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

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.

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.

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

"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. 😊

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

Never forget the unprovoked attack on Alderaan

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.

Finally, a video explaining how Ican purge the unclean.

"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

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

A new ironic series Sunday Super Weapons.

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.

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

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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

A common super weapon would be a Atomic mass conversion device. Such a device can be the size of a base ball. Once it hits a planet it can convert it into anything the user wants. It requires no destructive power. Quick, quiet and gives you a planet that is turned into a extension of your civilization.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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"...

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.

Palpatine has entered in the chat.

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

NOTIFICATION GANG!!!

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

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."

Thank you for your hard work issac ❤

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

cant get enough of this mas videos

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

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

Thank you for all your incredible content.

Another epic video, perfect addition to a good Sunday afternoon

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.

Yet another amazing video. Pure quality

Thank you Isaac.

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

Can a nuke be powerful enough to start a nitrogen-nitrogen fusion reaction with the nitrogen in the atmosphere?

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.

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

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

Pulling the power cord on the computer running our simulation

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

amazing episode! Loved it

This is going to be fun!

Thanks Issac

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

Nice! Dropped just in time for my Sunday afternoon project

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

I enjoyed this video. Great and good.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I love you man!

First Rule of Warfare: Never die first.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

Heck yes love Mr. Author

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."

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

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

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.

One other point in favour of having many smaller bombs over one big one is simply the flexibility, with smaller bombs you can scale the number and dispersion pattern of the devices to the size and resistance of the target. With a huge bomb you can only efficiently deploy it against an extremely large or insanely well hardened target, there is no point firing a 1 Teraton device at a colony on a small asteroid, even if the colony is inside you could excavate your way in to the settlement and blow it with probably just a handful of 1 Megaton devices, and certainly with far less than a million of them. With just a fraction of that firepower you could turn the entire asteroid into a bunch of gas although even that would be overkill blasting every fragment larger than a pebble until no such fragments remain would well and truly do the job too. Only exception perhaps would be if you are afraid of even bacteria surviving the assault but it surely wouldn't be that hard to sterilise fragments that small, basking the whole area around the fragments in gamma rays from nuclear devices or something like a graser should do the trick.

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

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

"That's no moon...!" (yeah, *somebody* had to say it, might as well be me.)