DandomRudeWhich battleship from which sci-fi series has the longest laser range? Who has the longest?
BjörnProbably whichever uses an actual laser.
PsionicsicknessDeath Star fired from lunar range. Not sure if that’s the right answer but it’s a start.
KrakatoaI can’t think of any with actual lasers
I found this:
The Atlec used laser weapons on their ships and once targeted them on the Enterprise-D in an attempt to acquire the Straleb Jewel of Thesia and Thadiun Okona. Picard noted that such lasers would not even penetrate their navigation shields. Starfleet regulations required that a vessel targeted with laser weapons go to yellow alert; it was considered a very old regulation. (TNG: “The Outrageous Okona”)
The Space Battleship Yamato, seeing as you said “Battleship”.
I recommended that show to my anime watching daughter and she laughed at me
Space Battleship Yamato
No respect for the classics.
Death Star fired from lunar range. Not sure if that’s the answer but it’s a good start.
While the death star did fire a hyperlaser it was considered a station and not a ship!
Oh fine. You win this one.
Meho_NohomeIt’s definitely no moon.
And it’s definitely fully operational.
in the Honorverse lasers are the main ship mounted weapons and are to be focused effectively out to a million kilometers against unshielded targets. Off the top of my head that series has some of the longest range combat.
Fun books but the formula gets tired quick. Every book starts the same way, and what a Mary Sue character. Haven is such a caricature of communism that they’re not even fun as a villain.
I read both the Honorverse and Jack Campbell’s The Lost Fleet series, and They both have some interesting caricatures of communism/hyper-corpo-communism.
Reading both series, and other serial space operas, I’m really just reading it for the space battles and futuristic Cyberpunk political intrigue, that’s why the Mary Sue main characters work, that and having a cast of characters that are nice to come back to, part of what I loved about the familiarity of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
Also Weber hasn’t been writing Honor as frequently these days, so it’s a treat to go back to that storyline when something new comes out, I’ve been a Weber fan for decades and enjoy the Safehold series as well, even though the main character is pretty much Honor Harrington, lol.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆I can’t remember what it was, but there was a game or a book I played/read where the lasers on battleships were infinite and there’s an argument over why the gunner needed to be precise.
Not Mass Effect; not the “Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in the galaxy” line. Similar thing, but that game world used ballistics, not energy weapons IIRC.
Horus Heresy had something similar to that. Using their weaponry, I think that the quote was something like you will ruin someone’s day. It might be today or it might be a planet 10000 years from now, so be accurate.
Didn’t the last Star Wars movie have deathstar laser mounted to battleships and they were all going to shoot one planet somewhere in the galaxy - and they started with Corrisont which was on the other side of the galaxy. Would that be considered longest range?
VindictiveJudgeMixing up a couple movies. The planet-killer fleet never got to use their main guns. Starkiller Base did destroy planets in another star system, but none of them was Coruscant. The main planet was commonly mistaken for Coruscant, but that’s due to bad communication with the audience. The laser splitting to hit individual planets in the same system being visible with the naked eye from anywhere in the galaxy also indicates Abrams has no idea how distance works.
BloodwoodsrisenRegardless of how distance works, it was still one of my favorite scenes
Did you know it would have been impossible for Denethor to run the distance across the courtyard of Minas Tirith while on fire?
He may or may not know how distance works, but he knows how screens work and prioritizes that.
It’s not about the size of your laser, it’s what you do with it.
Yeah but it takes a long time to melt an asteroid with a flashlight.
I know it’s not on a ship but if Deathstar counts, this should be pretty close.
I want to introduce you guys to a bunch of Colony Lasers in Gundam universe.
Colony Laser
The Colony Laser is a weapon of mass destruction which appeared several times in the Gundam universe. As the name implies, the weapon is an empty shell of an orbiting space colony which is converted into a large laser to destroy several targets at once. Built by Gihren Zabi of the Principality of Zeon, the first colony laser, known as the Solar Ray, was planned to be used by Zeon to attack the Earth Federation. Instead, however, he chose to use it to eliminate his father Degwin Sodo Zabi, who wa
-RJ-I’m not totally sure but want the Death Star always moved to pretty much be in orbit before firing? It was powerful but not necessarily looking range.
That was just because the guy they hired to aim it was a bit slow. They told him they could fire from far away, but he just kept driving it up and parking it right in front of the target.
camr_onThe Macross can hit from Earth’s surface to past the moon, probably much further aswell but it’s never really explained
SDF1 main gun. Anything larger than a city shouldn’t be considered a ship.
But SDF-1 had an entire city within it 🧐
The Behemoth from the Expanse Series had a laser with a range of literal light years.
Granted, it was a comm laser, but they did weaponize it at one point.
Even if we assume that the beam had a solar-system sized diameter after 4 ly, a weaponized output should still be in ship-killer range after an AE or five.
Ultimately, the weapon was never fired (and would have melted half the ship if it ever were).
The Tribe of Silver melted Earth from several hundred light years away.
Lensman USS Ohio was pretty impressive. It had a scout/targeting ships that were always just on the verge of not being in range, when it saw an enemy it sent the location back which meant that the effective range was always a circle double the sensor range.