why the honorverse would be full of dead planets

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:How to destroy a planet:

[snip]

Our rockpile is of course an x-ray source in the sky--but note that it's behind the star--the planet can't see it.

The trajectory I have picked will cause the rocks to miss the star by about 1 solar diameter, in the last 3.6 hours of flight (remember, lightspeed sensors) the planet will see an x-ray source slowly emerging from behind the star--that is, if they can make it out at all as a separate entity from the star. And who points telescopes at the local star, anyway??

Once it clears the star the planet has less than 3 minutes to detect it and intercept. There is no way to match orbits, thus the only defense is to interpose a wedge. From the response to Oyster Bay we can see that this would be hopelessly inadequate in stopping a pile of rocks that are spread across the planet. They'll get some, most will get through.

So you are targetting a planet that's got enough reaction capability that you need to try to hide the relativistic attack, yet so minimal a space presence that they didn't deploy the basic solar orbit system sensors to avoid people sneaking up on them from behind the sun?
Nobody with even a basic space navy is going to rely exclusively on planetary, or planetary orbital, sensor to try and monitor the whole system. (Yes the other sensors will have a lightspeed lag to inform the planet of what they see, but even a relayed warning of a moving x-ray source 14 light hours away (20 hours from impact) should still give you a couple hours warning.

But ok, given a target that's blind to what's happening behind their own sun I guess that this attack would work - but it seems overkill to use relativistic boulders to attack such a weak system.

OrlandoNative wrote:Come from above or below the ecliptic. For some reason, while most of the systems are known to look "out", they don't seem to look up or down much. Probably because any planets, moons, and asteroid belts all tend to be in the same plane; and ship orbits reflect that.

Two dimensional thinking, Z minus 10K M? LOL

What we haven't see- except for the PRHIE mercenaries going after Torch at the orders of the Alignment- is a deliberate EE violation under the general consensis of what that is.

When the Alignment ran Oyster Bay, they took great care that no active weapons and no "misses" went on down and impacted on the planets. What they ignored was that the pieces of orbital infrastructure from the destruction of the stations etc would have little choice but to fall into the gravity well of the planet they orbited. They wrote that off as "debris" which the defenders would have to clean up on their own. If they could. If anybody was going to call them on it--and that's tough to do when nobody really knows who made the attack though there is reasisticly only one group with the kind of weapons and advanced propulsion systems they used--so they just don't care. They needed to blow up all that manufacturing and baseing etc and the survivors would just have to deal with the mess.
Grayson didn't get the planetary bombardment of debris because BlackBird was so far away from the habitable planet. If the Alignment had gone after the orbital farms (and whatever manufacturing and baseing facilities were in Grayson orbit) the same thing would have happened to Grayson. It's not that the Alignment was concerned about blowing up the oribtal farms, it that they didn't have the ships and weapons to do that along with what they did hit.

You can argue- and the SLN did- that the destruction of all the orbital infrastructure in the systems they hit in Buccannere was retaliation for preceived working against the intersts of the League. We all know how well that went over.

Even the attack on Beowulf wasn't structured as an EE, it was aimed at the manufactring facilities and the nominally Civilian Stations were a strike by the Alignmenet to teach Beowulf a lesson and act out on their frustration for not having been fully successful in Operation Houdini. It was pure terrorism.
One thread running through the books from the time the Alignmneet shows up is that they want to HURT Beowulf and rub it's nose failing to see and attain the hights of development in the biological sciences which the Alignment has. They have no intention of blasting Beowulf back to someplace where perhaps single cell organisms might survive. That would leve nobody to suffer and stand (or prostrate them selves) in awe of the Glorious Alignment.

Even the Torch operation comes off a bit odd. From one perspective, the one the MSN officer as the control for the PRHIE ships uses, what is being done for blasting all the people on the ground at Torch is to be a lesson to any who would defy Mesa/Manpower and rise up against them. Torch is presented as a massive trove of pharmacology and bio products. Hammering it to a gray ball covered with ash and nothing living seems a lot of overkill, even for Mesa/Manpower/the Alighment. Take the orbitals, even destory them, and then pound facilities on the ground with KEWs to wipe out the populations centers has a certain logic but then what happens? "Manpower or Mesa" lands an occupation force, wipes out any surviveing exslaves and sets up operations again? Mesa is already a pariah, who is going to come after them for this excpet possible Manticore or Haven or Maya Sector.
On the other hand, if you make the planet useless for the next several centuries (at least) then perhaps you are are doing that to keep any further traffic away from it and let the Torch Wormhole go unobserved since it is already a known killer.
Too convoluted but it's the Alignment, who was killing all those people on Mesa (and trying to blame Manticore) just to cover their tracks.

Only problems are that your aiming accuracy needs to be on the order of 1eex-7 radians.

This is like an accuracy of 1/10 of a millimeter at arange of 1 kilometer.

Also, ifyou just dump out the sand or water, there will be dispersion. Even if your aim is accurate, most of it wouldnt hit the target.

Of course if you can do this, you should use frozen feces so as to hit your target with an ICy Bowell Movement.