Highlights

  • Forget phasers, the deadliest weapon in Star Trek is the transporter, with endless destructive possibilities.
  • The controversial idea of using transporters as weapons challenges the boundaries of Federation technology in the franchise.
  • While an intriguing concept, the transporter's lethal potential is a fantasy that has yet to be achieved in reality.

While the Star Trek universe is stuffed with many powerful weapons and dangerous technologies, one fan has outlined what they see as the most deadly weapon in the United Federation of Planets' arsenal.

Star Trek has been at the forefront of driving the general view of science fiction technology since its inception in the 1960s, with each new entry in the franchise giving fans more and more futuristic devices, systems, and techniques to accomplish everything from solving world hunger to crossing galaxies. One of the more prominent ways that sci-fi properties show off this advancement is with weapons and how potent they can be. Despite the utopian trappings of the Federation, it still has its fair share of bizarre futuristic weapons seen across mediums, which fans have discussed at length and ranked over the years.

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While there is certainly no shortage of weapons in Star Trek with the capacity to do some wicked damage, Reddit user FatherBobby has a unique pick for which of the Federation's armaments should be considered its deadliest weapon. Taking to the site’s r/startrek board to post his controversial opinion in a post titled “Shower thought... The Federation's most deadly weapon is...”, the user would answer… the transporter. The answer is controversial for several reasons, notably that the transporter isn’t a weapon. Present in almost every episode and film in the franchise, the transporter is the device used to teleport people and objects within the Star Trek universe, notably to and from Federation ships. While some unusual uses for transporters have been explored in Star Trek, the idea of this tech being the deadliest Federation weapon is a new one, which the OP proceeds to elaborate on.

Forget phasers and photon torpedoes, it's already been shown that entire planets can be evacuated via transport, so it would be just as easy to transport an entire planet of people up a few hundred feet and splat them back into the planet, or even just into space. Wanna take out a Borg ship? Just transport a nearby asteroid directly into the path of the ship, kinda like a railgun. Transport the air into space and suffocate everyone. So many possibilities.

While it should be easy enough to explain how the Star Trek transporter works, as the transporter breaks down the objects or organisms into an energy pattern via a process named dematerialization and then rematerializes them at the destination, it isn’t all that straightforward. The franchise's long-running nature has led to quite several occasional exceptions to the usual rules surrounding the tech, a point that other fans in the comments were quick to note. Another popular comment mentioned the Genesis Device, a well-meaning weapon of mass destruction designed to atomize an uninhabited planet’s surface and then reconstruct it with breathable air, water, food, and natural resources to make it livable. This seems to be FatherBobby’s idea made manifest and gives some credence to the original thought.

While the idea is interesting, the transporter is one thing from the franchise that has no bearing on the world outside the screen. While no one is even entirely sure if this futuristic Star Trek tech is feasible, teleportation has been at the top of mankind’s bucket list for ages. If scientists ever do manage to accomplish this feat, fans of the franchise can only hope no one takes up FatherBobby’s ideas in real life.

The Star Trek franchise is available for streaming on Paramount Plus.

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Source: FatherBobby/Reddit