a bomb or other weapon capable of destroying a planet
What will the future be like? No physicists have testified to a limit to bomb size. Does this mean that maybe in ten or twenty years actual ‘planet-busters’ will be made?
Not like the planet busters; there is a defense against those, you just haven’t found it yet. But there actually was no defense whatever against their weapon.
We're going to take up a tight orbit. Out beyond us will be five transports full of I-A marines and a class IX Monitor with one planet-buster. You're calling the shots, God help you!
A simple heatgun, to the Darkovan ethical code, is as reprehensible as a super-cobalt planetbuster.
I don’t see anything to shoot. Five hundred miles; one planetbuster, or four or five thermonuclears.
But they couldn’t chance letting one of those planet-busters back into Old Sol’s backyard.
We don’t have to worry about being shot at; those planet-buster missiles are too big and slow to hit a small mobile target.
If this weren’t enough to scare any would-be criminals witless, secreted in dark asteroids throughout the galaxy were the Great Golden Ones' Planetbuster Bombs and Nova-grade lasers. These were never used, but perfectly capable of annihilating an entire solar system faster than you could say, ‘Just kidding!’
They would have seen a brief surge in the apparent magnitude as Omuta’s mercenary ships dropped fifteen antimatter planet-buster bombs on their home world.
But unlike an asteroid impact, where the energy release was purely thermal, the planet-busters each emitted the same amount of radiation as a small solar flare.
You could see it, across a quarter of a million miles, the surface of the Mare Imbrium billowing up into space, as the demonstration planet-buster went off beneath it, a quarter of the Moon’s old grey face convulsing in an instant.
Penny Royal doesn’t look likely to be escaping, so maybe it can hold off on the planet busters.
antedating 1950
B. Vanier 'Planet-Buster!'
The above cites are for weapons: Fred Galvin submitted a 1969 cite for "planetbuster" from James Blish and Norman L. Knight's "The Piper of Dis" in which the planetbuster is a natural force (a one mile diameter meteor)
We would like to see cites for planet-buster in the (n.) or (adj.) forms.
Last modified 2020-12-19 13:05:07
In the compilation of some
entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries
in OED.