10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek Beyond

The long-gone "Ancient Ones"on Altamid forged this horrible bioweapon, then decided it was bad, m’kay. So their solution? Split it in two and throw both parts into… space? Couldn’t they break it more thoroughly? Or will it always find someone willing to use it until it is unmade in the fires of Mt. Doom?

That silliness aside, there’s its inconsistent demonstrated behavior. When first tested by the movie's villain, Krall (aka Edison), its black death dust zips right to poor Ensign Syl and shreds her in the time it takes her to run to the door, but when activated in starbase Yorktown a similar quantity of the dust spins complacently around the Frisbee, and even when Krall/Edison is thrown into it, it spins harmlessly around him without taking a nip. It does so from the time he falls into it at the center of the station all the way to space outside, a distance of like 13 kilometers/8 miles (as the VFX people pegged Yorktown’s radius) …when it finally chews up him.

Speaking of the death dust, we’re meant to believe this Frisbee-sized doomsday device is somehow a threat to the millions of inhabitants of Starbase Yorktown, which has a volume of almost nine trillion cubic meters. Just how much of this dust can this handheld contraption make? 

If you guessed “as much as the story requires in a given moment,” you are correct.