I won't bore you with the train of thought that brought this show to mind, but I found the intro. Anyone else remember this cheesy, fun show? OMG, the wave motion gun--did they ever fire that thing and NOT disintegrate everything? Even as a kid, I had trouble understanding why their enemies would always conveniently cluster together in front of the giant, slow-moving and slow-turning battleship to get obliterated by that thing.
I vaguely recall some sort of reluctance to use the gun except in desparate measures, like maybe because it used so much power and they had to ration it because their engine was also a wave motion engine. And yet it seems (in my sketchy memory of childhood) that every single episode was a conflict where they tried to fight valiantly but that ultimately culminated in the use of the WMG.