5 Famous Fictional Weapons

From 1966 to 1994, the Klingons and Romulans, with their cloaking devices and disruptors, held the spot of being famous fictional weapons makers the longest. Action and science fiction movies used to be the playground for writers and directors to showcase powerful weapons that only exist in the imagination. The first famous fictional weapon in US history is the ray gun used by Flash Gordon. The interesting thing is that lasers ended up being invented. This makes one wonder what the future will hold for the other forays into the realm of weapons used in the fiction genres.

1. Weapons of Star Trek

Phasers and Photon torpedoes follow both the Captain Kirk and Captain Picard eras. The Federation had ship mounted as well as rifle and hand held Phaser weapons. They were used for everything from stunning an aggressor to completely vaporizing them. They were used in more than one episode to heat rocks for warmth or light. Klingons and Romulans used disrupter weapons. The Varon-T disruptor was banned by the Federation because of the terrible slow disintegration death it caused.

2. Empire Weapons of Star Wars

The Death Star was being made by the Empire to fight the Rebel Alliance. There were two of them. The Death Stars were supposed to be the size of some planet’s moons and were capable of completely obliterating entire planets. Even though that would be considered an ultimate weapon, it was the lowly Lightsaber that took hold of the imaginations of audience members. The Lightsaber emitted a plasma beam that was the length of a sword. It could cut a person in half with a single swipe.

3. Weapons of Halo

Halo is probably the biggest first-person shooter game in video game history. The multi-billion dollar franchise has spawned lucrative sequels. In the Halo universe, a weapon called “Halo rings” was made to protect people from the “Flood” of parasites that were consuming everything in the Milky Way galaxy. When the Halos were activated, they were designed to destroy all living things that the parasites could use as food. They were superstructures 5,000 miles in diameter with several of them making up an array.

4. Weapons of Umbrella Corp

The Umbrella Corporation is from the Resident Evil series of video games. The franchise’s real fame came when Mila Jovovich starred in the feature films based on the video game plot. Umbrella Corp is a fictional evil corporation driven by profit. Their claim to fame with weapons was using genetics to create powerful soldiers. Jovovich played the role of Alice. She was engineered by the evil corporation but turned on them to become a defender of the remnant of human beings left after a weapons experiment went bad. The T-virus made by the corporation ended up turning most of the human race into zombies.

5. The Martian Tripod

The “War of the Worlds” was written in 1898 by author H.G. Wells. Back then, speculation abounded about whether Mars was inhabited or not. The “little green men” in H.G. Wells novel turned out to be more malevolent than other forays into the genre. The Martian Tripods were large weapons that walked on three legs. They were cited in the book written by Wells as being “higher than many houses.” In the 2005 movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise, the Tripods could fire beams that could disintegrate vehicles or buildings as well as being able to emit a poison gas. The Tripods would then pick up the humans to extract their blood.

There are many famous fictional weapons. This is just one version of the Top 5 of all time. Honorable mentions go to Robocop from Omni Consumer Products, and the alien of the Alien movie franchises. Technically, the Alien was not manufactured but was implied to just be an alien species. Some versions of the back story imply it was a manufactured race of biological weapon. There are so many fictional weapons in the history of literature, TV and movies that it would take an encyclopedia to cover them all.

Attached Images:

Sam Hester is a gunsmith and guest author at BecomeGunSmith.org, a site with information on how to become a gunsmith.