Planet killer

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In science fiction, a planet killer (also called a "planet(-)buster, "planet-smasher" "planet destroyer," etc.) is an entity, often a large spaceship or space station, expressly designed to destroy or render uninhabitable a planet.[1] An example of a planet killer is the Death Star from the Star Wars franchise. The science fiction series Babylon 5, Star Trek, Lexx, Farscape, Titan AE and Stargate SG-1, the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000, as well as the Starflight and Wing Commander computer games all have at least one such device.

Contents

[edit] Planet killers in fiction

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[edit] Babylon 5

[edit] Halo

  • Covenant warships (Plasma bombardment destroys the planet's biosphere; known as glassing)
  • UNSC NOVA Bomb(a group of nukes clustered around a core that forces the explosions together)
  • Planet razing(Attack the star until it explodes in a supernova, resulting in the planet getting destroyed)

The Halo installations themselves only kill sentient life, leaving planets and their biospheres-as well as any creature without sufficient biomass to support The Flood-otherwise intact.

[edit] Lexx

  • Mantrid Drones
  • The Lexx
  • The Divine Shadow's Capital Ship - Destroys the Brunnen-G homeworld using a large scale version of the "Black Pack" weapon often seen in the LEXX series.

[edit] Stargate SG-1

  • Anubis's Ancient weapon that charges a Stargate powerfully enough that it explodes and the resulting explosion can destroy a U.S state with the fallout spreading all over the world within a matter of days.
  • Naqahdah-enhanced nuclear weapon
  • A stargate that is dialed out to another stargate which some where near by a black hole like P3W-451 and put into a sun. It causes the sun to become destabilized and go supernova.
  • Anubis's mothership, powered with the Eye of Ra as well as four other "eyes", in "Full Circle"
  • The Dakara Superweapon in the Temple of Dakara can return all matter in its range to its base state, it is not powerful enough to destroy entire planets.
  • The Asgard managed to destroy Halla by causing Halla's sun to become a black hole.
  • The Ori Priors can turn planets into Point Singularities (Black Holes) to power their supergates, and have done so twice thus far.
  • The Replicators have eaten an entire planet and converted everything on it into replicator blocks.
  • The stargate on P3W-451 is orbiting a black hole; in-bound wormholes become altered by the gravitational influence of the black hole and, in turn, can wreak havoc on the dialer's side.

[edit] Star Trek

  • Genesis Device (a terraforming project; not really a weapon but if used against an existing biosphere it will destroy it in favor of a new one)
  • Species 8472 starships
  • The Doomsday Machine
  • Krenim temporal incursion ship
  • Planetcracker weapons and sunkiller bombs (Diane Duane's novels)
  • Reman warbird Scimitar.
  • Son'a collector (intended to strip radiation surrounding a planet thus rendering it uninhabitable)
  • The Crystalline Entity that would feed by stripping planets of all organic life.
  • The Xindi superweapon
  • The Fleet of Romulan and Cardassian starships that destroyed the Founder's homeworld in Star Trek Deep Space Nine (although this was merely orbital bombardment by a fleet of ships, not a single superweapon)
  • Tox Uthat (A weapon from the future that would stop all fusion operations in a sun)
  • Trilithium torpedo. Used by Dr. Tolien Soran in Star Trek Generations to stop all the fusion reactions in a star to cease, causing it to go nova, much like the Tox Uthat.
  • Dreadnought Missile. Created by the Cardassian Empire, a missile with a highly advanced AI and a potent anti-matter warhead capable of destroying a small moon
  • Nomad. A small spacecraft resulting from the combination of two unrelated craft that was able to "sterilize" entire planetary populations (The Changeling).

[edit] Star Wars

[edit] Warhammer 40,000

[edit] Games

[edit] Miscellaneous media

  • "Mega-maid" from the Movie Spaceballs. A transformation of Spaceball One, capable of sucking the air from an entire planet and thus making it uninhabitable.
  • Buster Machine III, aka the Black Hole Bomb in Gunbuster uses the mass of a gas giant planet (specifically, Jupiter) to create a black hole which ultimately destroys the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
  • Chronicles of Riddick the Necromongers take converts with them, then execute their "Final Protocol", a series of energy waves that destroy the planet
  • Galactus (Marvel Comics Universe)
  • Gamilon planet bombs from Space Battleship Yamato
  • Hydra-Cannon
  • Hugo Drax's space station in Moonraker, which launches poisonous globes that would have wiped out mankind.
  • Big Venus (The Big O)
  • Serpentera featured in Power Rangers.
  • Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four destroys planets 4 days after his arrival
  • The Pirate Planet in Doctor Who
  • Unicron (Transformers: The Movie)
  • Vogon Constructor Fleet Ships (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) (appear in all adaptations of the series)
  • Erdammeru the Void-Hound (DC Comics)
  • A bomb made of 9th-dimensional matter in Supernova
  • In Getter Robo Armageddon, the protagonists manage to create a massive Getter Beam Tomahawk powerful enough to slice through planets. Likewise, in some Getter Robo manga, an entire fleet of impossibly enormous Getter Emperors exist. These super-mecha are so large, they create their own gravity field that can actually shatter planets as they pass.
  • In Vandread, A special variant of harvest ship can destroy planets that are not needed by Earth anymore.
  • In the Eek! The Cat episode Eek vs. The Flying Saucers, aliens called Zoltarians threaten to blow up the earth using a death ray powered by Eek's 300 pound girlfriend, Annabelle, and want to do so because Earth "obstructs our view of Uranus."
  • In the Exosquad episode A Night Before Doomsday an antimatter bomb capable of destroying all life on earth is revealed and its activation by the Neosapien leader Phaeton dying of Automutation Syndrome is prevented in the episode Abandon Hope.
  • In the Futurama episode "I Dated a Robot," Fry blows up a planet with a planet blowing-up machine.
  • In the British sci-fi series The Tomorrow People, an alien race known as the Thargons have a weapon known as a "Ripper Ray" which is allegedly capable of destroying a planet.
  • In the cartoon Invader Zim, the Planet Jackers tried to feed the Earth to their sun to keep it from going out.
  • In the Kurt Russell film 'Soldier' one portable explosive device nicknamed 'Planet Killers' is used, devastating the planet.
  • In the Roger Corman film Battle Beyond the Stars, the evil Sador's mothership has a planet killing superweapon called the "Stellar Converter" which seems to have the effect of superheating the core of the planet causing a delayed explosion where it incinerates from the inside/out.
  • In the TV series Earth Final Conflict, the Jaridians have a planet killer and have destroyed thousands of Taelon occupied planets including their homeworld. The video archive of all the planets destroyed one after another is seen by William Boone but at the time he doesn't understand what it is until the circumstances are explained to him later by Da'an
  • Later, Buster Machine #7 and #19 work in tandem to destroy an Earth-sized life form and a black hole which it carries in tow.
  • Likewise in Gunbuster's sequel series: Diebuster, the android Buster Machine #7 splits the moon Titan in half.
  • Point singularity weapons, nova bombs, Maximm charges, kinetic missiles (rare case) in Andromeda
  • Project DESTINY in The Core
  • Serlena's ship is seen making vengeful blasts on searched planets, causing an icy one to shatter and another to implode. Men in Black II
  • Several attacks used in the manga/anime Dragon Ball such as the Death Ball technique as used by Freeza to destroy Planet Vegeta, are capable of destroying a planet.
  • The Displacement Engine in Farscape is a device which employs a wormhole to draw a large mass of fusing plasma from the core of a star, and then deploys it against a target. The device is described as being able to destroy a planet.
  • The Hand of Omega in Doctor Who
  • The Super Robot Mazinkaiser is said to be capable of blasting a hole right down to a planet's core with a full-powered Fire Blaster.
  • The Vok second Moon (Beast Wars) (could only destroy energon-rich worlds)
  • The Warworld (DC Comics)
  • The Wave motion gun from Space Battleship Yamato (a.k.a. Star Blazers in the U.S.)
  • The Annihilatrix from Frisky Dingo
  • The Beast Planet (Shadow Raiders)
  • The Desiccator in Dark Reign
  • The Doomsday Machine (Dr. Strangelove)
  • The Drej Mothership (Titan A.E.)
  • The Ideon Sword (capable of slicing a planet in half) and the Ideon Gun (capable of cutting large swaths of destruction encompassing thousands of ships and celestial bodies) from Space Runaway Ideon. In addition, when ultimately destroyed, the resulting force caused by the detonation of its power source could potentially destroy the universe.
  • The Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator In the classic Bugs Bunny short Haredevil Hare in 1948. Marvin Martian wanted to use it to blow up Earth because, as he said, "It obstructs my view of Venus" (although in reality, Earth and Venus almost never come into complete alignment with Mars). The explosive was in the form of a small red stick of Dynamite that was screwed into a large telescope-like machine.
  • The Planet and System Killers in Gall Force
  • The Dark Heart in Justice League Unlimited
  • When the entire Zentradi main fleet was brought together it could destroy the entire surface of a planet through large bombardments of its energy weapons, as seen in the Macross Saga segment of Robotech.

[edit] Various novels and written sources

  • The Inhibitor machines from Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitor series of novels, were capable of consuming worlds over time to convert to copies of themselves, or to create weapons capable of utilising stars to destroy planets e.g. venting stellar core material in a collimated beam to burn away planetary crusts. In the same series, the "Greenfly" machines, developed by humans as terraformers, instead go rogue and start eating planets by reducing them to their atoms and rebuilding them into more such machines, as well as numerous domes filled with vegetation.
  • Spacer nuclear reaction intensifier (Robots and Empire)
  • Stephen Baxter's Moonseed: a virus-like microscopic object (or substance made from it) that transforms substances into more copies of itself - and thus consumes Venus and then the Earth by doing so. (Baxter has also employed geomagnetic storms (see Sunstorm) and larger universal constructors (see Evolution) as planet killers.)
  • The Neutronium Alchemist (Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy)
  • At least five methods in E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman saga: "super-atomic bombs"; a "nutcracker", consisting of crushing a planet between two others; a "negasphere," an antimatter planet; "Nth space planets" from other dimensions can be used to ram planets or even create supernovas - there was even the worrying possibility that these could cause the Big Crunch in zero time; and a "sunbeam", a way of concentrating most of a sun's energy output into a narrow beam -- this one a defensive-only weapon against nutcrackers and negaspheres.
  • Device Ultimate in The Xenocide Mission
  • In Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of the seven suns, the ongoing war between the Faeros, and Hydrogues see entire suns having there cores frozen.
  • In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the MD (Molecular Disruption) Device, or "Doctor Device", generates a field inside which it is impossible for atoms to coexist in a molecule. The field propagates in a chain reaction, so it basically destroys all matter until it reaches pure space. This was intended for ship to ship combat, but was eventually used to destroy an entire planet.
  • In E. E. Smith's Skylark of Space series various planet-killers are used or discussed. Throwing planets and moons out of orbit, incredibly high-yield atomic or copper bombs, near-instantaneous dematerialization of physical objects and the teleporting of close to fifty billion stars in order to wipe out a Galaxy-wide alien civilization are all used.
  • In L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth a device is created which, when activated, causes all matter it touches to break down into its constituent molecules. This device was used on a moon, which was consumed faster than ships based on that moon could launch.
  • In the Gor-novel series by John Norman, specifically "Tribesmen of Gor", the alien Kurrii deploy a weapon, apparently housed in a small space craft, to the eponymous planet. If it had been put to use, it would have to have rendered the planet uninhabitable not only to humans, but also to the Priest-Kings, who were sheltered deep inside a mountain range.
  • Nova Bombs (Starship Troopers)
  • Relativistic projectiles (Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski's The Killing Star)
  • The Electron Pump (Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves)
  • The Dahak-class battle station (David Weber's Heirs of Empire trilogy)
  • The Supernova (Matthew Reilly's Temple)

[edit] References

  1. ^ stardestroyer.net: Planet-Killers

[edit] External links