Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereidalbel
If you want to be a REAL jerk, you unleash a swarm of missiles. 299 of these missiles are "conventional" warheads, but #273 is nuclear. There goes the battleship!
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Fusion isn't an available technology in this setting, and fission is outlawed. Sure, you manage to take out the battleship, but then you're a horrible war criminal and pretty much the entire galaxy goes to war with you. Not a very good trade.
EDIT: I feel I should note here that the shield your nuke likely had to get through probably wrecked the detonation mechanism, giving you just a really expensive dirty bomb... and if any missiles managed to get through, they probably wouldn't need to be nukes to take out the ship.
If you instead opted for proximity detonation, the vast majority of the energy that would normally hit the ship would be absorbed by the shield, meaning you just made yourself a war criminal with minimal, if any, gain. Good job.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereidalbel
As for interplanetary weaponry? Well, let's say somebody wants to kill every living thing on Earth. Attach a K-Sink (or two, if such a thing can work) to Vesta and/or Ceres. Either of those scoring a direct hit on the Earth will end life as we know it, and there is basically nothing you could do to stop them.
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Keep in mind, you can only use a K-Sink to accelerate toward a relative velocity of 0. The closest thing to Ceres (which I think is closer to Earth than Vespa, although I'm not certain) is Mars, at 1.2 AU away. To tether to Mars (SM+44 by mass) at 1.2 AU (SM+66), you need a K-Sink large enough for an SM+17 ship (K-sink would weigh 1.5 million tons). Once you've done so, you can start to (slowly) set up a geosynchronous orbit with Mars, but you'll probably screw up Mars' orbit quite a bit. Once you've swung around into Earth's orbit, you can tether yourself to the Sun so that you're going 18.5 mps relative to Earth - probably enough to cause some serious damage. Of course, this is all going to take a very long time, cost a good deal of money (K-Sinks are cheap, but this is a
big K-Sink), and screwing up Mars' orbit is probably going to clue Earth in that Something is going on - and they have plenty of time to stop you by just attacking Ceres (which even without Mars getting screwed up they'll probably notice is moving) and destroying the K-Sink. In theory you could tether to Mars and fling Ceres (slowly) onto an unavoidable collision course, then destroy your K-Sink (so Earth can't use it to just tether it to something else and stop it). It might be doable, but it's going to be very difficult and give Earth plenty of time to evacuate. Could make for an interesting campaign, however.
Note the above ignores the idea of only being able to tether to whatever is proportionally closest, in which case you could probably only tether the sun, which wouldn't be of any use for killing Earth.