From: dpn2@po.CWRU.Edu (Damien P. Neil)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science
Subject: Re: Invading planets
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 21:35:56 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University
NNTP-Posting-Host: b63519.student.cwru.edu

In article <1js764INN6q7@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu> mgcbo@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Charles B. Owen) writes:
>Everyone is very much in love with dropping or throwing rocks in space.
>Remember, though, that to drop that asteroid so that it can destroy a
>city, it must have enough kinetic energy to destroy a city and that
>energy has to come from somewhere.  It will not come from just falling
>into the Earth's gravity well.  Text's such as Lucifer's Hammer assume
>an object on an unrelated, but intercepting course.  That is not the
>same as "dropping a rock".  Now many may say that we will just "divert"
>a rock from the asteroid belt.  The energy required to do so will be
>simular to that expended by the rock reentry.  So, you are not
>accomplishing much.

I'm not certain about this. In order to conduct interplanetary war there 
must be, of course, interplanetary travel. The size of the "rock" being 
dropped does not have to be very large; something about the size of one of 
the spaceships being used should be fine. (Remember -- the ships will have 
to be either numerous or large, in order to carry all the needed troops.) 
What this means is that the technology used to move the invasion ships 
should be able to be used on the "rocks". It might take a while to get 
them to the planet being attacked (say 6 to 9 months?), but seiges have 
lasted _much_ longer than that before.

Attacking a planet might have a lot of parallels to besieging a castle, but 
with some interesting differences. For example, you can park in a high orbit 
and be relatively safe from attack from below; anything coming up should be 
fairly simple to hit before it can reach orbit. Sort of like standing on top 
of a cliff while people try to climb up and attack you; you can just toss 
things down at them and knock them off.

Does anyone know of any good invasion books other than _Lucifer's Hammer_? 
This thread has piqued my interest.

>
>Anyway, this planet has been able to produce 60,000 nuclear weapons.
>Why worry about dropping rocks.  Just nuke strategic sites.  Screw up
>communications and infrastructure and occupy where you need to.  Ask the
>Germans and Japanese how this works on even a small scale.  Look what we
>did in Iraq against a much larger force.  And, in these cases nukes were
>not involved.  
>
>In closing, invading a planet would be little different from invading a
>country, just larger scale.
>
>
>-- 
>| Charles B. Owen                            Internet: mgcbo@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu |
>| Western Illinois University                            Phone: 309-837-4292 |
>| 1002 E. Murray                                                             |
>| Macomb, IL  61455                                                          |
-----
Damien Neil   dpn2@po.cwru.edu    "Until somebody debugs reality, the best
Case Western Reserve University    I can do is a quick patch here and there."
CMPS/EEAP double majoring masochist               - Erik Green
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science