How would you invade a planet?

[adm]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Filling the air with dust and covering large areas with ash and lava, let alone starting world-wide fires, seems to destroy or damage a lot of what we want the planet for.

Perhaps, note that middle America gets a lot of fertilizer on the grain producing areas, the lava dust that is kick up will limit our ability to use aircraft, plus devastating North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and coastal China takes out most of our planets advanced weapons and manufacturing capabilities. South America, Africa, Australia, and Central Asia remain for immediate exploitation, and the Central North American area should be useful for food production within a decade.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by adm

Perhaps, note that middle America gets a lot of fertilizer on the grain producing areas, the lava dust that is kick up will limit our ability to use aircraft, plus devastating North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and coastal China takes out most of our planets advanced weapons and manufacturing capabilities. South America, Africa, Australia, and Central Asia remain for immediate exploitation, and the Central North American area should be useful for food production within a decade.

I'm expecting something like this: half of North America covered with ash up to hundreds of feet deep and hot enough to sinter itself. Or the formation of a large igneous province of tens of thousands of square kilometres of flood basalts over hundreds of thousands of years of eruptions. You might end up with something like the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event.

Either way, you are attacking the locals by attacking plant life while leaving the inhabitants able to do stuff until they starve. That seems immensely destructive. I recommend an attack on transport and energy supplies because that cuts off food supplies to the population centres without damaging the biological productivity of the land itself, diminishes net agricultural productivity without damaging gross productivity, and paralyses the prey during its death-throes.

[Anthony]

Depending on your assets, antimatter bombing might be an excellent way to sterilize the surface with only modest levels of damage -- small amounts of antimatter are mostly sources of penetrating radiation (similar to neutron bombs) and should produce very little lingering radiation.