Fire from Heaven

[The Yosemite Bear]

ok, something is decideably cool about blasting shit from orbit. I know it's evil bullying, but it doesn't matter if it's an Ion/Thor "anti-missile/anti-city orbital", a StarDestroyer, terrorist miners chucking rocks <Ben Bova and Mobile suit gundam) It's a fun staple of Sci-fi

So what's your favorite orbital bombardments.

mine: Chucking Ice Asteriods, or just add water, ok, we make a big wave, kill off lots of people, and the planet is still inhabitable.

[Noble Ire]

Hmm, havent seen this subject before.


Eh, different enough.
I've always been a fan of reducing a planet's surface to huge, flat puddles of glass.

[Akaramu Shinja]

mine: Chucking Ice Asteriods, or just add water, ok, we make a big wave, kill off lots of people, and the planet is still inhabitable.

What if it doesn't have enough water on the planet? That's a lot of water to add...though I love the idea

[Nephtys]

... terrorist miners chucking rocks <Ben Bova and Mobile suit gundam)

...

You totally forgot about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where lunar miners use cargo freighters to drop large slabs of rock onto Earth to create their socialist paradise in space. You know. The famous Heinlein maneuver.

[18-Till-I-Die]

The Galactic Patrol do this shit right. Take two uninhabited planets, dead rocks like Mars or Venus, accelerate them from two different directions at the enemy planet, traveling at a good percentage of light-speed. They smash the planet between them, creating a small, short lived star.

Best part: with hyper-tubes this can be done from another galaxy...now THAT is how you handle this shit

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Mobile Suit Gundam: colony drop.

[TheMuffinKing]

I was always partial to the orbital defense platforms of B5. My favorite though, has to be the space cannon from the anime Akira, that thing rocked!

Can't forget the mass drivers used to bombard the Narn homeworld in B5, those were cool too.

[Neko_Oni]

Kinetic Lances from Night's Dawn Trilogy (horrible ending, but some cool toys).

C-sabots from Schlock Mercenary. Any weapon you can track because of the radiation emmited from it's relativistic passage through the solar wind is automatically awesome.

[bilateralrope]

terrorist miners chucking rocks

I'm a fan of all the thrown/dropped rocks type weapons for how simple the basic idea is (send the rock towards the target, let gravity do the rest) and that early combat between humans must of also involved thrown rocks. So the basic idea goes back quite far, just now the rock are much bigger

[Screwball]

My personal favourite 'dropped rock' bombardment is that of Home Hive Two in The Shiva Option. What approach could be a greater application of inelegant brute force than sending several asteroids towards a single planet by detonating nukes behind them?

[Vanas]

Zeus Cannon/SOL are a good start to this sort of thing. There's that lovely moment of anticipation, that 'ohshit' moment as you see the glow building around you/ punching through the clouds, just before a fair chunk of the surrounding area explodes.

Sunstorm has the long-winded approach that takes the thread title literally. It's a newish book out, and I don't want to go nuts with the spoilers so I'll leave that one.

Interms of just silly, the Dweller nightmare of rock from The Algebrasist is fun. A planet, traveling at a fair percentage of lightspeed, surrounded by an entourage of moons, each of which is surrounded by asteroids, surronded by rocks, surrouded by stones, surrounded by dust and giving you about enough time to utter the local equivalent of 'What the Fu~" before hits.

But favourite? Hmm. Probably the Zeus cannon (FF: The Spirits Within). Not overly powerful, but I just like it for some reason.

[Dakarne]

I wonder how much damage the Deathstar would do in a Hyperjump directly into a planetary mass?

Other than that... High-Yield missiles from long distance...

[Chmee]

*Known Space spoiler alert*

After the Kzinti occupation of the human colony at Wunderland (in Alpha Centauri), Earth retaliates against the Kzinti occupation with a sublight ramship that reaches Alpha Centauri at a high percentage of lightspeed and throws a bunch of large iron slugs at military targets in space and on the ground ... collateral damage from projectiles at relativistic velocities is unfortunately large.

[andrewgpaul]

Zeus Cannon/SOL are a good start to this sort of thing. There's that lovely moment of anticipation, that 'ohshit' moment as you see the glow building around you/ punching through the clouds, just before a fair chunk of the surrounding area explodes.

Sunstorm has the long-winded approach that takes the thread title literally. It's a newish book out, and I don't want to go nuts with the spoilers so I'll leave that one.

Interms of just silly, the Dweller nightmare of rock from The Algebrasist is fun. A planet, traveling at a fair percentage of lightspeed, surrounded by an entourage of moons, each of which is surrounded by asteroids, surronded by rocks, surrouded by stones, surrounded by dust and giving you about enough time to utter the local equivalent of 'What the Fu~" before hits.

But favourite? Hmm. Probably the Zeus cannon (FF: The Spirits Within). Not overly powerful, but I just like it for some reason.

You forgot to mention that it takes a good few hundred years for this thing to arrive, so your descendents have just about forgotten that you attacked the Dwellers in the first place.

As for the cannon from Akira, didn't Kaneda manage to dodge it a few times? I'll take something with a bigger blast radius, thanks.

I liked the Inhibitor weapon from Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds: It pokes a hole in the local star, right through to the core, and causes it to emit a huge quantity of heat, light, radiation and core material out to several AU. Turns the star into a gigantic flaethrower.

[Xon]

I liked the Inhibitor weapon from Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds: It pokes a hole in the local star, right through to the core, and causes it to emit a huge quantity of heat, light, radiation and core material out to several AU. Turns the star into a gigantic flaethrower.

If you are going to make a flamethrower, do it right!

[Zor]

Came up with my own system

Mystrain

Mystrain bombs are a specialised type of ordinace designed by the Rumaur Federation, first deployed by the forces of the Cityship Eternal Striver against a massive Industrial Era army attacking a colony on Framqera in 133 After Tranquility, and have been used later by several Rumaur Cityships on various Campaigns.

Mystrain Bombs are comparitivly simple in design, they are a large, insulitive containers generally about 60 meters in diamiter with a solid chemical mass (Generally in excess of 15,000 tonnes) inside them. When the container hits ground, it will not only form an explotion, but will releace the chemical payload along with the explotion. Survivors that happen to be in basements or other re-inforced locations face toxic gas that lingers around afterwards. This makes releif missions into the area Dangerious. Generally they are fired from specially designed railguns at a distance of 1 to 5 million kilometers at 5,000km/s in groups of twenty to thirty to contaminate as much land as posible. Destroying them as soon as posible is imperitive, as even if they are destroyed in Relitivly, there contence could reach the ground and do damage. Imperial Naval command has orderd that these devices be destroyed at a distance of five hundred thousand kilometers using standard PD lasers and that capital ship lasers be used if it gets any closes

The origenal Mystrain Bomb was loaded with large blocks of Chlorine intended for water treatment, however most modern Mystrain Bombs use more effective Nerve agents that are leathal to most sentiant beings with less than an gram. Others contain powerful Herbicides and/or soil contaminantes to destroy pastureland and level crops to starve out the enemy.

While somewhat more expensive, they are harder to shoot down than nukes (due to shere mass), unleash gas can worm there way around things that shockwaves can't, Can do plenty of damage even if destroyed before hitting the ground and are easier to clean up afterwords than radioactive fallout. They are speciallised weapons, designed for raids against industrial or agricultural planets. Makeshift Mystrain bombs have also been used by terrorists on rare ocasions.

[Gustav32Vasa]

Genesis.

Kill everyone and then colonize the new planet.

[CDiehl]

I wonder how much damage the Deathstar would do in a Hyperjump directly into a planetary mass?

While it would probably do massive damage, why would you throw that at a planet? Do you realize how much it must cost to build the Death Star, just to crash it on purpose? It's easier and cheaper simply to fire the superlaser at it or propel a similarly sized asteroid at it. In all three cases, the planet is probably just as ruined.

[Chmee]

I liked the Inhibitor weapon from Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds: It pokes a hole in the local star, right through to the core, and causes it to emit a huge quantity of heat, light, radiation and core material out to several AU. Turns the star into a gigantic flaethrower.

Just finished Absolution Gap ... Reynolds just has to introduce one insanely scary tech weapon in each book, doesn't he?

[Lord of the Abyss]

My favorites :

Just for the name, the Finger of God laser satellites from Vernor Vinge's True Names.

The orbital lance from Schlock Mercenary (" Judging from the sounds of general panic, I want a gun like that. " ) .

The THOR system, even though it probably wouldn't work.

[Adrian Laguna]

I just made this up:

Planetary Impact Super-Shotgun

Basically it is a giant rock which is propeled at very high velocities towards the target. At a designated point en route, charges which have been very carefully placed inside the rock detonate, neatly separating the asteroid into about two dozen pieces. Thus the weapon acts more like a buckshot from a shotgun. The effects tend to wipe-out everything on the side of the planet they hit and cause severe damage on the other side. Something on the order of 10E8 megatons total.

So, picture a commander whose that troops are having trouble taking over a particular planet from its tenacious defenders. So he orders his troops to withdraw, and then contacts Strategic Weapons Controll. After giving the proper outhorization codes he order that a PISS be taken on Telorak VI (fun fact, the "Super" in Planetary Impact Super-Shotgun is there merely to stasfy it's creator's warped sense of humor). A few minutes later the planet that looked like this:

Now looks like this (well, not that bad):

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Rocks are NOT ‘free’, citizen.

Firstly, you must manoeuvre the Emperor’s naval vessel within the asteroid belt, almost assuredly sustaining damage to the Emperor’s ship’s paint from micrometeoroids, while expending the Emperor’s fuel. Then the Tech Priests must inspect the rock in question to ascertain its worthiness to do the Emperor’s bidding. Should it pass muster, the Emperor’s Servitors must use the Emperor’s auto-scrapers and melta-cutters to prepare the potential ordinance for movement. Finally, the Tech Priests finished, the Emperor’s officers may begin manoeuvring the Emperor’s warship to abut the asteroid at the prepared face (expending yet more of the Emperor’s fuel), and then begin boosting the stone towards the offensive planet.

After a few days of expending a prodigious amount of the Emperor’s fuel to accelerate the asteroid into an orbit more fitting to the Emperor’s desires, the Emperor’s ship may then return to the planet via superluminous warp travel and await the arrival of the stone, still many weeks (or months) away. After twiddling away the Emperor’s time and eating the Emperor’s food in the wasteful pursuit of making sure that the Emperor’s enemies do not launch a deflection mission, they may finally watch the ordinance impact the planet (assuming that the Emperor’s ship
does not need to attempt any last-minute course correction upon the rock, using yet more of the Emperor’s fuel).

Given a typical (class Bravo-CVII) system, we have the following:

Two months, O&M, Titan class warship: 4.2 Million Imperials
Two months, rations, crew of same: 0.2 MI
Two months, Tech Priest pastor: 1.7 MI
Two months, Servitor parish: 0.3 MI
Paint, Titan class warship: 2.5 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.9 MI

Total: 9.8 MI

Contrasted with the following:

5 warheads, magna-melta: 2.5 MI
One day, O&M, Titan class warship: 0.3 MI
One day, rations, crew of same: 0.0 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.1 MI

Total: 2.9 MI

Given the same result with under one third of the cost, the Emperor will have saved a massive amount of His most sacred money and almost a full month of time, during which His warship may be bombarding an entirely different planet.

The Emperor, through this – His Office of Imperial Outlays – hereby orders
you to attend one (1) week of therapeutic accountancy training/penance.
Please report to Areicon IV, Imperial City, Administratum Building CXXI,
Room 1456, where you are to sit in the BLUE chair.

For the Emperor,
Bursarius Tenathis,
Purser Level XI,
Imperial Office of Outlays.

[Hawkwings]

lol, I like the paint comment on that.

What's that from?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

lol, I like the paint comment on that.

What's that from?

An old WH40K Chapter Approved compilation.

[Ford Prefect]

Oh, that was in response to the whole thing about the Imperium saving money by using asteroids in orbital bombardments, as opposed to their weapons. I think it's funny. It was also the first time I found out the name of Imperial Currency.