this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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In sci-fi no one ever acknowledges that strapping a faster-than-light engine to an asteroid would be a very simple and effective weapon for destroying planets. I guess this is an anti-trope since it's never used, but that seems like the logical use for warp drives in sci-fi. It's an easy analogy for mutually assured destruction
Any time it's not super well explained, I just always assume FTL engines are utilizing some method of spacial distortion rather than actually accelerating an object to such speeds. Like I kind of feel like if you plot a course and there's a planet in between you and your target coordinate you'll just most likely go "through" it via kinda going around it through spacial fuckery
Realistically (I know that word means nothing here), if FTL were possible and utilised by a galactic society, it would have to be the type you're talking about.
Space is mostly empty, sure, but there is enough shit out there to be a problem if something hit it at light speed.
Imagine hitting the FTL button, the stars stretch around you, and then you appear at the other end to find a graveyard of spaceships around a dead planet.
Then the emergency lights start up, and then you realise half of your ship has been hit with the astronomical equivalent of buckshot. Your ship passed through screws and bolts; parts of Elon's fucking Testla from five thousand years ago.
Fuck you Elon.
If we can only accelerate mass to relativistic speed by removing the effective mass. To get a Atsterorid up to C it would have to be effectively masless. To make a warp speed projectile would have to involve some crazy math so the tidal forces don't just shear it appart. Like the hyperfast low mass atoms hitting the decelerating atoms at the front of the object.
In enders game the AI would feather the FTL drives so that ships effectively stopped instantly as mass returned regular physics decelerated the object down to speeds available to regular physics. Which is a little handwavy but not actually that bad
If you're warping spacetime that's a shit ton of energy you're manipulating, which has a lot of Implications about how deadly the average person in the setting is, so it's better to just ignore it and continue with your space opera.
Using an slipspace FTL engine to "warp" giant rocks a mile above a city would be a terrifying weapon.
Zero defense. No warning.
The Expanse had the belters launch asteroids to effectively nuke parts of earth
There are stories that use it. The term "relativistic kill vehicle" gets used sometimes. Spin a rock up to a good fraction of c then delete a whole planet. Really depends on what the writer wants to do, though. Three Body Problem is the most recent famous example of "ftl big gun." Thing. Star wars has done it a bunch of times. One of the old comics had a star destroyer that fired planet cracker torpedoes through hyperspace. The ancient Lensman series has had every kind of variation of "strap ftl drive to object" you could imagine.wh40k orks hollow out asteroids, fit them with warp drives, then fire them at the next star system they want to invade. They crash the entire asteroid, or moon, in to the target planet as their invasion ship.
nods in galaxy gun
I ADORE Tom Veitch, but yeah that sums most of his work up in one sentence.
In practical terms there's very little reason to destroy an entire planet. It's complete overkill. You can decimate the population of a planet but things like farmland and living biospheres are in short supply in the cosmos, sublight asteroid drops do the job just fine and you can just wait for the dust to settle and sift through the ruins for valuables
It’s a divisivr movie , but that exact scene in The Last Jedi fucking rocks
They should have just let Rian cook
As mid as that movie was it left such a great setup for a third movie and instead of letting Rian or even a third director stick the landing they gave it back to JJ to have a childlike tantrum and spend the first 20 minutes undoing the bits he didn’t like
TLJ was a mid movie, retroactively made shit by TROS. It could have been made better by a sequel that actually built on it and didn't just flip the table in anger.
That's assuming that an engine built for driving a space ship would be powerful enough to push the giant space rock.
It'd be like strapping a car engine to a mountain and expecting it to go just as fast.
I recommend an obscure, fun, bonkers SF novel called The Killing Star, which features accelerating metal slugs to 90% c before flinging them into planets. There's also a chapter that takes place on the Titanic. And TNG makes an appearance toward the end. Supposedly the ships in this novel inspired the interstellar vehicles we see in the Avatar movies. There's also an earlier book in this series which features wooden spaceships piloted by kangaroos (though it's all hard SF, I assure you!).
Depends on how much effort it is to add the engine to an asteroid. Besides that, it would be single use and the navigation system of the ftl is probably not precise enough to hit a ship/station several LY/AU away.
Stargate SG-1 did something similar. It was a wormhole having subtle effects on an asteroid's trajectory that just happened to aim it at a planet, but the asteroid was initially put in the path of said wormhole by the Big Bad. This is followed by Bombs Not Food trying to save the day, failing, and the in-universe version of deus ex machina.
Somewhat similar concept on a TNG episode New Ground, they test a new warp magic device that creates a warp wave and after a failure they unintentionally discover the wave will destroy most of the planet.
Build one of these a few light years away from a nearby enemy planet and boom.