Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereidalbel
If you tether to the Sun with the math done right, you only need to destabilize the orbit enough to put Vesta or Ceres into a death spiral that intersects with the Earth. And while this is going to be a very, very expensive K-Sink, you have plenty of time to pack up and go, or at least set the demolition charges to blow when somebody gets too close.
You could also tether to smaller asteroids for no purpose other than to slow your doomsday dwarf planet of choice, which will cause it to "fall" in towards the Sun, again, with everything mathed out to intersect with the Earth.
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Good point. I had thought of people using smaller incoming projectiles at really high speeds for planet-killing, and a clever shielding system (actually a series of orbiting satellites that project Blades and spin) would cause the projectiles to destroy themselves. With something large and slow, shielding won't really work. Perhaps there are large vessels with the primary purpose of landing on such inbound doomsday devices and using their own K-Sinks to alter the course enough to prevent an impact?
Certainly, throwing something like Ceres at an inhabited planet would be an interstellar crime in excess to merely using a nuke, but while governments might be able to restrict access to fissionables, an extremist group with enough funding could probably manage something like this. Of course, it should require a lot of time, planning, and personnel to get the ball rolling, which would make it an interesting plot or subplot (with the PC's being the Only Ones that can stop it, for whatever reason).