Quote Originally Posted by Mark Hall View Post
And, for a while, a significant portion of the galaxy* was clones of a single human. There were 950 million of him.

*Small, but significant. With 10 trillion sophonts, 950m is a tiny fraction... but bigger than the other tiny fractions.
It should be noted that these 950 million clones in the Shclockverse were made with F'sherl Gaani gate tech, from a buuthandi that was already partially destroyed. In other words, with five surviving buuthandi, the F'sherl Gaani can instantly make about 5 billion of anything they happen to feel like, as often as they like until their stars have been completely converted into whatever they're making (the gates can handle up to about city bus size, roughly, if we stay strictly with what's been shown on panel). If you send a pallet of terapedoes through, you could be slinging 60 billion gigatons of 'boom' wherever you happened to feel like as often as you could shove the pallet through the gate.

Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
Going back to tabletop, I bring two artifacts from Lamentations of the Flame Princess:

First is the Monolith (from The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time). It allows travel across times and universes. It can be made to not exist, but given a co-operative character, this is a defensive feature more than a weakness. Pretty hard for other universes to destroy something that doesn't exist.

Second is the Book (from The God That Crawls). It is a spellbook that, once assembled, destroys all information other than itself. All. Information. Starting with other writing, ending with natural constants. The Monolith would allow a relatively safe and easy way to take its pages, one by one, to a target universe. Once assembled, it would make a potent weapon against them. Notably, nearly all sci-fi universes would be suspectible, because if they can't neutralize it near-instantly, all high-tech solutions for locating it are ruined. Sadly, the Book is destructible, though it renews itself (on the pages of other books, which must be recollected and reassembled).
... this sounds like a rather good episode of Doctor Who, honestly.


If we split things off into time-travel and non-time-travel universes, for non-time-travel, I think that Schlock Mercenary and the Lensmen are our two top contenders..?

Lensmen for obvious reasons, and Schlock Mercenary wins out over Star Wars, for example, because Death Star-level firepower is commonplace enough to be done by accident (three total-conversion bombs temporarily contained in a small warship's inverted shield bubble).

Oddly enough, because of their widespread wormhole-based tech, the Schlockverse is one of the few in a position to deal with the Lensmen's FTL planet outta nowhere, since that's also wormhole-based. And their gravity weaponry is one of the very, very few things I'm aware of that could get through the Lensmen's inertialess absolute defense. Not gonna say that the Schlockverse is going to win, given how nuts the Lensmen 'verse gets, but the first few battles are going to be some very harsh lessons for the Lensmen.