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List of fictional doomsday devices

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File:TheLexx.jpg
The Lexx, from the series Lexx

In science fiction, a planet killer (also called a "planet buster" in some Sci-Fi circles) is an entity, often a large spaceship or space station, expressly designed to destroy or render uninhabitable a planet. (At the very least, a planet killer must have the capacity to destroy a planet, or its capacity to support life.) The most famous planet killer is the Death Star from the Star Wars franchise, though many others have been seen on film or print. The science fiction series Babylon 5, Star Trek, Lexx, Farscape, 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.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe uses the term "superweapon" for such a device.

To Kill a Planet

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Science-fiction writers have devised many methods of destroying a planet; targeting it with a specially designed laser weapon, launching nuclear missiles at the surface until the radiation and heat levels render the planet's surface uninhabitable, or through the use of exotic energy weapons not covered by present-day physics. The defining criteria is that the weapon should, at least, destroy the planet's ecosystem and render the planet uninhabitable afterwards; a more thorough tactic is to physically destroy the planet itself. Different science-fiction writers have created many designs to fulfil both of these purposes.

Most writers, working in a print medium and unable to match the visceral chill of a short film sequence of an obviously life-bearing blue marble world being turned into a brilliant fireball in less than a second, prefer to use slower methods of planet destruction, making up in pathos what they lack in instantaneous impact. Under such a constraint, planet destructions are often much slower affairs, taking minutes, hours, sometimes even days for the protagonists to act or simply reflect upon their fate. The classic exception to this rule is probably Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the print version of which destroys the Earth in three sentences:

There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.

When categorizing such apocalyptic instruments, one should note that several devices – Asimov's Electron Pump or the 27th century Tox Uthat (See Star Trek:TNG episode Captain's Holiday), to name a couple – operate not by destroying a planet, but by annihilating the star which it orbits. The absolute energies involved here can exceed that produced by the Death Star's blast, but they are generated indirectly. Finally, inventions like Egan's Ensemble mod are too esoteric to admit classification by energy output.

To Eat a Planet

Some writers (and comic book cartoonists) make stories about devices that convert planets into various products, often other machines (although the Monoliths in 2010: Odyssey Two turn Jupiter into a star). In the cult science fiction television series Lexx, the main characters pilot the eponymous Lexx battleship, "the most powerful destructive force in the two universes,” which first blows up planets with a powerful blast of energy, and then consumes the mass for fuel. The Doomsday Machine from Star Trek functions similarly.

More literal examples of eating a planet are seen in the 3D series Shadow Raiders, in which the Beast Planet (the main threat of the protagonists) is a virtually indestructible ball of black steel which can open to reveal a claw which pulls hapless worlds into its grasp, and in the various incarnations of Unicron in the Transformers multiverse. The comic book villain Galactus falls somewhere between the two foregoing categories, consuming - but not necessarily physically eating planets.

An even more extreme example in this category could be the Star Wars' World Devastators, horrifying, nigh-indestructible weapons that literally eat through a planet, consuming all elements within to create massive mechanized armies within its hold, or with sufficient raw material and time-another World Devastator.

These were destroyed by pitting them against the only foe that could defeat them-themselves.

The Tyranids of Warhammer 40K are similar to these, but merely devour all of the biomass of the planet, not the planet itself. Using several stages of infiltration, invasion, and consumption, Tyranid Hive Fleets scour all biological matter from the surface of a living world along with all useful elements such as water and atmosphere, leaving it no more than a cold rocky ball in space.

To Blow a Planet Up

In order to completely disperse a planet, one must supply at the very least enough energy to overcome its gravitational binding energy. One can supply more than this, of course, to overcome inefficiencies or to make the planet's dispersion more spectacular. The king of brute-force planet destruction is the Death Star, whose energy output has been estimated to equal "the liberated energy of a small artificial sun" (STAR WARS novelization). Then again, the Veloxi Black Egg from Starflight could do the same thing in a package about fourteen quintillionths of the volume and mass, so in terms of power per mass the popular king may be relatively lacking. In The Forge of God, Greg Bear estimates it may take some two hundred million tons of matter converted to energy at the core of an Earth-sized planet in order to give its mass enough energy to achieve mutual escape velocity (where a large nuclear bomb may only convert a few grams of matter to energy.) Clearly this suggests interesting technology in doomsday ships whose mass is only a tiny fraction of that.

A weapon of this type is often referred to, in SciFi circles, as a "Planet Cracker," a term first coined by Diane Duane.

Two complementary forms of planet-destroying bombs are used in the L. Ron Hubbard book Battlefield Earth, in which Johnnie Tyler finds a group of "planet buster" nuclear weapons and causes them to be teleported back to the home planet of the enemy Psychlo race, which destroys it in a nuclear fire. Later, based on information given by Terl, the Psychlo chief security agent for earth, humans mine a special material from space, that when teleported to a planet, turns it into a ball of frozen gaseous electricity. Thus one bomb turns a world into a molten hell and the other bomb turns a world into a frozen hell.

To Render a Planet Uninhabitable

For many plot purposes, it is sufficient to render a planet uninhabitable instead of completely destroying it. There are countless ways of accomplishing this, as it is usually enough to disrupt only one of the requirements for life. As examples, in Larry Niven's Known Space, the planet of the Grogs (a race who could exert mind-control) had a Bussard ramjet in orbit around the star. If necessary, it would fly into the star, and the ramjet "scoop" would disrupt the stellar magnetosphere, causing long term problems that would eventually end life on the planet. A more direct method of planetary extermination occurred in Catherine Asaro's Primary Inversion. Here, some of the atmosphere from a gas giant was siphoned onto the air of the planet, and its atmosphere was lit on fire. Anyone who could withstand the searing heat and following torrential downpour would find no oxygen left to breathe. In the comedy movie Spaceballs, the title species plots to steal all the air from the peaceful planet of Druidia. This plot is subsequently foiled by a Luke Skywalker/Han Solo type hero (Lone Starr) with help from a Chewbacca-like character (Barf). Ben Jeapes' novel The Xenocide Mission, the superweapon "Device Ultimate" is a series of boxes creating a poweful gravitational device that is placed in a small spacecraft and fired into a sun. This would cause the sun to become unstable, exploding the first 1% of the sun, and releasing enough radiation to kill all life in the star system, as well as disintegrating the first planet of the solar system. In Peter Hamilton's novel "Judas Unchained", the Prime Aliens use a device which induces a directed, high-intensity long-duration solar flare, which literally fries the surface of a planet. In addition to the Death Star from the Star Wars series, the Eclipse class Super Star Destroyer has a superlaser that, while not capable of completely destroying a planet like the Death Star, can crack the crust of planet to make it uninhabitable.

Less large scale efforts at making a planet uninhabitable include chemical, biological, and nuclear attack, as well as dusting the surface with radioactive dust (as in some of Isaac Asimov's short stories). In Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, the author also presents a version of water called "Ice 9" which is just like ordinary water except that it takes on a crystal form at room temperature. Ice 9 can also convert neighbouring water molecules from their "wet" form into their crystalline form (in a similar way that some prions can influence other proteins by making them fold into different shapes, with the new shape also having this property). The result of contaminating even the smallest part of the water system on a planet like Earth would have disastrous consequences for all the liquid water on the entire planet, as effectively there is really only one body of water which is connected by rivers, seas, drains, groundwater reservoirs, and so on. A single chip of Ice-9 would be capable of rendering a planet uninhabitable to water-needing life such as just about every living thing on Earth. In Warhammer 40,000, a planet can be destroyed by a process called Exterminatus, in which a fleet's payload of one of 2 kinds of bombs is dropped onto the planets surface. Either Virus bombs, which unleash diseases that kill off everything leaving the worlds' atmosphere full of explosive gases, or Cyclonic torpedoes, which ignite the planet's atmosphere. These are usually used together on one planet, like the destruction of Isvaan III.

Another example of this is shown in the Halo novels, in which the Covenant are shown "glassing" Reach, in other words, bombarding it with so much plasma that the surface actually melted and recooled into glass, rendering all life vaporized and the planet useless. Similarly, in David Weber's Honorverse novels standard shipboard weaponry normally used for space battles possess so much firepower that it could easily render any planet uninhabitable. Its sole use for this, however, shocked the Humanity so much that special convention was created to prevent such occurrences -- the Eridani Edict.

Famous planet killers

Babylon 5


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)

The Halo installations themselves only kill sentient life, leaving planets and their biospheres otherwise intact.

Lexx

Stargate SG-1

File:Dakara weapon.jpg
Dakara Superweapon charging
  • Naqahdah-enhanced nuclear weapon
  • The Dakara Superweapon in the Temple of Dakara can return all matter in its range to its base state
  • Anubis's Ancient weapon that charges a Stargate powerfully enough that it explodes and destroys the entire planet it is on.
  • Anubis's mothership, powered with the Eye of Ra, in "Full Circle"
  • The Ori Priors can turn planets into Point Singularities (Black Holes) to power their supergates, and have done so twice thus far.
  • A stargate has been used to scoop up matter from a star's surface, successfully destabilizing the star and causing it to go supernova.
  • Stargate P3W-451 is embedded in 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.
    • A gate positioned in the surface of a sun dialed P3W-451, causing matter to be sucked through the gate in sufficient quantity that the star was destabilised and went nova. In this case, dialing from a planet-bound gate would also most likely destroy the dialier's planet.
  • The Replicators have eaten an entire planet and converted everything on it into replicator blocks.
  • The Asgard managed to destroy Orilla using some sort of self-destruct device.

Star Trek

  • The Doomsday Machine
  • 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)
  • Reman warbird Scimitar.
  • Tox Uthat
  • Trilithium torpedo (which fired at a star causes a supernova and thus destroys the target planet)
  • The Xindi superweapon
  • Species 8472 starships
  • Krenim temporal incursion ship
  • Son'a collector (intended to strip radiation surrounding a planet and render it uninhabitable)
  • Planetcracker weapons and sunkiller bombs (Diane Duane's novels)
  • The Fleet of Romulan and Cardassian Starships that destroyed the Founder's homeworld in Star Trek Deep Space Nine

Star Wars

Warhammer 40,000

File:Exterminatus.jpg

Various games

Various films, television and radio programmes

File:Unicron2.jpg
Unicron consuming one of Cybertron's moons
  • Several attacks used in the manga/anime Dragonball such as the Death Ball technique as used by Freeza to destroy Planet Vegeta, are capable of destroying a planet.
  • The Doomsday Machine (Dr. Strangelove)
  • The Drej Mothership (Titan A.E.)
  • Unicron (Transformers: The Movie)
  • The Vok second Moon (Beast Wars) (could only destroy energon-rich worlds)
  • Hydra-Cannon
  • Vogon Constructor Fleet Ships (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) (appear in all adaptations of the series)
  • The Beast Planet (Shadow Raiders)
  • Point singularity weapons, nova bombs, Maximm charges, kinetic missiles (rare case) in Andromeda
  • Serpentera featured in Power Rangers.
  • The Displacement Engine in Farscape
  • The Wave Motion Gun from Space Battleship Yamato (a.k.a. Star Blazers in the U.S.)
  • Gamilon planet bombs from Space Battleship Yamato
  • The Hand of Omega in Doctor Who
  • The Pirate Planet in Doctor Who
  • The Planet and System Killers in Gall Force
  • 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
  • The Desiccator in Dark Reign
  • The Ideon Sword (capable of slicing a planet in half) and the Ideon Gun (capable of cutting large swaths of destruction encompasing 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.
  • 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.
  • Likewise in Gunbuster's sequel series: Diebuster, the android Buster Machine #7 splits the moon Titan in half.
  • 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.
  • 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 Vandread, A special variant of harvest ship can destroy planets that are not needed by Earth anymore.
  • In the cartoon Invader Zim, the Planet Jackers tried to feed the Earth to their sun to keep it from going out.
  • "Mega-maid" from the Movie Spaceballs. A transformation of Spaceball One, capable of sucking the air from an entire planet and thus making it inhabitable.
  • 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.
  • In the Kurt Russell film 'Soldier' one portable explosive device nicknamed 'Planet Killers' is used, devastating the planet.
  • 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 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."
  • 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.
  • 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 the Roger Corman film Battle Beyond the Stars, the evil Sador's mothership has a planet killing superweapon 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
  • The Annihilatrix from Frisky Dingo

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.
  • The Dahak-class battle station (David Weber's Heirs of Empire trilogy)
  • The Electron Pump (Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves)
  • Galactus (Marvel Universe)
  • Spacer nuclear reaction intensifier (Robots and Empire)
  • The Warworld (DC Comics)
  • Erdammeru the Void-Hound (DC Comics)
  • The Neutronium Alchemist (Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy)
  • Nova Bombs (Starship Troopers)
  • The Supernova (Matthew Reilly's Temple)
  • 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.)
  • Device Ultimate in The Xenocide Mission
  • 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.
  • 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 dematerialisation of physical objects and the teleporting of close to fifty billion stars in order to wipe out a Galaxy-wide alien civilisation 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.
  • a bomb made of 9th-dimensional matter in Supernova
  • Mechanoid motherships (Rifts)
  • Relativistic projectiles (Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski's The Killing Star)
  • 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 HALO: First Strike, a human weapon known as the NOVA bomb is mentioned. It is described as being made up of multiple thermal nuclear warheads with a central core of material that boosts its yield to a sufficient amount to destroy a planet and anything in the vicinity of that planet. In HALO: Ghosts of Onyx, the weapon is detonated on board a covenant ship orbiting a covenant world. The planet suffered damage sufficient to render it uninhabitable and the explosion also destroyed a covenant fleet.

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