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What, no planet kablooey?

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What, no planet kablooey?
Post by cthia   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 10:53 am

cthia
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Eridani Edict!

This Edict is responsible for something else missing in the Honorverse -- a planet killer! And relatedly, attitudes that wish to destroy planets -- though not always human -- and oftentimes not -- throughout my media excursions.

What follows are some examples, though in no way even close to exhaustive. I guess we should be thankful that RFC deviated from the norm. The worry is there, less the effort.

*To note, is the account at the end of this post indicating how much this idea has permeated the minds of Americans.

** And the real life Doomsday Machine built by the cold cold Soviets during the Cold War -- The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, Dead Hand.



1. In the Star Trek: Original Series there was the Doomsday Machine.

2. The Death Star from Star Wars. Which has gone through a recent iteration in the new movie. Several iterations in total.

3. Andromeda...

⦁ All Commonwealth warships were equipped with a limited stock of "Nova-bomb" warheads for their missiles, one of which is sufficient to cause a star to nova, thus destroying its planets.

4. Babylon 5: The Lost Tales – Centauri Superweapons, hinted at by a dream sequence set 30 years into the future that Sheridan experiences. While only NYC is destroyed in the scene, it is implied that all of Earth gets wiped out.

- A Shadow Planet Killer is a fictional machine from the Babylon 5 television show and films, which was used to destroy planetary ecosystems.

- The biggest ships in the Vorlon fleet appear to be the Eclipse Planet Killers, huge starships capable of destroying entire worlds. They are said to be 3–4 miles (4828–6437m) long. The first planet to be hit by a planet killer was called Arcata 7. It was reduced to rubble, slag, dust and asteroids, killing the 4 million people on it.

⦁ Mass Drivers used by the Centauri against the Narn homeworld in the episode The Long, Twilight Struggle

⦁ Starships and orbital platforms were supposedly also capable of laying waste to a planet, such as the Shadow Battlecrab, a Minbari Sharlin Cruiser, the Narn-Drazi fleet that leveled Centauri Prime, and the Global Orbital platforms in Earth orbit.

5. Lexx
The Lexx – Capable of entirely destroying planets.
The Foreshadow – predecessor of the Megashadow. Reduces the surface of Brunnis-2 into molten slag, using a large scale version of the "Black Pack" weapon often seen in the LEXX series.

⦁ The Megashadow – Annihilates an Ostral-B asteroid base and the surrounding field in a single shot.

Mantrid Drones – They consume all forms of matter (including planets) to replicate themselves.

DC Comics

⦁ In Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, the Quantum Eigenstate Device (QED) is a planet-killing or possibly universe-killing weapon.

⦁ Most cosmic beings and even some heroes or villains have the power to destroy a planet.

⦁ Superman himself (frequently implied to have infinite strength) has demonstrated the strength to move or destroy multiple planets and once infamously destroyed a solar system with a sneeze. His heat vision also has vaporized entire planets, though being a hero he rarely uses this level of power.

⦁ In Green Lantern: The Animated Series, the Red Lantern Corps have a large number of cylindrical devices called 'Liberators' that can disintegrate a planet.

Stargate SG-1/Stargate Atlantis

⦁ A tainted Zero Point Module can explode with enough energy to destroy an entire solar system.

⦁ Project Arcturus, an abandoned Ancient project capable of extracting energy from our own universe, unlike a normal Zero Point Module which draws energy from subspace, would create exotic particles with unpredictable properties, and would overload to actually destroy approximately 5/6 of a solar system.

⦁ The Stargates themselves are composed of Naqahdah, and, if caused to detonate, would cause considerable damage.

Anubis's Ancient weapon that charges a Stargate powerfully enough that it explodes.

⦁ A wormhole passing through a star is capable of introducing super-heavy elements into it, thus destabilizing fusion processes and changing, possibly catastrophically, the climates of planets orbiting it.

⦁ P3W-451 has fallen into a black hole; an inbound wormhole to its stargate propagates the gravitational influence back to the dialing gate. Initially this caused time distortion effects near the gate, but as P3W-451 got closer to the black hole objects were pulled into the gate, as of Exodus a gate dialing from a star would exert such a pull that it could not only remove matter from the star, but do so fast enough to cause it to go supernova. The effect of dialing from a planet at this point was not described.

⦁ The Dakara Superweapon in the Temple of Dakara can return all matter in its range to its component molecules. Its range is normally limited to Dakara and its surrounding space, however the wave will propagate through the wormhole of an active Stargate (unimpeded by either iris or Goa'uld shield technology) and expand on the far side to cover the planet's surface, but unlike Dakara itself, the wave will not propagate into orbit. Ba'al however modified the Dakara Stargate, using a 'hack' of the DHD's correlative update function to dial every Stargate in the Galaxy simultaneously, turning the weapon from a strategic threat to a Galactic scale superweapon against all planets within the Milky way Stargate network.

⦁ A Tauri Mark 9 Naqahdah-enhanced nuclear weapon has a "Multi Gigaton" yield.

⦁ Anubis's mothership, powered with the Eye of Ra as well as four other "eyes", in "Full Circle"

⦁ Goa'uld System Lord Sokar used a fleet of Goa'uld Hatak Class Motherships to terraform the moon Ne'tu to serve as his prison.

⦁ The Asgard managed to destroy Halla by causing Halla's sun to become a black hole.

⦁ The Asgard destroyed their home planet, to commit mass suicide, by unknown means.

⦁ The Replicators have spread across the surface of an entire planet and converted everything on it into replicator blocks.

⦁ The Ori Priors can turn planets into Point Singularities (Black Holes) to power their supergates, and did so twice.

⦁ The Tok'ra have been shown to possess Thermonuclear Induction explosives capable of burrowing to a planet's core and igniting a reaction to which the planet would explode; as shown when they used it to destroy Netu. "The Devil You Know"

⦁ Gadmeer terraforming ship – see Genesis device below.


References:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dooms ... nal_Series)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Star


*White House petition
In 2012–13, a proposal on the White House's web site urging the United States government to build a real Death Star as an economic stimulus and job creation measure gained more than 30,000 signatures, enough to qualify for an official response. The official (tongue-in-cheek) response was released in January 2013 and noted that the cost of building a real Death Star has been estimated at $850 quadrillion, while the International Business Times cited a Centives economics blog calculation that at current rates of steel production, the Death Star would not be ready for more than 833,000 years. The White House response also stated "the Administration does not support blowing up planets" and questions about funding a weapon "with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship" as reasons for denying the petition.




Can't we all just get along?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by JohnRoth   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 11:38 am

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Tisk, tisk. You missed the negasphere in one of the later Lensman novels, plus the trick in Backstage Lensman to make a negasphere look like a planet.
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by MaxxQ   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 11:57 am

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JohnRoth wrote:Tisk, tisk. You missed the negasphere in one of the later Lensman novels, plus the trick in Backstage Lensman to make a negasphere look like a planet.


Also, there's a planet-killer in James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars series, an indirect planet-killer in his single book, Thrice Upon a Time, and a potential planet-killer in his Genesis Machine book.
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by cthia   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 12:16 pm

cthia
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MaxxQ wrote:
JohnRoth wrote:Tisk, tisk. You missed the negasphere in one of the later Lensman novels, plus the trick in Backstage Lensman to make a negasphere look like a planet.


Also, there's a planet-killer in James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars series, an indirect planet-killer in his single book, Thrice Upon a Time, and a potential planet-killer in his Genesis Machine book.

The idea is so common that it's close to impossible to list them all.

I even forgot about one of my own favorites... Galactus: Galactus was depicted as a god-like figure who feeds by draining living planets of their energy. Even though he's a god instead of a ship, I suppose he should qualify.

Also, the ships in Independence Day were to lay waste to Earth.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by munroburton   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 12:40 pm

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cthia wrote:Eridani Edict!

This Edict is responsible for something else missing in the Honorverse -- a planet killer! And relatedly, attitudes that wish to destroy planets -- though not always human -- and oftentimes not -- throughout my media excursions.

What follows are some examples, though in no way even close to exhaustive. I guess we should be thankful that RFC deviated from the norm. The worry is there, less the effort.


RFC did turn it up to 11 in his Dahak series. One of the empires at one point had more than a quarter million warships of similar size to the Death Star, not to mention the latest generation of the gravitionic warhead in book 3...
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by noblehunter   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 12:51 pm

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Isn't an impeller drive instrinsically a planet killer? Either by direct contact or by accelerating a mass to near lightspeed. Can't an impeller theoretically get to lightspeed almost instantly? Even if the ship disintegrates, there's still a lot of high-energy particles bombarding the planet?
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by Louis R   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 1:37 pm

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That theory is for the mathematical construct that is the wedge itself. Like your typical 1st-year dynamics exercise, it assumes that all dimensions and masses not specifically given are zero. In the real world, using real nodes to generate that wedge with finite power, near-infinite accelerations don't - and can't - happen.

noblehunter wrote:Isn't an impeller drive instrinsically a planet killer? Either by direct contact or by accelerating a mass to near lightspeed. Can't an impeller theoretically get to lightspeed almost instantly? Even if the ship disintegrates, there's still a lot of high-energy particles bombarding the planet?
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by noblehunter   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 1:46 pm

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Assume a perfectly spherical side-wall?

Do we know how fast a wedge can accelerate in a practical sense? For ships and missiles, it's limited by the inertial compensator's ability to preserve the the object being accelerated but that's not a limit if the desire is just to get something moving as fast as possible as quickly as possible.
Louis R wrote:That theory is for the mathematical construct that is the wedge itself. Like your typical 1st-year dynamics exercise, it assumes that all dimensions and masses not specifically given are zero. In the real world, using real nodes to generate that wedge with finite power, near-infinite accelerations don't - and can't - happen.
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by George J. Smith   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 1:50 pm

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munroburton wrote:
cthia wrote:Eridani Edict!

This Edict is responsible for something else missing in the Honorverse -- a planet killer! And relatedly, attitudes that wish to destroy planets -- though not always human -- and oftentimes not -- throughout my media excursions.

What follows are some examples, though in no way even close to exhaustive. I guess we should be thankful that RFC deviated from the norm. The worry is there, less the effort.


RFC did turn it up to 11 in his Dahak series. One of the empires at one point had more than a quarter million warships of similar size to the Death Star, not to mention the latest generation of the gravitionic warhead in book 3...


IIRC a star was made to go supernova in order to destroy an Achuultani incursion fleet
.
T&R
GJS

A man should live forever, or die in the attempt
Spider Robinson Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (1977) A voice is heard in Ramah
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Re: What, no planet kablooey?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Dec 30, 2015 2:42 pm

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noblehunter wrote:Assume a perfectly spherical side-wall?

Do we know how fast a wedge can accelerate in a practical sense? For ships and missiles, it's limited by the inertial compensator's ability to preserve the the object being accelerated but that's not a limit if the desire is just to get something moving as fast as possible as quickly as possible.
Louis R wrote:That theory is for the mathematical construct that is the wedge itself. Like your typical 1st-year dynamics exercise, it assumes that all dimensions and masses not specifically given are zero. In the real world, using real nodes to generate that wedge with finite power, near-infinite accelerations don't - and can't - happen.
Probably not much, if any, faster than a CM already does - so 130,000g or so. You need the impeller nodes, and their power source, to hold together long enough to keep the wedge viable. If you accelerate harder than you can compensate the physical object creating the wedge goes away and the wedge disappears.

Maybe if you only wanted it to last for 5 or 10 seconds you could squeeze a bit more out of the hardware; but probably less that 2x increase. <shrug>
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