"Need ideas for super-tech devices" Topic

Looking for suggestions for super-gonzo technological devices from science fiction. The kind of thing that might be the goal of a whole campaign. I've offered some suggestions, with their sources. Hopefully, you will do the same.

Nova Bomb: Can cause a sun to go nova, causing a whole star system to be effectively destroyed. From The Programmed Man, Jean & Jeff Sutton

Wormhole Weapon: Can create a massive wormhole, large enough to swallow a Jovian world or a fleet of battleships, or maybe even the galaxy. From Farscape.

Slaver Amplifier Mind control amplifier that can enslave the galaxy, or cause all beings in it to commit suicide. From one of the Man-Kzin Wars stories, can't remember which one.

Race Bank: The genetic code of a super-evolved alien race contained in a datacube. From Doctor Who.

Dyson Sphere: An artificially created world encompassing an entire star. Harnesses the whole power of the star for weaponry, industry, research, or whatever. Can't remember where this originated.

Pocket Universe: An entire dimension, with its own worlds, etc., in some small object like a gem. May contain wonders. From Men in Black.

Death Star / Doomsday Weapon: Moon-sized battleship that can destroy a planet with a single shot. Star Wars / Star Trek (the two were basically the same thing).

A flash disk with plans to create the above, with seed nanobots to construct them from regular dirt. Galactic Armageddon in a pocket.

Dyson Sphere: An artificially created world encompassing an entire star. Harnesses the whole power of the star for weaponry, industry, research, or whatever. Can't remember where this originated.

With Dyson.

With Dyson.

That much I knew. I was wondering aloud in which which piece of SF I had first read about it.

What's nice is all of those things can be represented by a suitably painted ping pong ball.

With Dyson.

That much I knew. I was wondering aloud in which which piece of SF I had first read about it.

Probably a Hole in Space by Niven, in "Bigger Than Worlds."

Oh yes, and you can add time machine to the list.

Wan't that Slaver device from the animated Star Trek episode with the Kzinti?

What about the Krell Machine from Forbidden Planet? The one that could instantly generate matter in any form from thought alone. Of course, the Krell forgot they had a subconscious mind, which killed them. Dopes.

Along with the Dyson sphere are ringworlds – can't remember which book they came from.

FTL/warp drive. (Assuming your campaign doesn't have it already.)

Perpetual motion machine. Do the players want to get it to the masses or squelch the discovery?

Transporter/matter replicator.

How about taken a page from Hellboy: The Golden Army and crossing it with the replicators from Stargate -

An army of indestructible warrior robots composed of self replicating nanobots/microbots, all under the control of whoever owns a particular techno tiara.

Or maybe a stockpile of red matter a la the new Star Trek movie…

The slaver device is from Niven "World of Ptavs"

Of course, the original Dyson Sphere was a cloud of free-floating "statites" kept in position by light pressure against their solar sails. The (impractical and mostly useless) solid structure is a later invention, by someone who wasn't paying attention.

Depending on your preference for "super-tech", take a look at scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-series

Plenty of ideas for "wierd" there.

Well, SCP is certainly good for the weirder side of the weird… There's also Orion's Arm, kinda like "the best of modern space opera" to peruse for "god tech":
orionsarm.com

Here's a couple from me I have time to jot down…

If you want to go for weapons, anything that does anything to mess up causality within one's historic lightcone is always great fun… For the ones whose historic lightcone isn't being messed with. Time machine as commonly envisioned is a clunky version thereof. Meanwhile, for "fun" with the three spacelike dimensions, different forms of disintegrator are a must. Alistair Reynolds' hypometric weapons are a recent example: anything hit by them simply ceased to exist, at least as far as anyone was able to determine. Reynolds also has a nice solution for "no stealth in space" problem (and it can also replace your fridgerator right easily): a machine (a kind of calculator to be specific) that gets *colder* the faster it operates.

For the solutions to cut that tiresome travel time between the stars, there is the particle quantum information tweaking device used in Greg Bear's Moving Mars: just tweak a bit and hey presto! all your atoms quantum tunnel into another part of space (or possibly into another universe, but hey, long distance travel is always a little risky) with no time delay at all. The same devide can also be used to translate ordinary matter into antimatter, for example.

The Star Drive from the RPG game Spaceship Zero. The drive was supposed to cause the spacecraft to reach light speed, which technically it did do. What actually happened is that as the ship reached light speed, it also achieved infinite mass and the whole Universe was instantly pulled into a single point around the starship (this does not cause a massive black hole because, well, you need a Universe to have a black hole be "in" and as that the Universe no longer exists…). As soon as the drive is shut off the Infinite mass is gone, and BOOM, event 1, again. The ship is protected behind force fields so the crew survives to watch in horror as they restart the big bang.
James Blish's book, "Cities in Flight", ends with a similar idea, the whole Universe get's destroyed, with 6 survivors that end up each in their own empty universe. They then blow themselves up to start new a Universe. There is a slight implication that each person might then become 'God' of each Universe, but the idea is not deeply explored.

the sun beam, from the EE "doc"Smith Lensman books, take the energy output of a sun and direct it as a energy beam weapon, poweful; enough to melt semi drigable planets, and burn out negispheres of planetry anti mass.

one from the book " the also people" from the new Dr Who series, the pin stripe cattle grid, which isnt realy described further but you get the impresion its staggeringly distructive.

Ian M Banks Look to the Windward had a shape shifting assassin made out of nanobots, the Culture series also features a range of megastructures (plates, rings & rocks), collapsed antimatter weaponary, serious combat drones, displacement (sort of teleportation) and effectors (the ultimate in EW).

Temporal-distortion weapons, from the Peacekeeper/Vigilante books: They cause quantum 'hiccups' in a star's fusion process, causing the star to go nova. They also interact with the FTL drives causing anyone currently in FTL travel to simply disappear. That's *if* they detonate in realspace. If they detonate in 'n-space' (the place ships go to travel FTL), then you still get prolonged, massive coronal discharges and radiation spikes that will fry just about anyone not hiding behind a magnetosphere, but the star doesn't go nova.

A TD weapon looks like a 'crenelated dodecahedron', ie, like a d12 with pyramidal spikes instead of the pentagonal flats.

ROU, Against A Dark Background probably had better "high-tech" stuff for use in a miniatures game or RPG.

Firstly there's the Synchroneurobonding virus, which makes those "infected" more able to work as a team. Nothing overt, just more able to know exactly when the guy on your left will move, so you can support their action, or know when your squadmates' morale will give out. THen there's the monowheel "hunting vehicle", with integrated cannon, which can reconfigure itself to cross water, walls and to scale nearly-vertical surfaces. Or the anti-aircraft weapon used at one point by the Solipsist mercenaries – no-one knows how it works, but it effortlessly shoots down 3 ground-attack aircraft – and the bombs they'd released – at once, with some sort of pink "death ray".

Then, of course, there's the ultimate maguffin – the Lazy Gun. Looks a bit like an old-style film camera on a steadicam harness, but when you centre the target in the viewfinder and pull the trigger, it destroys whatever it's looking at – by dropping anvils on their head, or "summoning" wild animals to tear them apart. The larger the target, the more likely it is to simply resort to a thermonuclear explosion, as the science institute which experiments on one finds out to its cost.

Alistair Reynolds' hypometric weapons are a recent example: anything hit by them simply ceased to exist, at least as far as anyone was able to determine.

I preferred the unforseen* side-effect of the reduced-inertia field – not only did it destroy the person caught in the field, it removed them entirely from recent history (it "rewound" the universe until it found a point where the victim could have plausibly died, and then rewrote history from that point" only one or two people even remember they existed, and no-one believes them.

*as opposed to the forseen side-effect – rather than tunnelling through lightspeed by giving the matter inside the field egative inertia, it instead gives it zero inertia, and the ship dissacociates into photons.

Moonlight Butterfly from Turn A Gundam.
It used a field of nanobots to break things down as they passed through the field. It creates a rainbow looking wide beams which is where it got it's name.

I like the Nova Bomb.

I seem to recall a weapon called a Hellburner, from eons ago.

Not sure if my recollection is accurate, but it was a very high-tech, powerful, and dangerous weapon, in the development stage.

Ships in the fleet didn't want to be anywhere near vessels carrying these, for obvious reasons, since they have the power to destroy planets. I think they bore to their cores, and then explode.

Needless to say, if something goes wrong on the carrier vessel, any other ships in close proximity will be destroyed as well.

I think they were used against planets, but might be useful against stars too.

It has been some time since I have read about them.

on a slightly smaller scale, how about a soul-breaker orb?

pretty much infinitely adjustable time delay, and it rips the life-energy out of everything living within whatever distance fits your game background.

Think neutron bomb writ gothic horror.

Dyson Sphere from Star Trek TNG (the episode where they find Mr. Scott, (James Doohan)…

super health nano tech that can heal all wounds and damage giving the user 10 times life spans and good eye sight hearing straight etc etc.

Surprised everybody seems to be forgetting one of the coolest supertech "devices" of all: Psychohistory.

Yep. For the price of a few absent-minded professors and a backwater planet off in the galactic version of East Bumble, you can whip the galactic emperor with all of his battleships.

Provided that you have a thousand years or so to throw into the mix…

Good one, Grape Ape. A way to crack humanity's Operating System. Luvverly.

A naked singularity (ie a black hole minus event horizon). Anything is possible, indeed all madness is possible, Cthulhu could leap whole from it. Mentioned in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, where it's just "weakly godlike."

Alternatively, some kind of mega quantum-vacuum fluctuation device. You could summon anything from that.

A dimensional gateway, straight to Cthulhu's realm.

A device which cheats death, always restoring the human body to its backup state.

Etc.

A device which cheats death, always restoring the human body to its backup state.

A twist on the above,one i first came across in Babylon 5. Think of a "medical/punishment" machine that can literaly "suck" a number of years (or all) the life force out of a person, and add it to another, including healing any disease into the bargain, and a perfect punishment for criminals. You can add in that it could be the cause of a war not only to acquire it, but to utilize it-needing more victims so as to extend the life of the "chosen" race!

Creatures of Light and Darkness, the Steel General had a "horse" that could double it's distance traveled with each step (1,2,4,8,16,etc), that'l cover distance quick. They also had the "Time Fugue" which was a fighting skill that allowed time travel, ie., you could appear behind the guy trying to hit you, and thereby save yourself.

The cosmic supernova bomb, from Life, the Universe and Everything? Detonation would link the cores of every sun in the universe together at the press of a button and cause the end of the universe. Prolly best not to consider exactly how this would be achieved though…

"I seem to recall a weapon called a Hellburner, from eons ago.

Not sure if my recollection is accurate,. . . Ships in the fleet didn't want to be anywhere near vessels carrying these, for obvious reasons, since they have the power to destroy planets. I think they bore to their cores, and then explode."

Ummmm . . . if you mean the Hellburners from H BEam Piper's "Space Viking" and other linked stories of the Federation and the Empire, then your recollection is innaccurate. A Hellburner, dropped on a planet, basically was a runaway fusion/fission phoenix reaction like a small star, but temporary and unstable. After a time it would burn out and stop – not before it had destroyed not just a city-sized area but one the size of a small state. Considered worse than nukes, as they could create volcanic vents in the target area and lead to far-reaching planetary wide damage.

A microwavable burrito that actually gets evenly cooked on both sides on the first try?

Uesugi Kenshin "A microwavable burrito that actually gets evenly cooked on both sides on the first try?"

Okay, let's try to maintain at least some realism in this discussion, shall we? Star cracker bombs and galactic level mind control devices are one thing, but this…

Hellburners are also mentioned in passing in The Mote in God's Eye if I recall. Seems like a euphemism for some kind of very high-yield nuke used to glass a planet.

Grape Ape's idea of psychohistory is on the right track. I think you might want to go in the opposite direction: rather than a second wave industrial weapon like a "supernuke", why not something more insidious? If what you want is a MacGuffin, then the *design* for something is worse than an actual production model.

1. An AI with a hyperadvanced memetic system: it can come up with ideologies, rumors and beliefs which are designed specifically to tear apart cultures. They aren't necessarily TRUE, just very compelling and divisive.

2. Self-replicating "dry" nanotech. A potential gray goo apocalypse waiting to happen.

3. A chip that can quickly crack the common form of encryption in your game setting. Whoever holds it can potentially wiretap anyone, read any database, and learn anything. If many of your assets are digital, this is potentially a world-destroying innovation.

4. An Intelligent Plague a la Greg Bear's novella Blood Music. If you haven't read it, it's about a disease where every cluster of 100 or so cells is equivalent to a human in intelligence-- so every infected person is like a world with a population of billions of strategists, scientists and workers. The disease quickly makes contact with its first victim's brain and learns from him about the outside world. The second victim (his girlfriend) is subject to radical transformations before liquifying and escaping down a shower drain to infect the rest of the world. In a test tube? Curiousity. In a person? Armageddon.

5. An adaptive computer virus that somehow bypasses normal protections and can infect a person's implanted virtual interface computer. If it gets out, suddenly everyone with any wealth or education (ie who could afford an implant) becomes a host for a hostile entity, which can use the implant to scare, deceive, intimidate and even sometimes directly control its victims.

6. An uploaded consciousness. Bonus points if it's a friend of a player character. Super-bonus points if it's a COPY of one of the player characters. This can be supertech if uploading is rare or unheard of.

7. (Another greg bear idea, this time from Moving Mars) – Someone discovers that the universe is actually a gigantic simulation and learns how to hack the system. Spontaneous creation/destruction of energy/matter right now and, eventually, the potential for total omnipotence. (In Moving Mars, the universe was actually hardwareless software and information is the fundamental unit of existence-- it wasn't like in the Matrix where there was some real world).

8. A book by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex.

9. Obviously, any technology not available in the current setting: FTL, zero-point power, quantum black holes, brainpeeling, etc.

10. A tailored virus designed to re-work someone's brain to correspond to some ideology/mission the engineer created. Best option: obey the genetic engineer :)