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A planet killer is a science-fictional entity which is a giant spaceship or other object expressly designed to destroy or render uninhabitable a planet. The most famous planet killer is the Death Star, though many others have seen film or print. Most major science-fiction franchises, including Star Wars, the Starflight series of computer games, Wing Commander, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Lexx, Farscape and Stargate SG-1 have at least one and possibly many such devices.
To kill a planet
It doesn't really matter how you do it - you can blast it with a laser, you can use strange energy reactions, you can launch nuclear missiles at it until the air hums with radioactivity and the surface glows red, but one way or the other you have to impart enough energy into a planet at least to destroy the entire ecosystem forever in order to "kill" it. And science-fiction writers, being ever-creative to one-up each other's worst atrocity machines, are eager to do exactly that. So naturally, there are quite a few planet killers - some quite famous - in science fiction.
In order to completely disperse a planet, one must supply at the very least enough energy to overcome its gravitational binding energy. One can supply more than this, of course, to overcome inefficiencies or to make the planet's dispersion more spectacular. The king of brute-force planet destruction is the Death Star. The Death Star's energy output has been estimated equal to the output of the Sun for over thirty thousand years in a single blast.
Most writers, working in a print medium and unable to match the visceral chill of a short film sequence of an obviously life-bearing blue marble world being turned into a brilliant fireball in less than a second, prefer to use slower methods of planet destruction, making up in pathos what they lack in instantaneous impact. Under such a constraint, planet destructions are often much slower affairs, taking minutes, hours, sometimes even days for the protagonists to act or simply reflect upon their fate.
Famous planet killers
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