1189 replies to this topic

[Bianca Flowers]

I put in my vote for the Yamato. Most have probly not heard of it, but its a WWII battleship in space, with a number of advantages:
1) The Wave Motion Gun, basically an reverse-tachyon beam that wipes out *fleets* that are just near the beam, it can cut through a Star if need be.
2) The writers are on her side. Outnumbered 20:1? Yamato wins.

[Zakatak]

From the looks of the Launch Trailer, Mass Effect 3 will be having a space battle that puts DS9 and Babylon 5 to shame. Should give us some nice material to geekout on.

Any other sci-fi's in the mid-kiloton yield category?

[AcesHigh]

If you look at it merely as a matter of power/density, Star trek wins hands down.

Enterprise D could destroy planets by ACCIDENT

• Star Wars (78 votes [22.54%]) -takes a moon-sized death star to destroy a planet
  
• Star Trek (61 votes [17.63%]) -enterprise D could destroy planets by ACCIDENT.
  
• Star Craft (4 votes [1.16%]) -many powers, many threats, but cannot crack a planet
  
• Battle Star Galactica (15 votes [4.34%]) -cannot crack a planet
  
• Battle Tech (45 votes [13.01%]) -cannot crack a planet
  
• Macross (13 votes [3.76%]) -cannot crack a planet
  
• Gundam (8 votes [2.31%]) -cannot crack a planet
  
• WarHammer40k (71 votes [20.52%]) -even a damon prince, Mork&Mindy, The Emperor, cannot crack a planet
  
• Star Gate (7 votes [2.02%]) -cannot crack a planet (that is not over 80% naquida)
  
• EveOnline (26 votes [7.51%]) -cannot crack a planet
  
• Battleship Yamato (6 votes [1.73%]) -cannot crack a planet
  
• Legend of Galactic Heros (3 votes [0.87%]) -cannot crack a planet
  
• Halo (9 votes [2.60%]) -cannot crack a planet(though wiping out all life in the universe is a nifty thing, but star trek does that every other season)

If you want to use a more subjective metric than planet cracking, coaxial warp beats all in speed, modulating the deflector array is more useful than any other.

Edit: about the only Sci-fi universe I can think of that beats star trek, is Frank herbert's Dune. Briefcase sized "atomics" can apparently crack planets.

Edited by AcesHigh, 02 March 2012 - 04:08 PM.

[Zakatak]

Stargate can't crack planets? Really? Stargate has the highest planets to blown up planets ratio, actually.

Tok'ra bomb the size of TV?
Blows up a moon.

Asgard homeworld?
Blown up in season finale.

Carter dropping a Stargate connected to a blackhole into a red giant?
Supernova destroys solar system.

McKay dicking around with Ancient power sources?
Destroys solar system.

Primitive planet asks for Tollan technology.
Planet blows up.

Ori looking to create a new power source?
Implodes planet into a mini-blackhole.

Asuras' neutronium core destabilized?
Blows up.

Puddle Jumper fleet goes to town on some very sizeable asteroids with Drones.
Really really really really really small planets, yes, but they blow up.

If we are talking about wiping out all planetary life, the Tau'ri Apollo dropped a 5TT MIRV (Horizon) on one Asuran industrial planet. The Goa'uld glassed Earth in not 1, but in 3 alternate universes. Anubis wiped out life on Abydos by destroying the Stargate causing a 3000 gigaton explosion. I think that should cover it all...

Also, the UNSC "Novabombs" create neutron stars for a few microseconds, and are around 1.5 PT, and can turn planetary crust into nothing but plasma, and destroy small moons. Forerunner superweapons have a range exceeding megaparsecs. Andromeda can destroy stars and planets with a fair amount of ease. Star Wars has better weapons then the "Death Star" aswell, I suggest you look up the Suncrusher.

Edited by Zakatak, 02 March 2012 - 04:32 PM.

[AcesHigh]

zakatak, you do have a point there, though using a wormhole to make a star go nova is topped by 1 Trilithium torpedo making a star go nova, atleast IMHO.

If we're gonna go the wormhole linking route though, I got four words for you: Deflector Array, Spatial Flecture. And Deflectors are in a little more supply than stargates...

Edit: also suncrusher is video game territory not exactly cannon, If we're gonna go there.....


Also if we're just talking about wiping out life, we can rewind the ST clock back to TOS(General Order 24.) or even NX days(Xindi)

Edited by AcesHigh, 02 March 2012 - 04:49 PM.

[ChuiKowalski]

Hmm. Not on the list but my vote goes to "The Culture".http://en.wikipedia....s_(The_Culture)

Closely followed by the Uplift Universe. Most likely something much bigger and deadlier is slumbering in the aeons old archives of the Library Institute.http://en.wikipedia....Uplift_Universe

Back to the original topic, ST:ToS battles feel more like U-Boat Battles than anything else. "Sir, Romulan Warbird decloaked and fired Photon Torpedoes, brace for impact." Nice, but not the action I would want to play.

The niceness of the Star Wars X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter battle is that it feels close and personal like a heated dogfight retaining the Illusion that the personal skill is actually more decisive than mere equipment. Also, at least in the Tie Fighter Game the feel was really movie-like http://en.wikipedia....rs:_TIE_Fighter

[Catamount]

Hmm, I still have to go through the Uplift series. I have most of it here, but it won't be gotten to for time time yet

So I can't comment there. Still, kudos to someone for bringing up some real written scifi.

[Grayson Pryde]

AcesHigh, on 02 March 2012 - 04:04 PM, said:

If you look at it merely as a matter of power/density, Star trek wins hands down.

Enterprise D could destroy planets by ACCIDENT

• WarHammer40k (71 votes [20.52%]) -even a damon prince, Mork&Mindy, The Emperor, cannot crack a plane

.

Thats why Abbaddons flagship is called Planetkiller. It destroys planets!
What about the Melter-torpedos that destroys planets?
What about the chaos gods sucking whole planets into the warp to transform/destroy them?
What about the Blackstone-fortresses?

Star Trek fanboy ignores other lores and puts the Enterprise over everything....

Sorry man but you should check the lores first before you type nonsense


Edit: Even Star Wars doesnt need a death star to destroy planets. There are many other things that can destroy planets. Examples are the Eclipse(Super-Stardestroyer), Sunhammer(dont know the exact english name) and some "super" torpedos that can destroy whole star systems.

Edited by Grayson Pryde, 02 March 2012 - 06:36 PM.

[Strum Wealh]

ChuiKowalski, on 02 March 2012 - 04:48 PM, said:

Hmm. Not on the list but my vote goes to "The Culture".http://en.wikipedia....s_(The_Culture)

Closely followed by the Uplift Universe. Most likely something much bigger and deadlier is slumbering in the aeons old archives of the Library Institute.http://en.wikipedia....Uplift_Universe

Back to the original topic, ST:ToS battles feel more like U-Boat Battles than anything else. "Sir, Romulan Warbird decloaked and fired Photon Torpedoes, brace for impact." Nice, but not the action I would want to play.

The niceness of the Star Wars X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter battle is that it feels close and personal like a heated dogfight retaining the Illusion that the personal skill is actually more decisive than mere equipment. Also, at least in the Tie Fighter Game the feel was really movie-like http://en.wikipedia....rs:_TIE_Fighter

Catamount, on 02 March 2012 - 06:14 PM, said:

Hmm, I still have to go through the Uplift series. I have most of it here, but it won't be gotten to for time time yet

So I can't comment there. Still, kudos to someone for bringing up some real written scifi.

Well, then... how about any of the Inhibitors, humanity after the discovery of anti-Inhibitor countermeasures (cryo-arithmetic engines, hypometric weapons, and so on), or Greenfly from Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe?

[Zakatak]

I'm not a big fan of Star Wars, but I felt a strange need to defend it.

EU statistics false are not, the SW universe has a lot more ways then 1 to destroy a moon, planet, or even a star. Most of which are plenty smaller then a Deathstar. All of what you see listed above are capable of destroying planets with ease. The Galaxy Gun can hit you anywhere in the galaxy, and basically starts an "unlimited fusion" reaction that causes particles, and any they are bonded with, to fuse. So a planet basically consumes itself. The Sun Crusher is the size of a Viper, but it can destroy a star with as much ease as a the Andromeda.

[AcesHigh]

Grayson Pryde, on 02 March 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

Thats why Abbaddons flagship is called Planetkiller. It destroys planets!

that's a single vessel, but ok I'll give you that. but the Exception makes the rule.

Grayson Pryde, on 02 March 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

What about the Melter-torpedos that destroys planets?

never heard of them. what obscure supplement/magazine did you find these in? Closest I can find is a single instance of a "Massive Nuclear Fusion Plasma Generator" overloading to destroy a planet. The rest just ignites the atmosphere and do some superficial damage.

Grayson Pryde, on 02 March 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

What about the chaos gods sucking whole planets into the warp to transform/destroy them?

what about Q just unmaking reality at a whim? If you wanna up the ante to omnipotent beings, again ST wins;chaos gods do not have temporal control. if you wanna go into obscure semi-to-non-cannon books, "the lady" from I, Q. Even trumps the Q.

Grayson Pryde, on 02 March 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

What about the Blackstone-fortresses?

k, so two moon sized objects can collectively destroy a planet, and with 3 threaten a star....still not on the level of a single torpedo or a few narrow-beam phasers...from one ship about 1/10 their size.

Grayson Pryde, on 02 March 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

Star Trek fanboy ignores other lores and puts the Enterprise over everything....Sorry man but you should check the lores first before you type nonsense

Nah I was just excluding extended-universe items. if I was to include those I'd have to deal with with the subspace monster, Axis of time, the aforementioned "lady", 0, (*), or any other galaxy and/or universe threatening entities...or are we limitting this to a single faction of coporial beings now? Was that like 1 paragraph buried in some optional codex?

Grayson Pryde, on 02 March 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

Edit: Even Star Wars doesnt need a death star to destroy planets. There are many other things that can destroy planets. Examples are the Eclipse(Super-Stardestroyer), Sunhammer(dont know the exact english name) and some "super" torpedos that can destroy whole star systems.

this Eclipse? the one that is a fraction of the death star's power and can only "crack open a planet's crust and sear entire continental landmasses." ? The conqueror or galaxy gun would be better ones to go with, but even then you have to reach into extended-universe.

[wolf74]

You all have your big ship you limited range weapons.

Doctor Who Wins hands down.
Case and Point

[Captain Hat]

.

AcesHigh, on 02 March 2012 - 04:04 PM, said:

If you look at it merely as a matter of power/density, Star trek wins hands down.

Enterprise D could destroy planets by ACCIDENT

not really. Where are your sources for this? Most quantifiable sources that I've seen put the E-D as having high megatonne to at most low gigatonne level firepower, impressive for sure but hardly planet-cracking. Strangely, the original NCC-1701 (the Enterprise from the original series) has more impressive observed feats. A lot of people put this down to the original NCC-1701 being expressly a warship and using a couple of technologies that were later banned because they were unsafe for one reason or another. The NCC-1701D was never really all that impressive, to be honest. Also you're flat wrong about a lot of the others:

Quote

Star Wars (78 votes [22.54%]) -takes a moon-sized death star to destroy a planet

You don't know Star Wars that well. The DS was massive overkill- they actually mounted a superlaser which IIRC proved perfectly capable of destroying a planet (regardless of its design specs) on the Eclipse class of Super Star Destroyer (roughly 7km long) and there are also self-replicating machines in the SW universe called World Devastators that eat planets to make more of themselves. Their most impressive showing, though, was probably a neutronium-armoured craft the size of a large fighter that destroyed entire solar systems.

The EU is canon. Deal with it.

Just sayin'.

Quote

Star Trek (61 votes [17.63%]) -enterprise D could destroy planets by ACCIDENT.

Under very special and specific circumstances, possibly: You will need to provide a source for this claim, however, and a valid reason why it is a reproducible feat and not just a Random Act of Plot relevant only to one specific episode.

Quote

Star Craft (4 votes [1.16%]) -many powers, many threats, but cannot crack a planet

The Zerg ate a planet down to the bedrock, and I'm pretty sure the Protoss have blown one to pieces before: They've certainly cracked a few. Their problem dowsn't seem to be one of power, but rather of will. it's usually more efficient from their perspective just to wipe out all life present.

Quote

Macross (13 votes [3.76%]) -cannot crack a planet
Gundam (8 votes [2.31%]) -cannot crack a planet

I actually wouldn't be so sure about these. When you can pack a weapon onto a 15-metre exosuit that will nigh on vapourise a multi-kilometre space colony, cracking a planet isn't that far off the scale. I don't think anybody actually bothers to do it, mostly because it would be profoundly counterproductive owing to the relatively small scale of the known universe in those stories, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can't.

Quote

WarHammer40k (71 votes [20.52%]) -even a damon prince, Mork&Mindy, The Emperor, cannot crack a planet

Oh lol, now you gone and stepped in it. Abaddon the Despoiler created an 8km starship called, oddly enough, the Planet Killer. You know what it does? Well, let's just say he wasn't very imaginative.

The Eldar Blackstone Fortresses, hooked together the right way, are known to have destroyed at least one entire solar system.

Even absent that, during the 13th Black Crusade one of the planets in the Cadia system (or one of the larger moons, I forget exactly which) blew up and fractured into an asteroid field when its civilian power generation network was overloaded.

The original homeworld of the Night Lords Space Marine Legion was destroyed and rendered into pieces by orbital bombardment, and that was supposed to be one of the toughest planets in the known universe because of the high proportion of Adamantium in its crust.

The Dark Angels' Fortress-Monastery, the Rock, was originally on the surface of the planet Caliban. It is now a spaceship, but it never actually took off: Caliban was simply destroyed from underneath it and its shields held during the bombardment.

Planets are destroyed in 40K by everything from fleet actions to Warp storms to rogue alpha+ psykers to Daemonic action to the awakenings of long-dormant Necron ships. Hell, you mention Daemon Princes? There is a recorded instance of a Greater Daemon of Khorne manifesting into the material universe in a form that was literally several astronomical units across: That is to say, you could literally travel five times the distance between the Earth and the Sun and you would not have finished moving past him.

40K has as many ways to kill planets as most universes have planets.

Quote

Star Gate (7 votes [2.02%]) -cannot crack a planet (that is not over 80% naquida)

First: It's spelled Naquadah. Second: as has already been pointed out at length above this is incorrect.

Quote

Halo (9 votes [2.60%]) -cannot crack a planet(though wiping out all life in the universe is a nifty thing, but star trek does that every other season)

Actually ST generally deals with "The known universe" which in ST's case is roughly half of the Milky Way galaxy. Star Wars is twice that size, 40K similar.

Quote

If you want to use a more subjective metric than planet cracking, coaxial warp beats all in speed, modulating the deflector array is more useful than any other.

"more subjective" in your book presumably equates to "open to scientific analysis" because honestly that's all it is: You find something you can quantify, you quantify it and you extrapolate into hard numbers. That's the most objective way of determining anything from fiction- not a particularly interesting thing to do, but it's the only way to get rational numbers. The rational numbers come out with ST slightly less than an order of magnitude weaker than Star Wars or 40K. and leagues behind some of the real players. But I'll get to that later.

Quote

Edit: about the only Sci-fi universe I can think of that beats star trek, is Frank herbert's Dune. Briefcase sized "atomics" can apparently crack planets.

Oh lol. Dune is basically science fantasy writ large, just not as cheesy about it as 40K. It's got just as much shutipthisdoeswhatIsayitdoesium as 40K but there is far less of it actually demonstrated or explained. Aside from the fact that Guild Heighliners are freaking huge to the point where you can literally lose a kilometre-long starship inside one we know next to nothing at all about the spaceborne capabilities of the Dune universe.

If you want my pick of the big players? Excluding comic books, that is, because they get silly.

The obvious one is the Culture. When your civilian starships can safely hide in the corona of a star you're hardly lacking for power, but when you add in the capability to react to incoming threats in timespans measured in single-digit Planck moments total power doesn't even seem all that relevant any more. An ROU stripped of all but its defensive weaponry can still destroy a planet, but that's not really the point with the Culture. The Culture are just capable. An engagement measured in nanoseconds sees hundreds of lightyears traveled and sixteen enemy ships dead as afterthoughts in a search pattern. At that stage all you need to know about your shields is that they aren't enough: if it can penetrate them, and the Culture usually can, your shields will be gone and your ship a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma, gamma radiation and weird radio signals before you even know they're there. Whatever your industrial output is, not only can the Culture overmatch it within days via exponential growth, but even if they couldn't it wouldn't matter because you can't move fast enough to hit them and they can kill your ships so much faster than they come off the lines that frankly it's like watching a urination competition between an ant and a rhino.

But the Culture aren't even the high end. That step on the ladder is occupied by the next tier up, the extrauniversals. The Culture, for all their technology, never really figured out how to escape the universe. They could manipulate its fabric, sure, but they didn't quite figure out how to go beyond the boundaries they found there. The Photon Birds, the Xeelee and a couple of others did take that step. And once you're outside the universe, it suddenly seems like so much more of a fragile thing. Why, all you would have to do is puncture it here....

Needless to say, in any kind of real sci-fi contest it is these guys who show up with the big wins every time. But they're still not the scariest out there. That honour falls to Larry Niven's Known Space humans.

There's a fun quote from Larry Niven's Protector where the protagonist is talking to Jack Brennan, the Human Protector on the edge of the solar system who has systematically murdered every alien incursion and removed all of the threats his prodigious mind could think of for longer than anyone can remember (and with Boosterspice to stop them aging, Known Space humans have a looong memory), about a small fleet of Pak Protector scoutships that Brennan has detected coming insystem- bear in mind now, that these are single-seat scoutships, relatively primitively built because Protectors don't need much in the way of creature comforts, basically a lifepod the size of a small car, an engine out front that's slightly larger and a weapons pod at the back that's about the same size and packed with whatever the Protector thought might be useful. The human asks Brennan "Can they destroy planets?" and Brennan's reply is nonchalant and matter-of-fact (and I may be paraphrasing a little here). "Of course. There wouldn't be much point if they couldn't." Known Space stuff isn't- for the most part- particularly tough, if you know how to hit it, or particularly quick, or particularly maneuverable or whatever but some of the things that lurk there are scary. Protectors especially. Supergenius-level intellect, near-infinite adaptability and a monomaniacal, pathological urge to protect their offspring. They aren't what makes Known Space really scary though. What makes Known Space really scary is Lucky Humans.

Humans in Known Space are selectively bred for luck. it's undefinable to a great extent what makes them lucky, and it's uncertain as to whether humans themselves are ever fully conscious of the process- at the time when most of the stories are set the program is in its infancy and was started as a social experiment by a bunch of paranoid aliens called Puppeteers- but the end result of the program is known. There's a short story about it called Safe At Any Speed. The basic upshot is that no matter how slim the odds, no matter how unlikely the scenario- things will always work out to the advantage of a Lucky human. Always. Without fail. The Galactic Empire will attempt to invade, and through a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences, end up handing over the keys to the throne room to the first guy they meet. Starfleet will have every intention of wiping them out and will be very surprised to find their ships coming back with extremely lucky enemy crews. The Culture itself will show up to destroy the planet and of the ten million wormholes they open in the opening thousandth of a second all of those that do not simply fail to open at the other end will kick back into the ROU tasked with Earth's destruction in a never-before-seen pattern that rewrites its Mind into a fearsome protector of the mother planet. The Xeelee themselves will show up and all of their efforts at destroying the planet will not only fail but somehow make all of its citizens into demigods and render the planet and the universe it resides in definitively invulnerable and eternal.

Yeah. It's like that.

Edited by Captain Hat, 02 March 2012 - 09:32 PM.

[Isaac Corbett]

Tbh 40k would wipe the floor with pretty much every universe out there in every department :\ Space combat is no exception. For the Emperor and Sanguinius!

[Capt Cole 117]

Warhammer 40k wins though overall fleet tonnage.

[Catamount]

Zakatak, on 02 March 2012 - 08:30 PM, said:

I'm not a big fan of Star Wars, but I felt a strange need to defend it.

EU statistics false are not, the SW universe has a lot more ways then 1 to destroy a moon, planet, or even a star. Most of which are plenty smaller then a Deathstar. All of what you see listed above are capable of destroying planets with ease. The Galaxy Gun can hit you anywhere in the galaxy, and basically starts an "unlimited fusion" reaction that causes particles, and any they are bonded with, to fuse. So a planet basically consumes itself. The Sun Crusher is the size of a Viper, but it can destroy a star with as much ease as a the Andromeda.

yes, but we're sticking specifically to the original canon in these franchises, as far as I know, NOT EU canon.

If we included EU, many franchises would suddenly be slugging it out with ridiculous dues ex machina plot devices (those that have an EU, anyways). The idea of Shatnerverse ever entering this discussion really does make me shudder

Strum Wealh, on 02 March 2012 - 08:07 PM, said:

Well, then... how about any of the Inhibitors, humanity after the discovery of anti-Inhibitor countermeasures (cryo-arithmetic engines, hypometric weapons, and so on), or Greenfly from Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe?

Oh, I'm sure there's all sorts of interesting universes from various novels. I'm not familiar with the story, but it sounds interesting. These guys sound pretty darn hyper-advanced, too.

Edited by Catamount, 02 March 2012 - 09:52 PM.

[Strum Wealh]

wolf74, on 02 March 2012 - 09:13 PM, said:

You all have your big ship you limited range weapons.

Doctor Who Wins hands down.
Case and Point

Already did that.

Quote

Each of the latter three has also demonstrated possessing the know-how and capability to destroy one or more universes (including, potentially, "all of Creation" - the entirety of the multiverse) - the Daleks through the use of a "reality bomb", the Silence through causing the self-destruction of a Type 40 TARDIS (thus bringing about a "total event collapse"), and the Time Lords through either self-destructing a TARDIS (as the Silence did) or through implementing their "Ultimate Sanction".

[Zakatak]

wolf74, on 02 March 2012 - 09:13 PM, said:

You all have your big ship you limited range weapons.

Doctor Who Wins hands down.
Case and Point

Xeelee > Daleks

Xeelee have existed forever. They created time travel, went back 13.5 billion years, and at the end of the universe, they went back and did it again. And again. And again. And again. Their handguns destroy stars. Their ships can go from 0 to 299'790km/s in microseconds, or zoom across galaxies in a single jump. They use stars as kinetic weapons, spacetime as building material, and live in black holes. And when the Photino birds almost destroyed their universe, they took humanity and every other sentient species, stuffed them in a storage cube, made a string of millions of galaxies and spun it around to create a hole to another universe.

Only thing better is the Downstreamers, who are gods for all intents and purposes.

[draeke]

I'm totally loving this geekly battle of epic proportions here. FYI my vote was for WH40K naval only, after reading through a bit of the thread I was wondering if it ever came up re Interdiction cruisers. Is it possible that the projection of a gravity could protect the empire fleet(s)?

[GDL Rahsan]

You know just a question what was the Daleks planning to do after destroying reality?