runsforcelery wrote:Plasma cannon are "sized" to do certain things, and they didn't happen to have a "Destroy Tower, Mark One" version on hand. They had infantry-sized weapons, the "Stinger-equivalent" SAMs, and a few different sizes of vehicle mounted weapons, but even the heaviest of those weapons were the Honorverse equivalent of 155mm howitzers, not 16" guns, and that tower was a very hard target. You're not going to bring down the Sears Tower in Chicago with the main guns of Abrams tanks in a hurry, and this was a vastly larger and much broader target, relatively speaking (and one which might as well have been built as a military bunker the size of a small mountain from the outset). In the Honoverse, if you need a bigger nutcracker than your equivalent of a 155 mm howitzer, then you go out and get a KEW, which is the equivalent of anything from a 16" gun to a 40,000-lb bomb to a tactical nuke to a strategic nuke, and happens to be cheap and so procurable in largish numbers. Why invest in a lot of other, much more expensive hardware to do the same job from the bottom of the gravity well? Sure, in this case that would have turned out to be a good thing to have, but under normal circumstances, you're not going to need it, and Drescher got caught out by the Gods of the Procurement Branch.
Well, sure it won't be done in a few shots, but you have some time and the building isn't going anywhere. The man portable plasma guns were noted to be excessively destructive of the building structure, it would appear to follow that a big honking version would be significantly more destructive. So you set them up a few km away, put an infantry company+ around them and methodically pound your way through the building, then start traversing and cut out a big notch in the side of the central tower. Eventually you will blow out enough structural members and the mountain will become significantly shorter when the tower falls on the rest of the building.