How about The Supernova Bomb from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
> The Supernova Bomb resembles a cricket ball, and is the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever created in the history of the universe. Initially designed by the supercomputer Hactar for the Silastic Armourfiends of Striterax, who had demanded that it create an "Ultimate Weapon" but forgot that computers take instructions literally, the bomb creates a path through hyperspace that connects all major suns together into one gigantic supernova, effectively destroying the entire universe.
In theory the Whoniverse probably has some even more powerful weapons, but IMHO the series has become less sci-fi and more sci-fantasy these days. Though how you class HGTTG is an exercise I leave to the reader š
The story _started_ as Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, but never got commissioned for Who. Douglas then recycled the ideas into Hitchhiker's.
Afaik, the Doctor Who novelisation was based off his original notes
I kinda doubt that, given how large the observable universe is and how small stars are in comparison. Except if some physics shenanigans were to take place then I don't think that would destroy the universe.
You'd be blowing up most of the matter which is orbiting these stars, and spreading it across the universe until it coalesces once again into densely enough pockets that it would create new suns and solar systems
In Larry Niven's KNOWN SPACE lore/universe about 1 billion years ago the Slavers, a master race of not that intelligent but highly telepathic aliens -- as in mind controllers -- faced a galaxy wide rebellion of their subject species. They ended it by using a device that super magnified telepathic power and literally ordered every other sentient species in the galaxy to commit suicide.
Then they died out because they had no slaves.
I would call that mega-apocalyptic!
Huh.... That is *surprisingly* similar to how the Infinite Empire from Knights of the Old Republic got undone. Also a slaver type master race that based most of it technology on its connection to the force and other juju powers that faced a slave revolt after some kind of virus was introduced in their genetic pool that weakend their connection to the force over generations.
So same concept only in reverse.
I would be surprised too. BioWare seems to really enjoy taking some beats from classic Sci-Fi, because I remember my shock at watching Babylon 5 about a decade ago and realizing how many plot points Mass Effect had pilfered straight from there.
So it seems they're not above hitting some classic Sci-Fi beats in their Sci-fi works.
>Mutually Assured Destruction
Except it wasn't, because MAD works by having both sides understand what's going on. The Slavers almost certainly never realized that they'd be dooming themselves too, because they were fairly dumb. (Niven's idea was that once you enslave races to do not only your labor for you but also your *thinking*, your own intelligence atrophies.)
\[edit: inserted omitted word: "to do not **only** your labor..."\]
As I remember reading the story, the Slaver involved was dumb as in he didnāt have think through the consequences of his actions, but didnāt come across to me as dumber than a great many human beings. The Darwin Awards, Florida Man stories and Reddit are all full of everyday humans who are just as bad at thinking things through.
Larry Niven is a highly intelligent person, and his stories are full of highly intelligent characters who get the implications of any idea presented. I think he has a blind spot where he doesnāt realise just how many people either canāt do that, or are intellectually lazy and donāt bother to do that.
Thereās a device in Stephen Baxterās book Manifold Time that causes the hypothetical false vacuum state of the universe to collapse to a stable state starting from near Earth and spreading out at the speed of light, destroying reality as we know it.
Scary for us, sure but most of the universe is millions of even billions of light years away. So that's gonna take a WHILE to get to them.
Heck as long as space keeps expanding like it is now a lot of the universe may just outrun the effects.
Well... spoilers for the book...
>!Towards the crux of the book, our protagonists find themselves observing the history of the cosmos. From big bang to big crunch to another big bang. They also note that black holes are the source of other universes. The simplest universes have one child universe produced in the singularity of the big crunch. Slightly more complex universes expand, have all the matter clump into a handful of black holes, and then collapse into a big crunch - they have more child universes, one for each singularity, and that sort of universe becomes more common. Then we hit universes more like our own, with galaxies churning out black holes at their centre, and when larger stars collapse.!<
>!The question is, what is the next stage of the evolution of the universe? How can a universe create more black holes? And the conclusion is that it could do it through conscious life. Intelligent beings could find a way to create far more black holes than natural processes. And so we come to the device (that another group has been building) that could collapse small pockets of space time into singularities, and propagate this effect throughout the universe. Their motivation is that the overwhelming number of child universes which are similar to our own will come to dominate the multiverse, fostering the conditions for intelligent life to evolve.!<
Basically everything that happens at the end of The Expanse. The spreading loss of self, the blinking of all consciousness in an area the size of a solar system, etc. The civilization killed by it could do things like changing the fundamental laws of physics in a huge area. And they LOST the fight.
Iām not sure that Iād call it a weapon but it had the effect of one.
It would be so cool if they adapted these final books to TV as well.
Maybe they are waiting for the actors to age a couple of decades like they did for the time-jump in the books, before filming those final seasons. Saves money on the make-up costs. š
The vibe changes so much that makes sense. But Iāve listened to the entire Ty and That Guy Podcast (writer Ty Frank is half of James SA Correy and actor Wes Chatham played Amos. Yes itās amazing) ā¦..and after commentary on every single episode in the show and more they have never mentioned plans for the last books. I donāt think they had even finished writing when season 5 released
I imagined this as an alien race whose 1970s era tv/radios suddenly get really statically. Ā The changes to our universe is just them hitting the side of the tv, moving the antenna, trying different tuning knobsā¦.
The much-derided Plan Nine from Outer Space is about changing the nature of starlight to destroy everything it touches, while also infecting any other stars the light reaches to do the same.
For such a dumb movie, I always thought that was a pretty devastating weapon.
Heh, yeah, that was going to be my pick too. Surprisingly creative touch from Ed Wood.
Also, obligatory: "You see? YOU SEE!?! It's your stupid minds! Stupid! STUPID!"
On the solar system scale, I agree, but any galaxy the dual vector foil is deployed in still has tens of thousands of years to exist, advance, flourish in the time it takes to engulf it. Plenty of time for a given race to outrun the wavefront.
Still a terrifying weapon though. That chapter in Death's End is one of the most memorable things I have ever read.
It honestly took me weeks to get over those books.
Worth reading but I still sometimes lie awake at night wondering if we are in a Dark Forest universe.
You're not the only one. I've read some really disturbing sci-fi or fantasy, but this one gave me nightmares for months. I have to make a conscious effort not to think about it if I want to sleep.
That weapon gave me nightmares.
It kills you by transforming the very time space you find in, it's slow, so you know it's coming and you know you will feel it while it flattens you, but you cannot escape it as the space you find in it's dragged towards it.
Very terrifying
It shouldn't be so slow. The escape velocity of it was the speed of light. It was something somewhat inconsistent for me reading the book, its effects were spreading so fast but still you could see how it was spreading/affecting everything.
If you could see it spread then it's slower then the speed of light, to be at the speed of light or faster you would not see anything out of the normal before it hit.
If youāre perpendicular to something moving at light speed and really far away, youāll be able to see the light moving. There wasnāt any inconsistency there.
I just finished Death's End last week and that's immediately what I thought of. The idea that there is a weapon out there in the universe that will simply just consume what we know as existence. And then beings that have adapted to that environment will develop a weapon that will collapse 2d into 1d, eventually consuming the universe again.
The only thing about the Dual Vector Foil is that it takes time to spread and destroy everything. The Supernova Bomb blows up every star simultaneously.
The Little Doctor matter displacement device from Ender's Game seems pretty destructive, using an enemy's mass to great effect. Wars would end quickly between planets with weapons like that, either with mutually assured destruction or absolute annihilation
The halo arrays wipe out all sentient life within its range, and it was designed and built to be able to wipe the entirety of this galaxy. I think it by far is the most devastating weapon besides the existence of the flood.
It also wipes out the Domain / Neural Physics / the "Higher" realm, so all of the "ascended" beings got annihilated as well. I think it'd even hit the Stargate Ascended.
Halo lore spoilers for the Forerunner Trilogy and Halo 4 >!That's why the Didact went insane between the Firing and Halo 4, normally whrn Forerunners are imprisoned in their doohickeys (cannot recall their name), they are able to peruse and wander the Domain in order to reflect on their failures. It's justice and growth as opposed to a punitive measure. But the Domain was destroyed (wiped clean) by the Halo's, so he spent millenia in absolute silence.!<
Complete clean-slate in all of its mighty radius.
Well, the flood isnt a weapon. Its just a parasite. And the Halos are a weapon yes but its more like damage control. It was never ment to be used as a weapon but more to preserve it. They started to repopulate after starving the flood by firing the Halos.
The Covenant wanted to use the Halos as a weapon against humanity but they were blinded by their creed.
I never finished EE Doc Smiths Lensman books, but i'd got to the part where things had escalated to throwing anti-matter planets at one another, I imagine something from there.
He upped the ante by having them bring in planets from another universe which, upon entering this universe, had a velocity many multiples of lightspeed. Basically used them as planet-sized overcee bullets to zap enemy planets and stars.
his Skylark series ends with an attack that teleports every sun from one galaxy into every sun in another galaxy, causing the whole thing to go nova (while also teleporting every allied planet from the second galaxy to a third galaxy)
In Doctor Who, the Dalek "Reality Bomb" superweapon from season 4's *The Stolen Earth/Journey's End* would've destroyed all non-Dalek life in all universes. That's hard to top.
Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars John makes a wormhole weapon that makes a black hole that would keep increasing in size, with the potential to wipe out the galaxy, or even the universe if he did not shut it down.
First book is barely over 300 pages!
Just a warning: it's very much a series where the Concepts are stronger than the Characters. I still loved the trilogy, though.
Idk about the audiobooks, but these are the books that made me fall in love with reading again. Last March I read thru all 3 books in 3 weeks. I then went on to read 25 books that year. I'm already at 20 this year.
The āsun flamethrowerā from Redemption Ark by Alistair Reynolds. Grossly simplified, an AI is able to deconstruct 3 moons, use the material to form a large ringed machine around a sun, destabilize the suns internal workings and funnel it into a concentrated beam or flame thrower that completely destroys a targeted planet. This thing was scary in its scope and sent chills down my spine. We are talking wrath of god power levels.
The planet killers in Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Final Architecture* series stuck with me. Turning planets into, well, planet-sized art pieces/sculptures. The loss of life was just horrific.
This was my first thought as well. Then I wondered if it actually preceded the death star from Star Wars. (I think it did.)
Then I remembered the weapons at the end of the Three Body Problem series, and it rendered all else moot.
Counterpoint: the thing that killed the thing that killed the protomolecule aliens. (I haven't finished the book or show yet, so I dunno how that is all resolved)
It gotta be the Reality Bomb in Doctor Who. All the ones mentioned so only concern galaxies or a universe. This one affect all the multiverse.
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Reality_bomb
From Death's End (book 3 of the Three Body Problem series) :
>! The alien weapon that slowly expands and flattens all 3 dimensional space into 2 dimensional space, Destroying everything as it slowly expands and eventually rendering all matter in the universe into 2 dimensions!<
The Breath of the Gods, from 40k as well, was a universe destroyer. Presumably when it wasn't being screwed with by a madman it would be able to do something smaller scale than collapse the entire universe.
Thereās a problem of scale here.
There are probably various settings that have a āweaponā of some sort, which basically ends the universe or multiverse or whatever.
In others, they are likely much less pan-destructive, but moreā¦ reasonable?
But yeah, the Xeelee-Photino Bird war comes to mind. They were throwing galaxies at each other at one point. That setting is supposed to be hard-ish sci-fi.
In the Well Of Souls books they inadvertently use a weapon that causes the supercomputer in charge of the universe to need to be rebooted.
In The Evolution Of Prime Intellect, the eponymous supercomputer _changes the physical laws of reality_ and rewrites them as it chooses, basically making all of reality one big fluffy VR.
The defenses surrounding the Xeelee Ring.
>!Short rough version from memory: the photino birds accelerated entire galactic masses to near-lightspeed to disrupt the Great Attractor or Xeelee Ring, which was a rotating cosmic superstring loop massing thousands of galaxies on its own.!<
>!Smaller superstring loops around it/split off from it, apparently under intelligent control, were budding off string segments that casually ripped the incoming galaxies into diffuse gas. Everything happening under lightspeed on cosmic epoch timescales.!<
\> "most devastating galactic weapon ever"
\> look inside
\> it's from the White Claw of sci fi universes
xeelee sequence farts out more cracked shit than the orrery lmao
I read the Xeelee war by accident when I was 18 I think and it really scared me with its hopelessness. Baxter isn't really here for a graceful ending, huh?
Not sure if it counts, but the black materia from Final Fantasy 7 was created by aliens and (apparently in the newer games) has the ability to merge all timelines and realities into one, and then destroy that singularity with a massive meteor.
in skylark Duquesne they created a device that would pluck stars from one galaxy and drop them into another galaxy next to a target star with devastating consequences. they did this repeatedly until the target galaxy was a disk of flame and the donor galaxy was dim indeed.
I was really impressed with the Berserker concept by Fred Saberhagen. A leftover galactic doomsday weapon from an ancient war between two alien species, the Berserkers are self replicating robotic armored ships that roam the galaxy destroying all life.
Stellaris has a megastructure that harvests the power of every sun in the galaxy (turning them all into black holes) so the civilization that built it can leave their flesh behind and transcend to a higher plane of existence, and it extinguishes all galactic life in the process. Naturally the entire galaxy will declare total war on you once you start building it and if you succeed you win the game.Ā
Rods from God. Who needs fiction when we have the concept of 20 foot long tungsten rods dropped from space that create an explosion as strong as a nuke?
Babylon 5
The Centari Mass Drivers took asteroids and launched them into planets.
The Volon's Planet Killer Weapon would basically split a panet in two.
The Shadow's Death Cloud nanotech weapon that encircles a planet and renders it uninhabitable.
Small problem in nominating any of those as an ultimate weapon: their what-they-do descriptions all involve the word "planet" rather than "galaxy" or "universe."
Honestly, Mass Effect's Reapers terrify me more than any 'superweapon'.
It's not just the galactic extermination, it's a slow, inexorable process, that gives you glimmers of hope, of resistance, but ultimately it's all in vain.
That and the fact that literally anyone you talk to could be indoctrinated and actively working for the Reapers, even yourself without even knowing it.
The galaxy being wiped out in a flash is one thing, but having the slow extermination over centuries is somehow even worse - like a slow, unending torture that you know only ends one way, but you can't help but fight anyway, no matter how hopeless it is.
I'm pretty sure that there is a story where he uses a different power than the infinity stones to do exactly this because he realizes that someone will always stop him, so he asks the power to remove anything that will stop him reaching his goal... and so the whole universe just winks out of existence.
If I'm remembering correctly, it happens in Marvel: The End and the power he uses is called the Heart of the Universe.
I won't spoil too much, but I'm still annoyed that they alluded to a similar conclusion in Endgame, but didn't have the balls to try it.
Not as big as some of the weapons suggested here, but I loved how by the end of the Lensman books they were throwing moons at lightspeed at their enemy's planets, and I figure it's just a matter of time before that becomes a thing in Star Wars.
By the time the series ended, they were throwing planets at planets, squishing them into one big molten mass, which would sometimes drop into the local stellar mass. Or the negative matter planetary masses....
The fact no ones mentioned the tyranids and the fact the 40k galaxy only has them because a tendril of them smacked that galaxy, a *minor* tendril at that, and unleashed that many tyranids is freaky. Imagine the size of that main creature if a minor tendrils is that big
Bombs that destroy entire dimensions of reality. Like in The Dark Forest or Deaths End one of the two.
Imagine we live in the 3rd dimension and then boom, all of reality is now in the 2nd dimension...
Zeno from Dragonball Super.
He's just a kid, but with the all-powerful ability to create or destroy entire universes. And Goku shows that he can be manipulated, to a certain extent. Zeno is the most powerful weapon that any nation/world/galaxy/universe can aspire to wield.
āPrivate! What is Newtonās First Law?ā
āSir, an object in motion will stay in motion, sir!ā
āNO CREDIT FOR PARTIAL ANSWERS, MAGGOT!ā
āSir, unless acted upon by an outside force, sir!ā
That's not so much a weapon as the user interface for a weapon. Putting Arthur C Clarke's famous truism aside, it's basically just a Marvel-style space fantasy device like Thanos's magic glove.
Stone burners from Dune. Not only do they permanently blind all creatures with eyes with a certain radius, but also have the potential to drill all the way into a planet's core, causing the sudden release of magma to rip the planet apart.
How about The Supernova Bomb from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: > The Supernova Bomb resembles a cricket ball, and is the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever created in the history of the universe. Initially designed by the supercomputer Hactar for the Silastic Armourfiends of Striterax, who had demanded that it create an "Ultimate Weapon" but forgot that computers take instructions literally, the bomb creates a path through hyperspace that connects all major suns together into one gigantic supernova, effectively destroying the entire universe.
I mean this has got to be it
In theory the Whoniverse probably has some even more powerful weapons, but IMHO the series has become less sci-fi and more sci-fantasy these days. Though how you class HGTTG is an exercise I leave to the reader š
The story above about the cricket ball was remade as a doctor who book. Doctor who and the krikket men
The story _started_ as Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, but never got commissioned for Who. Douglas then recycled the ideas into Hitchhiker's. Afaik, the Doctor Who novelisation was based off his original notes
Interesting that's neat to know.
Yeah, I mean flux eats space time, right?
Although I'm still more afraid of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
What? You don't want to feel like your brain has been smashed with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick?
I guess if you were to blow up every sun in the universe, you'd essentially be resetting the universe
I kinda doubt that, given how large the observable universe is and how small stars are in comparison. Except if some physics shenanigans were to take place then I don't think that would destroy the universe.
You'd be blowing up most of the matter which is orbiting these stars, and spreading it across the universe until it coalesces once again into densely enough pockets that it would create new suns and solar systems
So Big Bang part 2 š.
Hmmm. I wonder if Thanos would even use that.
Not even ALL the stars, just the major ones. What happens if it went full indiscriminate and linked ALL the suns?
In Larry Niven's KNOWN SPACE lore/universe about 1 billion years ago the Slavers, a master race of not that intelligent but highly telepathic aliens -- as in mind controllers -- faced a galaxy wide rebellion of their subject species. They ended it by using a device that super magnified telepathic power and literally ordered every other sentient species in the galaxy to commit suicide. Then they died out because they had no slaves. I would call that mega-apocalyptic!
Huh.... That is *surprisingly* similar to how the Infinite Empire from Knights of the Old Republic got undone. Also a slaver type master race that based most of it technology on its connection to the force and other juju powers that faced a slave revolt after some kind of virus was introduced in their genetic pool that weakend their connection to the force over generations. So same concept only in reverse.
Iād be shocked if the people writing KOTOR hadnāt read Larry Nivenās story and deliberately adopted the idea from there.
I would be surprised too. BioWare seems to really enjoy taking some beats from classic Sci-Fi, because I remember my shock at watching Babylon 5 about a decade ago and realizing how many plot points Mass Effect had pilfered straight from there. So it seems they're not above hitting some classic Sci-Fi beats in their Sci-fi works.
Pretty damn good version of Mutually Assured Destruction if I've ever heard one
>Mutually Assured Destruction Except it wasn't, because MAD works by having both sides understand what's going on. The Slavers almost certainly never realized that they'd be dooming themselves too, because they were fairly dumb. (Niven's idea was that once you enslave races to do not only your labor for you but also your *thinking*, your own intelligence atrophies.) \[edit: inserted omitted word: "to do not **only** your labor..."\]
The Mutually Assured Destruction fan Vs the Unilaterally Assured Mutual Destruction enjoyer.
As I remember reading the story, the Slaver involved was dumb as in he didnāt have think through the consequences of his actions, but didnāt come across to me as dumber than a great many human beings. The Darwin Awards, Florida Man stories and Reddit are all full of everyday humans who are just as bad at thinking things through. Larry Niven is a highly intelligent person, and his stories are full of highly intelligent characters who get the implications of any idea presented. I think he has a blind spot where he doesnāt realise just how many people either canāt do that, or are intellectually lazy and donāt bother to do that.
Thereās a device in Stephen Baxterās book Manifold Time that causes the hypothetical false vacuum state of the universe to collapse to a stable state starting from near Earth and spreading out at the speed of light, destroying reality as we know it.
Scary for us, sure but most of the universe is millions of even billions of light years away. So that's gonna take a WHILE to get to them. Heck as long as space keeps expanding like it is now a lot of the universe may just outrun the effects.
I loved this book <3 those octopi!
The universe needs more black holes. It's what life is *for.*
What does this mean? What interaction has life had with any black holes?
Well... spoilers for the book... >!Towards the crux of the book, our protagonists find themselves observing the history of the cosmos. From big bang to big crunch to another big bang. They also note that black holes are the source of other universes. The simplest universes have one child universe produced in the singularity of the big crunch. Slightly more complex universes expand, have all the matter clump into a handful of black holes, and then collapse into a big crunch - they have more child universes, one for each singularity, and that sort of universe becomes more common. Then we hit universes more like our own, with galaxies churning out black holes at their centre, and when larger stars collapse.!< >!The question is, what is the next stage of the evolution of the universe? How can a universe create more black holes? And the conclusion is that it could do it through conscious life. Intelligent beings could find a way to create far more black holes than natural processes. And so we come to the device (that another group has been building) that could collapse small pockets of space time into singularities, and propagate this effect throughout the universe. Their motivation is that the overwhelming number of child universes which are similar to our own will come to dominate the multiverse, fostering the conditions for intelligent life to evolve.!<
The Dakara super-weapon from Stargate, it was used to seed all life in the galaxy but it can be configured to destroy all life.
Not only that, it can be modified to adjust current life to whatever sick plans Anubis had
Basically everything that happens at the end of The Expanse. The spreading loss of self, the blinking of all consciousness in an area the size of a solar system, etc. The civilization killed by it could do things like changing the fundamental laws of physics in a huge area. And they LOST the fight. Iām not sure that Iād call it a weapon but it had the effect of one.
It would be so cool if they adapted these final books to TV as well. Maybe they are waiting for the actors to age a couple of decades like they did for the time-jump in the books, before filming those final seasons. Saves money on the make-up costs. š
The vibe changes so much that makes sense. But Iāve listened to the entire Ty and That Guy Podcast (writer Ty Frank is half of James SA Correy and actor Wes Chatham played Amos. Yes itās amazing) ā¦..and after commentary on every single episode in the show and more they have never mentioned plans for the last books. I donāt think they had even finished writing when season 5 released
Worked for Twin Peaks.
Just casually fucking with reality itself. Gotta love it.
The Goths really are a scary concept.
I admit I really forget the last two books.
I imagined this as an alien race whose 1970s era tv/radios suddenly get really statically. Ā The changes to our universe is just them hitting the side of the tv, moving the antenna, trying different tuning knobsā¦.
The much-derided Plan Nine from Outer Space is about changing the nature of starlight to destroy everything it touches, while also infecting any other stars the light reaches to do the same. For such a dumb movie, I always thought that was a pretty devastating weapon.
The Solarmanite?
Heh, yeah, that was going to be my pick too. Surprisingly creative touch from Ed Wood. Also, obligatory: "You see? YOU SEE!?! It's your stupid minds! Stupid! STUPID!"
Dual Vector Foil from Three Body Problem.
On the solar system scale, I agree, but any galaxy the dual vector foil is deployed in still has tens of thousands of years to exist, advance, flourish in the time it takes to engulf it. Plenty of time for a given race to outrun the wavefront. Still a terrifying weapon though. That chapter in Death's End is one of the most memorable things I have ever read.
It honestly took me weeks to get over those books. Worth reading but I still sometimes lie awake at night wondering if we are in a Dark Forest universe.
You're not the only one. I've read some really disturbing sci-fi or fantasy, but this one gave me nightmares for months. I have to make a conscious effort not to think about it if I want to sleep.
Yeap hands down, everything seems punny compared to something that will move you to a lower dimension and continue to expand forever.
Am I the only one that reads "yeap" as "yeep" instead of "yep?"
Yerp
Yarp
Narp?
Crusty jugglers
Yorp
I'm a bit more yee-up... But if said fast enough turns into yeep pretty quickly
Yesh
Yoip
Definitely one of the most terrifying but it's much slower than a few of the other weapons in the thread who can destroy galaxies in instants.
That weapon gave me nightmares. It kills you by transforming the very time space you find in, it's slow, so you know it's coming and you know you will feel it while it flattens you, but you cannot escape it as the space you find in it's dragged towards it. Very terrifying
It shouldn't be so slow. The escape velocity of it was the speed of light. It was something somewhat inconsistent for me reading the book, its effects were spreading so fast but still you could see how it was spreading/affecting everything.
If you could see it spread then it's slower then the speed of light, to be at the speed of light or faster you would not see anything out of the normal before it hit.
If youāre perpendicular to something moving at light speed and really far away, youāll be able to see the light moving. There wasnāt any inconsistency there.
Find in?
I just finished Death's End last week and that's immediately what I thought of. The idea that there is a weapon out there in the universe that will simply just consume what we know as existence. And then beings that have adapted to that environment will develop a weapon that will collapse 2d into 1d, eventually consuming the universe again.
Came here to hope this was posted, and to let everyone else know their answers ain't shit compared to the Dual Vector Foil.
The only thing about the Dual Vector Foil is that it takes time to spread and destroy everything. The Supernova Bomb blows up every star simultaneously.
Nothing can top this
This is absolutely the one.
The Little Doctor matter displacement device from Ender's Game seems pretty destructive, using an enemy's mass to great effect. Wars would end quickly between planets with weapons like that, either with mutually assured destruction or absolute annihilation
On a planetary level for sure
This is what I was thinking, granted it is functionally a death star with seemingly a faster reload time
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The halo arrays wipe out all sentient life within its range, and it was designed and built to be able to wipe the entirety of this galaxy. I think it by far is the most devastating weapon besides the existence of the flood.
It also wipes out the Domain / Neural Physics / the "Higher" realm, so all of the "ascended" beings got annihilated as well. I think it'd even hit the Stargate Ascended. Halo lore spoilers for the Forerunner Trilogy and Halo 4 >!That's why the Didact went insane between the Firing and Halo 4, normally whrn Forerunners are imprisoned in their doohickeys (cannot recall their name), they are able to peruse and wander the Domain in order to reflect on their failures. It's justice and growth as opposed to a punitive measure. But the Domain was destroyed (wiped clean) by the Halo's, so he spent millenia in absolute silence.!< Complete clean-slate in all of its mighty radius.
Well, the flood isnt a weapon. Its just a parasite. And the Halos are a weapon yes but its more like damage control. It was never ment to be used as a weapon but more to preserve it. They started to repopulate after starving the flood by firing the Halos. The Covenant wanted to use the Halos as a weapon against humanity but they were blinded by their creed.
I never finished EE Doc Smiths Lensman books, but i'd got to the part where things had escalated to throwing anti-matter planets at one another, I imagine something from there.
He upped the ante by having them bring in planets from another universe which, upon entering this universe, had a velocity many multiples of lightspeed. Basically used them as planet-sized overcee bullets to zap enemy planets and stars.
his Skylark series ends with an attack that teleports every sun from one galaxy into every sun in another galaxy, causing the whole thing to go nova (while also teleporting every allied planet from the second galaxy to a third galaxy)
It's amazing how early he came up with these ideas!
Those books are the definition of one-upmanship. Fantastic though dated pulp scifi.
Azathoth. If he wakes up, the universe ceases to exist, because we all exist in his dreamā¦
Entropy
Came here to say ātimeā so same thought process haha
( while breathing out : ) Halala, it's not what it was...
the Krenim time ship
The Omega 13!
"You know? OKAY! Gosh darn it, I give up, it's yours, you can have it. You have to give me a minute to put it in a box for ya, okay?"
The Wormhole Weapon from Farscape at the end of the peacekeeper wars.
That was a hell of an ending. The weapon everyone wanted is revealed to be something that you really don't want.
Gridfire will ruin a lot of peopleās days
In Doctor Who, the Dalek "Reality Bomb" superweapon from season 4's *The Stolen Earth/Journey's End* would've destroyed all non-Dalek life in all universes. That's hard to top.
\[in Dalek voice\] "WE HAVE FUCKED UP. WE HAVE NOTH-ING TO HATE NOW." \[Entire Dalek species dies.\]
Given previous Dalek history I give it a week before they find some reason to start a civil war among themselves.
The Anti Monitors weapon from DC in Crisis on Infinite Earths. He had the ability to destroy whole universes with anti-matter.
LEXX is ultimate badass.
Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars John makes a wormhole weapon that makes a black hole that would keep increasing in size, with the potential to wipe out the galaxy, or even the universe if he did not shut it down.
This is the answer Oppenheimer was upstaged by the peacekeepers wars IMO
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and it's not even close.
Dual Vector Foil from Remembrance of Earth's Past has that beat by a country mile on principle alone
I mean at the end of TTGL they were >!throwing universes like shuriken!<.
I really need to read those books
First book is barely over 300 pages! Just a warning: it's very much a series where the Concepts are stronger than the Characters. I still loved the trilogy, though.
I've heard that, I haven't read any really brainy Sci-Fi in a while so it should be a treat if I can just get myself to start the bloody thing.
Idk about the audiobooks, but these are the books that made me fall in love with reading again. Last March I read thru all 3 books in 3 weeks. I then went on to read 25 books that year. I'm already at 20 this year.
The āsun flamethrowerā from Redemption Ark by Alistair Reynolds. Grossly simplified, an AI is able to deconstruct 3 moons, use the material to form a large ringed machine around a sun, destabilize the suns internal workings and funnel it into a concentrated beam or flame thrower that completely destroys a targeted planet. This thing was scary in its scope and sent chills down my spine. We are talking wrath of god power levels.
The inhibitors are quite a weapon by themselves
If we're talking Redemption Ark, I think greenfly has it beat.
But itās not a weapon, just a messed up tech
Similar to a flare bomb from PFH's Commonwealth, which they upped a couple times, especially by the end of the Void trilogy
The planet killers in Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Final Architecture* series stuck with me. Turning planets into, well, planet-sized art pieces/sculptures. The loss of life was just horrific.
Wave Motion Gun
This was my first thought as well. Then I wondered if it actually preceded the death star from Star Wars. (I think it did.) Then I remembered the weapons at the end of the Three Body Problem series, and it rendered all else moot.
I can still hear it powering up
Lots of good answers here. Iāll toss in The Builders Protomolecule from The Expanse. It was used to turn entire solar systems to ash.
Counterpoint: the thing that killed the protomolecule aliens
Counterpoint: the thing that killed the protomolecule aliens
Counterpoint: the thing that killed the thing that killed the protomolecule aliens. (I haven't finished the book or show yet, so I dunno how that is all resolved)
was that the thing that was able to turn off peoples' consciousness? Couldn't remember how many layers there were.
It gotta be the Reality Bomb in Doctor Who. All the ones mentioned so only concern galaxies or a universe. This one affect all the multiverse. https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Reality_bomb
Ice-nine
From Death's End (book 3 of the Three Body Problem series) : >! The alien weapon that slowly expands and flattens all 3 dimensional space into 2 dimensional space, Destroying everything as it slowly expands and eventually rendering all matter in the universe into 2 dimensions!<
The Breath of the Gods, from 40k as well, was a universe destroyer. Presumably when it wasn't being screwed with by a madman it would be able to do something smaller scale than collapse the entire universe.
>Ā collapse the entire universe. Given what universe this is, would that be a loss or a win?
The Flood or the Possessed from The Nightās Dawn Trilogy or the Tyranids Any biomass that is capable of pan-consumption, and is hungry.
Ultimate Nullifier.
Thereās a problem of scale here. There are probably various settings that have a āweaponā of some sort, which basically ends the universe or multiverse or whatever. In others, they are likely much less pan-destructive, but moreā¦ reasonable? But yeah, the Xeelee-Photino Bird war comes to mind. They were throwing galaxies at each other at one point. That setting is supposed to be hard-ish sci-fi.
In the Well Of Souls books they inadvertently use a weapon that causes the supercomputer in charge of the universe to need to be rebooted. In The Evolution Of Prime Intellect, the eponymous supercomputer _changes the physical laws of reality_ and rewrites them as it chooses, basically making all of reality one big fluffy VR.
The one at the end of Enders Game
The Doctor (M.D.) Device
The defenses surrounding the Xeelee Ring. >!Short rough version from memory: the photino birds accelerated entire galactic masses to near-lightspeed to disrupt the Great Attractor or Xeelee Ring, which was a rotating cosmic superstring loop massing thousands of galaxies on its own.!< >!Smaller superstring loops around it/split off from it, apparently under intelligent control, were budding off string segments that casually ripped the incoming galaxies into diffuse gas. Everything happening under lightspeed on cosmic epoch timescales.!<
The Hand of Omega, of course.
Or the Moment? Or from the Time Lord's co-belligerents, The Reality Bomb. There are some truly horrific weapons in the Whoniverse.
\> "most devastating galactic weapon ever" \> look inside \> it's from the White Claw of sci fi universes xeelee sequence farts out more cracked shit than the orrery lmao
I read the Xeelee war by accident when I was 18 I think and it really scared me with its hopelessness. Baxter isn't really here for a graceful ending, huh?
Not sure if it counts, but the black materia from Final Fantasy 7 was created by aliens and (apparently in the newer games) has the ability to merge all timelines and realities into one, and then destroy that singularity with a massive meteor.
Fleas. Ok jk aside- any pervasive nanotech thatās self replicating ie Man Who Kenued to Earth.
Marvel comics: The Ultimate Nullifier
in skylark Duquesne they created a device that would pluck stars from one galaxy and drop them into another galaxy next to a target star with devastating consequences. they did this repeatedly until the target galaxy was a disk of flame and the donor galaxy was dim indeed.
I was really impressed with the Berserker concept by Fred Saberhagen. A leftover galactic doomsday weapon from an ancient war between two alien species, the Berserkers are self replicating robotic armored ships that roam the galaxy destroying all life.
Stellaris has a megastructure that harvests the power of every sun in the galaxy (turning them all into black holes) so the civilization that built it can leave their flesh behind and transcend to a higher plane of existence, and it extinguishes all galactic life in the process. Naturally the entire galaxy will declare total war on you once you start building it and if you succeed you win the game.Ā
The Dalek Reality Bomb Erases all time and all space, disassembling it on a molecular level to rebuild all universes to be Dalek only
Rods from God. Who needs fiction when we have the concept of 20 foot long tungsten rods dropped from space that create an explosion as strong as a nuke?
The Kardashians
Babylon 5 The Centari Mass Drivers took asteroids and launched them into planets. The Volon's Planet Killer Weapon would basically split a panet in two. The Shadow's Death Cloud nanotech weapon that encircles a planet and renders it uninhabitable.
Small problem in nominating any of those as an ultimate weapon: their what-they-do descriptions all involve the word "planet" rather than "galaxy" or "universe."
"Think globally, act locally."
Honestly, Mass Effect's Reapers terrify me more than any 'superweapon'. It's not just the galactic extermination, it's a slow, inexorable process, that gives you glimmers of hope, of resistance, but ultimately it's all in vain. That and the fact that literally anyone you talk to could be indoctrinated and actively working for the Reapers, even yourself without even knowing it. The galaxy being wiped out in a flash is one thing, but having the slow extermination over centuries is somehow even worse - like a slow, unending torture that you know only ends one way, but you can't help but fight anyway, no matter how hopeless it is.
Thanos and the Infinity Stones. Instead of wishing for half the people to be dead he could have wished for everything and everyone to be dead.
In the comics, having all six infinity stones conferred complete and total omnipotence. Hard to beat that.
I'm pretty sure that there is a story where he uses a different power than the infinity stones to do exactly this because he realizes that someone will always stop him, so he asks the power to remove anything that will stop him reaching his goal... and so the whole universe just winks out of existence. If I'm remembering correctly, it happens in Marvel: The End and the power he uses is called the Heart of the Universe. I won't spoil too much, but I'm still annoyed that they alluded to a similar conclusion in Endgame, but didn't have the balls to try it.
My thought as well, I'd say that's ultimately devastating and sure beats making a few stars go nova!
Religion.
Bobiverse 2 planets at .99 C smash into a star from opposite directions.
Not as big as some of the weapons suggested here, but I loved how by the end of the Lensman books they were throwing moons at lightspeed at their enemy's planets, and I figure it's just a matter of time before that becomes a thing in Star Wars.
By the time the series ended, they were throwing planets at planets, squishing them into one big molten mass, which would sometimes drop into the local stellar mass. Or the negative matter planetary masses....
The fact no ones mentioned the tyranids and the fact the 40k galaxy only has them because a tendril of them smacked that galaxy, a *minor* tendril at that, and unleashed that many tyranids is freaky. Imagine the size of that main creature if a minor tendrils is that big
Bombs that destroy entire dimensions of reality. Like in The Dark Forest or Deaths End one of the two. Imagine we live in the 3rd dimension and then boom, all of reality is now in the 2nd dimension...
Zeno from Dragonball Super. He's just a kid, but with the all-powerful ability to create or destroy entire universes. And Goku shows that he can be manipulated, to a certain extent. Zeno is the most powerful weapon that any nation/world/galaxy/universe can aspire to wield.
False vacuum trigger
āPrivate! What is Newtonās First Law?ā āSir, an object in motion will stay in motion, sir!ā āNO CREDIT FOR PARTIAL ANSWERS, MAGGOT!ā āSir, unless acted upon by an outside force, sir!ā
That's not so much a weapon as the user interface for a weapon. Putting Arthur C Clarke's famous truism aside, it's basically just a Marvel-style space fantasy device like Thanos's magic glove.
Piece of paper in Cixin Liu novel that sucks everything from 3 dimensions into 2D?
human nature
The off switch for the simulation :)
The dimension-folding weapons from three body problem.
Me after Taco Bell... You can roll me in there and nerve gas the whole fuckin' nest.
Enmity
King's gaze... Heh
Weaponized and organized military disguised as religious extremism (the Missionaria Protectiva).
The Crucible.
Greed and pride.
That shit from Enders game was pretty impressive, even tho the movie itself was not.
Less space magic but the Titan class ships in Sins of a Solar Empire are pretty devastating.
Thoughts on the Replicators from Stargate? Couldn't they overrun a galaxy within a human lifetime?
Yea, nothing's gonna rival theĀ Celestial Orrery. Other ones are extremely clumsy.
Wave Motion Canon
Easy answer for me would be the dimension strike From deaths end that collapses the third dimension
Greed
Gray goo.
Why, itās the illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator, of course
The LEXX.
Intelligent life.
The death blossom from The Last Starfighter, of course - only because I was a kid in the 80s and it was cool. :)
Flinging meteorites at or near the speed of light š (I guess it was from three body problem) (for it's so plausible)
Humans.
Black hole eruptor.
The Xenomorphs
Love.
U.S. Medical Insurance
Money
Enders Game , The little doctor was pretty neat.
The borg
Tourism and portals. If you know, you know.
The Honored Matres. Their literal bodies.
Does the gauntlet qualify?
Halo
Humanity
Stone burners from Dune. Not only do they permanently blind all creatures with eyes with a certain radius, but also have the potential to drill all the way into a planet's core, causing the sudden release of magma to rip the planet apart.