Superweapon

"Tony Stark has created the ultimate weapon — a masterpiece of death. A man with a dozen of these could rule all of Asia."

— Raza on the Iron Man suit, Iron Man

Superweapons are weapons for which there is no practical counter. Whenever one enters a setting, their mere presence and scale overshadow any conventional options available - whether defensive or offensive, nothing can effectively fight them.

Whatever the specifics and whatever the weapon does, Superweapons are game changers exactly because conventional means of fighting is completely negated by their in-universe Game Breaking abilities^note in much the same way that an army of muggles usually serve as nothing more than Cannon Fodder if there's a Differently Powered Individual around, to the point that conflicts are often decided by who controls them or whether or not they can be destroyed/disabled before they can be used. Usually the superweapon's mere existence means any conventional rules go out the window, but it can also be the case that firing it might not be considered an option until no other recourse is left^note This is especially the case if the weapon in question is indiscriminate and leaves a lot of collateral damage, or if there is some cost to its activation.

Sometimes the only counter to a superweapon is another superweapon, and might form a parallel to a Yin-Yang Clash or an Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object situation, and in these situations the superweapons might end up becoming the object of a Lensman Arms Race and suffer Uniqueness Decay as a result (as was the case throughout history), while relegating conventional fighting to theaters of battle without their presence.

Compare Legendary Weapon, which often overlaps since a Lost Superweapon is prime breeding ground for legends, Infinity +1 Sword for conventional weapons that are the strongest of their kind, Super-Soldier for soldiers who render the ordinary best of the best into so much Cannon Fodder, and BFG, which may overlap if all you need to utterly dominate the battlefield is a really, really, big gun.

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Subtropes

• Atomic Hate: Nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
• Colony Drop: No need for finesse here; weapons capable of this just hurl the largest object they can find at a planet and watch the devastation. The occupants will be hard pressed to stop it.
• Doomsday Device: Any device that will bring about some unspecified 'doom' if it is activated is usually one of these.
  • Pointless Doomsday Device: An ancient device with the singular purpose of destroying the world.
• Fantastic Nuke: Nuclear weapons are the Real Life superweapon of the 20th and 21st century, as such their destructive potential is immediately relatable to any audience, and invoking the detonation of nuclear bombs, regardless of what makes them, instantly gets across that this is a weapon above the setting's norm.
• Grey Goo: Set one nanobot on a world, tell it to make 10 copies of itself out of any available material, and then wait. Eventually, the entire planet is Eaten Alive as the nanobots consume even the weapons used to fight it.
• Kill Sat: A weapon of devastating potential capable of striking anywhere on an entire hemisphere of a planet with no threat to its owners
• Lost Superweapon: A weapon either sealed away or otherwise lost to time, and because Older Is Better this weapon is immeasurably more dangerous than its contemporaries.
• Neutron Bomb: A thermonuclear weapon specifically designed to use radiation to kill people while leaving buildings relatively unharmed.
• Nuke 'em: An attitude that the wielders of a superweapon might take; proportional response be damned.
• Phlebotinum Bomb: A weapon which might not be more devastating than its counterparts, but only damages specific targets.
• Planet Destroyer: If a weapon can destroy a planet, it will immediately be considered a superweapon by those on the receiving end, and seldom is the Planet Destroyer that will not destroy something smaller if it gets in the way.
• Superweapon Surprise: For those superweapons that the wielders don't advertise having.
• Superweapon Suspense Subversion: The usage of a superweapon, especially the indiscriminately destructive kinds, very often carries drastic consequences. As such, some authors up the audience's suspense by merely pretending to have a superweapon used.
• Synthetic Plague: Plagues are already deadly; with just a little genetic engineering you have a weapon that self-propagates and kills anyone it comes into contact with.
• Tactical Superweapon Unit: These units are overpowered, expensive and hard to deploy. They focus the power of a superweapon where it's needed, rather than indiscriminately.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Superweapons of the 'overwhelming power' variety often take this form if laser-based.
• Weapon of Mass Destruction: For the superweapons who dial up the destructive power to the limit, then keep on going, and don't care one iota for Friendly Fireproof.

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Examples

Comic Books

• Blake and Mortimer: In The Secret of the Swordfish, during World War III, Blake and Mortimer work their damnedest to respectively build and pilot the SX-1 "Swordfish" rocket plane, which can take off from underwater and is virtually impossible to intercept by Anti-Air weapons. It is the only chance of La Résistance to defeat the Empire of Tibet (an unnamed empire in the animated series) that took over much of the world, and once it's completed, a single one of them annihilates the empire's fleet, and a handful of them end the empire with nuclear strikes.

Fan Works

• The New Adventures of Invader Zim: The Story Arc of Season 1 is built around the search for a Lost Superweapon called Project Domination, an ultimate weapon created by a rogue Meekrob Mad Scientist, which was then cast out into the stars by the rest of his disgusted species to be lost forever. When finally found, it turns out to be a Wave-Motion Gun so powerful that at minimum power it unleashes streams of energy the size of planes, and at maximum power is projected to be capable of punching holes into a planet the size of Lithuania.

Film

• Five involves five survivors, one woman and four men, of an atomic bomb disaster. It appears to have wiped out the rest of the human race while leaving all infrastructure intact.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe has the Infinity Gauntlet, an armored gauntlet designed to harness the energies of the six Infinity Stones. While the individual infinity Stones that power it are powerful, none of them are insurmountable in a Superhero setting, but the gauntlet can harness all six at once for universe-spanning effects with absolutely no means of defending against it — the wielder, in essence, becomes The Omnipotent. Once the gauntlet enters play, the goals of everyone else become "Keep the Infinity Stones far away from it", and once it is used to wipe out fully half of all sentient life, the goal immediately shifts to using it to undo the devastation.
• The Death Stars of Star Wars, two moon-sized battlestations capable of destroying planets, are perhaps the most famous cinematic superweapons, if not the most iconic superweapons of all time. They have become so ingrained into the consciousness that many Star Wars games culminate in the Battles of Yavin or Endor, and not only did they influence years of Expanded Universe material (see Literature below), but it also inspired Starkiller Base in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a planet-sized battlestation capable of destroying entire planetary systems.

Literature

• The Mahabharata has celestial weapons or 'Brahmastra', which may be the Ur-Example. These are magical weapons provided by the gods and requiring years of training and austerities to acquire, and are used as a weapon of last resort in combat. They always hit their target and completely annihilate their enemies, and are described as a weapon channeling the power of the entire universe. The Brahmashirsha Astra is an even more OP version wielded by Arjuna that has the power to kill gods and annihilate the world.
• Star Wars Legends: Trying to recapture the magic of the Original Trilogy, and the Death Star being part of that magic, the Legends continuity (especially the Bantam-era novels) becomes positively littered with superweapons, both leftovers from the height of the Empire and new constructions.
  • Jedi Academy Trilogy gives us the Sun Crusher, a starfighter-sized ship with literally-indestructible armor that fires resonance torpedoes that can supernova a star.
  • Dark Empire provides the World Devastators, automated factory ships that strip-mine planets for resources to build other ships, notably clouds of TIE Droid fighters, becoming one-ship Zerg Rush factories. Also Palpatine's Eclipse-class Super Star Destroyers, which contain a scaled-down version of the Death Star's superlaser. They can't destroy planets, but can sterilize them in a single shot or annihilate almost any ship.
  • New Jedi Order: The Yuuzhan Vong have "Yo'Gand's Core", a tactic whereby they plant a gravity-controlling dovin basal to lock on to the planet's moon and bring it crashing down on the planet's surface. They rarely use it, as it's implied one of the reasons they travelled to the Star Wars galaxy is because there aren't enough habitable planets left in their own because of this exact tactic.
  • Grand Admiral Thrawn himself is considered a superweapon, partly due to Flanderization In-Universe and out, partly due to the fact that he's just that damn good. His tactical genius, ability to tailor his attacks to his enemy's psychological blind spots, and knowing when to withdraw combine to make him a very difficult foe to actually defeat decisively. It takes a string of grave miscalculations on his part, and a Bodyguard Betrayal to bring about his downfall.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Invoked by the means by which one can enact Exterminatus. Ranging from basic planetary bombardment by guns the size of most settings' small spaceships, to specific planet-cracker or viral ordnance which either crack the planet down to the mantle or turn everything organic into a high-flammable biological slurry, the whole point of Exterminatus is that by the time you need to use it, you need to be absolutely certain that nothing can defend against it.
  • From Battlefleet Gothic: The Activated Blackstone Fortresses are treated as such; not because they are individually overwhelmingly-powerful, but because they can do a Combined Energy Attack with their main guns that fire pure Warp energy. One can be bested by a starship the size of a small moon, three using their combined power can destroy stars - there are six in existence.

Video Games

• The Ace Combat series tries to include at least one per game. Many of them were built as a response to the Ulysses meteor that threatened Strangereal in 1994.
  • In Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies features two:
    • Stonehenge was built as a series of gigantic, rotating rail cannons capable of shooting down the Ulysses meteor and any other fragments from it, until the Federal Republic of Erusea seized it during the beginning of the Usean Continental War. For the first half of the game, it serves as a long-range anti-air weapon against the ISAF forces that forms a perimeter that prevents them from advancing, shooting down any aircraft attempting to get too close.
    • Once Stongehenge is destroyed, the Eruseans fall back to Megalith, a missile-launch facility capable of firing ballistic missiles anywhere across the Usean continent. Failure to blow it up before it activates is an instant game over.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has the SOLG, a Kill Sat capable of launching nukes from above. Should it lose contact from whoever is controlling it on the surface, it is programmed to fall from orbit and destroy a pre-determined city.
  • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War has the Excalibur, a Wave-Motion Gun that catches the allied forces off-guard when giant lasers start blasting at them from long distance. The assault to destroy it proved daunting, as it can still fire at anything approaching it only until they actually get within half a mile.
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown features the Arsenal Birds, two gigantic AI-controlled airborne carriers that are able to dispense dozens of Attack Drones to do its fighting, as well as fire devastating long-range burst missiles from afar. They also have Deflector Shields that prevents damage from conventional weapons. All throughout the story, their arrival on the battlefield forces the Osean forces into retreating, because the two of them form a perimeter around the Space Elevator that is key to winning the war. It takes the final cannon from Stonehenge that wasn't destroyed in Ace Combat 4 to pierce through the shields and destroy one of them.
• The Command & Conquer series has featured superweapons throughout its games: Each is always of the 'unretaliatory range' kind (often being the only things capable of blind-firing into the Fog of War), but oftentimes also of the Weapon of Mass Destruction variety - the only thing holding them back is a lengthy charge time between each shot, and it often is a mad dash for the enemies to ensure their destruction before they come online.
  • The Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series prominently feature GDI's Ion Cannon, and it is mentioned In-Universe that it became really easy for GDI to outlaw their own nukes and shame the use of such when they possessed a different weapon of that was otherwise just as devastating and unblockable.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series is the only one of the three main series to use anything beyond range and deadliness of its superweapons; while they certainly have that, they also feature the Chronosphere, the Iron Curtain, and the Nanoswarm Barrier, the former providing instant relocation of a sizeable group of vehicles, while the latter two makes anything within their targeting area completely indestructible — while the Iron Curtain targets a smaller area than the Nanoswarm Barrier, the nanoswarm barrier marks the targeted area in which nothing can be damaged, while the iron curtain makes the targetted units indestructible, leaving them free to run rampant against a helpless opposition.
    • In the Expansion pack for Red Alert 2, "Yuri's Revenge," the titular supervillain Yuri uses the Psionic Dominator and Genetic Mutator as his supeweapons. The Psionic Dominator fires a pulse of psychic energy that levels bases like a nuke, but permanently Mind Controls any non-robotic unit caught in its area-of-effect. It's building-destroying blast is much wider than its mind-control ability.The Genetic Mutator instantly transforms any infantry unit caught in the blast into the Hulk-like Brute.
    • In the Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 expansion, the Soviet campaign centers around the Sigma Harmonizer, a weapon capable of stopping time... while leaving allied units unaffected. Needless to say, the soviets make destroying it their top priority before enough power is generated to overcome its limitation to only be active in short bursts.
• The Elder Scrolls series has Numidium, a Dwemer-built Humongous Mecha designed to be powered by the Heart and possibly soul of quasi-dead Lorkhan. Unfortunately, the Dwemer were a race of Nay-Theist Straw Vulcans, and Numidium may have followed their tendencies upon its first activation by turning all of its creators into a Puff of Logic. It is such a powerful Reality Warper that it invariably ends up refuting time around itself before eventually disproving its own existence and vanishing. Long after the Dwemer disappeared, it was refurbished by Tiber Septim, equipped with a jury-rigged power source consisting of the soul of one or several of Lorkhan's incarnates, and used to finish his conquest of Tamriel by handing the Altmer a Curb-Stomp Battle. Several centuries later it would suddenly reappear in a province fraught with unrest and rebellion and again break time so badly upon activation that every warring faction gained control of it simultaneously, wiping each other out and leaving The Empire to pick up the pieces. Finally, former lore writer Michael Kirkbride's Loose Canon web comic script C0DA sees Numidium's return by disproving its own non-existence, intent on refuting the entire world out of existence.
• Mass Effect 3 features the 'Crucible', the culmination of millennia worth of flinging an ever more complete light into the future, when connected to the citadel, it is capable of wiping out every single synthetic being in the galaxy, including the synthetic Reapers, and when it becomes apparent that the Reapers cannot be defeated through conventional combat, the attention of everyone in the galaxy turns towards ensuring its completion and defense. It is later discovered that it can also perform an inverted Villain Override, or subject the entire galaxy to transhumanism, which renders the Abusive Precursors objective moot, which sets up Philosophical Choice Endings.
• Metal Gear Rex from Metal Gear Solid was designed to be a game changer in world conflicts. It is capable of launching nukes from halfway across the world with an electromagnetic railgun, and since the nukes aren't being propelled by fuel once launched, they're undetectable by radar, rendering defence impossible.
• Spore has three different superweapons in the Space Stage: the Planet Buster, which completely destroys a planet; the Gravitation Wave, which flattens every city on a planet while leaving the world intact; and the Fanatical Frenzy, which forcibly mind-controls a planet's entire populace. The use of any of these superweapons constitutes a violation of interstellar law and will cause all nearby empires to view you unfavorably (save for the Grox).
• StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void sees the Protoss on the run from their Abusive Precursor, Amon. To stand a chance, they activate The Ark made by their ancestors — sealed away until the Darkest Hour was upon their descendants. This Arkship, known as The Spear of Adun is slow to reenergize over the course of the campaign, but as it slowly powers up, it becomes clear that this is much more than a mere Arkship: The weaponry it sports can glass planets, and even fleets of capital ships cannot withstand that kind of firepower, it's got the production capabilities to rival entire planets as well, which means it can construct and launch capital ships itself, holds a legion of Protoss warriors who willingly entered stasis to fight in the Darkest Hour, is an Arcology thanks to its miniature Dyson Sphere powercore which not only provides it with power for all its functions, but also allows it to feed its Protoss occupants as they photosynthesize, is extremely maneuverable for its size, and is nigh-Made of Indestructium — the only thing that did any significant damage were entire fleets of ships weaponizing Ramming Always Works, and it still survived that in a repairable state, while the attackers did not survive at all. This is a ship that, once fully powered, is completely unrivalled by anything In-Universe — to the point where even the Custom-Built Host Amon built for himself couldn't stand up to it. The caveat is that it takes a long while to get to this stage, and while this process can be sped up by feeding the powercore a mineral known as Solarite, because the Spear of Adun is Lost Technology, Solarite is a lot more limited now than it was back when it was created, leaving an instant-energizing beyond the capabilities of current-day Protoss; The Spear of Adun used to be one amongst three sister Arkships, but the other two were activated in the defense of Protoss homeworld during an Alien Invasion by the Zerg Swarm — these Arkships did not have the time to energize at all, and were taken out by the Zerg through copious amounts of literal Zerg Rush: The Spear of Adun only survived this fate because it was left inactive, and the Zerg settled for infesting it, rather than destroying it.

Real Life

• The Korean Geobukseon, or 'Turtle Ship' as it has come to be known, has a reputation to this day for being a a direct counter to anything Japan had in the 1590's - It had an armored deck, so small arms fire would be hard pressed to hurt the crew; The deck was spiked to deter boarding actions, Japan's conventional sea-tactic outside of small arms fire; The dragonhead at its stem could let out both fire and sulphur, the first of which was was very effective offensively against Japan's wooden ships, and the latter which allowed for decreased visibility; finally, the cannons were much better than the Japanese contemporaries, as Japan was used to fighting land wars, not sea battles, unlike Korea who was dealing with pirates a lot. In the entire war, 0 turtle ships were destroyed in direct engagement, and the only losses that were incurred happened because of spygames putting a General Failure in charge, who proceeded to let his fleet get ambushed in the dead of night.
• In the early 20th century, the invention of machineguns practically rendered conventional battle tactics moot; the reason why so much of World War 1 was resigned to trench warfare and artillery shelling was that there was no effective way to challenge an entrenched machinegun — Artillery was not powerful (or accurate) enough to breach the entrenched positions; aerial combat was in its infancy and 'bombing' was often just dropping long-fuse grenades over the side of the cockpit, leaving it both incredibly imprecise and ineffectual; and any attempt to charge was self-destructive at best and only the suicidal (or those erroneously believing in the Marked Bullet propaganda) would do so. This sheer dominance directly led to the accelerated invention of the Tank, which never held superweapon status as the first incarnations moved so slowly they could be outpaced by walking, which — coupled with their size — made them really easy to hit with direct artillery strikes. By the time they were moving at a speed that didn't make them easy targets for artillery, personnel-carried and truck-hauled anti-tank weaponry had been invented.
• Nuclear Weapons are the superweapons of the second half of the 20th and early 21st century; weapons of such destructive potential with no viable defence, leaving no one wanting to be the first to use them out of fear of inviting retaliation in kind.
• Hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles gained notoriety in The New '20s. Due to their speed, they form a cone of atmospheric plasma in front of them that eats radar pulses, rendering them undetectable by radar. As nearly every kind of Anti-Air defense uses radar for detecting incoming threats and guiding their own missiles to intercept, and the missiles' hypersonic speed makes them nearly impossible to hit with unguided Anti-Air, this makes them a form of nigh-Unblockable Attack whose only drawback is that getting a missile to go that fast takes a lot of power, which makes them large and expensive compared to the conventional options. The real nightmare fuel comes when you consider that there's nothing stopping them from being armed with nuclear warheads, but that's more a point in favour of the superweapon status of nuclear weapons than the hypersonic missiles themselves.
• A good case can be made for satellites being an early-21st century superweapon of their own alongside nuclear weapons. While the world has yet to develop Kill Sats, that's almost a footnote compared to their usefulness in terms of rendering battlefields incredibly transparent and facilitating communication, because while the technology exists to shoot down satellites no one wants to be the first to do so. This is because the nature of their operation in orbit around Earth means that shooting one down would go a long way towards triggering Kessler Syndrome which would render any kind of satellite unfeasible, even those owned by the one shooting them down, and even those used for civilian day-to-day life - and even that's not to mention the political fallout. Given that even combatants without satellites of their own can simply purchase access to private satellites from the numerous companies who are willing to sell such access, this means that battlefield intelligence is incredibly affordable, and as such the battlefields of the early 21st century are so transparent that if you do not operate on the assumption that Sinister Surveillance is in full effect your life expectancy is severely decreased.

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