My Life In Fandom: Space Opera Can't Have Too Many Super-Weapons

Things got you wound up? Need something stupid to laugh at? Eckhart's Ladder--the most fanboyish of fan channel for Space Wizard Fun Time--has you covered.

Of the complaints made here, only one doesn't play: "there are too many superweapons".

We're talking a galaxy-sized setting. Space Is Big. There are too few superweapons, not too many, and the galaxy is stupidly under-populated even for the agranian worlds. A galaxy-spanning civilization, even one riven by competing states, will nontheless be measured in the hundreds of trillions in population and should be expected to field Death Stars as if they were Star Destroyers (and Star Destroyers as if they were actual destroyers and not battleship/carrier hybrids).

This sort of thing is what E.E. Smith--the father of Space Opera--got right with the Lensmen series, and man did the super-weapons in that series get crazy: trans-galactic railguns using dead planets as ammo, weaponizing entire stars as super-lasers, planet-sized webs that disintegrated what they touched, and so on. Compared to what he wrote, the super-weapons of both Western and Eastern Space Opera in comics, film, and television is often pathetic.

(Note: You have to start thinking in terms of Getter Emperor, Mazinger Zero, Ideon, the Third Impact, fully-powered Zeorymer, Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann/Super Anti-Spiral, etc. to get on Smith's level. Iserlohn and Geiserberg from Legend of the Galactic Heroes are entry-level efforts by any galaxy-spanning civilization worth a damn.)

And that's before we start talking biological weapons. That's when things really get nasty.