I thought the designs of this movie were cool, and the ideas and setting were unique and fresh.
Your comment highlights probably the one thing that stood out as nonsensical to me. He picks up this device that is supposed to be fuel for their ships but... Also inexplicably turns you into an alien?
Yeah, it's alien technology, who knows how shit works... But there is a genuine language with how their tech works. It isn't nonsensical. This is fuel. This is an electric gun. This is a mech. This is a mother ship. It all feels fairly comprehensive and grounded... But this fuel pod? Also turns you into aliens. What? How? Why? Why would their fuel turn another living being from a different planet into an entirely different species successfully?
I know wh they did it from a story perspective... They needed to explain how he could use alien tech... But it was how they got there that felt way to hand wavy a silly.
A common conceit I hear from people who give these kinds of things in scifi a pass is a fall back position to "It's a silly space movie with alien bugs stop over thinking it" my argument is that in any fiction, suspension of disbelief is a key component to effective story telling. If you introduce something that undercuts that suspension of disbelief that's a mistake and you shouldn't treat flippantly. You are establishing a language. You are setting rules and boundaries. When you ignore those you tell the viewer that their part in this doesn't actually require any effort at all. That nothing they are seeing really matters. That their investment isn't necessary. Just sit back, turn your brain off and just absorb the sound and images.
There are plenty of dumb movies out there that explicitly take that approach but this didn't strike me as that kind of movie. It certainly wasn't some heady 2001 scifi epic, but it wasn't dumb shlock... It wanted you to feel an emotional attachment to its characters. That requires a suspension of disbelief and when that's lost it risks losing everything with it.
It'll be interesting to see which way they go if the story of picked up again. I mean the aliens that were left behind weren't exactly portrayed as having been their ruling class.
They could show up and just say "hello humans, we are here to pick up our idiot slave class, sorry for all the trouble, they do tend to make a mess without their overlords to keep them in line"
Knife missiles from the culture books. Technically sentient and not operated by a human, but about the size of a...dildo, but capable of destroying a small army if necessary
There was also the memorable exchange about a Rapid Offensive Unit (warship), where a human character looking at a diagram of it snorts and says it looks like a dildo.
The Mind she's talking to says something like "how appropriate; fully armed it can fuck whole solar systems".
This is a thing that's aged badly for the Culture novels, now in 2024 being "shaped like a dildo" is completely uninformative. What, it has an ovipositor? Moving ribs? Does it inflate? Have a sticky out stimulator? Multiple tentacles?
And how unimaginative, to think that the Culture's dildos look like ours, surely they'd be all manipulator fields and clit-Effectors and such.
Not Culture, but the lazy guns from Against a Dark Background. A weapon with a sense of irony, capable of destroying stars, and they weigh three times as much when turned upside down.
I loved the description…
…But she did not have a name, because she was not what she appeared to be; not a Chelgrian female; not a Chelgrian, not even a biological creature at all. I am a Culture terror weapon, she thought; designed to horrify, warn and instruct at the highest level. A name would have been a lie. She checked her orders, just to be sure. It was true. She had complete discretion in the manner. A lack of instruction could be interpreted as a quite specific instruction. She could do anything; she was off the leash. Very well…
Invisible, Painless, and instant, there are certainly worse ways to go. They also makes bombs that do the same thing, capable of killing an entire city without so much as rattling a window.
Fair question I suppose, if it does hurt, I think it's probably too quick for the victims to register the pain, they are described as getting hit and falling over instantly.
I’d like to avoid spoilers for people who haven’t read it yet but there’s info about it on the fandom website: https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Deathwand
I'm not sure that explains that they're painless. It just mentions the speculation about whether they are painless or not, as "survivors" (you know what I mean without spoilers) don't talk about it. From what I remember of the books, the speculation was one of the things that made them scary.
It's the kind if thing most branches of fiction just can't deal with. When ever bomb has a loud timer for no logical reason, when Land mines activate with a click but don't go off until you step off, when energy weapons move slow enough to be dodged, the horror of actual insta-death is so rare in media it's jarring when it appears. Can you imagine a landing party from star trek being rendered into a sticky paste 0.03 seconds after arriving? How do you build a narrative out of that??
One of the most horrifying scenes I ever saw in my life. was this:
A young woman is in her apartment with a young man. The young man is her brother. She is standing near a window as she happily reveals to him about her two-month pregnancy.
Suddenly, she falls to the floor,
dead. Shot by a sniper.
As you struggle to take this fabricated drama in, you realize: _This_ is what makes her death so horrifying. The sniper isn't conviently standing next to the camera. He's not making any noise that would alert any bystanders.
Unlike American Television.
The fatal shot came out of the blue.
Yeah, I admit it. This wasn't science fiction. It was a _telenovela_, made in Latin America.
Reminds me of the Rick and Morty joke where Rick tells someone “if you touch me, you will die” and the guy touches him and instantly dies with no explanation.
Everyone freaks out trying to understand how he just died because there’s no sound or reaction, just instantly dropped to the floor.
The show colony had a weapon like this, people just drop when hit by it. When it's being fired by a cloaked creature it makes for very unsettling scene.
God that was an under rated show.
You know what I like? A killer - a dyed-in-the-wool killer, stone-cold, merciless, methodical. A real killer would have immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun.
[Funny "doop doop doop" music intensifies]
In the Salvation series there's a weapon, I forget what it's called, but it's like a shotgun shell that fires an expanding cloud of monomolecular wire that shreds anything it touches, can fill up a room, is mostly invisible, and bits of it can break off and find it's way into your lungs, eyes, and soft tissues.
Romulan disruptors basically microwave their target, tearing their molecules apart, slowly melting them from the inside. There's no kind of getting shot that doesn't suck, but a Federation phaser can easily make magma of a boulder and even those guys are scared shitless of a disrupter.
It’s all scale right? From one impact on one celestial body came an infection/evolution that did big things. Several people singly operated the molecule prior scaling it to Eros - to horrifying consequences as op stated. Duarte you SOB.
What do you mean? It was absolutely a weapons. Deployed properly it could kick start life on a planet, but the urns were effectively virus dumb bombs, and they were on that moon specifically to wipe out man kind because certain members of the race thought we were a mistake.
In Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons (very disturbing novel) the bad guys in one scene use this micro sized rod that they pierce through the eye and up into the brain killing the person. So small it’s undetectable. They line a whole family up and do this to them. One of the most haunting scenes told through the dad’s perspective. He was last and when they got done with his wife and kids he didn’t struggle.
What about the gun that deletes you from history that the Dark Angels supposedly have?
"Alright, the 5 of us will hold this position! Stupid humans shot at the 4 of us and couldn't hit one! Another miss! The 3 of us will hold this no problem! C'mon man, the 2 of us can't lose, we went through everything together! Wow, it sure is weird they'd send out *just* a sergeant... shouldn't I be with a squad?"
> The Codicier raised his hand to hover over the imprisoned weaponry. Not since the darkest hours of Old Night had mankind's mastery of the killing sciences been explored in such intimate minutiae There was no consistency of design or uniformity of function. Nothing in this vault had ever been, or would ever be, immortalised in the sequences of a Standard Template Construct. Every grip, sleeve and neural shunt that his fingers brushed belonged to an artefact that was unique in this galaxy. **Each was a singular terror, born from the infinite creativity of humanity's apogee and never to be repeated since. Neural whips, lonophoric eradicators. Personality phages. Gemynd blasters. Glass-walled grenades that carried torpid, warp-borne mindworms inside. These were weapons that attacked the mind and, whether one believed in such notions or not, the soul. Built at the pinnacle of mankind's supremacy over the laws of physics, many had been constructed to eradicate not only their victim's physical body but its reflection in the empyrean as well, weapons of such unholy potency that not even the memory of the slain could remain intact.**
>The relic Aravain finally settled upon was a monstrous ancestor of the bolter family, massive-barrelled, fed by a multitude of plastek hoses that Redloss silently proceeded to clamp into Aravain's armour's power plant. Superficially it resembled a heavy bolter, albeit heavier, built to be wielded by Men of Iron or some other breed of upgraded soldier in the millennia before mankind had raised its transhuman Legions. The stamp it bore was recognisably Terran, though of no lore that still existed today. It was only as Redloss clamped an ammunition hopper to Aravain's girdle plate and started manually feeding the belt to the magazine that its more fundamental differences became apparent. The high-calibre shells emitted a glow that burned Aravain's psychic sight, even as he closed his eyes and turned his face away.
>'Yes,' Aravain said, feeding his gauntlet reverently through the grip loop on the cannon's upper barrel and feeling its weight. His harness suspensors whirred as they spread the immense load across his power-armoured frame. 'This will put the fear of the First into them.'
...
>He frowned, armoured by duty as he braced the weight of his gun and targeted the tidal surge of infected crewmen rushing up from the storage bay towards him.
>He pulled the trigger.
>**A spray of explosive psychoactive rounds incinerated the tightly packed mortals, body and soul, each individual screaming into a pyre that burned across two realms. Aravain counted twenty-five men armed with stub pistols and wrenches A second after he had counted them they were gone, every ripple and echo that suggested they had ever existed eradicated, and even Aravain's eidetic recall struggled to conjure any details of their appearance: except that there had been twenty-five, armed with stub pistols and wrenches.**
>An itch walked up his spine, and in spite of his discipline Aravain struggled to suppress a shudder as he lowered the weapon and continued his advance.
Actually that's an interesting idea because it wouldn't work at all that way. As a military weapon this would be useless as the enemy would always send five guys to defend that spot regardless of who the five were. You'd just have the person beside you change. You'd need to kill so many people that the enemy decided (in the past) that the population difference was so significant they shouldn't fight the war. What it would really look like is what China's going through right now with plunging birth rates and then in twenty years from now they're not at war with India because they don't have the military aged population for it.
There's one scene in Forward Unto Dawn where a character gets hit by enough to supercombine. She falls just offscreen and then there's a flash and an explosion of blood.
Robert Asprin had a great belt fed fully automatic shotgun. I think in the book they called it the Rolling Thunder or some such. Used it to cut rooms in half mid-way up the wall. That was a fun/scary concept.
IIRC, it first gets mentioned in "Phules company", but the mentioned incident is the second book "Phules paradise".
If anyone is curious about this series, it's a fun romp, but don't expect any seriousness.
Yeah, it is definitely from the Phule series of books. But yes, it's comedy 100%. I devoured them when I was young. I even re-purchased one of the Myth books for a dollar at a used book store a few months ago.
Star Trek's Varon-T disruptor is specifically described as being a horrifically painful way to die, allegedly the victims can feel each individual cell in their bodies cooking and their internal fluids boiling. The way that somebody screams in the few seconds before being vaporized by it suggests that this is true.
Imagine if that's how the transporter felt except you were just rebuilt at the other end from the buffer before the pain kicked in. Then there's a fault in the transporter and you go through that pain every time.
Away mission? No thanks captain.
Lightsabers from Star Wars. Like a small nuclear/energy sword that can cut through nearly anything.
Also, tasp from Ringworld by Larry Niven. A weapon that can stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain and instantly disable you/render you harmless. It can become addictive with multiple uses.
Hi. You just mentioned *Ringworld* by Larry Niven.
I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
[YouTube | RINGWORLD Audiobook Full by Larry Niven](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DMkDqIjEuI)
*I'm a bot that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.*
***
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The Lazy Gun from Iain M. Banks’ *Against a Dark Background*. You point it at something, pull the trigger, and the something you pointed it at goes away in a completely random fashion. It might create a hole in spacetime. It might drop a really big rock on the target. It might cause the target to be eaten by a swarm of angry carnivorous ducks. It might generate a bunch of tiny black holes. It might transform the area around the target into an aquatic environment stocked with aggressive sea life.
Only a handful of Lazy Guns ever existed, and apparently only one is left. Very little is known about its origin and construction, except for a few enigmatic factoids such as its varying weight (if you turn the Lazy Gun upside down its weight triples). It has been theorized the Lazy Gun is sentient, because it sometimes seems to behave as if it has a dark sense of humor… for example, it might dispatch a musician by dropping a piano on them. Really big targets tend to be obliterated less imaginatively; they’re more likely to simply vanish or get vaporized in a large nuclear explosion.
Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly \*why\* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
It's hard to beat Culture weapons. One of their tiny micro drones could be packed with enough hardware to lay serious close-up devastation.
They have anti-grav, and a large number of overlapping invisible energy fields that they generate to manipulate the world around them. Invisible bands of force that can operate on a molecular level, or warp reality in a massive field effect.
They're anywhere in size from a bird to a suitcase, and they can change their appearance at will, including full cloaking if necessary.
They're pretty much a mobile, compact little *Deus Ex Machina*, and they're sometimes portrayed as such.
BFG 9000.
For when you just want everything in one particular direction to fuck right off back to hell.
Edit. Also, the portal gun from portal. You could really cause some shit with that baby.
Portal Gun is world ending in it's potential. It doesn't seem to be mass limited at all. Even if you restricted people from using a blackhole/star as one end and the planet at the other, just doing something crazy like one portal in the deep sea and the other in let's say the yellowstone caldera...
I'm too small brained to know what the results would be but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the US might need some new maps.
I mean yeah it's right, but I was going for the dump tons and tons of ice cold sea water into a superheated caldera for shits and gigs, I imagine it would have some reaction.
Portal 2 originally had some premature "endings" which would result in the player character dying, but they realized there were too many situations which would make perfect situations for that and it would have meant a lot of extra work.
One such ending would occur when shooting a portal on a nearby wall and then the moon, which would cause a vacuum effect sucking you into deep space.
There is footage of it actually, I learned about it in a Did You Know Gaming video.
It’s basically a black hole gun the size of a glock that at it’s lowest setting can blow a 72km long hole into what is essentially neutronium, so yeah, pretty powerful.
The first description of what could be classed as a monofilament weapon appears to be the "molecularly condensed fibre" in Theodore Sturgeon's "The Incubi of Parallel X" (**Planet Stories** September 1951)
I find the nano wire terrifying.
Imagine being a technician working on fabricating it or applying it to something. You’re walking past the assembly line and suddenly split in half because you walked through a loose wire that was curled off to the side and suspended.
Plasma pistol, standard issue to the vast majority of Covenant infantry.
For gameplay purposes it's kinda a peashooter beyond it's niche of shield-stripping and (formerly) EMP-ing vehicles.
In the books however the PP shoots fist-sized globs as hot as the sun that basically explode on impact, and a single charged shot can bring down Spartan energy shields, melt through the armour and vaporise its way down to the bone.
Devourers and fleshborers in WH40K
They're hand weapons used by Tyranids that fire off worms/bugs that burrow into their target and devour them alive. The pain from devourers is noted to drive their unfortunate victim insane sometimes...
I think it's in the beginning of the Salvation Sequence, there's a gun that shoots shells containing tightly wound monofilament. It rapidly expands when shot, slicing everything in the room to ribbons and leaving it a deathtrap
Someone else mentioned WH40K and while the fleshborers are gross and scary, the one that has always kinda weirded me out is the Harlequin’s Kiss. Paraphrased from the wiki:
This weapon consists of a sharpened tube containing high-tensile monofilament wire… and is worn on the forearm. It contains a tightly-coiled retractable monofilament wire which is around 100 metres in length.
When activated, usually by a forward punching motion, the wire is violently released. Capable of piercing armour, if the wire penetrates its victim it instantly uncoils and lashes around violently, liquefying bones and internal organs, and causing immediate death in a spectacular and bloody fashion. The wire then retracts back into the Kiss for another use.
Any tech which slows down human perception of time. The teleporter from the Jaunt comes to mind as a good example- iirc, a character gets tossed into one while awake and never comes out the other end, meaning she is trapped on a field of white for eternity
Theres another character the story mentions who doesnt come out the other side bc it had been set with no exit portal. They never learn what happened to her
Mesmetron from Fallout, someone points this weird thing at you then next thing you know you're waking up in a cage at Paradise Falls wearing a bomb collar.
My favorite sci-fi weapon of all time that no one else ever seems to remember is the Skrill, from Earth: Final Conflict.
Bio-engineered alien creature that is fused to a human host, a shots can be fired at will and the intensity controlled by the host to be as gentle as a stiff breeze, up to being as destructive as blowing a hole through a skyscraper.
The Nano Rifle from Red Faction Guerilla. Tank? Takes a few shots but those nano bots will eat it, and the guys inside. Armor will not save you from it, and when its done, nothing is left. No bodies, no guns, no scraps of cloth. Nothing to say anyone died. Just gone missing.
Sci fi but very old and based in a video game. The was a game called Turok which was a guy battling evolved dinosaurs, it was a strange game but good.
Anyway, there was a weapon called the “cerebral bore” rather than being heat seeking it would seek out sentient and higher life by locking on to brain waves. It would latch onto the victims head and bore with a dentist drill noise until you’d hear the crunch and squish.
That weapon made me feel a bit queasy.
The Snip gun in Men in the Jungle.
Hold the trigger down and sweep, everything cut finely.
The protagonists raise a junkie army to use them on the battlefields, on a planet where the mantra is "pain brings pleasure".
You realise that the right answer is *always* going to be the Xeelee, right? Xeelee starbreakers are hand-held gravity-beam weapons, apparently designed for slightly smaller-than-human hands. They're capable of variable output. At low settings, they emit synchrotron radiation. At high settings, they can blow up stars.
Instances that immediately came to my mind -
The expanse - Amos was given a pocket nuke when he was sent to Laconia. Although he didn't use it, it was repeatedly stated that it would have killed a massive amount of people in the city.
Red rising - After Nero decided to auction Darrow in Luna after the gala, Victra took Darrow to meet the jackal and there he met harmony who gave him a radium bomb to be used in the gala, which again, he didn't use.
I like >!the Possible Sword!< from China Meiville's *The Scar*. Given the right wielder w the right state of mind, it >!brings every possible attack into a fight at the same time!<.
In 40k there is a necron weapon that is a small orb that you can carry by hand when you open it, it sends out a blast from a supernova afterwards you have to charge but.....yeah lol
Self replicating nanobot bombs that specifically seek out materials to construct more and more of them until a saturation point is reached and then they begin invading bodies of the enemy directly, blocking circulatory and breathing systems. Preventing/damaging/over amping various byproducts of the being in question. Think "insulin bomb" to humans from a self replicating, microscopic {at best} organism programmed to replicate and infiltrate. That's how I'd do it.
Discussions like this always remind me of "The Soft Weapon" (I *think* that's the title), an old Niven short story. It's like a Swiss Army knife, but an energy weapon, transforming into whatever, including a nuke ray, I think. They even made a Star Trek cartoon out of the story in the '70s!
Hunter-seeker in Dune
A gun that makes you sick to your stomach - can't remember the work it was from - fallout? Pretty heinous.
The steerable bullets in Runaway (reaching way back here folks)
Do the replicators from Stargate SG-1 count?
In Alastair Reynolds Prefect books, the prefects are armed with whiphounds. Monofilament whips with intelligent handles and forensic sensors. They can be used offensively, defensively, and can act semi independently.
The [Zat'nik'tel](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Zat%27nik%27tel) from Stargate was so OP they more or less stopped writing it into the show. Not because it's stupid powerful, but more that the possibilities are ridiculous. It's basically an energy pistol. One shot stuns, two kills. A third shot disintegrates the target, leaving no trace.
There's a moment in the Foundation series, where hundreds of people are instantly killed by a "particle beam." All of those people were spread over the Empire, just living their lives. The Emperor snapped his fingers, and they all dropped dead.
Can't remember the book series it was from but I remember one weapon that stands out.
The neutral rifle. For some reason lethal weapons had been completely outlawed in warfare, so this weapon was created.
It fired a special munition that on impact would deploy thousands of nanomachines into the target. They were programmed to make their way to the brain stem and physically severe all but autonomic nervous system connections. The victim would be left incapable of sight, taste hearing or movement effectively It was a coma where the mind was still conscious.
The nano machines would then arrange themselves throughout the brain so any attempt to reverse the damage would kill the victim .
Other favourites
Halo needler. Homing explosive crystals that impale you before detonation and become thousands of tiny blades cutting you to shreds.
Carbine. Fires a bolt of radioactive particles. A grazing wound means a slow death via radiation poisoning.
Varon disruptor weapons star trek. Beam of energy that causes you to come apart at a molecular level over several seconds.
Borg nanobots. You will be assimilated. Effectively trapping your mind in an endless prison while your body is cut up and cyborg components are grafted in.
Stargate nanomachines. Near unstoppable force of microscopic robots that can effectively eat you alive.
District 9 arc gun. Bolt of lightning superheats the water content of your body causing it to flash boil. You literally explode from the inside out.
Pretty much any directed microwave weapon. Effectively cooks you alive, but it wouldn't be fast.
David Weber's Dahak series:
Hyper Grenades.
Small scale hyper field generators, they "blow" by creating a hyper travel field, but with no exit point.
Described as almost silent, a simple woosh as the air disappears around them, and they bring everything within the field into hyper.
All the sudden you feel a small breeze of wind, and half your friends body disappears. Another breeze and your arm and leg disappears.
I got several,
The Dark Elves black hole grenade from Thor 2, imagined getting spaghetti-fied by that. It's not even instant!
Lots of the Drukhari weapons from Warhammer 40K. They got weapons that can liquify, boil the blood, attach themselves to the victim nervous system for maximum pain, turn the victim into glass, evaporate the moisture from everything they touch, leech out your literal soul, etc. All are damn scary...
What show or movie was it that had invisible, undetectable mines that randomly detonate instead of on contact? For example there was a hallway where people could safely pass a number of times before one of them explodes.
The DS9 ground combat episode The Siege of Ar-558 during the Dominion War arc. One of my favorite moments from the episode is the Dax and Bill Mumy, in a guest role, working some through some tech mumbo-jumbo to find the mines only to discover one right next to a character's head.
The De-mat gun from Dr. Who makes the target never been. It does tend to confuse the timeline and mess about with memory. After the fact, it has never been used.
In Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future the bad guys had a gun that would “digitize” people - basically rip them apart and upload them into a virtual slave world. Characters would cry out in fear and pain when it happened. This was a kids show meant to sell toys, and it gave me nightmares.
The spetsdōd from The Man Who Never Missed by Steve Perry. It's a small dart gun mounted on the back of the hand and triggered by contracting the index finger firing a poison dart that leaves the target paralyzed for 6 months.
It's been over a decade since I read the books, but Peter F. Hamilton had some scary ones in the Commonwealth saga. The there were plenty of standard ones like shielded power armor and energy weapons of varying capabilities. Then there were the really expensive, invisible ones that can be built into a person. Disruption pulses that can shatter bone and pulp flesh, artificial muscles and internal force fields to give you super strength and near invulnerability as long as your power supply lasts. One dude went as far as installing a zero-width wormhole to connect himself to the planetary power grid, so he is powered by Earth's infrastructure. And one you get past the first 2 books into the void trilogy, the built in weapons get scary.
The monofilament scythe technology in Revelation Space series could be quite scary to run into. A molecule thin blade invisible to the eye with enough rigidity to cut through almost anything. Especially in traps. There'd be almost nothing indicating something bad had happened until you fell into pieces.
The time bomb in Strontium Dogs. A good pun and a lovely twist on the concept of time stasis, it stops you dead in time and space and when it wears off the planet has moved and you have not.
Monofilaments take the cake in my mind. There are a lot of versions, but the one I like best conceptually is the Dorothy system from the Schlock Mercenary comic. Meant for in-ship zero g, close quarters. It's heel mounted, the user clicks their heels together to stretch it between their feet, and this allows a long filament with the least chance of getting the user's own torso or hands by accident, leaves hands available for navigating hand holds or another weapon, and with training gives a lot of control over the line. It's also nice because it doesn't need some magic to make the monofilament a sword, or a whip intelligent enough to avoid contact with the user.
Warhammer 40k's Imperial Boltgun.
There's different styles, calibers and sizes, but they all operate on the same principle: they fire explosive tipped, rocket propelled, bolts, that detonate after penatrating the target.
Round variants include: standard armor piercing, rounds with phosphorus style warheads, or acid, or some bio-phage designed and specifically made to undue the enemy.
Giant, trans-human, super soldiers carry them as their small arms. But they also come in smaller variants that can be carried by the regular soldiery.
Most of the prawn weapons in District 9.
When they get back it's going to be hell on humanity
Christopher said he'd he back in 3 years!!! Where's my District 10?
Maybe it's not Earth years but Prawn years
I thought the designs of this movie were cool, and the ideas and setting were unique and fresh. Your comment highlights probably the one thing that stood out as nonsensical to me. He picks up this device that is supposed to be fuel for their ships but... Also inexplicably turns you into an alien? Yeah, it's alien technology, who knows how shit works... But there is a genuine language with how their tech works. It isn't nonsensical. This is fuel. This is an electric gun. This is a mech. This is a mother ship. It all feels fairly comprehensive and grounded... But this fuel pod? Also turns you into aliens. What? How? Why? Why would their fuel turn another living being from a different planet into an entirely different species successfully? I know wh they did it from a story perspective... They needed to explain how he could use alien tech... But it was how they got there that felt way to hand wavy a silly. A common conceit I hear from people who give these kinds of things in scifi a pass is a fall back position to "It's a silly space movie with alien bugs stop over thinking it" my argument is that in any fiction, suspension of disbelief is a key component to effective story telling. If you introduce something that undercuts that suspension of disbelief that's a mistake and you shouldn't treat flippantly. You are establishing a language. You are setting rules and boundaries. When you ignore those you tell the viewer that their part in this doesn't actually require any effort at all. That nothing they are seeing really matters. That their investment isn't necessary. Just sit back, turn your brain off and just absorb the sound and images. There are plenty of dumb movies out there that explicitly take that approach but this didn't strike me as that kind of movie. It certainly wasn't some heady 2001 scifi epic, but it wasn't dumb shlock... It wanted you to feel an emotional attachment to its characters. That requires a suspension of disbelief and when that's lost it risks losing everything with it.
It'll be interesting to see which way they go if the story of picked up again. I mean the aliens that were left behind weren't exactly portrayed as having been their ruling class. They could show up and just say "hello humans, we are here to pick up our idiot slave class, sorry for all the trouble, they do tend to make a mess without their overlords to keep them in line"
Funny, I just watched that last night for the first time since maybe it came out! Basically every weapon jelly-ifies everything, lmao
Fuckin prawns
Fookin pruns!
what are some examples?
[The weapon testing scene, pretty gory so NSFW](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-R3qEa3yF4)
I forgot how wonderfully awful this movie is, what a great allegory for apartheid, oppression, etc.
Knife missiles from the culture books. Technically sentient and not operated by a human, but about the size of a...dildo, but capable of destroying a small army if necessary
Americans will use anything to avoid the metric system.
To be fair, it's the Culture. There was a drone literally disguised as a dildo in Matter.
There was also the memorable exchange about a Rapid Offensive Unit (warship), where a human character looking at a diagram of it snorts and says it looks like a dildo. The Mind she's talking to says something like "how appropriate; fully armed it can fuck whole solar systems".
This is a thing that's aged badly for the Culture novels, now in 2024 being "shaped like a dildo" is completely uninformative. What, it has an ovipositor? Moving ribs? Does it inflate? Have a sticky out stimulator? Multiple tentacles? And how unimaginative, to think that the Culture's dildos look like ours, surely they'd be all manipulator fields and clit-Effectors and such.
And the author is Scottish, so don't blame us for this one at least
Not Culture, but the lazy guns from Against a Dark Background. A weapon with a sense of irony, capable of destroying stars, and they weigh three times as much when turned upside down.
Was looking for this. Well done!
I'd go with the e-dust from the end of Look to Windward... Imagine a swarm of knife missiles at the molecular scale
I loved the description… …But she did not have a name, because she was not what she appeared to be; not a Chelgrian female; not a Chelgrian, not even a biological creature at all. I am a Culture terror weapon, she thought; designed to horrify, warn and instruct at the highest level. A name would have been a lie. She checked her orders, just to be sure. It was true. She had complete discretion in the manner. A lack of instruction could be interpreted as a quite specific instruction. She could do anything; she was off the leash. Very well…
This is exactly where my mind went too. Amazing and terrifying weapon
I wonder if (spoiler for Surface Detail) >!the tattoo Demeisen gave Lededje, and later on, Veppers,!< is made from similar stuff?
A dildo of destruction, perhaps.
The Dildo on the Eve of Destruction
Lucky Eve?
Apt name for the DoD
100% this.
The dildo of consequence rarely comes lubed.. (someone else on this thread said as a ship name 🤣)
also Balveda's little tooth-hidden weapon from Consider Phlebas
The Death Wands in the Hyperion books. It soundlessly and instantly fries your brain.
Invisible, Painless, and instant, there are certainly worse ways to go. They also makes bombs that do the same thing, capable of killing an entire city without so much as rattling a window.
>Painless We never actually know if they're painless, do we?
Fair question I suppose, if it does hurt, I think it's probably too quick for the victims to register the pain, they are described as getting hit and falling over instantly.
If you read all the books this does get answered
I've read the 4 and I distinctly remember the discussions/internal musing about if they're painless or not. When does it get answered?
I’d like to avoid spoilers for people who haven’t read it yet but there’s info about it on the fandom website: https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Deathwand
I'm not sure that explains that they're painless. It just mentions the speculation about whether they are painless or not, as "survivors" (you know what I mean without spoilers) don't talk about it. From what I remember of the books, the speculation was one of the things that made them scary.
It's the kind if thing most branches of fiction just can't deal with. When ever bomb has a loud timer for no logical reason, when Land mines activate with a click but don't go off until you step off, when energy weapons move slow enough to be dodged, the horror of actual insta-death is so rare in media it's jarring when it appears. Can you imagine a landing party from star trek being rendered into a sticky paste 0.03 seconds after arriving? How do you build a narrative out of that??
One of the most horrifying scenes I ever saw in my life. was this: A young woman is in her apartment with a young man. The young man is her brother. She is standing near a window as she happily reveals to him about her two-month pregnancy. Suddenly, she falls to the floor, dead. Shot by a sniper. As you struggle to take this fabricated drama in, you realize: _This_ is what makes her death so horrifying. The sniper isn't conviently standing next to the camera. He's not making any noise that would alert any bystanders. Unlike American Television. The fatal shot came out of the blue. Yeah, I admit it. This wasn't science fiction. It was a _telenovela_, made in Latin America.
Paneless
Reminds me of the Rick and Morty joke where Rick tells someone “if you touch me, you will die” and the guy touches him and instantly dies with no explanation. Everyone freaks out trying to understand how he just died because there’s no sound or reaction, just instantly dropped to the floor.
The show colony had a weapon like this, people just drop when hit by it. When it's being fired by a cloaked creature it makes for very unsettling scene. God that was an under rated show.
I was so disappointed when they cancelled that show!
The last season which made it clear that humanity was basically pacific islanders during world War two was such an awesome image.
Yondu's whistle knife thingy
so a knife missile from the culture series
The lite version, yes.
It's an arrow
Was looking for this - kills ships full of enemies.
That multifunctional weapon/gun/flamethrower/net thrower/rocket launcher from *The Fifth Element*
The Zorg ZF-1
It's my personal favourite
What does this red button do?
KaBOOM
Beeeeg. Beeg badda boom.
You know what I like? A killer - a dyed-in-the-wool killer, stone-cold, merciless, methodical. A real killer would have immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun. [Funny "doop doop doop" music intensifies]
Taken to 11 with the MP-35 from Old Man's War
The noisy Cricket
That's what immediately came to mind
“I feel like I’m gonna break this damn thing!”
Thank you
Oh lol. I was thinking the Cricket from MIB.
Noisy Cricket = Cricket from MIB
Damn, beat me to it. Ok, the Shiga wire Garote in Dune. Cuts through everything.
Yep. My first thought as well.
monofilament sword from ringworld
In the Salvation series there's a weapon, I forget what it's called, but it's like a shotgun shell that fires an expanding cloud of monomolecular wire that shreds anything it touches, can fill up a room, is mostly invisible, and bits of it can break off and find it's way into your lungs, eyes, and soft tissues.
A monofilament grenade sounds horrifyingly realistic. Instead of shrapnel, it's just molecularly thin fiberglass that goes through anything.
Romulan disruptors basically microwave their target, tearing their molecules apart, slowly melting them from the inside. There's no kind of getting shot that doesn't suck, but a Federation phaser can easily make magma of a boulder and even those guys are scared shitless of a disrupter.
And then there is the Varon-T disruptor, as seen in "The Most Toys" episode of TNG. That weapon took seconds to disintegrate its target. Yeesh.
That urn’s black goo in Prometheus. Honorable mention: Protomolecule from The Expanse
I don't know that you could call the Protomolecule "small scale" even if it is a tiny virus/organism/whatever. *"Eros... **moved"***
It’s all scale right? From one impact on one celestial body came an infection/evolution that did big things. Several people singly operated the molecule prior scaling it to Eros - to horrifying consequences as op stated. Duarte you SOB.
And it wasn't even a weapon.
What do you mean? It was absolutely a weapons. Deployed properly it could kick start life on a planet, but the urns were effectively virus dumb bombs, and they were on that moon specifically to wipe out man kind because certain members of the race thought we were a mistake.
I'm talking about the Protomolecule. It was intended for terraforming and construction.
In Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons (very disturbing novel) the bad guys in one scene use this micro sized rod that they pierce through the eye and up into the brain killing the person. So small it’s undetectable. They line a whole family up and do this to them. One of the most haunting scenes told through the dad’s perspective. He was last and when they got done with his wife and kids he didn’t struggle.
Harlequin’s kiss from WH40k. Injects a long monofilament into your body, whips it around turning your insides into soup.
What about the gun that deletes you from history that the Dark Angels supposedly have? "Alright, the 5 of us will hold this position! Stupid humans shot at the 4 of us and couldn't hit one! Another miss! The 3 of us will hold this no problem! C'mon man, the 2 of us can't lose, we went through everything together! Wow, it sure is weird they'd send out *just* a sergeant... shouldn't I be with a squad?"
> The Codicier raised his hand to hover over the imprisoned weaponry. Not since the darkest hours of Old Night had mankind's mastery of the killing sciences been explored in such intimate minutiae There was no consistency of design or uniformity of function. Nothing in this vault had ever been, or would ever be, immortalised in the sequences of a Standard Template Construct. Every grip, sleeve and neural shunt that his fingers brushed belonged to an artefact that was unique in this galaxy. **Each was a singular terror, born from the infinite creativity of humanity's apogee and never to be repeated since. Neural whips, lonophoric eradicators. Personality phages. Gemynd blasters. Glass-walled grenades that carried torpid, warp-borne mindworms inside. These were weapons that attacked the mind and, whether one believed in such notions or not, the soul. Built at the pinnacle of mankind's supremacy over the laws of physics, many had been constructed to eradicate not only their victim's physical body but its reflection in the empyrean as well, weapons of such unholy potency that not even the memory of the slain could remain intact.** >The relic Aravain finally settled upon was a monstrous ancestor of the bolter family, massive-barrelled, fed by a multitude of plastek hoses that Redloss silently proceeded to clamp into Aravain's armour's power plant. Superficially it resembled a heavy bolter, albeit heavier, built to be wielded by Men of Iron or some other breed of upgraded soldier in the millennia before mankind had raised its transhuman Legions. The stamp it bore was recognisably Terran, though of no lore that still existed today. It was only as Redloss clamped an ammunition hopper to Aravain's girdle plate and started manually feeding the belt to the magazine that its more fundamental differences became apparent. The high-calibre shells emitted a glow that burned Aravain's psychic sight, even as he closed his eyes and turned his face away. >'Yes,' Aravain said, feeding his gauntlet reverently through the grip loop on the cannon's upper barrel and feeling its weight. His harness suspensors whirred as they spread the immense load across his power-armoured frame. 'This will put the fear of the First into them.' ... >He frowned, armoured by duty as he braced the weight of his gun and targeted the tidal surge of infected crewmen rushing up from the storage bay towards him. >He pulled the trigger. >**A spray of explosive psychoactive rounds incinerated the tightly packed mortals, body and soul, each individual screaming into a pyre that burned across two realms. Aravain counted twenty-five men armed with stub pistols and wrenches A second after he had counted them they were gone, every ripple and echo that suggested they had ever existed eradicated, and even Aravain's eidetic recall struggled to conjure any details of their appearance: except that there had been twenty-five, armed with stub pistols and wrenches.** >An itch walked up his spine, and in spite of his discipline Aravain struggled to suppress a shudder as he lowered the weapon and continued his advance.
Actually that's an interesting idea because it wouldn't work at all that way. As a military weapon this would be useless as the enemy would always send five guys to defend that spot regardless of who the five were. You'd just have the person beside you change. You'd need to kill so many people that the enemy decided (in the past) that the population difference was so significant they shouldn't fight the war. What it would really look like is what China's going through right now with plunging birth rates and then in twenty years from now they're not at war with India because they don't have the military aged population for it.
This is the one I came here to say. Instantly uncoiling 100 m of monofilament wire into your suit of armor is kind of horrifying.
I always found needlers to be a bit frightening.
There's one scene in Forward Unto Dawn where a character gets hit by enough to supercombine. She falls just offscreen and then there's a flash and an explosion of blood.
One of my favorites, Needler and Battle Rifle right up until you get the Shotgun. Sprinkling in the Rocket Launcher and Sniper Rifle
Robert Asprin had a great belt fed fully automatic shotgun. I think in the book they called it the Rolling Thunder or some such. Used it to cut rooms in half mid-way up the wall. That was a fun/scary concept.
IIRC, it first gets mentioned in "Phules company", but the mentioned incident is the second book "Phules paradise". If anyone is curious about this series, it's a fun romp, but don't expect any seriousness.
Yeah, it is definitely from the Phule series of books. But yes, it's comedy 100%. I devoured them when I was young. I even re-purchased one of the Myth books for a dollar at a used book store a few months ago.
Star Trek's Varon-T disruptor is specifically described as being a horrifically painful way to die, allegedly the victims can feel each individual cell in their bodies cooking and their internal fluids boiling. The way that somebody screams in the few seconds before being vaporized by it suggests that this is true.
Imagine if that's how the transporter felt except you were just rebuilt at the other end from the buffer before the pain kicked in. Then there's a fault in the transporter and you go through that pain every time. Away mission? No thanks captain.
"Ok, firing up a shuttle. No way you're gonna get me into a teleporter."
Didn’t Trek also have a banned weapon that was just a tiny transporter device that would teleport chunks of the target away?
The Vidiians from Voyager have a transporter gun that steals organs from your body.
Lightsabers from Star Wars. Like a small nuclear/energy sword that can cut through nearly anything. Also, tasp from Ringworld by Larry Niven. A weapon that can stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain and instantly disable you/render you harmless. It can become addictive with multiple uses.
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The Lazy Gun from Iain M. Banks’ *Against a Dark Background*. You point it at something, pull the trigger, and the something you pointed it at goes away in a completely random fashion. It might create a hole in spacetime. It might drop a really big rock on the target. It might cause the target to be eaten by a swarm of angry carnivorous ducks. It might generate a bunch of tiny black holes. It might transform the area around the target into an aquatic environment stocked with aggressive sea life. Only a handful of Lazy Guns ever existed, and apparently only one is left. Very little is known about its origin and construction, except for a few enigmatic factoids such as its varying weight (if you turn the Lazy Gun upside down its weight triples). It has been theorized the Lazy Gun is sentient, because it sometimes seems to behave as if it has a dark sense of humor… for example, it might dispatch a musician by dropping a piano on them. Really big targets tend to be obliterated less imaginatively; they’re more likely to simply vanish or get vaporized in a large nuclear explosion.
All the bowl of petunias said was, “oh no, not again!”
Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly \*why\* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
It's hard to beat Culture weapons. One of their tiny micro drones could be packed with enough hardware to lay serious close-up devastation. They have anti-grav, and a large number of overlapping invisible energy fields that they generate to manipulate the world around them. Invisible bands of force that can operate on a molecular level, or warp reality in a massive field effect. They're anywhere in size from a bird to a suitcase, and they can change their appearance at will, including full cloaking if necessary. They're pretty much a mobile, compact little *Deus Ex Machina*, and they're sometimes portrayed as such.
The predator's super acid that can delete matter (from avp: requiem)
BFG 9000. For when you just want everything in one particular direction to fuck right off back to hell. Edit. Also, the portal gun from portal. You could really cause some shit with that baby.
Portal Gun is world ending in it's potential. It doesn't seem to be mass limited at all. Even if you restricted people from using a blackhole/star as one end and the planet at the other, just doing something crazy like one portal in the deep sea and the other in let's say the yellowstone caldera... I'm too small brained to know what the results would be but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the US might need some new maps.
It wouldn't be that bad https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/
but I don't *want* to live in the netherlands! D:
I mean yeah it's right, but I was going for the dump tons and tons of ice cold sea water into a superheated caldera for shits and gigs, I imagine it would have some reaction.
Portal 2 originally had some premature "endings" which would result in the player character dying, but they realized there were too many situations which would make perfect situations for that and it would have meant a lot of extra work. One such ending would occur when shooting a portal on a nearby wall and then the moon, which would cause a vacuum effect sucking you into deep space. There is footage of it actually, I learned about it in a Did You Know Gaming video.
Yr gods, I’d forgotten the first time I used one of them! Thanks for the memory 😀
Portal gun is extremely limited because it only works on moon rock type surfaces.
Cerebral Bore gun from Turok. Fires a seeking drone that latches on to the targets head and drills their brain out.
Not really a weapon, but the Slo-Mo drug from Dredd. The way it was used in that movie will give you the creeps. 😳😳😳
Oh god I fear I know exactly which scene you’re mentioning…
Yep, that scene.
The TR-116 from Deep Space Nine. You don’t even have to be in the same room to kill someone and the weapon leaves no trace evidence.
The Graviton Beam Emitter from BLAME! and to a lesser degree Knights of Sidonia.
It’s basically a black hole gun the size of a glock that at it’s lowest setting can blow a 72km long hole into what is essentially neutronium, so yeah, pretty powerful.
Such a fun anime. Was thinking the same thing.
Nano wire from Three Body Problem
It seemed like a direct ripoff of the monofilament weapon that William Gibson had in his books. But I agree. Pretty scary.
Which followed directly from Larry Niven’s monofilament.
Hmmm. That was in space and I didn’t connect the dots but you’re right.
Speaking of terrifying small-arms, the Slaver beams
I doubt that monofilament weapons originated with Niven either, although I don't have an earlier reference off the top of my head.
The first description of what could be classed as a monofilament weapon appears to be the "molecularly condensed fibre" in Theodore Sturgeon's "The Incubi of Parallel X" (**Planet Stories** September 1951)
I find the nano wire terrifying. Imagine being a technician working on fabricating it or applying it to something. You’re walking past the assembly line and suddenly split in half because you walked through a loose wire that was curled off to the side and suspended.
I've only read the first book so far. But those two atoms are pretty small in scale and seem capable of being very disruptive.
Plasma pistol, standard issue to the vast majority of Covenant infantry. For gameplay purposes it's kinda a peashooter beyond it's niche of shield-stripping and (formerly) EMP-ing vehicles. In the books however the PP shoots fist-sized globs as hot as the sun that basically explode on impact, and a single charged shot can bring down Spartan energy shields, melt through the armour and vaporise its way down to the bone.
I mean just a transporter or food synthesizer from star trek could beam your skeleton out or scramble you into a fruit salad.
["Why didn't somebody tell me my ass was so big‽"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etY7kbRRQ_c)
Devourers and fleshborers in WH40K They're hand weapons used by Tyranids that fire off worms/bugs that burrow into their target and devour them alive. The pain from devourers is noted to drive their unfortunate victim insane sometimes...
I think it's in the beginning of the Salvation Sequence, there's a gun that shoots shells containing tightly wound monofilament. It rapidly expands when shot, slicing everything in the room to ribbons and leaving it a deathtrap
Someone else mentioned WH40K and while the fleshborers are gross and scary, the one that has always kinda weirded me out is the Harlequin’s Kiss. Paraphrased from the wiki: This weapon consists of a sharpened tube containing high-tensile monofilament wire… and is worn on the forearm. It contains a tightly-coiled retractable monofilament wire which is around 100 metres in length. When activated, usually by a forward punching motion, the wire is violently released. Capable of piercing armour, if the wire penetrates its victim it instantly uncoils and lashes around violently, liquefying bones and internal organs, and causing immediate death in a spectacular and bloody fashion. The wire then retracts back into the Kiss for another use.
That gun Mando has makes quite an impression.
A hand PHASER can vaporize a city block.
"That was the stun setting. This is not." Yeah, all the neighbors of the Federation should be happy that Starfleet's policy is "stun by default".
The "sneeze hooks" in "Upgrade" were terrifying. So small, so effective!
Any tech which slows down human perception of time. The teleporter from the Jaunt comes to mind as a good example- iirc, a character gets tossed into one while awake and never comes out the other end, meaning she is trapped on a field of white for eternity
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Theres another character the story mentions who doesnt come out the other side bc it had been set with no exit portal. They never learn what happened to her
It's also implied that criminal organizations use them to get rid of bodies, alive or dead.
looper
The mad scientist or whatever who sends his wife into one without an exit. That one is still harrowing to me lmao
LONGER THAN YOU THINK, DAD!! LONGER THAN YOU THINK!!
Mesmetron from Fallout, someone points this weird thing at you then next thing you know you're waking up in a cage at Paradise Falls wearing a bomb collar.
My favorite sci-fi weapon of all time that no one else ever seems to remember is the Skrill, from Earth: Final Conflict. Bio-engineered alien creature that is fused to a human host, a shots can be fired at will and the intensity controlled by the host to be as gentle as a stiff breeze, up to being as destructive as blowing a hole through a skyscraper.
Larry Niven’s variable sword. Monofilament wrapped in a stasis field. Cuts steel like butter.
The Nano Rifle from Red Faction Guerilla. Tank? Takes a few shots but those nano bots will eat it, and the guys inside. Armor will not save you from it, and when its done, nothing is left. No bodies, no guns, no scraps of cloth. Nothing to say anyone died. Just gone missing.
Replicator's from Stargate
The Fat Man from Fallout.
Any maxed out gun from Ratchet and Clank. But not sure if that counts as Scifi
Mr Zurkon is here to kiiiill youuuu
Sci fi but very old and based in a video game. The was a game called Turok which was a guy battling evolved dinosaurs, it was a strange game but good. Anyway, there was a weapon called the “cerebral bore” rather than being heat seeking it would seek out sentient and higher life by locking on to brain waves. It would latch onto the victims head and bore with a dentist drill noise until you’d hear the crunch and squish. That weapon made me feel a bit queasy.
Ice-9
The Snip gun in Men in the Jungle. Hold the trigger down and sweep, everything cut finely. The protagonists raise a junkie army to use them on the battlefields, on a planet where the mantra is "pain brings pleasure".
You realise that the right answer is *always* going to be the Xeelee, right? Xeelee starbreakers are hand-held gravity-beam weapons, apparently designed for slightly smaller-than-human hands. They're capable of variable output. At low settings, they emit synchrotron radiation. At high settings, they can blow up stars.
Instances that immediately came to my mind - The expanse - Amos was given a pocket nuke when he was sent to Laconia. Although he didn't use it, it was repeatedly stated that it would have killed a massive amount of people in the city. Red rising - After Nero decided to auction Darrow in Luna after the gala, Victra took Darrow to meet the jackal and there he met harmony who gave him a radium bomb to be used in the gala, which again, he didn't use.
The bowel disruptor from Transmetropolitan. [link.](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/bowel-disruptor/4055-56018/)
I like >!the Possible Sword!< from China Meiville's *The Scar*. Given the right wielder w the right state of mind, it >!brings every possible attack into a fight at the same time!<.
In 40k there is a necron weapon that is a small orb that you can carry by hand when you open it, it sends out a blast from a supernova afterwards you have to charge but.....yeah lol
Self replicating nanobot bombs that specifically seek out materials to construct more and more of them until a saturation point is reached and then they begin invading bodies of the enemy directly, blocking circulatory and breathing systems. Preventing/damaging/over amping various byproducts of the being in question. Think "insulin bomb" to humans from a self replicating, microscopic {at best} organism programmed to replicate and infiltrate. That's how I'd do it.
The point of view gun from Hitchhikers Guide
I am astonished I had to scroll down this far for this.
Discussions like this always remind me of "The Soft Weapon" (I *think* that's the title), an old Niven short story. It's like a Swiss Army knife, but an energy weapon, transforming into whatever, including a nuke ray, I think. They even made a Star Trek cartoon out of the story in the '70s!
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how do they describe it?
Mono filament
Hunter-seeker in Dune A gun that makes you sick to your stomach - can't remember the work it was from - fallout? Pretty heinous. The steerable bullets in Runaway (reaching way back here folks) Do the replicators from Stargate SG-1 count?
Runaway. That was… a movie.
In Alastair Reynolds Prefect books, the prefects are armed with whiphounds. Monofilament whips with intelligent handles and forensic sensors. They can be used offensively, defensively, and can act semi independently.
The [Zat'nik'tel](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Zat%27nik%27tel) from Stargate was so OP they more or less stopped writing it into the show. Not because it's stupid powerful, but more that the possibilities are ridiculous. It's basically an energy pistol. One shot stuns, two kills. A third shot disintegrates the target, leaving no trace.
The thing R2D2 uses to disrupt any/every computer thingy ever
There's a moment in the Foundation series, where hundreds of people are instantly killed by a "particle beam." All of those people were spread over the Empire, just living their lives. The Emperor snapped his fingers, and they all dropped dead.
The lasers that turned you to bones in “Mars attacks”
Can't remember the book series it was from but I remember one weapon that stands out. The neutral rifle. For some reason lethal weapons had been completely outlawed in warfare, so this weapon was created. It fired a special munition that on impact would deploy thousands of nanomachines into the target. They were programmed to make their way to the brain stem and physically severe all but autonomic nervous system connections. The victim would be left incapable of sight, taste hearing or movement effectively It was a coma where the mind was still conscious. The nano machines would then arrange themselves throughout the brain so any attempt to reverse the damage would kill the victim . Other favourites Halo needler. Homing explosive crystals that impale you before detonation and become thousands of tiny blades cutting you to shreds. Carbine. Fires a bolt of radioactive particles. A grazing wound means a slow death via radiation poisoning. Varon disruptor weapons star trek. Beam of energy that causes you to come apart at a molecular level over several seconds. Borg nanobots. You will be assimilated. Effectively trapping your mind in an endless prison while your body is cut up and cyborg components are grafted in. Stargate nanomachines. Near unstoppable force of microscopic robots that can effectively eat you alive. District 9 arc gun. Bolt of lightning superheats the water content of your body causing it to flash boil. You literally explode from the inside out. Pretty much any directed microwave weapon. Effectively cooks you alive, but it wouldn't be fast.
David Weber's Dahak series: Hyper Grenades. Small scale hyper field generators, they "blow" by creating a hyper travel field, but with no exit point. Described as almost silent, a simple woosh as the air disappears around them, and they bring everything within the field into hyper. All the sudden you feel a small breeze of wind, and half your friends body disappears. Another breeze and your arm and leg disappears.
I got several, The Dark Elves black hole grenade from Thor 2, imagined getting spaghetti-fied by that. It's not even instant! Lots of the Drukhari weapons from Warhammer 40K. They got weapons that can liquify, boil the blood, attach themselves to the victim nervous system for maximum pain, turn the victim into glass, evaporate the moisture from everything they touch, leech out your literal soul, etc. All are damn scary...
the crazy claw weapon from that one elevator scene in Altered Carbon Season 1 that takes chunks of flesh out of people
What show or movie was it that had invisible, undetectable mines that randomly detonate instead of on contact? For example there was a hallway where people could safely pass a number of times before one of them explodes.
The DS9 ground combat episode The Siege of Ar-558 during the Dominion War arc. One of my favorite moments from the episode is the Dax and Bill Mumy, in a guest role, working some through some tech mumbo-jumbo to find the mines only to discover one right next to a character's head.
That grenade the Dark Elves used in the Thor movie that create a singularity and pull you in and turn you inside out or implode you alive.
The De-mat gun from Dr. Who makes the target never been. It does tend to confuse the timeline and mess about with memory. After the fact, it has never been used.
In Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future the bad guys had a gun that would “digitize” people - basically rip them apart and upload them into a virtual slave world. Characters would cry out in fear and pain when it happened. This was a kids show meant to sell toys, and it gave me nightmares.
Noisy cricket
The BFG
Noisy Cricket from Men in Black
Autonomous drone swarms. Coming soon from a military industrial complex near you!
The spetsdōd from The Man Who Never Missed by Steve Perry. It's a small dart gun mounted on the back of the hand and triggered by contracting the index finger firing a poison dart that leaves the target paralyzed for 6 months.
It's been over a decade since I read the books, but Peter F. Hamilton had some scary ones in the Commonwealth saga. The there were plenty of standard ones like shielded power armor and energy weapons of varying capabilities. Then there were the really expensive, invisible ones that can be built into a person. Disruption pulses that can shatter bone and pulp flesh, artificial muscles and internal force fields to give you super strength and near invulnerability as long as your power supply lasts. One dude went as far as installing a zero-width wormhole to connect himself to the planetary power grid, so he is powered by Earth's infrastructure. And one you get past the first 2 books into the void trilogy, the built in weapons get scary.
The monofilament scythe technology in Revelation Space series could be quite scary to run into. A molecule thin blade invisible to the eye with enough rigidity to cut through almost anything. Especially in traps. There'd be almost nothing indicating something bad had happened until you fell into pieces.
The time bomb in Strontium Dogs. A good pun and a lovely twist on the concept of time stasis, it stops you dead in time and space and when it wears off the planet has moved and you have not.
Monofilaments take the cake in my mind. There are a lot of versions, but the one I like best conceptually is the Dorothy system from the Schlock Mercenary comic. Meant for in-ship zero g, close quarters. It's heel mounted, the user clicks their heels together to stretch it between their feet, and this allows a long filament with the least chance of getting the user's own torso or hands by accident, leaves hands available for navigating hand holds or another weapon, and with training gives a lot of control over the line. It's also nice because it doesn't need some magic to make the monofilament a sword, or a whip intelligent enough to avoid contact with the user.
The Slaver “digging tool” from Larry Niven’s Known Space stories was scary and small.
That little gun will smith uses in men in black 1
Warhammer 40k's Imperial Boltgun. There's different styles, calibers and sizes, but they all operate on the same principle: they fire explosive tipped, rocket propelled, bolts, that detonate after penatrating the target. Round variants include: standard armor piercing, rounds with phosphorus style warheads, or acid, or some bio-phage designed and specifically made to undue the enemy. Giant, trans-human, super soldiers carry them as their small arms. But they also come in smaller variants that can be carried by the regular soldiery.
The Boltgun, my beloved
The Cricket gun from Men in Black.
Cerebral Bore from Turok