cthia wrote:Now that's a new implementation of pincering between two forces. I have got to read this series. New application of the Kiss principle too. Bend over and kiss it goodbye.
The basic forces at work were that planets can mount better weapons and shields than anything mobile can hope to. Thus no fleet can hope to take a strongly held
planet by normal weapons.
They had used a negasphere (a planetary mass of negative matter--while it annihlated normal matter it did so with lethal radiation but no boom) against another
planet and they figured any weapon they used would soon be copied and defenses built so they only used such things once.
A free object has a mass of zero and reacts accordingly--smack it and it just drifts away. You can only harm such an object by holding it in place with tractor beams first. Smacking it with a
planet would have come down to pitting the power of the tractor beams against the power of the impacting
planet--useless. Hence squash it--now it's the power of the
planet vs the power of the other
planet. It doesn't really matter if you take down the defenses, Jarvenon ended up buried in the mass of the impacting planets.
I can't imagine looking up into the sky and seeing it fill with ominously cloudy planet growing ever so larger. What are you going to hide under? I'm sure people still run for their fallout shelters.
I doubt Jarvenon bothered with fallout shelters. And they wouldn't have had much time--the planets would have been positioned while free, the actual flight time inert was very short.