Wave Motion Gun



""Yet nothing warms my heart so much as the sight of a gun so massive that its fury makes the very world tremble.""

- First Captain Lysander of the Imperial Fists, Warhammer 40,000

The Cool Ship needs an equally cool weapon. If it's a sufficiently humongous Cool Ship, it will be equipped with a Laser Beam on steroids: the Wave Motion Gun—an enormous Ray Gun that fires a massive energy beam capable of blowing away an enemy ship (in the "blow a battleship in half" sense), sometimes an entire fleet, with one shot, and maybe even blowing up an entire planet. It doesn't necessarily have to even hit; if you're too close, the sheer energy bleeding off from the beam can be deadly. And don't even think about trying to waste your time with puny Deflector Shields—it'll just punch right through 'em.

Frequently, the Wave Motion Gun is made of Lost Technology, or is an experimental prototype, but sometimes they're a dime a dozen. It also explains how a small fleet can win consistently against enemies that grossly outnumber them: the defense units just have to hold their ground until the Gun(s) is ready to fire. Invariably, just before firing, The Captain has to order the attack.

This sort of weapon could also qualify as a Kill Sat. If it's built into a famous real-world location, then it's a Weaponized Landmark. If the bad guys have one, it's a Death Ray. Wave Motion Guns usually require a significant charging period before firing and re-charging/cooldown afterwards (occasionally depicted by Sucking-In Lines; the Wave Motion Tuning Fork is a popular subtrope used for visual effect). Can lead to Wave Motion Fun (that Pothole being, of course, a Wave Motion Pun). When it's built into the ship so that it's always pointed straight forward, it's a Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon.

A sufficiently powerful Sword Beam is the sword version of this trope. Kamehame Hadoken is the ki version of this trope.

Named after the gun of the same name in Space Battleship Yamato.

The reason why you should use it? For Massive Damage ! See also There Is No Kill Like Overkill, Big Bulky Bomb.

Anime and Manga

 * The eponymous main weapon of the Uchuu Senkan Yamato. Notably, the original Wave Motion Gun itself wasn't just a heroes-only weapon: by season 2, most ships in the Earth Defence Force carried one, and once exposed to the Wave Motion Gun, everyone else tried to copy or modify one. Desslok/Dessler had his Desslok Cannon (said to be weaker than the Wave Motion Gun, but not so much that you'd really notice), and the Comet Empire had their weaker (only one ship at a time) but longer-ranged Magna-Flame Cannon.
 * Likewise Space Carrier Blue Noah, the Spiritual Successor/ripoff of Yamato by the same producer (The Nish), has the Anti-Proton Gun.
 * Interestingly, the Wave Motion Gun was not treated as something invincible: at the end of the first season, Deslar's one was reflected back at him, and in the second season we have three different incidents of Wave Motion Guns utterly failing in their job (first was the Comet Empire's vanguard fleet flagship firing her Magna Flame Cannon while inside Saturn's ring, only for the energy beam to explode against the rings' particles, giving Earth's fleet the time to reach their weapons' range and annihilate the vanguard fleet; then the Earth Defense Force fired ALL their Wave Motion Guns at the Empire's comet fortress, but failed to do any damage; third was the Yamato finding herself attacked again by Deslar and charging the gun, only for Deslar to mine the space before the muzzle and get a good laugh as the Yamato couldn't fire without being destroyed by her own weapon).
 * The Macross Cannon, AKA Superdimensional Converging Beam Weapon, as well as the Grand Cannon, in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its sequels.
 * The original Macross Cannon provides the impetus of the plot: the Supervision Army gunship that later became the Macross had been rigged to fire upon Zentradi reconnaissance ships, which it did, prompting the arrival of a full combat fleet. Also, activation of the ship's Fold Engines left the Cannon bereft of power conduits for a while, prompting the iconic transformation (which allowed the Cannon to reconnect with its power source due to the new configuration.)
 * When the recon ships were fired on, they were below the horizon from the point of view of the Macross. It actually fired through several MILES of the Earth's crust, and still managed to spear the targets through their centers of mass.
 * By the time of Macross Frontier the concept is increasingly common in the U.N. Spacy fleet, finding itself as the Heavy Quantum Convergence Cannon of the smaller carrier Macross Quarter. Frontier also manages to pack a fully functional (if smallish) Macross Cannon into a fighter! It doesn't have as much oomph as does battleship version, but still has enough power to punch out the Deflector Shields of a capital ship. Also, while the original Cannon was an integral part of the Macross' design, posterior models of similar (and superior) classes modified it into a detachable gunpod. That will be hard to clean up
 * The Vajra from Frontier are giant sized Insectoid Aliens, most of which carry a biological Wave Motion Gun.
 * Fighter-scale craft with Converging Beam Weapons have been around since the original series.
 * The Zentradi Mobile Fortresses (Fulbtzs Berrentzs class) were each equipped with a Wave Motion Gun so powerful that any direct fleet engagement essentially boiled down to the question "who will be the first to fire?" This is vividly demonstrated in the original movie where Bodolza is so adamant about opening up on Lapramiz' MF that he willingly sacrifices thousands of his own screening force ships which just happen to be in the line of fire.
 * Synchro Cannons in Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles.
 * The Nadesico, from Martian Successor Nadesico, had the Gravity Cannon. When that got old and stopped working against the enemy, they upgraded to the Phase Transition Cannon.
 * Arguaby a Deconstruction in the latter case. They fired it once in battle, against live targets (they had been fighting mostly Mecha-Mooks until then, they are so horrified by the ease and scale of destruction unleashed that they never fire the PT Cannon again.
 * Also from Nadesico, the Cosmos fires 7 Gravity Cannons. This is one of the few times a Wave Motion Gun also qualifies as a spammable attack.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam and its sequels, spinoffs, and Alternate Universes have a number of these. It's kind of a custom in Gundam now that every series must a huge Wave Motion Gun, sometime even two in one series. It's usually involved in the final battle or close to the end, and destroyed by the heros blowing up its weak point and causing the whole thing to go kaboom.
 * While Universal Century timeline is usually overlooked in the BFG department, especially compared to Gundam Wing, it is actually better supplied with various WMGs and offers such notable pieces:
 * The Solar Ray Colony Laser is an entire space colony converted into a laser cannon (That's no space station...). The Solar Ray uses thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight at a target, turning the sunlight into a beam that was strong enough to take a chunk out of Solomon.
 * The 08th MS Team OVA. Imagine Seras Victoria's Artillery piece, scaled up to be used by a humongous mecha. In the original series (and later spin-offs), many of the normal Mobile Suit troops often carried giant 250mm+ Bazookas. According to the series' backstory, these were originally used to launch nuclear warheads.
 * A similar weapon is used by Gundam Physalis in 0083 Stardust Memory, this time to actually shoot nuclear warheads. Later it was upped by the infamous Dendrobium Orchis Mobile Armor, which was armed with the even bigger beam cannon, thousands of missiles in the fuselage bins and even the Deflector Shields. And this hulking monstrosity was designed for the single purpose—to dock with the eponymous Dendrobium Stamen Gundam, in effect making the whole huge Mobile Armor (which was almost the size of the prewar Salamis cruiser), a single BFG.
 * Unicorn, taking an example from the Wing below, gives us the Beam Magnum—essentially, a battleship-class Mega Particle Cannon fitted into a mobile suit-usable package. While the UC-standard e-pack battery can power a normal beam rifle for the whole engagement, or, maybe, replaced once or twice, Beam Magnum eats it up in one shot. The designers ended up strapping five or six e-packs together in a clip, in effect making BM a visual and tactical send-up to the early XX century bolt action rifles.
 * Another example is the Beam Gatling Gun first seen in Episode 3, which combines the deadliness of a regular gatling gun with beam technology to give the Gatling guns on Heavyarms more than a run for their money.
 * The Gundam Wing anime has a veritable collection:
 * In the early episodes, the role was filled by the Noventa Cannon, which barely had a chance to fire once before it was dismantled piecemeal by no more than two mobile suits manned by secondary character pilots.
 * Next came the cannon mounted to the Fortress Barge space battle station. In keeping with wave cannon tradition, it required a lengthy charging time and roomfuls of technicians to fire properly.
 * Finally, the weapon mounted to Battleship Libra was the series' crowning achievement in high-velocity destruction. Along with wiping out any number of generic mobile suits, it destroyed not one, but two of the eponymous Gundams. Also, its lengthy recharge time was Justified Trope due to the fact that the engineers who designed it built a flaw into the design so that it could not be fired in rapid succession.
 * Wing Gundam's signature Buster Rifle happened to be a handheld one of these. It's a beam cannon that kills space colonies, but only has enough juice for three shots. Its successor Wing Gundam Zero wielded a Twin Buster Rifle that not only packed twice the firepower, but could be split into a pair of Buster Rifles and can be fired as many times as the pilot wants! The Twin Buster Rifle is so powerful,
 * In Endless Waltz, there is the Tallgeese III's Mega Cannon, which Zechs uses to destroy the Mariemaia Army's base at asteroid MO-3.
 * Though not as devastating or as iconic as the Wing or Wing Zero's Buster Rifle, the Vayeate mobile suit carried around a large rifle very similar to its counterpart on the Gundams. Considering the Vayeate's purpose was to focus entirely on offensive capability and that it was designed by the Gundam Scientists, saying this laser was big may be something of an understatement.
 * Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny have a few of 'em:
 * Gundam SEED spacecraft of the Archangel (Earth Alliance vessels; specifically, the Archangel and the Dominion) and Izumo (Orb vessels; the Kusanagi) class have a weapon known as the Lohengrin, which is quite close to being a Wave Motion Gun. It shoots a beam of ANTIMATTER at the target, although it's somewhat based in fact: It is a positron beam cannon, and positrons are a form of antimatter that have been proven to exist (they're electrons, but with a positive charge instead of the requisite negative charge). They have to be charged before use, which involves Sucking-In Lines. They're clearly based on the aforementioned Blue Noah version, up to the placement of the gun and charging animations. A long tradition, there!
 * The GENESIS (from Gundam SEED) is a Wave Motion Gun powered by freakin' NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS! (Technically it fires a laser made of gamma radiation instead of light)
 * Gundam SEED Destiny has the Archangel and Kusanagi, which still have their Lohengrins. There are more Izumo-class Orb vessels, as well, meaning there are even more ships with the weapons, as well as artillery versions used by ground forces. ZAFT even gets in on the action with the Minerva, which has the Tannhauser, a positron cannon (essentially a positron beam cannon without the word "beam" in its name).
 * Remember the GENESIS from Gundam SEED? Well, Gundam SEED Destiny has the Neo GENESIS. It's a smaller, faster-charging version of the original GENESIS, which was destroyed at the end of Gundam SEED. Destiny also has the Requiem, which is a giant beam cannon fired from the far side of the moon (its beam can be redirected with magnetic fields, allowing it to be aimed at virtually anything).
 * And don't forget GENESIS Alpha in Gundam SEED Astray.
 * The GFAS-X1 "Destroy" is probably the closest a mobile suit gets in this series to packing one. In mobile armor mode, it wields two twin-barreled high-energy beam cannons on its back, while in mobile suit mode, it can launch blasts of multi-phase energy from three 1580mm cannons in its chest and one 200mm cannon in its mouth. Any one of these weapons is capable of blasting straight through an army, leaving behind nothing but molten slag. It also packs, between its two modes, twenty thermal-plasma composite cannons, ten beam cannons on its fingers, 24 missile launchers, and four 75mm automatic chainguns, for extra killing power.
 * The Satellite Cannons of Gundam X, which had the power required to fire it beamed to it from a base on the moon. The DX has two Satellite Cannons and fires them both at once. It can also fire without almost no cooldown.
 * The Satellite Cannons have the distinction of being possibly the most powerful Gundam-mounted beam weapon in the franchise. They are anti-army weapons that are so overpowered that they're almost useless for most of the series. The first time the Twin Satellite Cannon is fired, it pretty much vaporizes an island. The first Mid-Season Upgrade the Gundam X gets, in fact, involves the removal of the Satellite Cannon in exchange for weapons more suited to actually killing other Mobile Suits.
 * ''Mobile Suit Gundam 00' Memento Mori in the second season.
 * Every single one of Tieria's Gundams has at least one One-Hit Kill cannon on it. For Virtue and Seravee, it's the GN Bazooka; for Raphael, they're Seravee II's pincers.
 * Don't forget the Gadessa's GN Mega Launcher, or the GN Particle Cannon on Big Bad's mothership with the power to take out an entire fleet.
 * Whenever someone uses Trans-Am, whatever they fire is MASSIVELY beefed up, with no Arbitrary Maximum Range at all. Especially visible with the 00 Raiser which fires what looks to be a gigantic sustained shot but is actually a HUNDREDS OF KILOMETRES LONG BEAM SABER. The 00 Qan[T] has an even bigger version longer than the Moon's diameter.
 * Zabanya's Shield Bits can already cooperate with the Gundam's main weapon to produce Beam Spam but they can also combine into a chain of three rectangular frames that together fire a single crazy powerful shot with a maximum range in the tens of thousands of kilometres.
 * G Gundam goes Beyond the Impossible with Crazy Awesome with Neo-America's secret weapon- the Statue of Liberty Cannon! It shoots from the torch.
 * Gundam AGE has the Photon Blaster Cannon on the Diva, spruced up from the AGE Builder.
 * Which was beefed up even further with the development of the Photon Ring Ray, which in combination with the Photon Blaster can destroy colony sized targets.
 * AGE-3 has a handheld version of the Diva's Photon Blaster called the Sigmasis Rifle, capable of killing almost any Vagan mobile suit in a single shot. It even comes with an attachment that acts as a portable Photon Ring Ray that's powerful enough to destroy capital ships.
 * The Iron Ri Maajon (and a number of other Ri Maajon patterns) from Simoun. Strictly speaking, they aren't guns, but rather Wave Motion Prayers.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion:
 * The Positron Rifle can manage just two shots in the available time and needs to be slowly charged with all the electrical power of Japan.
 * There's some reality put into the concept: a positron weapon is a sort of antimatter weapon, and would require truly obscene amounts of energy to function, another example of the limitations put on Evas, including the repeated mentions of the incredibly large budget NERV receives from literally everyone in the world to pay for all that damage and firepower.
 * The angel that said Positron Rifle is employed against (Ramiel) produces a fusion-powered beam that goes through several buildings. Then it applies more power and fires right through a custom heat shield many meters thick. Next comes a series of blasts that seriously disfigure the surrounding countryside, vaporizing elements of Tokyo 3's point defense system. Finally (when hit by a beam from the Positron Rifle mentioned above), it gets really pissed off and charges a blast that melts away a fairly large mountain.
 * There's also a Positron Cannon, a combat version of the Rifle (the rifle was a prototype and wasn't supposed to be used at all). Too bad it didn't really help Asuka when facing off against the 15th.
 * RahXephon had the Vermillion equipped with an assault rifle. While it's primary function was that of a machine gun, the weapon could also fire an energy bolt that exploded with the force of a small nuke.
 * From Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha:
 * The title character has three attacks that are basically a magical Wave Motion Gun, the first being "Divine Buster," the second being "Excelion Buster," and the third being the even more powerful "Starlight Breaker." The Cool Starship, the Asura, also has the "Arc-en-ciel," which is famously used to.
 * Several of Nanoha's other characters have Wave Motion Guns of their own; Fate and Hayate in particular have their respective attacks "Plasma Zanber Breaker" and "Ragnarok," and the original Reinforce had a virtual arsenal of these attacks, some of them copied from the heroines. Hayate probably still has most of them.
 * This video shows why Quattro's face is the page image for Oh Crap.
 * Arika's "Bolt From The Blue" in Mai-Otome. Unfortunately, her equal and opposite number Nina has a similarly-powerful attack as well . Natsuki also has her Howling Silverwolf attack, debuting near the end of the series in a massive Beam-O-War with Nagi's siege cannon.
 * Similarly, in My-HiME, Mai's CHILD Kagutsuchi can take out an entire aerial fleet.
 * The super weapon in Black Heaven falls under this trope as well as being rather hard to activate.
 * The rifles carried by the gigantic Nobuseri leaders almost qualify, but more properly, the main guns of the Imperial Capital Samurai 7.
 * One of the most powerful ones is the Ideon Gun from Space Runaway Ideon, which can devastate a good portion of a star system. It's particularly fun to use in the Super Robot Wars series, as it can oftentimes wipe out the entire enemy force (and maybe some friendlies) in a single shot if you line it up right.
 * Both the OVA and TV incarnations of Ifurita from El Hazard wield a wave motion gun in the form of her "Power Key Staff." How she wields it is probably the crucial difference between the two worlds: OVA-Ifurita is a tragic figure, struggling to balance her nascent emotions with her nature as a living weapon of mass destruction; TV-Ifurita is a massive ditz with a really big gun.
 * The manga series Blame! features the Gravitational Beam Emitter, a wave motion pistol. Its power is so great that if it were to be used in a regular atmospheric environment (like, you know, ours...), it would have irreversible environmental side effects. Or so we've been told... The GBE is considered a Class 9 weapon of mass destruction in Blame and is VERY rare to to come across. To give you an idea, at lowest setting, it can shoot a beam 70 km long. Anything in this path is obliterated. At maximum firepower...um...you'd have to see it for yourself.
 * Pretty much every non-mook gun in a Tsutomu Nihei series. The various artificial humans in Biomega all have these; the male lead has two, just in case.
 * In the Digimon franchise, a few machine-based Mons have these, most notably Imperialdramon (his type isn't Machine if you wanna get technical, but his design is based on Transforming Mecha). He's got three, ranging from "standard finishing attack" through "frag the whole area" to "Combined Energy Attack as strong as a small nuke."
 * In Fate/stay night and Fate/Zero:
 * Odd as it might seem, Excalibur is essentially a Wave Motion Sword Sword. When it is charged, it can fire off waves of destructive light. Using it one-handed reduces it to mere concrete-rending level; using with both hands can raze cities. Except only the tip of the "wave" is dangerous and the wave is in fact just an optical illusion.
 * Ea, the Sword of Rupture, was specifically designed to resemble a subterranean tunnel drill, and once charged up—via, naturally, spinning—it can rip apart space-time. So far, it is the only weapon in Nasuverse ever classified "Anti-World."
 * Bizarrely enough, One Piece. How often do you see a pirate ship armed with one of these things?
 * The Big O has the Final Stage attack, which,
 * Hadron cannons in Code Geass, which come in both mech-mounted and battleship varieties (the latter are the really powerful ones). Then there's the Guren's Radiant Wave Surger.
 * Don't forget the Shen-Hu's Baryon Cannon.
 * Guchuko from Potemayo has two "horns" on the sides of her head that function like this.
 * In Zoids, a few Zoid types are equipped with Charged Particle Cannons, usually piloted by Dragons or the Big Bad. Of particular note is the Berserk Fury, which has three charged particle cannons.
 * In Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the God Warrior's primary weapon is essentially a Wave Motion Gun.
 * In Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Sodom and Gomorrah were but two places destroyed by it, according to Muska.
 * Getter Robo:
 * In the original, the Eagle Unit (one of the three machines that forms the eponymous Combining Mecha) was a small jet that could fire puny laser beams. By Shin Getter Robo it had upgraded itself to a beyond planet sized star-ship, and its laser appropriately became a fleet/planet busting Wave Motion Gun with an energy output high enough to potentially cause a Big Bang.
 * And in Will of Evolution.
 * Shin Dragon in Getter Robo Armageddon has one inside the dragon's mouth powerful enough to blow up one of Jupiter's moons!
 * Vash the Stampede's Angel Arm is a proper, honest-to-goodness wave motion gun. If it gets shot at medium power, it annihilates entire cities. If it's shot at full blast, it carves gigantic craters in other planets. The best part is that it basically consists of a tiny cylinder of Applied Phlebotinum in his revolver. Talk about miniaturization...
 * In the Naruto manga series:
 * the Technique that the wanted to make with, capable of destroying entire COUNTRIES in an instant. Maybe. Given that , who knows what that "weapon" really was.
 * Naruto and Killer Bee have their own version. At full power Bee's destroys part of a mountain range. Naruto's is less spectacular, with only half power, but still manages to leave a trail of destruction several miles long.
 * A lampshade is hung on this in Excel Saga, where Excel calls the weapon on the Puchuu starship a Wave Motion Gun, in the episode that parodies space operas.
 * Parodied in Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo. When Leopard asks Akiha to fire his antimatter cannon—and he's a living space colony, so this is a huge cannon—he prepares for it with bravado. It's a dud. Then played straight when the right components are obtained. The show being what it is, though...
 * Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann 's What's more important about this one is the fact that
 * In El-Hazard: The Magnificent World Ifurita's full power gun blast is basically a "nuclear bomb ray." She destroys an entire city with in in the anime, and a mountain in the manga. It takes some time to recharge, but not much.
 * In Mahou Sensei Negima:
 * Evangeline uses one to blow up the Demon God in the Kyoto arc.
 * And then there's Chachamaru's Artifact
 * Detonator Orgun has a solar-powered, chest-mounted WMG.
 * Guyver has the Giga-Smasher, a plasma cannon whose range, beam width, and power appear approximately equivalent to a Macross Cannon. It's a
 * The Five Star Stories has the Buster Launchers, enormous cannons the bigger of which (starting from the 2 meter caliber) are fully capable of obliterating planets. The common Prowler fighter usually mount at least two of these, and as such is considered overpowered, and was replaced by the Mortar Headds planetside. Later, though, a couple of MHs were armed with busters, making them the most heavily armed mechas in the universe.
 * Mazinger Z's Breast Fire was always close to this, but Mazinkaiser's Fire Blaster goes all the way when it's fired over the heads of several Mechanical Beasts... and still melts them.
 * The flagship of the Iron Tribe's fleet is equipped with one of these in Heroic Age. It can destroy and ignite entire planets, causing massive shockwave damage to nearby units. The Az-Azoth fleet commanded by Nilval Nephew also has specialized "core" units that apparently serve no other purpose than to be enormous space-based cannons. Bellcross's rarely used mouth-beam attack also qualifies, as does Artemia's more powerful beam attacks. Finally,
 * Something that has remained fairly constant throughout the various incarnations of Astro Boy is Astro's arsenal. One of his staple weapons, aside from the small laser guns in his fingertips (and the infamous machine gun barrels in his butt), is turning his arms into laser cannons.
 * In Bleach:
 * has pistols that fires Cero in his released form. Think of Gravitational Beam Emitter, times two.
 * The Cero could count as such.
 * In the first movie has something called the Kido Cannon.
 * The Hado #89 Hiryūgekizokushintenraihō (Flying Dragon Marring Heaven-Shaking Thunder-Sear)
 * Eureka Seven:
 * In the h-series Angel Blade, if a female mutant has something extra, chances are it will function like this for some weird reason.
 * The Jupiter Cannon in Fairy Tail. Extra points... to Erza, actually, because she just tanked it in the face before going off to kick even more ass.
 * In Angel Links, the Links Cannon ("shooooo-toh!") settled pretty much every fight. (Some fans, expecting more frenetic space combat scenes in the style of Outlaw Star, were a bit annoyed by this.)
 * The combined power of four Weapons and one meister, Kirikou, creates one of these in Soul Eater which destroys the Lightning, fire, and two pistols.
 * Gunbuster's Buster Beam. It destroys fleets with one shot.
 * And the sequel, Diebuster, slices a planet in half with the weapon.
 * From Slayers: Dragon slave!
 * In Legend of the Galactic Heroes the fortress Iserlohn is equipped with the weapon "Thor's Hammer" that is more than capable of destroying entire fleets in a single blast.
 * Battle Angel Alita series 2, Last Order, features a 500 ton Jovian combat cyborg among other things armed with a miniature wormhole connection to the inner parts of the planet Jupiter. You may try to imagine the scale of destruction caused by the pressurized plasma-or-whatever-may-be-the-next-state-of-matter-after-plasma in there being released in a focused beam, but it's probably nowhere close.
 * Space Knight Tekkaman and its reimagining Tekkaman Blade both have the Voltekka as ultimate attacks.
 * Super Atragon: The enemies' giant black cylinders fire lasers that can cut a modern destroyer in half in seconds.
 * In Iria Zeiram the Animation the burabudin cannon is basically a hand-held WMG. While capable of firing controlled and precise blasts, it can also fire massive continuous beams that can sweep whole armies off the map.
 * The maduradin cannons are similar to the burabudin, but in vehicle form.
 * The maduradin cannons are similar to the burabudin, but in vehicle form.

Card Games

 * In Yu-Gi-Oh, there is a card called Wave Motion Cannon. A card where if 8 turns go by can make the controller of the card have an automatic victory.

Comic Books

 * The Dark Empire series of Star Wars comics gave us the Eclipse-class Star Destroyer, which has a bow-mounted, downsized version of the Death Star's superlaser.
 * All Fall Down has the Reducto-Beam, a colossal shrink ray on the moon that runs on Living Batteries.

Film

 * Star Wars has the Death Star's Superlaser, though the first Death Star only used it to destroy planets. The second Death Star in Return of the Jedi had a superlaser that was better at targeting ships; as Ackbar says, "cruisers can't repel firepower of that magnitude."
 * The "Death Blossom" from The Last Starfighter is more of a Macross Missile Massacre combined with a bit of Beam Spam rather than a Wave Motion Gun, but it has the same energy-draining drawback.
 * The Zeus Cannon from Final Fantasy the Spirits Within.
 * It's also a Kill Sat.
 * The Night Fury in How to Train Your Dragon has a miniaturized version as a breath weapon. It's also a Lightning Bruiser.
 * Gamera's Mana Cannon and any variant of Godzilla's Breath Weapon, be it Red, Golden or Spiraling RED (film) all count as such. When things are hit with them, they die almost universally and they often rearranges the landscape. Godzilla's usually occur after a brief chargeup period. Gamera's does as well, but also has other nasty side effects—like cutting him off from humanity and draining the health of the earth itself.
 * Kiryu also had the 'Absolute Zero Cannon', which was capable of equal destruction. In Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, the humans decide to try and use one called the Dimension Tide on Godzilla, which literally fires a Black Hole. Side effects include ripping a hole in the fabric of space and time and.
 * The surprisingly good Roger Corman B-Movie Battle Beyond the Stars (Seven Samurai IN SPACE ) features a weapon called the "Stellar Converter". It appears to be exactly what it says on the tin, in that when the villain uses it, the weapon appears to ignite an inhabited planet into a small white dwarf star.
 * The "Hammer", the primary weapon equipped to the city-destroyers in Independence Day certainly qualify.
 * The Bifrost, properly mishandled, was almost one of these in Thor.
 * And it had the greatest range of anything on this list, striking through wormholes, though it took longer to get to work.

Literature
"This time they were not so lucky. "The first bioship is on a pursuit course," Tuvok reported. "Just one? That's a relief," said Paris. "I'd hate to have to take on the other nine and that wave-motion gun of theirs." Janeway assumed the weapon description was another of Tom's obscure twentieth-century cultural allusions."
 * The Dr. Device/Little Doctor in Ender's Game, so named because it was developed as the Molecular Disruptor Device. Somewhat different in that it has a short-range area effect rather than being a projectile or beam, but this field can start a chain reaction of apparently unlimited size - it obliterates everything in its area of effect, everything next to its area of effect, everything next to that, and so on until it hits an area without enough mass to continue the chain-reaction. It allows Ender to rewrite the book on military strategy by attacking the enemy formation where its ships are most heavily concentrated. Ender asks if the device could be used on a planet; the response is a horrified shudder.
 * The Lensman Arms Race is a trope for a reason. Starting with E. E. "Doc" Smith's novel Grey Lensmen and continuing in its sequels, we find our heroes using:
 * Throwing planets at things (or crushing them between two planets).
 * Planet sized bombs.
 * The sunbeam, a weapon which concentrates into a single beam the entire radiant energy output of a star.
 * ...and the enemy had plans to extend the principle to novae or supernovae.
 * The crowning glory is a planetary projectile taken from a universe where
 * In one of John W. Campbell's Arcot, Wade and Morley novels, the eponymous heroes come up with the molecular motion gun, which turns the random molecular motion of an object (heat) into motion in a single direction. The ray is catalytic in nature, so basically any object it is used on, from a city to (in one chapter) an entire star, is a) frozen to absolute zero, and b) hurled off in any direction desired.
 * Stephen Baxter's Xeelee stories are nothing but greater and greater Wave Motion Guns. Wormhole weapons are used to conquer Earth. Humanity escapes this after accidentally using some old Xeelee tech to hasten the life of a sun. We rebuild and conquer everything in the Galaxy except the Xeelee at the center. Weapons include neutron stars being used as bullets. This gets worse. The Xeelee had a greater foe. The photino birds are a form of exotic matter lifeform going around blowing up every sun in the universe that's not already a red dwarf in order to make the universe more palatable (for them). In response the Xeelee manipulate the entire history of the Universe to escape, sending fortresses in every galaxy in the universe to the Big Bang and spending all 15 billion years of history building a portal to other universes.
 * The most powerful weapon in the Antares novels is probably the antimatter projector, which fires a continuous stream of antimatter. Not only is it pretty much unbeatable, but it's standard armament for both human and alien blastships.
 * Stanislaw Lem's Invincible, while having a crew that was at best Mildly Military, certainly didn't lack in firepower. Even its recon planes packed an antimatter gun, and the starship herself could, quoting from the novel itself, "boil a medium-sized sea".
 * Ed Hamilton's "The Star Kings" featured a Disruptor—the gun that destroyed the space itself. It ate up a good part of a starship's energy balance, but where it hit, nothing remained.
 * In Iain M Banks' "Against a Dark Background" the Lazy Guns were ancient weapons created by a long dead race that destroyed their target with a suitable dark humoured effect. A person might suffer a heavy anchor to appear above them, or a shark to materialize and bite their head off. A city will be unexpectedly hit by a comet or have a volcano erupt in its main square. The implication is it plucks something from elsewhere in the multiverse and pops it into its own universe where it dispatches the target - with a sense of humour.
 * In Sergey Snegov's "The Men like Gods", people use a similar device as an engine. While not initially being all that warlike, they find the side effects of their favorite space drive quite useful later, when rather unfriendly aliens appear. The heroes go on to befriending the crap out of said aliens, in the best Nanoha-style, and then teaming up with them when the next bunch of the enemies arrived. THREE TIMES.
 * In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, there exists several of these:
 * In Ringworld's Children, human starships are armed with a weapon called simply "The Anti-Matter Bullet"; guess what it fires.
 * In Protector, the Brennan-Monster destroys an entire fleet of Pak warships with something he calls the Finnagle Gun. It fires bowling-ball-sized pellets of pure neutronium.
 * In The Man-Kzin Wars, the Terran system is defended from invaders by the Mercury Laser; it's a laser the size of the equator of the planet Mercury, and is capable of destroying ships as far out as the orbit of Neptune. It turns out that while a purpose-engineered Wave Motion Gun is fun in itself, lasers powerful enough to drive solar sails are just as grand.
 * And in his short story "The Warriors", a human colony ship uses a photon drive as its means of propulsion. When a Kzinti warship pulls up near them with hostile intentions, the crew has no idea what to do as war and weapons haven't been seen on Earth for hundreds of years now. The captain has a disturbingly sick idea and turns the ship so the engine faces the Kzinti ship and turns it on, which slices the Kzinti ship cleanly in two.
 * There are a lot of devices like the previous two examples in the era of peace leading up to the first Man-Kzin War. Mining lasers for slagging asteroids that can slag warships just as easily, light-sail launch cannon that can fire coherent beams to the orbit of Neptune, mass drivers for sending material between planets that can just as easily sling chunks of metal at high speed towards invading ships, highly efficient photon drives that double as super-lasers, super-powerful fusion drives for interplanetary and interstellar ships that can spray streams of hot plasma over planetary distances. All of which were key in humanity's overwhelming victory over the Kzinti warfleet in the first Man-Kzin War, since Kzinti telepaths had reported that "humans have no weapons at all." It's all but Word of God that all these technologies were created with a dual-purpose in mind by the paranoids of ARM.
 * Let's not forget the Soft Weapon, which is an multi-function alien device that can, in one of its modes, convert matter into energy at a distance. It should be noted that this is a hand-held device.
 * There's also the Wunderland Treatymaker, based on an alien 'excavation tool', it creates two areas, one that suppresses the negative charge of electrons, and one that suppresses the positive charge of protons. The humans made an orbital version. After it was used, they renamed the planet Canyon after its defining feature.
 * And the Ringworld itself is defended by a laser that is generated from artificially produced sunspots. It shoots a laser beam larger than Earth's moon. The kzin on the team comments, "With such a weapon I could boil the Earth to vapor."
 * In Jack L. Chalker's "Well World" series, the entire universe is actually a simulation running on a gigantic computer called the Well of Souls. Humanity figures out how to hack it to a minor degree and builds "Zinder Nullifiers" for use in a major intergalactic war, weapons that basically reformat a large region of space into a default empty vacuum state. The war gets a bit heated, the Nullifiers are overused, and the Well World starts suffering a progressive memory fault that will eventually destroy the entire universe unless our intrepid heroes are able to get into the Well of Souls' control center to fix it.
 * Colin Kapp's The Chaos Weapon was powered by pulling multiple stars into its ammunition feed; it used a ring of black holes to focus the resulting beam. What this beam did was manipulate entropy: if something bad would ever happen in the target area, the Chaos Weapon could make it happen NOW. Lightning strikes, dams giving way, earthquakes.... You say that star's not due to go nova for another twelve million years? Guess what.
 * In Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series:
 * The various Precursor races developed a number of these, especially the Tar-Aiym and Hur'rikku who fought a galaxy-spanning war 500,000 years in the past. One weapon (the Krang) requires a planet-sized power source and creates miniature artificial black holes, while another (the anticollapsar weapon) creates reversed black holes made out of pure antimatter. The latter's unique power source has a charging time on the order of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, quite possibly a record in fiction.
 * It gets better in the Grand Finale, Flinx Transcendent. Flinx finds a roaming Tar-Aiym weapons platform that has hundreds of Krangs, which when fired simultaneously can cross the intergalactic void and destroy entire star systems from the backlash alone. Even that isn't enough to affect the Ultimate Evil, though, so he goes and locates a Xunca superweapon that extends across multiple dimensions and pulls in several million galaxies' worth of energy.
 * The 'Hell-class' weapons from Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space. Some can blast big holes in a planet's crust. Others can destroy stars (or so we're told).
 * Personally I found the Hypometric weapons to be more impressive, not that showy as they just remove a volume of space from existence and the workings are generally described as looking 'wrong'
 * The Andalite Chronicles, a side-story of Animorphs, mentions that a dome ship's main shredder is a laser "as thick as a tree trunk, capable of blasting chunks off a planet".
 * Stephen Donaldson's The Gap series features the awesomely named Super-Light Proton Beam cannon, which, in addition to being stupendously powerful, is the only weapon in the series capable of dealing Death From Above to planets... we're told. However, despite essentially being the series' main antagonist for the last three books out of five, the weapon is never (successfully) fired. A sort of a reverse Chekhov's Gun. Despite its supposed usefulness, the good guys do not have one—even at the space police headquarters at Earth.
 * Andrey Livandny's The History of the Galaxy series has the LIGHT annihilation system, developed by the Free Colonies to combat the technological superiority of the Earth Alliance. How it works is not explained, but it acts as a weapon of mass destruction on a planetary scale. As an example, the first time it was used in battle it obliterated a moon and two armadas. Needless to say, it was later more used as a deterrent than a weapon. The reason was stated that the firepower of the weapon could not be adjusted. It simply turned to energy anything in its path with destructive results.
 * In Mikhail Akhmanov's Arrivals From the Dark series has many alien races using Annihilators (i.e. antimatter cannons), the only defense to which are Deflector Shields. The first novel, Invasion, shows humans get their asses handed to them by an alien starship armed with these, while humans are still using missiles, magnetically-launched icicle spreads, and low-power plasma weapons. The subsequent novels shift the Annihilators into the more common variety of weapons with missiles and magnetic weapons relegated to ground-based use (no one in their right mind would use antimatter weapons in an atmosphere). Plasma weapons remain as secondary weapons for capital ships and primary weapons for fighters.
 * These also can be used to turn a planet into a smoldering hellhole in about an hour, although this is rarely done, as habitable worlds are valuable.
 * In Dune, possibly the Honoured Matres' planet-killing Obliterators from the last few books.
 * In the Dale Brown novel Flight of the Old Dog, the Soviets use a laser system rated at hundreds of megawatts for anti-ballistic missile, anti-satellite and basically anti-whatever purposes. The eponymous Airstrike Impossible is carried out to destroy it.
 * Timothy Zahn's Conquerers series has the human's CIRCE weapon, which is capable of completely obliterating any fleet it goes up against. Subverted because
 * In the Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Vendetta, the USS Repulse uses a deflector dish weapon (much like the ones used in Star Trek: The Next Generation—see below) to blow a Borg ship to bits. To be fair, though, that cube had already been heavily damaged in a battle with a spaceborne version of The Juggernaut.
 * Additionally, the Alternate Universe Star Trek: Voyager story Places of Exile seems to reference the trope itself; shortly after Species 8472 blew up a Borg planet (like in "Scorpion"):


 * Hellbores are fusion cannons rated in megatons per second and standard armament on Bolos; the larger Bolos mount several. They were originally developed from weaponry intended for use as the primary armament of space battleships.
 * Eventually Hellbores were made part of a Bolo's secondary weapons to the point where a Bolo could have over a dozen Hellbores, granted the secondary Hellbores were smaller in size.
 * Some Bolos were equiped with a Hellbore variant called a Hellrail. These were normally larger than the Bolo's main armament, but could not be depresed to engage ground targets. They were intended explicitly to engage spacecraft. As a Hellbore is capable of pin-point accuracy at interplanetary range, this is a serious threat to any enemny operations in an entire star system.
 * Besides the Death Stars mentioned above, the Star Wars Expanded Universe has several other superlaser platforms, mostly large ships. They're not planet killers, but are instead mostly used against other large ships. Centerpoint Station also has a pretty impressive gun.
 * Special mention must go to the Hutt superweapon, the Darksaber, which was quite literally a Death Star stripped down to the bare essentials, an engine, a powercore, and a superlaser, shaped like a Lightsaber
 * In Troy Rising, the SAPL is one. The acronym stands for Solar Array Pumped Laser, despite it not actually being a laser; it consists of a whole friggin' lot of mirrors in solar orbit, the most critical of which have Lots of High Tech in order to reflect up to petawatts of sunlight without immediately blowing up. The first time they're used, against an alien cruiser that basically took over the Earth in the first chapter, the beam is aimed at a patch of shield that was collapsed by a breacher round. It misses, hits the undamaged front shields, and punches straight through the entire ship.
 * Then they upped output by few magnitudes. Best part? It was used primarily for orbital mining.
 * The Mortal Engines Quartet uses them as a plot device with MEDUSA (salvaged from old tech) and then ODIN, the Kill Sat.
 * Subverted in the first Honor Harrington novel. Honor is horrified that her ship is stripped of most of its regular armament to make room for one of these. Why? Because it only works at short range, and her opponents can easily blast her light cruiser to smithereens before she gets there.

Live-Action TV

 * The main weapon of the Victory-Class Destroyers in the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade is definitely an example: It's an incredibly-powerful (and visually-impressive) beam weapon that draws so much power that it cripples the ship for a minute after firing.
 * It was equipped with a reverse-engineered Vorlon weapon but not the Vorlons' hyperspace tap (power source). It's like firing a Tsar Cannon with a thimbleful of gunpowder
 * Arguably, the Vorlon planet destroyer ship in Babylon 5.
 * The Great Machine on Epsilon III was hinted to be such, and certainly seemed to have the power to do it, but its ultimate purpose was never completely revealed.
 * Lexx:
 * The primary weapon of the Lexx. In fact, the only weapon of the Lexx. Being a living ship and the most powerful weapon in two universes, it's not like the Lexx needs additional firepower. As an added bonus, the CGI effect of the Lexx firing even looks like a wave front.
 * The fact that the Lexx has no other weapons did cause plenty of trouble to the protagonists (usually involving boarders). This was likely a deliberate flaw in order for the ship to be recaptured easily should it fall into the wrong hands (coupled with the quickly removed Restraining Bolt that prevented the Lexx from firing on His Divine Shadow's ships).
 * In the very first minute of the very first episode, there's a rather hellish weapon (the Foreshadow, the flagship of His Divine Shadow) that eradicates the surface of a planet in about 5 shots.
 * In Star Trek: The Original Series, the episode "The Doomsday Machine" features a miles-long Planet Killer, a conical-shaped machine made of a virtually indestructible material that destroys planets and then uses the rubble to refuel itself. It was theorized by Kirk that the Planet Killer was created as a bluff to keep an all-out war from occurring, but that it somehow was activated and couldn't be stopped, destroying both its creators and their enemies before continuing through the universe.
 * The episode makes a very un-subtle allusion to the H-bomb. In a stroke of Irony, it is then stopped by essentially a real H-Bomb --.
 * In Star Trek: The Next Generation:
 * The navigational deflector dish of the Enterprise-D is modified into one of these on two separate occasions, most notably during "The Best of Both Worlds", where it was used against a Borg cube. the deflector "cannon" features all of the drawbacks of the Wave Motion Gun trope, including long charge times, potential damage to the ship from the firing process, and even the necessity of clearing all the decks surrounding the dish to avoid irradiating the crew. You have to wonder whether the weapon would have fared better if tested on the Enterprise's sister ship... the USS Yamato.
 * Conversely, the future Enterprise in "All Good Things" features an enormous phaser cannon on the bottom of its saucer section which can destroy powerful Klingon warships with a single shot; it does not appear to cause significant power drain or require a long reloading time.
 * In Star Trek: Voyager, the Doctor uses a weapon called the "Photonic Cannon" during one of his daydreams. Obviously the Voyager has no such weapon, but
 * Species 8472 can combine the output of nine ships into one single wave of destruction--which even looks like a wave.
 * In Power Rangers, the heavier Humongous Mecha tend to have these. The drawbacks usually aren't mentioned... however, such an attack is usually only used as a finisher or after conventional weapons have already been tried. Rangers themselves can often combine their weapons for a smaller one of these.
 * In Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, the big bad has ships equipped with Point Singularity Projectors. Essentially capable of firing off black holes which measure several dozen meters across and can blow holes in anything, from spaceships to planets, to a sun.
 * The Hand of Omega, in Doctor Who, which isn't even supposed to be a weapon. And that's just for starters. This a series where the final shot of a war erased two races from history.
 * The Hand of Omega is a weapon in the same sense that any tool is a weapon if held correctly. The less poetic name is the Remote Stellar Manipulator, and is is known to be able to cause stars to go supernova and to collapse into black holes. While USUALLY overkill, incinerating an entire star system is a very EFFECTIVE way to attack anything in that star system.
 * No longer Holding Out for a Hero, Earth has invested in one of these, first seen in The Christmas Invasion.
 * The Delta Wave from Parting of the Ways/Bad Wolf would have been one of these, except that the Doctor refused to use it because it would have wiped out two races (Humans and Daleks).
 * In the old German SF series Raumpatrouille, the starship has the aptly-named "Overkill" weapon capable of blowing up small planets.
 * Though not technically a gun per se, the wormhole weapon in Farscape fits this trope;
 * Lo'La's Weapons Cascade.
 * The Ori put these as standard armament of their HUGE warships. These things can oneshot a Ha'tak with full shields as well as heavily damaging 304-class ships, potentially destroying them if they can land three hits. Combined with the freakishly strong Ori shields, these guns make Ori ships the spaceship equivalent of Physical Gods.
 * The Ori ships' pulse weapons are also extremely powerful with three pulses enough to obliterate a Ha'tak.
 * Asgard plasma beam weapons can also qualify since these are the only weapons known to be able to defeat even Ori ships. And unlike the Ori super-cannon, plasma beam weapons have the same rate of fire but are MUCH smaller to the point where at least four can be fitted onto a single 304-class ship, turning them into Pintsized Powerhouses.
 * These prove to be useless in the Stargate Atlantis series finale against the super-Hive, a combination of Wraith and Ancient tech. Given that even the Ori motherships can be fairly easily taken down with these beams, this makes the super-Hive the single most powerful vessel in the known universe.
 * And of course there's the Ori satellite weapon. And the much bigger Lantean version that can literally cut a Wraith hiveship in half. Really, the Ancients are rather good at these.
 * The Asurans have a version of this that involves strapping a hyperdrive to a stargate and sending it to the target location, at which point an extremely-powerful beam is fired at their stargate back on Asuras. The power of the beam can keep the gate open indefinitely (beyond the usual 38-minute cut-off) and also powers the Nigh Invulnerable shield around the "aiming" gate. Essentially, it's a weapon that can destroy anyone without ever leaving home.
 * There is also the weapon whose sole purpose is bleeding off excess energy from an unstable experimental power source... that blows up 5/6 of a star system.
 * The Eye weapon built by Anubis for his mothership is capable of fighting off an entire fleet of Ha'taks and destroy the surface of a planet.

Tabletop

 * Warhammer 40,000:
 * Nova Cannons.
 * The Blackstone Fortresses' combined-shot star-killing trick.
 * The aptly named Planet Killer.
 * Even the single ship version of the Blackstone Fortress' Warp Cannon probably counts.
 * Planetside, the recently introduced Destroyer weapon class fills this role nicely. They don't care if you're insanely tough, incredibly well armoured, or seeking shelter behind a conveniently placed building... Destroyer hits automatically cause wounds, automatically invoke the Instant Death rule, completely ignore any physical armour (personal force fields still work), automatically penetrate any tank or fortress armour, and that building you're hiding behind?? It's no use - it gets vaporized right along with you!
 * Spinal mount particle accelerators and meson guns in Traveller.
 * Maulers in Star Fleet Battles, a ship built around a Wave Motion Gun and its associated power systems. Very effective in the hands of a skilled player with a grasp of the right tactics to employ them to their best, less so otherwise.
 * The Godspear of the Five-Metal Shrike from Exalted. It does, effectively, infinite damage at ground zero. If you have the right charms, though...you can block it.
 * The Eye of Judgment weapon from Titan-class citadels, which the Shrike was designed to replace, is another one. It's not as resource-efficient, since it requires a crew of 5000 and the Eye is focused by an orichalcum lens a mile across, but the look on an enemy's face as a Titan citadel begins charging its weapon is easily worth it. Yes, someone with a perfect defence will survive, but the surrounding five miles or so will not. And that's radius, not diameter - meaning that as soon as it fires it's goodbye Gem.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! has a couple of these, such as the much-loved/loathed/feared/dreaded Wave Motion Cannon, which charges up as the turns go by and able to be removed from the field to blast the enemy for 1,000 damage per turn it had charged, Satellite Cannon, a monster that cannot be killed by anything below a certain level and possessing a similar charge-up ability (1000 ATK per turn, loses it after it attacks), and more than one of Seto Kaiba's signature monsters -- XYZ Dragon Cannon uses this whenever he discards, and Blue-Eyes White Dragon happens to have this as an attack. Which was later made into a card, namely a Raigeki Expy.
 * Although Aberrant characters are generally played at a much lower level of power, akin to your average Marvel Comics character, the game has Quantum powers at levels 4, 5, and 6 (which could only be acquired after a very long campaign if you play by the standard rules.) One of the level 6 powers is Quantum Inferno which allows the character to fire a Quantum Bolt capable of punching a hole, hundreds of kilometers wide, clean through the planet (which needless to say is the immediate predecessor to the planet's destruction.)
 * Dream Pod 9's Jovian Chronicles has them in the form of the Valiant class patrol carriers. These ships, explicity designed for groups of PCs in the vein of White Base and The Macross, packs a high powered laser in a spinal mount easily capable of outright destroying the heaviest capital ships in one shot. Unsurprisingly, it is often referred to the Spinal Laser of Doom.
 * You can build your own in Mekton Zeta. Mega-Beam plus Charging Time plus Lots Of Kills Worth Of Damage...of course, it'll weigh about seven tons, take up all the space in both your arms, and/or cost a fortune in space efficiency, but just think what it'll do to whatever you point it at.
 * The ship construction rules have one already pre-designed - the Core Cannon. This takes three full turns to charge and inflicts 1000 Kills of damage. For comparison, a humanoid mecha built at middleweight scale can take maybe 60 kills of damage total (and a maximum of about 12K to any given component before said component becomes shrapnel) with another 60K in armour, meaning a shot from the Core Cannon could vaporise eight times over. Admittedly, with the size difference the Core Cannon is unlikely to ever hit a normal-scale mecha (that's what the Close-In Defence System is for). But it's still absolutely sodding huge and does huge amounts of damage, so it counts.
 * Thanks to the inclusion of Dragon Ball Z in the Fuzion system (which is directly derived from the Mekton edition of Interlock), Kills scale geometrically. 1,000 Kills is the structural integrity of a heavy striker type starship (about the size of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701, or a modern aircraft carrier). 3,200 Kills is the structural integrity of an Earth-type planet. 12,400 kills and you're one-shotting Jupiter. (reference: )
 * At peak output the Heavy Disintegrator Cannon from GURPS: Ultra-Tech can instantly vaporize 660 thousand metric tons of any substance per second. That's just the tank sized version, Spaceships has larger ones.
 * The Action Figure/Card Game Z-G has a special class of weapons intentionally referencing this trope. It is differentiated from ranged weapons by laying down a pattern of cards that hits everyone in the designated "zone". It is called a Zone Weapon.
 * In Dungeons & Dragons, the seventh-level spell Prismatic Spray mixes this with Beam Spam: a rather trippy, multicolored blast that can do (randomly) anything from setting foes ablaze to instant petrification. Among fans, it's popularly called "Taste the Rainbow!"
 * The comedy game Tales Of The Floating Vagabond has rather simplistic gun rules, however the most powerful guns are labeled "Don't Point That At My Planet!"

Video Games

 * The mining laser in System Shock. One shot is enough to turn all of Central Florida to glass.
 * In The Last Remnant, David's remnant is called the Gae Bolg. It Gaes hard, it Bolgs hard, and it's shaped like a giant penis!
 * Mass Effect 2 has the Collector ship's main weapon, fully capable of blowing the original Normandy in half with a glancing hit. Later in the game, you can get the Thanix Cannon, a recent Turian creation, which takes two shots to vaporize that annoying Collector ship that has been out to get you all game.
 * Both the Collector weapon and Thanix cannon are watered-down versions of a standard Reaper weapon. The Turians reverse-engineered theirs from Sovereign. The beam is actually a constant stream of liquid metal fired at C-fractional velocity. If that description doesn't scare you, look up C-fractional velocity, we'll wait.
 * It can be blocked, but then the Reapers will just continue firing until the target is completely buried in cooling metal.
 * It should be noted that the Collector ship is about ten times the size of the Normandy SR-2, which is itself double the size of the SSV Normandy SR-1. The Collector ship can be destroyed without the Thanix cannon, but it's going to cost you a crew member.
 * Also, don't forget the unknown weapon that managed to one-shot a Reaper sometime in the distant past. They don't know exactly what it was, but they know it killed a machine god and continued on to blast the crap out of some random planet.
 * Speculated it was simply an enormous mass driver, firing a slug rather than a beam.
 * Near the ending of the final game, Harbinger uses its dreadnaught pulverizing Death Ray to
 * Just about every fighter in the R-Type series has one, complete with charge up! It's even CALLED a Wave Cannon!
 * The giant warship in stage 3 of R-Type Final has a giant version of this, capable of destroying entire planets.
 * Super-powerful Wave Cannons a common phenomenon in the R-Type universe (the boss of stage 1 in Delta, Moritz-G, has one, the 'boss' of stage 3 in Delta has two even larger ones, the boss of stage 1 in Final also has one... and so on). A few that're worth noting would be the Utgarda Loki in Tactics, and the Giga Wave Cannon in Final, that can be charged for 7 loops, and instantly destroys any enemy that can die in any difficulty, and it goes through physical obstacles like, say, meteors. In fact, the 'Final' Wave Cannon used to destroy the Bydo Core in stage F-A basically looks and acts like a fully charged Giga Wave Cannon.
 * Final states that the "planet buster wave cannon" is the same as the fighter mounted wave cannons, but 100 million times more powerful. Given the amount of energy needed to destroy a planet, that means that the fighter-mounted wave cannons have a maximum output somewhere in the region of 100 teratons. No Kill Like Overkill indeed.
 * Wing Commander:
 * The "Phase Transit Cannon" from Wing Commander 2, and the Nephilim-derived fleet killing plasma cannon equipped on the mothership of Wing Commander Prophecy.
 * The main gun of the Behemoth from Wing Commander III fits this trope perfectly—the Behemoth being a huge honkin' cannon with a ship wrapped around it.
 * Homeworld:
 * The Siege Cannon from Homeworld: Cataclysm, which take several real-time minutes to charge, and even when the fire button is hit, the shot takes an extra few seconds to charge up.
 * Another weapon seen in Cataclysm, the Repulsor Cannon, can be fitted to Archangel Dreadnoughts might be considered one of these, for all that it's actually not all that useful.
 * Also, the Phased Cannon Array of the Dreadnought and from Homeworld 2.
 * Or just the good ol' Ion Cannons.
 * Super Robot Wars:
 * In Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, the capital ship "Hagane" wields a massive, energy-guzzling Tronium Cannon. However, it can be fired with no real recharge time for the ship, and is in fact used often with the 'gravity brake' off so the ship can use the massive inertia in a fancy escape maneuver. The "Hiryu Custom"'s Gravity Cannon and the SRX's Hyper Titanic Blasting Tronium Buster Cannon also count. Its full name, according to Ryusei, is the Tenjo Tenga Ichigeki Hissatsu ho or Heaven and Earth One-Hit Sure-Kill Cannon.
 * Super Robot Wars W adds the Valstork's Double Proton Cannon, which can even link with the Valhawk to utilize it's Chest Blaster for even more power. The Dimension Breaker, the Chest Blaster of the Valzacard, by comparison, is its least powerful attack, which, by comparison again, is apparently the Valstork's Double Proton Cannon redirected.
 * In Super Robot Wars Z, Setsuko Ohara's final upgrade, the Balgora Glory, has the Gunnery Carver, It comes in straight-line MAP attack form, damaging destroying every enemy in its path, made even more effective by the squad system the game employs, or it can use a Full Burst The Glory Star, complete with Crowning Moment of Heartwarming Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner, to fire one of the most impressive beam attacks ever to grace the franchise, reducing the enemy to stardust with a spectacle of explosions.
 * Terran capital ships in the StarCraft universe are equipped with a Yamato Gun (naturally, named after Uchuu Senkan Yamato), which fires a massive bolt of energy with massive Splash Damage in exchange for a large chunk of the unit's energy meter. This is easily acceptable, though, given the fact that the Yamato Gun is the only use for said energy.
 * The terran capital ships actually fire a directed nuclear blast. The yamato cannon creates a containment field, detonates a nuclear explosion and then sends the entire package flying at high speeds.
 * Star Craft 2 brings back the Yamato Gun, and also has the Drakken Lazer Drill (only seen in the campaign mission The Dig), a beam capable of taking out a Protoss Archon, which have 300 shields and great defense, in under three seconds. On the Protoss side we have the Void Ray, which should qualify as its initially super-powerful attack becomes stronger over time, and the Planet Cracker, a cut ability for the Mothership.
 * Interestingly, the Yamato Gun seen in the game and in one cutscene (Emperor Arcturus I's acceptance speech) have different visuals. The version in the game is, basically, a big red blast that travels to the target. The cutscene version is a bright-red energy beam.
 * The original Galaxy Angel games (see Galaxy Angel gameverse) have the Chrono Break Cannon.
 * It's standard for the Disgaea series to provide any unit that uses a gun long enough with a weapon skill that turns their normally modest weapon into one, Dark Filament from Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten probably being the best example (And a Shout-Out to the original wave motion gun).
 * The Egg Carrier in Sonic Adventure has one of these.
 * The Eclipse Cannon that first appeared in Sonic Adventure 2. Also, the Power Laser for Tails' and Eggman's mechs (battle mode and second enemy boss battle only). The former of which is advertised as being powerful enough to destroy planets when fully charged, and delivers as promised in Shadow the Hedgehog.
 * In Sonic Battle, the Death Egg's Final Egg Blaster takes it Up to Eleven: It destroys  in a single blow. And unlike the Eclipse Cannon, it doesn't need even a single Chaos Emerald. Its sheer demonstration
 * Final Fantasy uses this trope from time to time:
 * Final Fantasy III's Cloud of Darkness, with her—its—whatever—particle beam.
 * Final Fantasy V's Soul Cannon and Guardian.
 * The Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII incarnations of Alexander fire a laser from their mask; it's relatively thin, but it blows up the entire battlefield.
 * The Air Force boss and a handful of mechanical mooks have an attack called Wave Cannon that deals heavy lightning damage to all of its enemies. The Air Force uses it after its countdown completes.
 * Final Fantasy VII features a Mako Cannon, named "Sister Ray", built by the Shinra Electric Power Company for the sake of taking out the impenetrable barrier around Sephiroth. It is fired only once; Diamond Weapon stands in its way and is is cut through, but returns fire, destroying a fair chunk of Shinra headquarters and apparently killing the president. Despite the interference, the weapon succeeds in destroying said barrier.
 * The player can acquire a summon that calls a being known as Bahamut ZERO, a gigantic flying dragon that bombards its targets from space with a giant beam of destruction.
 * The prequel Crisis Core brings us Bahamut Fury, which destroys (or at least melts) a good portion of the MOON to fire a giant laser at enemies.
 * The Guardian Force Eden in Final Fantasy VIII has an attack in which Eden uses the enemy as ammunition for a beam that is fired into another galaxy, which then explodes. It's also powerful enough to break the 9999 HP Damage Cap, which applies to nearly every other attack in the game.
 * On the subject of Final Fantasy, Sin itself (from Final Fantasy X) should count, given the damage its Tera Gravitation attack causes to the planet when it is fired. Also, the machina that the Al Bhed use to attack Sin.
 * Final Fantasy X-2's Vegnagun, which tries to use to destroy Spira. It was originally designed to
 * Final Fantasy XII brings us the Mist Cannon, which is deployed at the end of the game against
 * To emphasize how powerful it is, the Bonus Boss Omega can use their Wave Cannon attack, which usually takes many turns to power up, without charging.
 * A common staple of Command & Conquer games:
 * GDI's Ion Cannon in the Tiberium series, which was exported to Command & Conquer Generals as USA's Particle Cannon. In the Zero Hour Expansion Pack, General Alexis Alexander's Particle Cannons were cheaper, stronger, and purple.
 * They did at least bother to have the Particle Cannon and Ion Cannon have different firing mechanisms - the Ion Cannon is a satellite-mounted energy weapon, the Particle Cannon is a ground-placed energy weapon that uses orbital mirrors to bounce the beam to the desired destination.
 * Red Alert 2, for the Allied Prism Tower and Prism Tank. The former can be charged up by other Prism Towers in range with tangible effect, while the latter's Prism Cannon has a flap on the rear which animates when the Cannon is shooting.
 * The Empire of the Rising Sun in Red Alert 3 has an interesting version in the Wave-Force Artillery. Besides the usual full power blast, it can be turned down for More Dakka.
 * Possibly Dan Smith's Collateral Shot from Killer7. It's the only thing that can kill the Heaven Smile hives and it uses all the bullets in his gun and three vials of blood.
 * In Rogue Galaxy, the Dorgenark carries a double-barreled Wave Motion Gun on the front—called, simply, 'The Big Guns'. According to an NPC, they can take out a small planet, and the one time they're used in-game, they live up to the hype.
 * You do battle against a Wave Motion Gun in Super Mario RPG, controlled by the evil Power Rangers spoofing Axem Rangers on top of their blade shaped Cool Ship (if you can call it that) called Blade. It takes 3 turns to charge it up but it has the potential to annihilate your entire party in one turn. Unfortunately, a boss later on in the game has the potential to use this attack every turn. Super Mario Bros Z shows what happens when this is connected to a Chaos Emerald from the Sonic games. Even the Axem Rangers themselves are shocked. They don't get to use it again though, because.
 * Halo universe:
 * The Scarab is equipped with a Wave Motion Gun, which can be found by the player in smaller form in one level.
 * The eponymous Halos appear to be weapons of this type as well, given Halo 3's last mission.
 * The Spartan Laser.
 * The Prophet of Regret's insta-death beam. The Hunters in 2 and 3 are equipped with a similar beam.
 * 343 Guilty spark's
 * To a lesser extent, the Sentinel beams, and the Focus Rifle in Halo: Reach.
 * In EVE Online:
 * Titan motherships are equipped with doomsday devices, enormous missiles capable of destroying entire fleets of (player) opponents. Even though it's in the hand of a player, this is a last-resort weapon that can only be used once an hour, prevents the Titan from jumping (effectively escaping) for 10 minutes and a single shot is more expensive than some smaller combat vessels. It's also subject to friendly fire (which limits its use to defensive purposes). Before the Obvious Rule Patch doomsdays could be fired remotely, and did not disable jump-drives, making them complete game breakers.
 * In a more recent update, the Doomsday Device has been changed to a giant laser beam which is used to take out another, usually equally large, ship within a few seconds.
 * In addition, Jamyl Sarum of the Amarr Empire used a chaining Wave Motion Gun against a Minmatar Titan, destroying it together with it's support fleet..
 * The 11th patch/expansion, Dominion, will modify doomsday weapons to be, in the words of Eve blogger/podcaster Winterblink, "Macross cannons": In exchange for losing the AOE damage, they will do massive damage to a single target via a large energy beam. CCP has also hinted that more doomsday weapons are on the way...
 * Supreme Commander:
 * Every side has an enormous, Tier 3 artillery piece which takes a half hour to build and fires about once ever 10 or 15 seconds to a range of around 10–15 km, enough to cross the small and medium maps and get almost across the large maps (the extra large maps are up to 81 km). They're really only useful when used by UEF, and then in large numbers to try and take out the enemy's commander.
 * The UEF also has a Tier 4 version, which is hideously expensive, has an insane build time, but has unlimited range and much better accuracy then the Tier 3 guns.
 * The Cybrans have their own Tier 4 artillery, which is cheaper, builds faster, does less damage, and fires fast enough to batter down shields in under 20 seconds, but takes obscene amounts of energy and has much shorter range (though it is mobile, barely).
 * The Aeon and Cybrans also have tier 4 units that are expensive and slow, but can vaporize everything in front of them with respectively a giant phason and microwave laser. The Cybrans also have the option of upgrading their ACU with one for a massive 5000 DPS. And it can turn invisible. In the expansion, the UEF got a Kill Sat with one of these.
 * Crysis provides a rather hilariously underwhelming example of this technology when
 * The Jehuty gets one in Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner, called the Vector Cannon. It takes an absurdly long time to fire, but rest assured that whatever's on the receiving end of it will die.
 * Bungie's Oni also features the Wave Motion Cannon, an absurdly BFG that was originally a part of a combat vehicle. It can either shoot a long, laser-like energy beam or launch grenades (and yes, each firing of the energy beam requires a few moments of Sucking-In Lines) The Cannon was previously Dummied Out of another Bungie game, Marathon. All that survived in the data files was its name, leading to Wave Motion Gun WMG.
 * To defeat Adam, the final boss of Headhunter, you first need to steal his 'Judgment Cannon', a massive hand-held Wave Motion Gun, charge it up by Sucking-In Lines, and blast it in his chest, hoping that he doesn't stomp up and hit you while you're vulnerable.
 * In Space Empires V, and its predecessors, a weapon available for ships is a literal Wave Motion Gun, which is a powerful, long-range beam weapon.
 * The Savior boss's ultimate attack from Devil May Cry 4 is of this variety.
 * The #3 ranked assassin Speed Buster in No More Heroes wields a shopping cart... which transforms into an all-annihilating Wave Motion Gun.
 * Star FOX 64:
 * Gorgon (the "Area 6" boss) with its giant rainbow laser.
 * And the Saucererer, with its Katina-base-destroying laser that takes a full minute to charge up.
 * In Koei's Warship Gunner series, basically Dynasty Warriors with battleships, the most powerful weapons in the game are "Wave Guns," which come in several sizes but all of which fire lasers larger than the player's ship (which cause the player's ship to rocket backward thanks to laser recoil) and can sink fleets of enemy ships, yet will do fairly little against the game's island-sized bosses, who can have multiple wave guns and giant, hull mounted instant death buzz-saws.
 * In the space flight simulation Free Space 2 most capital ships are equipped with up to a dozen very powerful beam weapons. They have a both visual and audible buildup of 3 seconds and fire beams that can blast straight through other ships. Their diameter is large enough to completely engulf smaller fighters, which are instantly vaporized if they happen to be in the beams path at the moment. This can lead to some irritating deaths where your fighter just happens to be in the path of one of those beams: the capital ship beams do not target fighters, but heaven help you if you decide to fight in between two opposing capital ships, because they hit instantaneously and are therefore undodgeable.
 * In Treasure of the Rudras, the Wave Motion Gun was used to kill the existing races on Earth.
 * Sins of a Solar Empire:
 * The TEC's Novalith Cannon. The best way to describe it is that it does to planets what nuclear bombs do to cities. A single hit will depopulate all the but the most heavily populated planets. For those, you need two missiles. Oh, and there's fallout.
 * Also, one of the Advent capital ships has one of these as its "capstone" ability, Cleansing Brilliance.
 * Likewise, the Vasari Kotsura Cannon applies.
 * Possibly the Advent's Deliverance Engine, which essentially fires weaponized love. Kinda.
 * When you pilot the Super Dimensional Gear for a single battle in Xenogears, you can opt to fire the Yggdrasil cannon for 9999 damage. The only drawback is that it costs 9000 of your 9990 fuel.
 * Xenosaga has several. There's the Phase Transfer Cannon KOS-MOS uses, for starters. Then the Dammerung has a huge version called the Rhine Maiden designed to be fired in conjuction with three other ships. Note that this is huge in comparison to the Dammerung itself. Also note that the Dammerung is huge, with dimensions measured in kilometers.
 * Don't forget the Durandal, which has beam weaponry capable of . And then there is KOS-MOS herself, who's pretty much a walking Wave Motion Gun. Her most powerful attack, the X-Buster, was one of the only few that got an in-battle video sequence in Episode I.
 * Heavy Beam-class weapons in Sword of the Stars, ranging from the Heavy Combat Laser to the (anti-matter) Cutter Beam. Firing one on a planet leaves a large canyon, and Dreadnaughts can carry up to fourteen of them.
 * Iji gives us the Phantom Hammer, a ship-mounted energy cannon that, used in numbers, can either render a planet uninhabitable, or destroy it completely. A shot from one of these can pierce through several kilometres of solid rock. The final boss carries a more compact version; it's no less powerful.
 * If Iji cracks together the two most powerful pieces of Tasen and Komato nanoweaponry, she gets the Velocithor, a hand-held Wave Motion Gun capable of blasting through enemies and walls alike, and is instrumental in a very specific bit of Dungeon Bypass.
 * In the RTS Rise of Legends, the Cuotl race have practically built their entire society off of Wave Motion Guns. Oh, and machines made of stone. But really the Frickin' Laser Beams.
 * Touhou Project:
 * Marisa Kirisame's Master Spark and Final Spark spellcards certainly count, whether she's using them as your ally or your enemy.
 * Yuka Kazami counts as well, since she's actually the creator of Master Spark, which Marisa stole copied and modified.
 * Don't forget Mima's Twilight Spark.
 * In Super Smash Brothers Brawl:
 * Samus Aran's Zero Beam, her Final Smash, consists of an all-consuming, screen-filling beam that will (very likely) instantly KO anyone standing in its path. Unfortunately, it's so powerful it breaks apart her Power Suit.
 * In the story mode, the Subspace army manages to pull what amounts to a huge gun with mounted turrets on its side out of subspace. Its about 10x the size of the Halberd, the annoying ship you chase for most of the game, and that ship is already hundreds of feet long. This floating gun fires a huge energy blast that pushes the entire world into another dimension!. Shortly thereafter destroyed by Kirby, riding a tiny Air Ride Machine. Miniature airplane trumps world crushing battleship. Who'da thunk it.
 * Smash Bros has a lot of WMGs. Lucario's Aura Storm, Mario's Mario Finale, Ho'oh's Sacred Fire, Deoxys' Hyper Beam, Red's Triple Finish...
 * Samus' Hyper Beam from Super Metroid, which is actually an attack taken from by the . It is only used for a short time during the final boss fight and brings the once-powerful creature to its Yugo-sized knees.
 * The Mana Cannon from Tales of Phantasia and its prequel, Tales of Symphonia.
 * The Capitol Ships from Empire Earth space age epoch has the DBoD or Devastating Beam of Death. It uses the game's Mana Meter so takes a long period of time to recharge. Longer than the duration of most space battles in fact. The prototype of the Capitol Ship was named, appropriately enough, the Yamato.
 * Space Pirates and Zombies has the Titan Beam, a true WMG with all the characteristics: It's useful, it's a laser, and it's required to advance.
 * Master of Orion II:
 * The Stellar Converter, which can only be mounted on ships of Titan class or larger, is the most powerful beam weapon in the game, and can indeed be used to destroy entire planets. It can also be built on planets as a defensive weapon.
 * The most powerful beam weapon in the first Master of Orion, by a factor of ten, is the Death Ray. Obtaining it mid-game is very feasible (unless Orion is on the far side of the galaxy, or you're in the middle of a hot war and can't spare the battleships), and at mid-game tech levels the weapon is so large and has such high power requirements that one instance of it may or may not fit into an otherwise empty cruiser hull. It is also powerful enough to take out an enemy cruiser in one shot, almost regardless of shields or armour (extra-heavy neutronium will sometimes withstand it), and is the only beam weapon guaranteed to be effective against planetary defenses all the way through the game. Note that the Stellar Converter from the second game shares only the name and enveloping damage with the first game's Stellar Converter. In the original Master of Orion, the Stellar Converter is merely longer-ranged weapon, with no Earthshattering Kaboom effect on planets.
 * You don't get to use one in Gradius except maybe for the E-laser in Gradius V, but they certainly get used against you. The idea generally isn't to dodge them (which is fairly easy) but to keep from getting forced into a very bad place by the beams (which isn't).
 * Fraxy gives you the Laser in 3 different sizes and the Sonic Wave, which pushes people away.
 * Star Wars: Empire At War and Forces of Corruption expansion: First and foremost: Both Death Stars. Then, there's the plasma cannons of the Zann Consortium space stations, Aggressor-Class battleships, and MZ-8 tanks. Captain Piett's Star Destroyer (the Accusor) also gets a Proton Beam weapon in both games.
 * The last mission of the expansion campaign features the Eclipse Super Star Destroyer, fitted with a weaker version of the Death Star's planet-busting beam. It can One-Hit Kill any ship and is very useful, since you have to fight both The Empire and the Rebel fleets. Conveniently, the beam stops working just as another SSD jumps into the fray, so you have to destroy it by conventional means. The Star Wars Expanded Universe novels indicate that the Eclipse could easily take on a large New Republic fleet on its own and win.
 * Another Star Wars example. The Mass Shadow Generator in Knights of the Old Republic. Turned Malachor V into a mass grave, killed most of the Mandalorians and all but one of the Jedi in proximity (and said Jedi had to go Force-deaf to survive it), and was so destructive that even the Mandalorians were horrified by it.
 * Ace Combat:
 * Not a laser, but Ace Combat 6 has the giant railgun Chandelier as its Final Boss. It normally takes a long time for it to fire one of its shots (about a minute and a half between "Stauros Preparing for launch" and the giant flash of the cannon firing), but when the crew realizes all is lost, failing to take it out then and there leads to the cannon firing 10 shots (and failing your mission) in a row before it collapses.
 * And then there's the Excalibur in Ace Combat Zero, which is a laser, the Arkbird's laser cannon in Ace Combat 5, and the Stonehenge railgun array in Ace Combat 4.
 * Ace Combat 5 and Ace Combat Zero also have unlockable planes with laser cannons as special weapons, the ADF-10A/F Falken in both, along with the ADFX-01/02 Morgan in Zero
 * Ace Combat 3 has Rena's X-49 Night Raven, with a laser that can destroy an island in one shot. The playable version is toned down though.
 * Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception has both a wave motion gun (the Shock Cannon of the Gleipnir airborne fortress) and wave motion missiles (the same fortress' Shock Wave Ballistic Missiles).
 * In the same vein as above, Airforce Delta Strike features the Leupold Battery of guns so large, you have to fly down the barrel to destroy it. There are three of them.
 * Armored Core:
 * Armored Core 4 has the Kojima cannons, massive Phlebotinum shooting beam weapons charged by Sucking-In Lines, that if they actually hit are an instant kill. Unfortunately, outside of two missions in for Answer,they're useless.
 * And in For Answer there's the Assault Cannon, Lethaldose, a Kojima Cannon of immense power that instead of having the traditional charge time of a Kojima Cannon, it uses your Primal Armor instead, which then takes a long time to recharge.
 * The series' signiature weapon, the KARASAWA (renamed CANOPUS) laser rifle, is one of these, generally the single most powerful energy weapon in its given game. In Armored Core 4, a middleweight craft wielding two of these can S-Rank the infamous March Au Supplice mission with ease, provided the player is experienced enough. Of course, in every game, they are severely hampered by their weight and the amount of energy they consume with each shot.
 * G-Darius has the Alpha (player-fired) and Beta (boss-fired) beams. The scary part is that they can absorb each other, and by doing so become larger, more powerful, and longer lasting. Enemies must be captured and consumed in order to fire your Alpha beam, and certain powerful enemies will make your Alpha beam more powerful.
 * In Spore, a player who has made certain choices progressing to the space stage will gain the racial ability to unleash the Gravitation Wave, which will destroy all structures on a planet. Anyone can research a planet-killing laser though. The use of either of these weapons is pretty much the only thing which is outlawed on a galactic scale and will piss off any neighbors close enough to detect it.
 * This is in Space Channel 5, of all series. Everyone you saved helps you charge up a super huge laser to take out Blank/Purge depending on which game you're playing. However, you have to hit all three "chus" that the villain gives you, or it's the bad ending for you!
 * In the Thunder Force series of games, the Rynex-class starfighter can be upgraded with the Thunder Sword that requires several seconds for the spherical CLAW drones to charge up to full capacity and fires a huge beam with a comparative short range that will annihilate standard enemies in its path and can inflict heavy damage on Boss encounters.
 * In several Kirby games, Kirby gains the power Crash. This power will destroy anything on screen, provided it is not a boss or a miniboss. Fortunately, this power can only be used once, preventing it from becoming a Game Breaker.
 * X2: The Threat and X3: Reunion have the Phased Shockwave Generator, which is a Game Breaker. Instead of firing a single energy bullet like most weapons in the game, it fires an expanding wavefront that is actually more deadly against capital ships, since it can hit them multiple times with a single shot. In X2 a single fighter with three Beta PSGs could destroy almost any ship or station en masse. And then there's the Paranid Zeus, which can mount eighteen of the things... (It is a heavy capital ship.)
 * The PSG was thankfully reduced to capital ship only in X3: Terran Conflict. Now the best contender for Wave Motion Gun is if you fit a Boron Thresher frigate with Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon Photon Pulse Cannons, which lets a player-piloted Thresher snipe capital ships quite effectively. A Thresher so equipped is a Glass Cannon however: in addition to the class having below-average shielding, you can get off maybe two or three blasts from your main guns before you've completely depleted your energy reserves.
 * Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, on the N64. A surreal fantasy-action-adventure set in semi-mythological semi-feudal Japan, like a simplified Ocarina of Time but with a seriously twisted sense of humour. Some of the bosses are giant alien war mecha that you fight from the cockpit of a giant war mecha of your own called Impact, which looks like a giant grinning robotic Goemon. Impact can charge up a huge energy cannon by causing damage to a boss with conventional attacks; firing this cuts to a cool exterior shot of the beam slamming into the boss and knocking it backwards. Three or four shots of the Impact Cannon are usually sufficient to do away with even the end-game boss, which is effectively a Death Star in the shape of a giant peach and has a wave motion gun of its own...
 * Front Mission 3 has the Heavy P-Gun, a prototype beam weapon that exists on two bosses . It's capable of destroying most wanzer body parts in one shot, often resulting in a one-hit KO against a target, but the action point cost to fire it is so high it often can only be fired once every other turn.
 * In Astro Boy: Omega Factor, you have the Arm Cannon (mentioned above in regards to the Astro Boy anime & manga series), which, when fully upgraded, has an area that takes up around half the screen. The game even identifies this in the introductory stage as Astro's strongest weapon.
 * In Kingdom Hearts II, Xaldin shoots you with a wind blast gun. Ansem also does it with darkness.
 * In Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix +, the Lingering Sentiment can morph his keyblade into a giant cannon to shoot explosive bursts of magic at you. In Birth By Sleep, the same move is Terra's final Shotlock.
 * The Liberty cruisers of Freelancer are built around wave motion guns.
 * Planescape: Torment has the Mechanus Cannon spell, which opens a portal to a giant frikkin energy cannon and blasts your target enemy with it.
 * Warblade has a long string of different weapon upgrades Then, halfway through, they become fairly close to this. You have the standard single, double, triple weapons that appear all the time in other space-invader-style shmups, then quadruple fire, which is a bit Up to Eleven for some people. Then there is an upgraded triple fire, then plasma, which shoots a blue ball of energy, followed by fireballs (a wave motion gun in itself), then a laser, and finally upgraded plasma which is like normal plasma but has a wider spread and melts absolutely everything. And that's WITHOUT Super Autofire, which pretty much quadruples firing rate. It's probably safe to say that if you pick up a triple shot powerup if you have something really awesome, you are totally screwed.
 * The UIMS' Cannon Seed from Galaxian^3
 * Also Gourb from the PlayStation version
 * The Sega Mega Drive game Ranger X features the Solar Mining Cannon, which covers 2/3rds of the screen and blows the camera forward instead of sending the eponymous Ranger backwards as might be expected.
 * The Spur, the Infinity Plus One Gun from Cave Story. At lower power settings it fires Frickin' Laser Beams, but its fully-charged blast is squarely in Wave Motion territory.
 * In Dungeon Fighter Online the Launcher subclass actually gets two. One is his/her bread-and-butter Laser Rifle, which can be charged into not only a larger laser, but causes the rifle to expand. The other is a technique that starts off as 4 separate rotating beams, then merges into a more powerful one. Fired by a Kill Sat.
 * The so-called "Turbo Attack" from Gauntlet (1985 video game): Legends and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. Although the Turbo Attack is actually a magic spell and not a technological device, it fits the trope in every other way.
 * The Particle Beam Smart Bomb weapon in Lightning Fighters.
 * The Fusion (and maybe Omega) Cannon in Descent.
 * The makers of Infinite Space sure love their WMGs. You've got both Krebs, the ZR, the ZR 2, Project Stetalumo, and that's even before you get onto the ones that you can actually use, namely the High-Stream Blaster (which is apparently an antimatter cannon) on the Corsair, Mayr and Evstafi, the Surface Blast on any number of ships (the Zanetti is the one that comes to mind) and the Meteor Plasma on the Freedom. Unfortunately, the ones you can use are a bit rubbish, and once you get to the later stages of the game, even one volley from your fleet is way more powerful, if much less awesome.
 * Raiden, the Big Guy/Brute in the Virtual On series, has this as its signature weapon.
 * The Reactor Bosses in P.N.03 are often guarded by these, and getting hit results in instant death. The Seerose is also equipped with a WMG-type charge-up attack. The Final Boss's second phase beam spams you with a dozen wave motion guns after it Turns Red.
 * The Leviathan from Conduit 2 is a gigantic sea serpent who shoots a massive laser beam from its mouth.
 * The Shock Beam cannon in Battleships Forever adds a damage multiplier to the base damage when fully charged, causing it to deal +150% damage while making the beam much larger.
 * Legend of Dragoon has 2, the first one being the Black-Burst dragon's shadow cannon, and the second one being the infamous divine dragon cannon.
 * The Tale of Alltynex series uses this in all three games in various shapes and forms. A special note goes to the ZODIACs, whose laser blast sometimes cover the entire screen.
 * Stage 6 of Hellsinker features a huge beam coming from the bottom of the screen as a setpiece. While the player isn't in control of the beam, enemies also take damage from being hit with it, and it can be used to break through walls or even kill the midboss.
 * And let's not forget Kaguras "Xanthez" discharge. The thing has the shortest duration of any discharge in the game but is also the most powerful.
 * Three major versions exist in Escape Velocity Nova. There's the Vell-os psionic weapons, including the "turreted" Autumn Petal and the even-deadlier fixed Winter Tempest. The Aurorans get in on the action by importing Vell-os tech, applying their standard Tim Taylor-meets-Worf design scheme to it, and create the Thunderforge dreadnought and its "Triphammer" main guns. Meanwhile, the Polaris Capacitor Pulse Lasers were just as deadly as either and vastly more common, being mounted on all their capital ships save the Dragon (frigate analog).
 * Elite II: Frontier and Elite III: Frontier: First Encounters have the Plasma Accelerator, a Wave Motion Gun that comes in two sizes, Small and Large.
 * The Brahmastra from Asura's Wrath  It ends up being fired twice: Once at the intended target, Gohma Vlitra, a continent-sized monster that the Guardian Generals/Seven Deities have been fighting for eternity.   Later, it gets fired at  . It manages to
 * The Pokémon games have some, the most known of which is probably Hyper Beam.
 * In Tales of Eternia, Fog/Max's Elemental Master arte turns his gun into one by firing a laser that covers the length of the entire battlefield and almost reaches the top of the screen.
 * In Tales of Eternia, Fog/Max's Elemental Master arte turns his gun into one by firing a laser that covers the length of the entire battlefield and almost reaches the top of the screen.

Web Comics
"Dr.Light: Jesus, George, it's just a harmless BB Gun!"
 * Suppression brings us the Doomsday Crush Cannon. It must be seen to be believed.
 * In Bob and George, Dr. Light has a Wave Motion BB Gun. It requires three hours of charging and half the power of a city, but it can accelerate a BB to relativistic speeds. It's the perfect thing to use on gnomes. When George asked why he never used it before, Dr. Light had only this to say:


 * Ship to ship combat in Angels 2200 seems to consist of capital ships firing their particle beams, powerful laser cannons that can blow right through another ship, at one another, then letting the fighters duke it out while they wait for the beams to recharge.
 * Black Mage's Hadoken from Eight Bit Theater.
 * The Beva-Gladlax from Indavo is this trope.
 * King LOTA's new toy, in Schlock Mercenary, can shoot you from the other side of the galaxy as long as LOTA has targeting information.
 * Homestuck: The Red Miles ability provided by the queen's rings, now used by Also present is Eridan's Ahab's Crosshairs.
 * The Dreadful: The eponymous pistol is acually this.
 * Wayward Sons: With a minor modification and application of his power, Airez has turned his sidearm into one of these.
 * Parodied in 21st Century Fox by the Wave Water Gun

Web Original

 * Ankh Robot Gunchest, naturally, has a pair of guns on his chest. Oh, but they're no ordinary guns, they fire pretty big beams. When he finally makes use of them, it's pretty sweet.
 * I'M FIRIN' MAH LAZOR!!!
 * The CF.Net Ship from AH Dot Com the Series has one; a Running Gag is that it only appears about once a season because it takes that long to recharge.
 * Also the A.S.S.H.A.T. warheads, which started out as a Shout-Out to the Little Doctors from Ender's Game.
 * Mother of Invention in Red vs. Blue Season 9 has the standard frigate MAC cannon, but it was animated such that it appears to be one of these. It has claimed three kills on screen by the end of season 9 - two heavy fightercraft, and one skyscraper.

Western Animation

 * The BFG (Binary Fusion Generator in the show, but we all know what it really means) on the Watchtower in Justice League Unlimited.
 * The flagship of the Irken fleet in Invader Zim, The Massive, has one of these as its main weapon. Also seems to be present on their Humongous Mecha.
 * Both on the Megadoomer Stealth Assault Mech and the Maimbot. Also worth mentioning is the "Death Wave Cannon" mentioned by the Tallest in the beginning of episode Hobo 13. Although never shown in action, this cannon seems to be a Wave Motion Gun of its own.
 * In the final episode the giant robot Dib pilots has 2 cannons one in its chest the other in its hair.
 * Megas XLR pulls out the Wave Motion Gun, Yamato and all, in the first episode of the show. Later, it pulls out the Macross gun, too.
 * My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic uses the Power of Friendship combined with an Amplifier Artifact to create a Rainbow-colored beam capable of defeating the most malevolent forces in the world, and clean up the damage.
 * The Malevolence, General Grievous' flagship from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, is equipped with a pair of gigantic ion cannons that each produce a blast so huge that they can hit an entire starfleet. It's a bit different from the standard Wave Motion Gun, though, in that it only disables enemy ships, rather than destroying them; the ship then actually finishes them off with its immense array of turbolaser turrets.
 * The eponymous Iron Giant has one in its chest.
 * The secret organization in Sym-Bionic Titan has such a weapon. It's even called a Wave Motion Cannon.
 * The last actual episode of Swat Kats to be aired featured a gun developed at the weapons lab with the power to stop earthquakes from space, and then look what's coming along assimilating all the technology it can...

Real Life

 * Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser. Look at the size of the friggin turret!
 * A hypothetical real-life Wave Motion Gun would be Nuclear Shaped-Charge weapons, also known under the more casual name of "Bomb-pumped Lasers". It believed that the needed technology does exist (Project Orion wouldn't have been considered without them). Basically, you take the might of a Nuke, and instead of wasting it in an undirected explosion, you convert it into a ravening plasma beam of death, as hot as a star's core, which remains lethal at a range of several light-minutes. Simply awesome.
 * Which sounds suspiciously similar to the concept behind the Battlecruiser's Yamato Cannon.
 * It is the concept behind the Yamato Cannon. Project Orion long predates Starcraft.
 * Combine Wave Motion Gun with Beam Spam with Recursive Ammo and you get Project Excalibur, a theoretical X-ray laser Kill Sat powered by a nuke going off that Edward Teller thought up for ballistic missile defense. Eventually folded into SDI, but never left the drawing board after disappointing preliminary tests with X-ray lasers.
 * Some space objects (quasars, dying supergiants, neutron stars colliding) can produce what is called a Gamma Ray Burst, basically two humongous lasers shooting out from opposite sides. The scary part? At least one star capable of producing a GRB is pointed at the Solar System, is extremely old, and may fire one off in the next 200,000 years. Talk about massive Frickin' Laser Beams. Some scientists think that a gamma ray burst is what killed off the trilobites and their cousins and made way for the fish to dominate the seas.
 * Excellent real-life example of what an unusually powerful GRB is capable of: the Oh-My-God particle. This is a proton with 300 EeV kinetic energy and speed 99.99999999999999999999951% of lightspeed (to quote The Other Wiki: "in a year-long race between light and the cosmic ray, the ray would fall behind only 46 nanometres") which in particle physics is simply unholy - energy equivalent to a baseball flying at 95 KPH. In a single subatomic particle. "Oh-My-God" indeed.
 * The A-10 Thunderbolt II is the closest thing to a Wave Motion Gun that works right now. Specifically, it's a 6 barreled rotary cannon that fires an INSANE amount of rounds and even appears to be a laser due to the amount of tracer rounds. The thing can cut a TANK in half and has a recoil as fast as the plane's engines. Just to make it even better, the plane is built around the gun.