If the problem is the 'nuclear winter' caused by dust kicked up after an impact, blowing up the pieces small enough will help... but "small enough" is "a lot smaller than a house," because a house-sized chunk of falling nickel-iron at twelve to twenty kilometers per second left this:Adamskywalker007 wrote:You are making the same physics mistake as the writers of the film Deep Impact(which was overall far better than Armageddon). Blowing up the debris further wouldn't actually help unless it was vaporized entirely. A thousand pieces have the same overall kinetic energy as a single large piece with the same mass. If any of it hits the forest moon, the energy must go somewhere.Zixinus wrote:What if the Death Star II explosion turned most of the debris it had around itself into plasma? Sure it would cool down but then there would be tiny particles of debris rather than big chunks, stuff that would be repelled or burn up in the atmosphere.
About a mile across...
Even then, there's a lot of raw heat transfer into the atmosphere, which may be your point when you say "the energy must go somewhere."
One possibility is that sustained barrages of light turbolaser fire could take a huge chunk of metallic wreckage and 'shunt' it aside by blowing craters in one side and pushing it in the other direction. Sort of like an improvised Orion drive. You don't have to vaporize the debris, after all, you just have to (in the short term) deflect it from a direct course for the forest moon, and (in the medium term) deflect it out of the overall Endor planetary system (or safely into the gas giant Endor itself)
