From time to time we have to deal in missions with a device that is capable of destroying a planet, a planetkiller, a doomsday device and I begin to wonder can it really exist. I am sure mankind and any other advanced civilization can make such a thing; that is possible in a technical way. But then there is the question why make it.
You can knock out a planet and everything that lives on it. Now there are countless planets in the universe so what is the point of killing one? A planetkiller is purely a weapon to destroy the people living on a planet, to kill a complete civilization. Now if this civilization is not space travelling, does not have colonized other worlds, you wipe them from the universe. Again, why should you do such a thing. If they are colonizing, space travelling, they may be a threat to you. As you are yourself colonizing space. Yet if you want to get rid of them, you have to kill all there worlds in one go. Hence one worldkiller is no worldkiller.
Space is big, there is no room for a planetkiller. We may be able to create one, technologically, but the same advancement and our knowledge of the universe will tells us, it is absolutely a waste of resources. Unless you just want to kill, as we do in this game.
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We can wipe out most life on Earth right now using nukes. Countries make them to project power. They believe that having something that can cause mass destruction will either prevent someone else from attacking them or scare someone into doing what they want. Same would go for a planet killer. The Death Star is a pretty good example of this.
Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.
-Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
so what if the planet doesn't explode instantly? you can still utterly wreck a planet just using a single victory star destroyer, which is only a few hundred thousand credits - a fleet of star destroyers is in fact overkill as shown by camaas
that's why the empire lost, you know; not because the rebels were the good guys and good guys always win - not because palpatine was too arrogant to even REMOTELY consider the fact his plan might actually FAIL...no, it was because of TRIBBLE-poor economical management
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
I think such a thing can exist. The universe is a big, old place, with trillions of stars, billions of galaxies, I am sure some race out there, be it out of fear, jealousy, or plain hate, could make such a thing. Our solar system is quite young, nestled among a bunch of far older systems.....what WE know might be possibly wrong, when it comes to science and technology....there are most likely would and races out there who's technology makes anything we got look like prehistoric junk.
Now, if for some reason I wanted to wipe out a species, I would personally use a disease to do this....something the local native populations would not have immunity against. Though, if a species were advanced enough to master manifesting whatever they need, I could see them simply wiping out an entire world....but if they were THAT advanced, why would they do so to begin with, not to mention why harbor malice towards other beings anyhow? To me, a species to master faster than light, interstellar, intergalactic, maybe even interdimensional travel, would be rather enlightened and matured....a lot more than mainstream, contemporary human society, in the very least. Far they'd be pursuing far more constructive and positive endeavors, not like us humans, fighting wars over oil, lithium, opium, tribal god images and the greed of corporate/military/banking conglomerates.
As for Palpatine losing, I doubt it was because of money....the old republic had a lot of cash to use as well. He was just a smeghead who got what was coming to him, I'm a believer of what goes around comes around, yo.
It is much like the MAD (mutually assured destruction) strategy the drove the Americans and Russians to build so many nuclear weapons during the Cold War. They had more than enough bombs to destroy the entire planet and kept building more at the cost of billions of dollars and rubles. It is a shame to think what we might have accomplished with that money if we spent it on more peaceful and productive projects.
The original Doomsday Device was a mutually-assured destruction device; a terror weapon - equipped with equally powerful defenses and weaponry that seemingly had slipped its leash or been active at the end of some war. (If I remember, it was Pike who first pointed out the Enterprise could easily devastate the surface of a planet in under an hour, and there's really no reason to doubt him).
The original planetkiller did more than remove technic civilization obviously, but the best guess was it was meant to overawe. Everyone's favorite 'Ambassador' B'Vat was refurbishing a doomsday , device for the same purpose - to sow terror, at the prospect of billions of deaths so the war would continue forever (Obviously, Starfleet has encountered one before and has an idea how to stop it, but if it had made it to a Federation system, the deaths could have been horrific)
The real question is where the Na'kuhl seemingly found a whole graveyard of the things.
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
My character Tsin'xing
and camaas DID have a planetary shield - didn't stop it being obliterated by a BDZ
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Species 8472/Undine have a weapon like this, that ties 5 of their ships together, and when aimed at a Star will cause it to go Supernova and destroy everything for a few light years.
And look at the Hobus supernova - That was actually a neighbouring star that went supernova, not their own, but caused a subspace shockwave that entirely obliterated the Romulan and Reman Homeworlds.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Something like that was never shown in any series... Has it appeared in the books?
This is a planet killer
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
These themes we've seen appear in Trek over and over, sometimes delving deep into the story, other times leaving many questions. In the original Doomsday Device, we know nothing of where it originated from, or why it was built. Why was it roaming free, from another galaxy? Did whoever build it, lose control of it? Maybe they ceased to exist because of it, the Genie out of the bottle, with no one left to bid its course. It's hard not to imagine that whoever did build it, were foolish, even though they held a great deal of technical knowledge. Maybe it was built by a xenophobic race, a Berserker created to eliminate anyone not like them. Once we get super AI, there will probably be a technological explosion, one making our own human mind driven one look weak in comparison. Where that takes us is anyone's guess. So far we have yet to demonstrate the ability to control our impulses, we constantly seek new and more powerful weapons. Will we always be their master? Will we end up like the Iconians, bitter, war like, changed forever? Or perhaps like the Organians, abhorring all forms of violence? Being Organian like does not seem like the best idea, until you possess the power needed to protect yourself from all harm in a non-violent way.
You just use a ship with tractor beams, or attach engines to a suitably sized asteroid and slam it into the planet = chaos ensues.
Considering something only 20km in size could cause mass extinctions on Earth i'd imagine Star Trek technology would allow much larger objects to be moved. Didn't the Enterprise once move a star remnant from hitting a planet?
Like a mass driver in effect.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
The sad thing is, you're right. Life is competition and that is definitely something we have not outgrown (in fact, competition is still one of the underlying principles of, say, capitalism).
Peace doesn't exist in nature. We may be able to create artificial peace by moving away and seperating ourselves from nature but for that we would likely mean we'd have to get rid of our own natural instincts and such (so not just, to use popular phrasing, build a wall between us and nature but also remove any natural features from ourselves as well). The only way for humans to ever achieve peace would likely be to cease being human, or being natural at all.
Cause humans, like all life, exist because they compete and have to compete for their existence which means that in practice conflict will always be preferred over cooperation. It's a sad fact and almost depressing to realise, but I guess that at least we can say that all the good things in life also are a result of that same competition that allows us to exist. So perhaps there is something good to be found in it after all
Greed, ego, power.
Wars are now made to sell weapons....
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
True, there are many easier ways. But those are never used cause the plot demands it of course.
I mean, why did the Iconians send an entire fleet or why did they use ships at all when they could just have opened a solar gateway near the core worlds and let the energy of our own stars destroy everything on its surfaces?
I don't think all these superweapons exist because, in-story, one faction wants to threaten another one, it's more likely because the public must fear the threat of Earth being potentially destroyed by a dozen different weapons. Even when the device or method itself will never be really used to its full potential, because, again, plot demands the survival of the heroes / Earth / a ship.
Or let me just use two words only: bad writing. That's the reason most of this stuff exist. Because there are writers who can't come up with complex problems like climate change threatening us and then come up with a complex solution like changing habits and our own behaviour or something, no it has to be some super bomb / device / maniac that can be stopped by one hero. It's just cheap entertainment, hardly worthy of discussion cause the main reasons why it exists are to be found outside of the movie / book / etc. itself.
Edit: spelling
most of the time, competition is result of artificially created and maintained status quo. Look how many people who try to create energy sources or technology that's better than oil, only 'have an accident' or 'commit suicide'. (look up 'black shelving', not to mention how many patents get confiscated by the federal government regarding alternate energy, and labeled 'national security threat') A population that's constantly competing and fighting each other is easier to control when you are on the top of the ladder, looking down.....if everyone's uniting and looking up, it's going to be Marie Antoinette time.
Today I would say that wars are just another (and not necessarily 'other') means or tool of realising political goals, as much as, say, lawmaking. There is no longer a distinction between politics and war, if there ever was and quite often politicians are basically fighting the war by stirring up the public, lying, using propaganda or indeed actively supplying weapons.
So it's not necessarily a continutation as if it's a linear process, the two actively reinforce each other and support each other.
Look at Syria and Libia for example.
The Death Star, for example. Sure, a single Destroyer/Cruiser can wreck an entire planet (as shown in KOTOR with Taris), but it's a ship that can be destroyed or driven away by another destroyer or enough ships. It's also common and "small" enough, so it has less of an impact, people are used to seeing it and its many counterparts.
The Death Star, however is massive, seemingly indestructible and it can obliterate (not just wreck) your planet in a single shot. Even when it doesn't try to threaten you, it still does. When you wake up and either see another "moon" with a giant cannon in your sky, or worse, see the horizon replaced by a part of this monstrosity, you will feel terrified at worst or very uneasy at best.
It's huge, it's unique, it's unstoppable, it can vaporize your whole world for any reason, and it's here, watching you and you may not know why...
It's also worth noting that according to the EU of Star Wars, when the Death Star destroyed Alderaan, it backfired on the Empire with several worlds defecting to the Alliance. Why? Because it lost its psychological impact by destroying a peaceful world without provocation.
Suddenly, the Empire was no longer something to just fear, but something to hate as well. It abandoned its "we have this terrible weapon and we MAY use it, so let's play nice together" stance to "we have this weapon and we WILL use it, because TRIBBLE you". People kept fearing it but now wanted to get rid of it and their creators because they crossed the line.
and i never understood why tarkin gave the order to destroy alderaan when it was HIS philosophy of ruling through fear of force rather than force itself...maybe he should've listened to his own flowery speech
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
My character Tsin'xing
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Still hell of a quote
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius