"Top 5 Sci-fi Weapons that Might Actually Happen" Topic

"Over the years, the science-fiction genre has amassed an impressive arsenal. Waltz through its fictional armories, and you'll find armaments spun from every scientific breakthrough, crazy theory and "Popular Science" article that sci-fi authors could get their hands on.

From the phasers and red matter bombs of "Star Trek" to the lightsabers of "Star Wars," our books, movies and comics are loaded with a vast array of organic, nanotech, gravity and energy weapons. But how much science is there to all of this? And just what kind of sci-fi heat will the soldiers of the future really be packing?…"

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Armand

3. Teleportation

Sure, it didn't vaporize people like thalaron radiation did. …

Star Trek transporters make horrific weapons, especially with their ability to transport something directly from point A to point B without having to bring it back to the transporter room. As soon as an enemy ship's shield fails in one sector, lock your transporter onto the ship's hull in that sector and beam it to a spot a few meters away, preferably inside the ship, which should result in an explosion. And of course the hole in the hull will be venting atmosphere.

Glup!

Armand

I'm surprised tractor beams are not on that list, I know some one is probably thinking tractor beams are not a weapon.

Ah then you are not thinking outside the box my friend, the PC game Starfleet in some situation when one gets close enough to tractor an enemy ship, I used this often enough to push that ship into an asteroid or even a planetary upper atmosphere. Or even grab an asteroid make a fast pass ramming the asteroid into the target ship, the asteroid is often destroyed but the target ship takes a massive blow to it's shields.

So don't tell me the tractor beam isn't a weapon, it most certainly is.

Tractor beaming your enemy can also make them vulnerable to other weapons since you have effectively neutralized any agility they might have had.

@Sargonarhes:

Well, they put teleportation there, and they're still assuming that it could actually teleport matter one day. The latest theory I heard was that unless the matter in question has a quantum entanglement between the two places, which would require it to have been there, it isn't going. Information may be able to be teleported some day, though.

Star Trek transporters make horrific weapons…

You don't even need to beam things away, just never rematerialize whatever you hit with a transporter beam. This makes it a scary disintegration beam that can go through cover and can only be stopped by shields. It also reinforces the fact that the transporter system kills the people it transports all the time.

@zircher and chironex
Duh, I should have remember in the Lensman books they would use tractor beams to hold a ship, and then use repulser beams to throw bombs at them.
Add in some transporter beams which would work much like the Eldar's Dimensonal cannons. Nasty combos in coming.

So would a personal force field screen one from a transporter beam, or would the beam eventually overpower it depending on how much power they're pushing through it?

That depends on the author, since current scientific theory states quite clearly that they're pulling the whole thing out of their arses.
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Teleportation would only look even barely recognisable if it worked more like in The Fly: two booths, one that scans and destroys the original, and one that prints out the copy at the other end, so really you shouldn't even bother as you won't get the item at the other end, only a copy of it. The "transporter beam" you speak of is nothing but a disintegrator ray which turns the matter it dissembles into energy and tries to send it somewhere else; trying to do it Star Trek style would probably just release it all at once, which is problematic because assuming a grown man and his equipment is 100kg, multiplying that by the square of lightspeed gives us the proverbial mushroom cloud the size of Nebraska (Or, to put it another way, around five and a half times the megatonnage of the version of Tsar Bomba that was actually tested.)

And who wants to be bunk mates with a cosmic accident?

(smile)

Armand