Super Weapons

The first rule of warfare: make sure quality control double checks your super weapon for pesky little exhaust ports leading straight to the reactor.

This channel is like an old friend you love. It doesn’t matter if you don’t check in for awhile, when you see them, they’ll make your day

Stellaris has a doomsday device that causes every star in the galaxy to simultaneously go supernova. Activating it instantly wins the game for you. Everyone else will try very hard to stop you.

"There's no such thing as overkill."
"If brute force isn't working, you're not using enough of it."
Words to live by, Mr. Arthur. 😊

Ah my monthly Sci-Fi Sunday episode and a side of First Rule of Warfare.
22:29 "Afterall a simple stone arrowhead teleported into your supreme leaders head works wonders for changing his mind." 😂😂😂
Informative as always Isaac.

"Listen I'm not a genocidal maniac, I just need to eliminate a few pops to cut down on lag"
Every late game Stellaris player

How come no one talks about mega-maid from spaceballs?
The ability to remove the atmosphere from a planet would be a devastating weapon.

Oh wow! I’ve always wondered about earth size/mass moons and what sort of conditions would be required for them to be habitable for modern earth life. And Isaac is releasing an episode on just that very subject *on my birthday*!
Greatest birthday gift ever! I can’t wait!

I had a kinda horrifying idea for a dark energy bomb, which would suddenly accelerate Hubble expansion in a volume by many orders of magnitude, disintegrating all matter within its radius.

Samantha Carter once blew up a star (and the fleet surrounding it) by dropping an active Stargate in it, causing the sun to go supernova. For a brief moment she as an individual person achieved Kardeshev II, harnessing the entire output of a star as a weapon against her enemies.

Never forget the unprovoked attack on Alderaan

A new ironic series Sunday Super Weapons.

Finally, a video explaining how Ican purge the unclean.

I've found it a little ironic how one of the very earliest depictions of an O'Neil cylinder in science fiction ALSO also includes -- like 30 seconds later -- the very first depiction of a Colony Drop.
Never forget: any spaceship, no matter how large, is just a badly designed missile with air conditioning.

16:37 _". . . Skinny Black Metal Mega-Bullet"_
good name for a band! \m/

The one that always sticks in my mind is at the end of E. E. Smith's "Skylark DuQuesne" where the "heroes" caused millions of suns, each being orbited by a planet where the "bad species" has evolved, to go nova because they were "irredeemable". Oh, and of course the end of Greg Bear's "Anvil of Stars" still haunts me to this day.

Some of those superweapons are absolutely M.A.D., but I think my favorite is the Berserker Swarm. Why fight the enemy when you can just take them apart and build them into more useful stuff?

Turning off EM forces holding matter together, is what Davros tried to do with his reality bomb. As a super weapon it reallly illustrates a lot of your points, because they had to get a 'planet engine' using several specific worlds plucked form time and space, so their gravity fields create an energy source to power the whole damn thing.
There's an idea, out of the box sources of energy.

Colony drops are a big trope in Mobile Suit Gundam as well. Probably the most famous franchise to use it, surprised to not see it here.

The Goths from The Expanse are a good example of what can happen when a civilization taps another universe for power. Good episode!

It's funny that you have mentioned gundam before on your space habitat videos....but you didn't mention the fact that one of the biggest atrocities in the series was one side of the war dropping an O'Neil cylinder on earth and craving a very big crater where Sydney Australia was along with a lot of other damage. In UC gundam they stayed dropping colonies with varied effects

Every time you say, “Send in the murder bots“ I hear it in my head to the tune of song Send in the Clowns. Which means I picture the sad ironic twist at the end of the song, “Send in the murder bots… They’re already here“ sung by one lonely remaining murder bot from the last invasion.

There are super weapons and then there are super content creators. Issac is the later.

I mean, taking the whole 'MIRV'd nukes' idea to a logical maximum, let's look at antimatter. Let's assume you want to uniformly blanket an entire planet in nuclear fire, say, 1.7kt per square kilometer. About 40mg of antimatter would do that. You can probably fit a containment system, guidance, and reentry package into a 100-gram dart, each containing that 40mg. That totals up to about 20 tons of antimatter to uniformly toast an Earthlike world, and about 51,000 tons of delivery systems. Divide that across a fleet, and it's entirely conceivable that a fleet of, say, 500 small warships is more than capable of delivering Exterminatus to any world they choose, without even making too big a dent in their mass budget.

Strange Matter bombs and False/True vacuum bombs are terrifying.

Captain, we killed all our enemies.
Not enough. Go back in time and kill them again.

Some (many) years ago, I read an article about the concept of "novaing". Basically, if you enriched the deep atmosphere of a gas giant with deuterium and detonated one (or many) nuclear warheads, you would cause a chain reaction that would sterilize everything up to the Kuiper belt.

Happy G-Type Main-Sequence Star Day! If you have your finger over the button of a Super Weapon, I hope you can hold off long enough to grab a snack, sit down, and enjoy this video!

In the Wing Commander series, the Kilrathi (the baddies) developed a super weapon ship that would increase the gravity constant on a target planet for a partial second.

1:30 that armored dude is strokin that gun like the sun's about to go supernova.

One fact of superweapons that was missed imo but has likely been covered is the fear factor being just so much more then a "normal" weapon.
Sure yeeting a few asteroids at a planet or a handful of RKMs will do the job for pennys on the dollar. But a sphere of anti-uranium the size of a moon that is set off nuke style and absolutely vaporizes not just the planet but the entire solar system while you televise it to your enemys survivors or your other enemys is one HELL of a message.
And sometimes a message is far more valuable then a million cheaper weapons. I mean see the U.S nukeing japan as a perfect case in point. If we had stormed the island the casualtys could have been many thousands of times worse then the bombs caused. At least from our PoV. Im sure japan would argue otherwise, but the then "super weapon" had the intended result and more or less ended the war on that front by scareing the piss out of them in essence.
Crimson worlds series had that as a weapon in it. And while wasteful i know i as a human would be scared shitless of the tentacle monsters of grixnax broadcasted that thing going off to us just before the super nova lit off in our skys and said you belong to us now. It would take the fight out of us before a shot was fired at least short term.
Long term its going to have an extremely high chance to ensure everyone and their little dogs too look for the first chance to burry a knife in your back and off your race asap out of fear they are next.

Love that you referenced "The Gods Themselves" the moment I thought of it applying to what you were saying about harnessing other universes for energy.

I'm not sure if she exactly ment it in regards to overkill but I think Mae West said it best "If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right!".

22:29 "a simple stone arrowhead teleported into your supreme leader’s head works wonders for changing his mind."
Isaac, your dark dad humor was definitely at form here!

USSC (United Spacefaring Species Council) member: "There are many ways to measure how advanced a species is: their architecture, art, philosophy, technology, weapons..."
Somebody in the audience: "Weapons? Surely, nobody would concentrate all their efforts on advancing those..."
Human just behind him: "And that's where you're wrong, buddy."

I came home from work frustrated today . Sitting in traffic didn’t help either- but I finally got home - showered n made dinner n played call of duty. Once bedtime was approaching I turn on my utube channel and click on Issac Arthur. So many episodes I miss🤦🏾‍♂️damn but I be busy. But this 1 I watched and really enjoyed!! Thanks Issac !!
I luv SciFi !!

I would like to type on behalf of Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (played by Peter Bull) from the movie, Dr. Strangelove. He responded to the question with "It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises."

18:34 Also, 'Look to Windward' by the late Iain M. Banks, in which the events of the plotline lead up to a memorial of the Culture supernova-ing an Idiran star

The secret doomsday weapon, is best line in Dr.Strange Love.

Everyone forgets Stargate. A solar system here and there, doomed a few planets to slow death by black hole...

Some crazy ideas:
1. piece of 'neutronium' extracted from neutron star and close to 'c' - to slow down it's natural detonation in relation to target
2. again small blackhole of precisely calculated mass and speed so it does 'airburst' of hawking radiation above hostile planet
3. fling brown dwarf to destabilize orbits and catapult target planet as rouge
4. aim quasar jet onto something
5. I loved Starcarrier ur-Shaddar approach: fling star huge star through Black Rosette - spacetime gateway created from collapsed 6 blue supergiants
6. 18:40 - nah, it was also used in Stargate ( improvised ), Andromeda ( Nova bombs - using dark energy to temporarily negate gravity within star ) and to extend Galactic Corps ( small starship called Trigger though the star under warp drive )
7. anything that messes with Higgs field - dictates mass, mass dictates chemistry -> express option to turn everything to green goo; or strong nuclear force

Regarding super-nukes, Teller (of the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design) had noted any sufficiently large bomb wouldn't need to be on target to achieve desired effect of annihilating the enemy. Of course, in his case he was conceiving of 10,000 megaton doomsday bombs which could level New England, Germany or the Korean peninsula in one blast and blanketing the planet in apocalyptic-levels of fallout.The sort you use to either deter the enemy from using their doomsday devices or take them with you if you are about to lose.

Rifts RPG games breaks this stereotype. The weakest pistols are on par with damage of an RPG 7 to anti-Tank weapon. Without the explosion, of course.

A fission bomb big enough to strip a planet of life, even if it's mostly fusion boosted, would surely be quite noticeable for vast distances across the universe

No tech yet can beat a real human mind. Nothing more devious or deceptive.

"It's a reminder that subtle and clever use of force can be better than raw might."
Yes, and on the other hand we have the "Disassemble a gas giant and several planets to create a gravity manipulator megastructure and then use it to destabilize the local star in such a way that it turns into the stellar equivalent of a flamethrower"...

Dresden Files was not a reference I was expecting here, but it was appropriate.

Death bots are easy. Just keep sending soldiers at them until they hit their preset kill limit.

Can you give a full count of the number of first rules of warfare?

I would think that if you are powering a volley of missiles using a laser, and you want them to all hit at slightly different times, the most efficient way to do that would be to stack them all together in a bundle, then accelerate that bundle all to the minimum speed you want one of them to be, and then that one would detach from the front of the pack and move itself just slightly out of the way, while the beam pushes the rest a bit faster, and then the second one splits off, and so on, until only one is left accelerating.

Honor Harrington and Harry Dresden name drops, I knew I liked you for a reason.

I've been watching since 2015. I'm a creationist but some of the concepts you cover I agree with and even enjoy the ones I don't. Either way you're a great person and it's so encouraging to see someone do what they love

Man what a plethora of ways to destroy everything. 😮😮

I first heard about dropping a colony on a planet in Mobile Suit Gundam (1979).

I just started the episode but can already tell it's going to be a.. banger.

Pulling the power cord on the computer running our simulation

"how many and how big is their cannons may be not the best one"
yep, never in the history of ever someone said, look at my rock, spear, sword, cannon, tank, plane, nuke, stealth bomber, i am this advanced compared to you.

What would it take to be able to lob a full-sized neutron star at an enemy planet or star system?

interesting how you mentioned the concept of colony dropping but you didnt mention moble suit gundam, one of the first (and probably the most well known) cases of colony drops in popular media.

Ryk Brown in his frontiers saga loves using "kinetic kill vehicles" to strike large capital ships in surprise attacks.

Wait, did you just describe how the nexus space works in "The Expanse" Series, The protomolecule builders found a way to break into another universe filled with energy and put a bubble in there for their nexus space and then sent "seedpods" as gate builders to other systems to connect to the same nexus space. It just so happened that the inhabitants of the universe they put their bubble in were not too happy and started tampering with space time on the other side of the bubble connecting to our universe, the nexus space quarantined itself to try and stop the other universe entities who settled down after the death of the builders till humans came along and started dumping stuff into the other universe whenever the gates exceed mass/energy flow rate.

17:30 _"...Brutal Relativistic Kill Rain"_
another great band name!! \m/

The Spitting Cobra in House of Suns was a good way of having an ftl like technology without violating causality

How big and sophisticated their weapons are for how small they can make those weapons and still be useful

From the Sun Beam and high dimensioned anti matter planets in the Lensman series, to mini blackholes, gravity negation on a planet by mental power in Galactic Milieu to the dimension strike in the Three Body Problem. Lots of methods

For the asteroid attack, in the Expanse Macro used stealth composites and complex orbital paths to attack Earth.

In the anime Series Gundam X it takes place AFTER an O'Neil Cylinder was dropped on the planet, and in Gundam SEED Destiny a chunk of Space Colony' well wreckage crashed into Earth, it was destroyed on the way down but there was still massive destruction. While the Sci-Fi elements are a tad leaning towards the fantastic (Given giant combat human piloted Robots) it still is within the subject, Gundam Wing has the space colony (technically a warship but called a colony to hide its purpose) with a giant super weapon, and in Gundam Seed it has a laser weapon that converts all the energy in a super nuke into a gamma ray beam. Nukes are actually a common weapon in many of the Gundam series do bigger weapons are often the replacement for MAD weapons instead Gundam SEED Nukes overuse is a major plot point. In Gundam SEED they actually consider genetic viruses to kill genetically engineered people.

I hope you haven't convinced anyone that we shouldn't build O'Neil Cylinders because some fool might drop one on us.

I love that every rule of warfare is the "1st rule of warfare."

Don't forget the "Bring down the sky" DLC for Mass Effect 1, your favorite! As for ZPMs, (gonna steal the stargate term), I like to think of the Markers in Deadspace as ZPMs from hell. But one of the more confounding superweapon uses in gaming is in resident evil. The continued tolerance of the rest of the world to Umbrella's making bioweapons. Even if the general public doesn't know, governments have GOT to know what Umbrella Corps was doing under Racoon City. I don't get why Resident Evil didn't devolve into a war of the whole world versus Umbrella. I also don't get why the writers of Resident Evil never went into the non weapon related things Umbrella made, even the non weapon related things involved in war. Supposedly they're a Pharmacutical company that's highly regarded, so why don't they have the retail and commercial presence on the ground in Racoon City to show it.
Moving back to the real world, I love using the following string of reasoning to disprove Marjorie Taylor Greene's Jewish space laser conspiracy theory;
1. Something of that size is not the sort of thing you can build quietly. It would be visible to EVERYONE in the sky while it was being built. Anyone with a backyard amateur telescope or a pair of binoculars could potentially spot it.
2. The Rothschilds are bankers, if bankers destroy large swaths of wilderness, they're not really gaining anything by doing so. You could imagine doing that to a small town or a neighborhood if you were really evil, and then blaming it on wildfires so that you can sell loans and insurance to the people there later. But there's no direct gain by doing so. You would have to work to recoup that loss and its not gueranteed.
3. If you really want to make money with a space laser, its in pushing spacecraft, not in setting virgin wilderness on fire. If you were the Rothschilds and you had a space laser, you'd be working with Elon Musk to sell tickets to the outer solar system to prospect for precious metals and set up colonies, then having people, governments and businesses pay for the privelage. But that's not what we see. We see massive wildfires, the kind that are easier to start with a careless use of pyrotechnics during a gender reveal party than with a space laser.

It's been many years since I read the Dresden Files but wasn't it an isolated mega mansion full of vampires that he pulled the satellite down on?
And yes, that was done by a single spellcaster, again showcasing that the "killing curse" style spells are woefully unimaginative. The guy in question was powerful enough to do a satellite drop with just their universe's version of Accio.

Everytime I think about Nanobots used for a weapon I imagine entire solar system turned into paper clips. Some paper clips as big as the width of Earth. Others the size of cars.

NOTIFICATION GANG!!!

Yess, there is no such thing as overkill. Love that.

Dual vector foil from Three Body is the most terrifying for me

"Relativistic Kill Cloud" is a great name for a metal band.

"We have arrived, and it is now that we preform our charge"

I like the Interex weapon in Voyager: they could rewind time with it and "erase" their enemies. If we ever encounter hostile aliens, perhaps we won't even notice them...we'll just cease to exist at their whim.

The biggest risk of a superweapon is the saying, "what doesnt kill me only serves to make me stronger." Long as enough people survive with the right skills, and want either to protect against that, or get revenge with multiplied or exponential force is a very real threat.

Thank you for your hard work issac ❤

Weapons of mass destruction that permanently change the laws of physics is a running theme in the "Earth's Remebrance" trilogy (AKA The Three Body Problem).

I wonder how effective bioweapons would be (ranging from edited viruses/microorganisms to super predators like the White Spikes from The Tomarrow War)?

YM: "At what time should we launch Time Bomb Capt'n?"
CPT: "Doesn't matter Yeoman! It Obviously didn't [isn't going to] work this time."

I thought you would've mentioned that episode of SG-1 where Sam supernova;d a star with the gate sent to an adress with the blackhole.
Also the dimensional weapons in the Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past

Tsar Bomba actually detonated with a measured yield of 57MT. Prototype for a 100MT model, the Soviets decided in the end not to proceed with it, even though a powerful enough rocket, the UR-500 (which eventually became the Proton satellite launcher) was being developed for it, because it was far more wasteful of nuclear material that could be better employed in fueling lots of 5MT or smaller devices, and also because there was no tactical value in a bomb powerful enough to make the rubble bounce 40 miles instead of only 10.

cant get enough of this mas videos

"Teleporting an arrow to your supreme leader's brain works wonders to change their mind."
- Isaac Arthur, 2023

Stargate has some nice uses supernovae to blow up stuff. Also crushing planets into black holes. Great video!

Palpatine has entered in the chat.

First Rule of Warfare:
Never die first.

I really like that in Babylon 5 the guns are weaker than modern ones for the express purpose being able to fire it on a ship or station without making a hole in the hull.

8:25 Damn, the fall of Reach still hits

Tactical nukes vs. strategic nukes: Do you want an ecological disaster and billions dead or a bigger ecological disaster and more billions dead?

Feels like you could create some very interesting weapons if you could create an antimater wave or a wave that changes the rules of nature in similar way.

Maybe the real super weapon is the friends we made along the way.

Another epic video, perfect addition to a good Sunday afternoon

In the opening of the original Gundam, they drop an O'Neill Cylinder on a city during an Earth/Spacian war.

Don't forget the nude bomb from "Get Smart" when you discuss smart bombs. That one got smart!

Soviets did build a doomsday device, system called Perimeter. It's still operational in Russia. It's an automatic nuclear response system. Soviets never told anybody for a very good reason, it wasn't designed to deter NATO. It was designed to deter hotheads in own government by ensuring no matter what, there will be retaliation, even beyond the grave.

Talking about sci-fi and the lack of rocket launchers immediately made me think of Stargate SG1 when they just used a stinger to blow a spacefighter out of the sky.