Crowbars & Planetbusters

There are many easy ways to sterilise a planet. But most of them take up some
time, and reduce property values.

Regarding the "How come race X doesn't just drop some relativistic mass on a
planet", I would prefer this to be technically difficult rather than rely upon
a moral imperative.

Example: * FTL travel gets buggered up by gravity wells. * It gets REALLY
buggered up by rapidly rotating or moving masses nearby.

So you want to exit in an area of space that is relatively flat. And you
really, really want to be exiting with a low relative velocity to nearby
masses, and they had better not be spinning too fast if they're near, even if
they're small.

Try to exit FTL at a relativistic speed within 10e6 AU of a sun, and one of
the following is guaranteed to happen: * nothing. You softly and silently
vanish away and are never heard from again.

* you emerge somewhere in the vicinity of your target position, but with a
direction
that's non-deterministic. Bits of you do, anyway.
* You bounce back to your original position, direction as above. * FTL doesn't
occur at all. * something even weirder.

Pickets consisting of rapidly spinning black holes or neutronium asteroids
could prevent FTL emergence (or departure?)quite a long way out.

You need this, or some Bunt is going to dump a few kilotonnes of Lithium in
your star's photosphere, causing its permeability to change locally and give
you a really nasty Solar Flare. Not enough to damage a planet, but enough to

> So Planetbusting is not worthwhile.

Unless, of course, you don't want the planet, but do want the extinction of
it's inhabitants.  Which is a rather final event, from a story / gaming
setting point of vew......

Right! We're Hydrogen breathers. What do we want with an oxygen rich world?
Nuke it!

On the other hand, if we take it intact, we COULD sell it to our Nitrogen
breathing allies, hmmmm...

[quoted original message omitted]

> Anthony Leibrick wrote:

> Anthony Leibrick wrote:

In which case, for 6 subsititute 3. Or even 2. Enough so it's far enough away
from the life zone to be harmless, close enough to makie getting there STL a
feasible, even routine proposition.

Are there competing definitions of an AU?
I found the following deffinition from Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: astronomical unit Function: noun
Date: 1903
: a unit of length used in astronomy equal to the mean distance of the earth
from the sun or about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers)

Or are we talking about a different AU?

Ignore the last message. I was asleep and did not read the message correctly.

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Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
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