their destination in a fraction of the time it would take in real space. This allows the 5th Empire to hit targets accurately from a long distance. Already a pretty scary weapon, but just wait until you hear what their payload is
First is the Antimatter warhead, which does the old matter-antimatter explosive romance to form an earth-shattering kaboom. But that's the AK47 of Hyper Missiles, cheap and numerous, but not the cream of the crop in terms of firepower. For the real heavy hit, you want the gravitic warhead, which creates a temproary black hole that implodes everything in it's area of a effect. And like the Warp gun, there really isn't a defence against it. You either need to be far enough away that it doesn't effect you, or have enough mass that whatever part of your shipped that got ripped off doesn't wreck you out right. and these get fired in salvos. Think of a hundred of those going off at once, and you have the thing that God has nightmares about.
So we have bomb-maker lasers and FTL black holes missiles. What could be worse than that? Well as a special we have a weapon that's not a weapon, namely the Enchanach Drive. Now I mentioned before that the EftA universe has more than one method of FTL. Hyperspace is the speedy straight line approach going straight to one's destination with no detours. The second method is by using the Enchanach Drive, which while slower, allows for an active pathing while in FTL. This is accomplished by turning the ship into a white hole (aka wormhole), which requires that the ship TEMPORARILY ACTIVATE A BLACK HOLE ON THEMSELVES. This effectively squeezes the ship from one location to another in a series of rapid "mini jumps". The actual teleporting occurs only over the span of a few femtoseconds, which means that the ship can travel inside of a system with no effects on the system. The activation of the Enchanach drive however takes microseconds, which is just long enough for the ship to wreak havoc on matter around it.
"But how is this a weapon?" you ask. Well, just a couple of Enchanach drives activating at once can completely destabilize a star, causing it to go supernova and
WIPE OUT THE SOLAR SYSTEM. That right, this universe's most powerful weapon is technically an engine.
TL;DR: THE EMPIRE FROM THE ASHES UNIVERSE IS FUCKING TERRIFYING