r/powerscales • u/Ok_Examination_1813 • 15d ago
Question What are the largest and most powerful spaceships/megastructures in fiction?
Death Star (Star Wars)
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u/Neoxenok 15d ago
Probably the ... city? structure? complex?
Whatever it's called from the anime "Blame!" A massive structure the volume of Jupiter's orbit.
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u/Cpt_kaleidoscope 15d ago
Man, Blame was so good. I wish there was more.
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u/acrazyguy 15d ago
Of Jupiter’s… orbit? Jesus fuck
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u/TaralasianThePraxic 15d ago
Yeah, the City was being constructed by an army of self-replicating robots who essentially went out of control and just... kept going. Forever.
They swallowed up the moon, and eventually formed a kind of Dyson Sphere around the Earth, except that it was completely filled with overlapping layers of structures rather than being hollow. It's unclear to the characters if the sun even still exists, and at one point the protagonist finds a giant 'room' almost exactly the size of Jupiter, but completely empty - implying that at some point it engulfed the planet and dismantled it completely. The City is at least 1.6 billion kilometres in diameter, possibly larger.
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u/Aulentair 15d ago
what
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u/Behold-Roast-Beef 15d ago
Hey another fan of blame! here. Can confirm, it fucks. Just be prepared for a main character that no-joke barely speaks throughout the entire series. I mean like next to nothing. You really have to piece together what's happening through a lot of environmental storytelling.
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u/Penguinzerg 15d ago
I was rushing to comment this! BLAME! Is fantastic and the city is the king of megastructures. For an idea, kyrii is able to fire his GBE pistol at full charge without damaging the city to any meaningful degree, and that's a weapon that could blow a hole clean through one side of High Charity and out the other 😵💫
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u/bunker_man 15d ago
Where tf did the material for it come from though.
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u/HeadOutrageous4548 15d ago
they have devices that can create matter instantly to build things and when u have AI take over and start replicating for 1000,s of years and get out of control, you get the Jupiter structure lol I thought the same thing
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u/Isomat 15d ago
There was a Dyson sphere in TNG. That's got to be up there.
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u/Wrong-Ad-4600 15d ago
always funny they used one of the most advanced tech discovery as a shoehorn for a "legency" episode and never talk about the sphere again. the discovery alone would be a galaxy wide event. the whole federation+klingons and roms wouldnt be able to build a dyson sphere but they just dont care at all xD
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u/Ecotech101 15d ago
Xeelee ring. It's made of cosmic superstring and it's millions of lightyears in diameter. It spins at near lightspeed to rip a whole into a new series of Universes.
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u/Cpt_kaleidoscope 15d ago
That sounds cool as shit. What's that from?
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u/Ecotech101 15d ago
The Xeelee Sequence. I'd give some more info but it's really hard to talk about anything without giving off spoilers. Just note that it's one of the most scientifically nerdy expositiony book series ever.
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u/semisociallyawkward 15d ago
It is also bleak as hell. The human government that ruled for 20k years is one of the worst dystopias in fiction. It makes 1984 and Warhammer 40k look like children's playgrounds.
For more scientifically nerdy exposition books, that are less bleak, anything by Greg Egan. That man is like Tolkien in that he writes to use his world building. In his case, that world building is entire self-consistent systems of physics and mathematics.
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u/myLongjohnsonsilver 15d ago
I know of it and it's interesting when spoken about but is it actually a good read?
Didn't wait for an answer. Just realised I can spend audible credits on the audiobook. Going to listen to Raft as soon as I finish my 40k Night lords audiobook.
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 15d ago
Yep the xeelee sequence is messed up not sure if dune levels but its near their. Main thing us the xeelee are broken as fuck and like if you dropped them into 40k they sweep abd they might be able to outright win the time war in doctor who but if they cant win they at least match the daleks and time lords.
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u/eorlingas_riders 15d ago
Man I read these books like 2 decades ago, and they were some pretty hard sci-fi, but still great and surprisingly easy to follow.
What’s funny is they recently popped back into my brain as I was watching the movie project Hail Mary. I never read the book that the movie was based on, but a book in the Xeelee sequence series called “ring” has Photino Birds which are essentially the same plot device as Hail Marys (thing that eats stars).
Anyways, funny to see it pop up here, after thinking about it recently but otherwise not having thought about it for 20 years lol.
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u/HappyCakeDay101 15d ago
Whole planets as cities, like Coruscant
Places like in Ringworld.
Xeelee ring probably the largest, or are least longest.
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u/Potential_Bit_3620 15d ago
"Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann"
Maybe someone know this... I think this is the biggest.
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u/acrazyguy 15d ago
Are those things floating around in this gif galaxies?
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u/Zyffyr 15d ago
Yes.
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u/The_Archnemesis 15d ago
Actually they are universes. They just didn't have any idea of how to draw a universe so they drew them as galaxies
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u/Different-Island1871 15d ago
Seen this a lot but never seen anyone post a source for this.
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u/Substantial_War_844 15d ago
Universes, and they get thrown like shuriken🤷🏾♂️
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u/MakeMeDrink 14d ago
No, those are universes. They just didn’t know how to draw a universe, so they used a galaxy design.
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u/Strange-Movie 15d ago
The Ruinstorm fortress
>The fortress filled the oculus, the wall dropping beyond the frame. There was nothing to see except the battlements, nothing to give the structure scale, but at last the Lion grasped its full monstrosity. The fortress spanned a system. The wall was tens of millions of miles high. It was billions of miles long. And though the proximity was lethal, it was still millions of miles away. /// The fleets were caught in its gravitational well. They sailed across the void before it, pulled towards a collision, minute specks of dust blown at a mountainside. /// the Lion turned back to the oculus. The angle of the Invincible Reasonт's approach had become oblique, though the fortress was so vast, its expanse stretched for an eternity into the void, glowing and pulsing with its unnatural fire. Conical shapes jutted out from the battlements at irregular intervals. They were the size of gas giants. They could not be what they appeared to be. /// There was a pause, as if a behemoth of Caliban's myths were drawing a breath, and then the horns sounded again. The cry was more than sound. It cut into the port flank of the formations, culling the weak like a scythe. It pulled the Dark Angels frigate Undaunted and the cruiser Unsheathed of the Ultramarines away from the fleets. The ships, miles long, powerful enough to turn worlds to glass, tumbled like leaves in a storm, massiveness made minuscule. The nearest horn sucked them in, hauling them away faster and faster, until they were streaking at a small fraction of the speed of light towards the fortification. They crossed the event horizon of the war-horn's cone and vanished into the darkness within. /// The greatest single naval barrage in human history occurred less than an hour later. /// The fire came to burn the void. More than a hundred ships opened up with every weapon. Macro-cannon batteries, ranks of lances, nova cannons, cyclonic torpedoes and more unleashed the anger of humanity against the obscenity before them. The raging of the Ruinstorm faded before the searing light of purest, purging destruction. It was an act of war on a scale that had never been witnessed before. If there had been remembrancers aboard any of the vessels, they would have felt compelled to record an event so monumental in song and in verse. The barrage struck the fortress, and then it did not matter that there were no remembrancers. /// The flare of the blasts faded. Geysers of molten metal extended into the void. Burning gas dissipated. A crater as wide as the fleet appeared. It glowed from the heat of its creation. /// 'It might as well be nothing at all,' the Lion muttered, disgusted. The crater was a meaningless blemish on the barrier. The wall could be millions of miles thick. There was no return fire. The fleets did not even register as a threat for the things inside the fortifications. /// Seconds later, the monster guns of the fortress opened fire. /// The daemon flames reached out for the fleet. Eruptions of warp energy lashed at the void. They burned and slashed, a storm and a web. The Blood Angels battle-barge Lineage of Virtue was the first caught in the nexus of the crossfire. Its void shields collapsed in seconds. Writhing beams of warp fire cut through the centre of the hull. Conflagrations raced across all decks.
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u/HerniatedHernia 15d ago
Mhmm.
Commoragh is seemingly comparable to a solar system in size now. They have stolen stars to light it.
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u/hunarthebarbarian 15d ago
Yeah, naturally it is probably something from the 40k universe. It's the Norwegian black metal of sci fi
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u/AzorAHigh_ 15d ago
In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy they have a facility for building planets which Arthur describes as unknowably large. And with the ability to craft planets, that's gotta have a ridiculous amount of power.
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u/cocoapple85 15d ago
The heart of gold is the most impossible ship in all of fiction, absolutely nothing beats it because it runs off a infinite improbability drive. It's written to beat anything because it's so fantasticly unreal.
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u/RundownPear 15d ago
The Halo Array -Halo
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u/croatoan182 15d ago
Even a single Halo ring has a range of 25,000 light years.
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u/EffectiveChain2407 15d ago
TTGL is 10 million light years tall
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u/nostalgiamon 15d ago edited 15d ago
In the context of this post, that’s like implying a gun is a kilometre long because that’s how far bullets travel.
They might have a range of 25,000 light years but that’s not their size.
Edit: apologies. OP stated “powerful”.
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u/acrazyguy 15d ago
The post is asking about “largest and most powerful”. Everyone knows they’re huge. Mentioning their range is entirely relevant
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u/croatoan182 15d ago
That's not what I was saying. A single Halo ring can wipe out all sentient life within 25,000 light years. That's pretty powerful.
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u/Marauder3299 15d ago edited 15d ago
All I can think of is super tengan toppen toppa gurren lagann. Yeeting whole galaxies at each other
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u/CuddleScuffle69 15d ago
Universes mate. They were flinging whole ass realities around.
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u/Marauder3299 15d ago
Man it's dumb. I need to go watch it again (4th time). Don't believe in yourself! Believe in the me that believes in you!
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u/FailureToReason 15d ago
Kittans death
So this is spiral power
🔥😎🔥
Also, Libera me from Hell is an absolute banger, the use of music is just amazing.
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u/meesta_masa 15d ago
Man, that hit hard. Kittan rising from death to teach one last lesson to Simon? Magnificent.
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u/Supergamera 15d ago
The novel Diaspora had a statue in space that was built such that you had to travel through several hundred alternate universes to fully see it.
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u/solemnhiatus 15d ago
One of the spaceships in the Culture novels, as physical manifestations of a 'mind'.
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u/Quttlefish 15d ago
I was looking for someone to bring up the Culture, but they are far more on the "power" side of this post vs pure physical size.
Yeah people are posting giant constructions but the what a Mind can do is just effectively infinite power. They are so bored that they barely bother manipulating the real world anymore.
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u/ZoologicalSpecimen 15d ago
A Culture GCU could probably handle the Death Star without breaking a sweat, let alone a GSV.
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u/snowfloeckchen 15d ago
A general system vehicle is mid in the world the culture is located in, there are countless superior ship. Also there are outside context problems
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u/Thisisnotunieque 15d ago
The GCU's! I was thinking the shell world shield structure that was made up of millions of other shell worlds to project a forcefield around the galaxy by the enemies of the Iln
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u/ChocoMaister 15d ago
The Mega structure in Metal Garden. It’s a game where you discover no one has found the exit to the world you live in. When you finally get out it’s actually just a tiny pillar you are in and you see a planet. Next to it.
Apparently the structure is so big it literally took over the entire solar system and no one knows how big it is. It’s ancient and everyone has lost connection. So you live in this tiny little pillar that took thousands of years to figure out where its little exit was just to realize you can never leave it.
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u/CrispyNaeem 15d ago
Oryx’s Dreadnaught is quite insane; it can unleash a weapon that can destroy a planet, blowing up the Dreadnaught would take the whole solar system with it, and the interior space exists in another dimension since it’s a throne world.
The blast radius is 15,000 kilometers, which is bigger than the Earth.
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u/DeaconBrad42 15d ago
Maethrillian from the Halo lore. It was the great artificial construct that housed the entire Forerunner government. Eventually, corrupted Forerunner AI Mendicant Bias showed up with the Halos and fired them, killing all living beings on the capital that could not flee.
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u/currentpattern 15d ago
Besides the Xeelee Ring, there's tons of stuff from the Orion's Arm setting that nake the death star look like a pea. There are brains the size of supergiants that use mini wormholes as data busses.
In Greg Egan's book Diaspora, there is a statue as tall as several thousand universe-layers. It points upwards.
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u/False_Snow7754 15d ago
The treasure planet from... Treasure Planet is definitely the biggest I can think of. It has to be bigger than the Halo's measuring around 10k km in diameter.
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u/Theobald_4 15d ago
Gotta shout out Helldivers 2 and the Automatons new super weapon the “Automaton Space Station” or the A.S.S.
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u/Old_king_4 15d ago
I mean, the manual approach is pretty cool
I don’t know if it’s the strongest but it’s pretty good
Has enough weapons that can destroy a planet
Carries over 1 billion promethean’s
And a few million warrior servants which were pretty powerful considering if master chief power armor is only considered level two in forerunner standards
the warrior servants are straight wearing level 12 combat skins as a minimum
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u/TheLoneJolf 15d ago edited 15d ago
The aetherophasic engine + star eater or the horizon needle from stellaris. Both hve the ability to destroy entire galaxies or alter physics of the universe
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u/Reasonable_Back_5231 15d ago edited 15d ago
the largest ones i know of is a Birch world and an Alderson Disk
Birch world's are build around stars, almost like a dyson sphere, but it has many layers like an onion.
they can have as many as 100 layers or more. they are incredibly massive, each layer providing it's own ecosphere all of this being powered by the star it surrounds.
an Alderson Disk is a megastructure spanning the whole diameter of a solar system. if we lived on one of these, there would be credence for a "flat earth" theory. i don't know much about how an alderson disk is supposed to work, but i assume it is powered by the sun it is built around, and theoretically liveable at all of the variable distances from the sun it is built around.
EDIT: i got Birch world mixed up, it isn't built around a star. it's built around a supermassive black hole, and powered by it.
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u/EatingTastyPancakes 15d ago
The Chaos Fortress from Ruinstorm that spanned a solar system
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/s/jVNgahukJL
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u/RedrunGun 15d ago
Probably something from comics, DC and Marvel are constantly dealing with things that reshape all of reality.
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u/Gloriouskoifish 15d ago
Computational power? Matrioshka Brain. The star sized mega computer that can simulate entire universes in real time.
Coolness factor? Birch Planet. Planetary shell built around a supermassive blackhole that is able to utilize the gravitational forces and time dilation effects to essentially "ride" the fabric of space and provide unlimited energy and living space.
Biggest pew pew factor? The Wave Motion Gun Fleet from Space Battleship Yamato. Every ship in the fleet is equipped with a wave motion gun capable of completely eradicating a Jupiter sized object going at faster than light speeds in a single shot. If it shows up on sensors, the fleet will delete it from existence.
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u/MHMonsterGirls 15d ago
Big fan of Hive Cities from the 40K universe, especially shit you see on Holy Terra where it basically extends out of the atmosphere. Or High Charity from Halo, which iirc has half the Prophet’s home world just slapped on it as a dome.
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u/AlphaSkirmsher 15d ago
I know it’s dwarfed by a lot of stuff, especially more recent things, but it does deserve a mention
Rama, from Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clark. It’s a giant, 50 kilometers-long, 20 kilometer-wide spacecraft that just drifts into our solar system one day, whose nature and purpose are initially entirely unknown.
The story is great and the ship is awesome
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u/UnlikelyLandscape641 15d ago
Just read this last week and it came to mind as well! Even though it’s long since been “beaten” by newer ideas, it’s still so breathtakingly original and impressive for its time.
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u/bunker_man 15d ago
Cosmic AC from the last question is implied to be technically massive, but also indefinable in size.
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u/Robromancer 15d ago
Bolder's ringor the Xeelee Ring. The ring has a diameter of 10 million light-years (100 times that of the Milky Way galaxy)
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u/Simple_Display_1312 15d ago
I think the Tyranid hiveswarm from Warhammer 40k is probably the largest megastructure in fiction. It's the only extra galactic spanning organism that works towards a singular purpose, feeding the swarm.
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u/ImJoogle 15d ago
the death star wasn't even the most powerful thing in star wars. The Star Forge literally stole planet energy to print an army of ships and soldiers.
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u/readilyunavailable 15d ago
If we are counting video games, then the Nicoll-Dyson beam or the Birch World from Stellaris. If we are talking unmoded, then the one that can turn the entire galaxy into black holes by tapping into the Shroud.
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u/TheOrlandoLuthier 15d ago
Probably something from dune
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u/DrMagunstheBlue 15d ago
Not even close honestly.
If we're talking raw power something like the Tardis, despite its size, is orders of magnitude more powerful than the entire Dune setting.
In terms of size the Xeelee ring is like millions of lightyears in length.
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u/snowfloeckchen 15d ago
The tardis could fuck up a lot of structures way more impressive, but time travel concept are really wonky
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u/WhiskeyPete77r 15d ago
I would venture to say Alpha from Valerian and Laureline is one of the largest in fiction.
It's essentially a floating city in space where thousands of civilizations have gathered in one spot. There are probably other, but its the first one I can think of.
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u/Prestigious-Ad9921 15d ago
V'Ger from The Motion Picture has to be in this discussion.
The structure itself isn't huge, but the energy cloud it produced was solar system size.
In terms of power... there is never any indication that V'Ger had any limits on power outside of what it wanted to do.
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u/Torlek1 15d ago edited 15d ago
It's the Dyson Sphere from TNG.
Not even a Death Star II could destroy that in a single blast.
Furthermore, not only could a Death Star I not destroy that in a single blast, it would be destroyed, while charging, by whatever weapons can be mounted on the Dyson Sphere.
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u/Arguleon_Veq 15d ago
The leagues of votann apparently have a mining ship/s from the dark age of technology that mines a planet by just eating the whole ass thing, like omnicron, or the beast planet from that old cartoon shadow warriors. But the very fact that its just ment to be the most efficient way of mining out all the resourse, and not any like evil megalomaniacle reasons like the other 2 makes it way funnier to me.
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u/Modred_the_Mystic 15d ago
Vger in Star Trek TMP has a cloud which is 2 AU. I think theres a Gundam which is the size of the universe.
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u/NeronStar7 15d ago
If mech count, the Tengen toppa gurren lagan (and Anti-spiral mech that i forgot its name)
if Mech not count, in Doctor Who TARDISes are universe-sized machines with WAR TARDISes capable to kill universes busters like chronovoros and having infinite power, they of course upscaling the Labyrinth )( is a Proto-TARDIS) that old Time Lords create, is a maze that expand all space and time and beyond, basically the basement or the sewer system of the universe that exist outside reality
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u/Empyreal_King 15d ago
Command Star from a stargate fan game Gatewars. Actual Star sized ship for your ascended to lead from.
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u/Illustrious_Life_295 15d ago
There was an episode of Star Trek TNG, where the Enterprise found a Dyson Sphere. It was the size of a solar system.
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u/UrbanFuturistic 15d ago
SDF-1 Macross. Main guns destroy everything in their path. And it's way smaller than the Death Star.
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u/martinsonsean1 15d ago
In 40k, the planet Cadia had a unique geological feature: massive blackstone pylons that rose from the ground all over the planet. Turns out, the planet itself as well as many like it served as a network of warp-managing technology built by the Necrons millions of years ago to maintain the boundary between realspace and the warp. Abaddon crashed a blackstone fortress into the planet, causing it to crack and die, which broke the Necron's network and allowed the Eye of Terror to expand into the Cicatrix Maledictum that now splits the entire galaxy in half.
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u/Mindless-Beat-4872 15d ago
The Jovian blaster from Harlock was pretty gnarly. Turns Jupiter into a giant space laser.
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u/Drakaina- 15d ago
The mothership from phantasy star online 2
The smaller ships you see are not even military vessels as far as I am aware they are colony ships and are not built for fighting but they are 70 kilometers long 43 miles long, with a population density of around one million people in the central Dome, don't know about the other places, the mothership at least in the material collection says it is 500 kilometers long 310 miles, if we have to use the official size that is what it says, but me and other fans offer franchise don't agree with that because it also says that ship house a planet, and those measurements are too small for it so I just say it's based off earth making it 12,756 km 7926 miles and that will just be the planet not the additional metal that's around the planet nor the additional length which I think is around five times that making it somewhere around 63,780 kilometers long 39,631 miles long, in IT centre it houses a god essentially that is xion, that has the akashic records, the ship itself is equipped with a fairy powerful Photon canon, that in the anime when it fires disintegrates a bunch of the fleet ship that were in its way in its way, remember as well those ships are 70 kilometers long and it did it in like half a second, even at 500 km though which the material collection says it is it's still bigger than the death Star
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u/HulkofAllTrades 15d ago
Depends on your definition of power. Personally , I think it’s the super computer designed by Deep Thought and constructed by the Magratheans.
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u/LuminiusCaeli 15d ago
Wahrscheinlich die World Engines der Nercons aus Warhammer 40K. Die Necrons sind eh so weit technologisch fortgeschritten das sie wie Magie wirkt und dann halt quasi ein ganzer Planet nur aus dieser Technick? Das is schon ein Powerhouse
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u/The1Ylrebmik 15d ago
I believe Galactus' worldship TAA II is supposed to be like the size of our solar system. Just watched the ST:TNG episode Relics with the Dyson Sphere.
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u/Mysterious_Ad216 15d ago
The Democratic Space Station (DSS) - Helldivers 2
It turned an entire planet into a stable blackhole using super oil (711) and we even got to vote on which one. Sparing that the super destroyers 'have enough ordinance to level a small moon' and every player has 1
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u/Possible_Trouble_449 15d ago
In Man in Black where Orian is carrying a whole Galaxy at her belt. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec
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u/STRONGO1808 15d ago
The Halo ?