Link: https://www.shithot.co.uk/sci-fi-weapons/

Have they missed any good ones?

The Boom Stick is missing.
Ash time travels twice in the movie.

When the gravity gun gets temporarily modified in Half-Life 2

I'm really not a fan of super weapons in sci fi. They make little sense, if you ask me.

like. really. the Deathstar didn't really serve much in the way of a useful purpose.

A carrier for self-mobile carriers? that made planets go poof?

Any reasonable rebel would just not be on a planet, which means you're making your own resources go poof. and by resources, I mean labor force.

This something I never understood about Hoth. strap that ion gun and it's genset to a freighter, and you'd have a pretty mean gunship that can disable entire convoys or blockades. equip other freighters for wildcat gas extraction and refinery and solve your fuel problems. same for manufacturing, with the advantage of not losing your shit everytime the Empire shows up.

I like that Han's blaster is more powerful than an ATAT

Yeah, I don't think the creator was very rigorous in their research. I feel like the Halo rings have to have more impact than the death star.

If James bond is in the mix, what about goldeneye?

You sir, are suggesting that Star Wars makes logical hard-sci-fi sense which it has not. Please refer to first minute of movie where you can hear engines and laser fire.

aural synthesis of sensrionics to enhance situational awareness.

(For a non bullshit answer it was for creating engagement with the audience. The utter silence of 2001 space odyssey kinda bothered a lot of people.)

(Same with the swooping.)

(Though from a certain point of view, swooping happens.)

Kinda misses the point that star wars is space fantasy, not sci fi

It absolutely is fantasy

But the physics as far as that goes are still on point compared to, idunno, Star Trek.

The sound in space, the swooping, all of that were story telling tools used to convey a sense of what was happening. Realistic space battles aren’t really all that exciting.

Not even the expanse got that right. They just replaced particle beams with Gatling guns and condescending but inaccurate explanations of why things don’t swoop.

Fun fact, the reason planes and stuff seem to swoop is because they’re under constant accelerations and observed from the perspective outside the plane. One source of that constant acceleration is the atmosphere (drag and lift,) but you can just as easily replace that with fusion maneuvering thrusters or something.

Can it be powered from a ship or does it take some sort of crazy large power station you just can't do on a ship. Ships did have ion weapons. They mention them in the movies and you see it in other media but it sounds like the hoth planet ones were way powerful. Also the dialogue and presentation is it was providing cover fire to forch the ships to veer off to make a cooridor for the escape ships. The plan was the ground based ion cannon makes a cooridor and each ship goes out with two fighters escorting it to harras any enemies that can recover enough to possibly take them out.

By a factor of 4 or more, no less.

Real space battles are probably like split-second flypasts repeated until one spacecraft is destroyed. The likelihood of both spacecraft voluntarily keeping the speed between them below 100m/s is very low.

so, here's an incredible cross sections scan of the v-150 cannon on hoth:

The cannons are absolute beasts. Don't get me wrong.

We don't actually know how big the thing is, at least not directly. We do have a scene with a golan df.9 turret (the stubby tower ones, not the dish turrets,) is next to it. those are 4 meters in height In the screen grab of the ion cannon. guestimating the height behind the snow drift, I make the ball 6 df.9's in diameter. 8, if I ignore the base and go with whats seen, and ignoring the actual barrel thingies. (that's another df.9.)

So for surface installation (Ball turret plus the reactor core that's under the ball,) I'd make it needing something between 48 to 64 meters in over all length, and 24 to 36 meters in cylindrical space.

this wouldn't be that hard to bolt on to something like a GR-75, which is 90 meters long, and mostly just cargo racks. Keep in mind they had to get all that equipment there in the first place, and these aren't the kind of things you're building in place, it might be broken down into some submodules, but you're not breaking them down into component parts.

if a GR-75 isn't large enough, (maybe because the reactor core isn't... a reactor core? and needs "base" power.) Then the Imperial Container Ship certainly is (and incredibly easy to steal.) You can actually build that thing out to something that resembles a mobile operations base, to be honest. (the internals of the cargo stack are all shirt-sleeve habitation, apparently,)

Both ships have an advantage here in that they would be rather easy to modify into hauling something other than containers, and including possibly something outsized like the ion cannon. basically becoming a system defense monitor (slow, big guns, and mobile only the sense that, sure, it technically can shuffle off.)

You could do a few things with it. use it concert in lightling raids- it doesn't come deep into the envelope, but it hits the biggies from range. Probably after a recon flight pops in and gives targets, it can jump in and start blasting with lighter things coming in to do whatever. fighters, bombers, etc.

alternatively, drop it in orbit and let it hang out where it can cover an escape and shuffle off on it's own. (bonus points for everything else being space-based and not planet-side.)

The Tasp (Larry Niven: Ringworld). No real destructive power, but renders victim incapacitated by inducing a strong orgasm.

Nobody accused Star Wars of having any form of coherent world building.

Iain M Banks' Culture series has a scene where a ship mind describes the Neural Lace as "The greatest torture device The Culture has ever created"

species 8472 planet killer, very effective, extremely fast charging, due to haivng multiple vessels charging up the main planet killer ship in a few seconds, while other scifi takes a VERY long time to charge. plus extremely manuevarability of the ships and thier ability to appear anywhere in the galaxy due to opening "singularity rifts", makes them extremely deadly.

I mean think about some alien reading a story about our modern military and the rebels have a patriot missile system. The alien is like I don't get why they don't strap these to a boat instead of using them on land. You see where Im going with the idea of strapping that thing that seems to be built down several stories into the ground and being like. They should just strap that to a cargo ship.

The Fat Man nukes from Fallout were miniature tactical nukes and were in no way more powerful than an actual nuclear bomb like Little Boy.

So, here’s the thing.

That’s not a great analogy. The MIM-104 Patriot missile system is still providing vital and necessary functionality on a daily basis.

It’s also mobile in the exact same way I’m suggesting the V-150 could (and should,) be.

And finally, the reason they haven’t done that is because there’s plenty of other options like the RIM-174, which we also gave them. (But I’m not so sure it’s as vital. That’s a high bar to cross.)

As for its size, yeah. It’s huge. But you’re comparing that to earth construction. Star Wars always went big. For example the Lucrehulk freighter (which they used for a pilot training academy,)

That thing was large enough that pretty much every they brought to Hoth could fit on it and access with all the same capability as echo base itself. With room to spare. They probably wouldn’t even need to give up the flight academy!

The point being, it’s not unreasonable to suggest they could just literally do that- strap it to an appropriately sized freighter.

Like i mentioned before: they had to get it there somehow, and it’s not the type of thing you’d just build in place. (They stole it and several other cannons, after all.)

If they start the list with handguns, they should have included the Bowel Disruptor from Transmetropolitan. Hands down (and ass puckered) my favorite weapon.

The Cobra Assault Cannon from Robocop

The "I like it!" gun

and i dont get how the Iron Giant is so low, its chest mounted cannon was basically a nuke launcher.

I think you might be confused as to the reference- Fat Man was the nuke dropped on Nagasaki, and was larger than Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima.

which makes these two not-actually-fiction.