Dilandu wrote:With all respect, but shooting relativistic projectiles over interstellar distances is perfectly possible. And you could actualky hit a planet with it. Yes, the interstellar gas may deviate projectile a tiny bit, but considering the inertia it would took a lot of lightyears to seriously hamper the ability to hit planet. The only risk us that your projectile may hit something like dust - which would kill the projectile.
A rail gun mass driver firing from near dead rest (orbital speed) won't be able to accelerate a projectile to relativstic speeds without strapping an Honorverse wedge system on the bullet. The little 2 person skimmer is likely capable of at least an order of magnitude greater speed outside of atmosphere than what you could accelerate a projectile to with an EM driver.
Honorverse KEWs were wedge driven for this reason.
We really need more textev to do much more than blindly guess here. What we have from the first book indicates a number of orbital bombardment platforms, likely widely spaced but covering most if not all of the planet, with beam weapon point defenses capable of taking out at least small craft that approach too close to the platform. That's all we've got.
I really need to go back and re-read the first few books again, if not the whole series. I don't recall if we have textev of the skimmer's full capabilities, much less the assault shuttle in the cave. We know the skimmer can operate outside of the atmosphere, but I don't think we've been told if it's capable of limited interstellar travel, its range, or its top speed outside of atmosphere/gravity well. With the limited info we have, it does seem a reasonable though risky approach to think the skimmers or assault craft could exit the gravity well of the planet, accelerate in interstellar space on a long loop, and set up a kinetic strike on all of the platforms simultaneously. Very risky... if you missed or even hit the platform without disabling it there's no telling what it will do according to the story. But it may be workable, depending on what we don't know about the skimmers/assault shuttle. Fixed orbital defenses, especially those looking ONLY down, are wide open to outside strike.