From: nuny@bid.nes   
      
   On Saturday, May 6, 2017 at 4:38:20 PM UTC-7, Mr Anderson wrote:   
   > Ok, so I had a brake from science fiction related topics, but today a thouhgt   
   > came to me: If we have a two planets, in two solar systems, a few lightyears   
   > apart from each other, and they have specialized relativistic speed   
   > spacecrafts serving as interstellar RKVs, and they are precise enough to hit   
   > the enemy planet in enemy's system, could this mean a MAD but on truly space   
   > scale?   
      
     To kill a whole planet reliably you don't need to disassemble it, just   
   disrupt the biosphere beyond habitability. I'd go with a relativistic shotgun   
   effort myself to raise a nuclear winter's worth of dust planetwide all at   
   once. The actual kill would    
   take a while, but it would be fairly certain.   
      
     I believe the greatest efficiency is to hit land rather than ocean, making   
   the accuracy problem a little worse- you have to hit, on average, only a   
   fourth or so of the planet, but the right fourth.   
      
     So, maybe a dozen or so projectiles, each made of an asteroid massing a few   
   million tons? Sounds about right.   
      
     Okay, so how to accelerate all that mass to your 0.95 lightspeed? Unless you   
   handwave a total-conversion-of-matter-to-unidirectional-thrust rocket (if you   
   have that, why not just one total-conversion bomb dropped on the planet?) and   
   begin with much    
   larger projectiles, a laser launcher is the only reasonable option. Doesn't   
   that kind of warn the target system that Death Is Coming though?   
      
     I'm going to ignore the travel-time issue. This would have to be a   
   zeroth-resort system operated by a deadman switch held by the whole home   
   population so to speak. It would only go off if the whole world sending it   
   were dead. The dead won't care how    
   long it takes their revenge to get there, right?   
      
   > Also, what could be a countermeasure to dense objects travelling at 0.95 c?   
      
     Uh. Deflect them with anti-RKVs? Great big ones made of pure iridium?   
      
   > Because if there is such thing, it's not MAD anymore. An, at last, how could   
   > the attacked system detect incoming missiles, when there are many possible   
   > angles of attack?   
      
     Spread zillions of tons of antimatter dust in a spherical shell maybe just   
   outside your own Oort cloud? Watch for annihilation radiation bursts as the   
   RKVs came in?   
      
   > Could there be a plausible justification for spies that observe the situation   
   > and send signal to mothersystem if they see launch, so they can launch their   
   > missiles?   
      
     But the signals won't get there much before the RKVs.   
      
      
     Mark L. Fergerson   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)