Okay, I'm not going to participate in this as a storyteller but as an mildly interested party I just wanted to point something out.
Why are people so worried about weaponized handwavium when there are already thousands and thousands of weapons of mass destruction in fenspace?
Do you realise how much damage a Buick Skylark will do if it smashes into something at .1c? That's one percent of LIGHTSPEED. That's 29,979,245 meters per second. Ye gods.
All I need is a engine that will send something in a reasonably straight line and and iMac and I can destroy any city on the planet. From the Oort Cloud. Without warning.
Do you realise how hard to intercept something moving at .1c would be? Even for other things moving at .1c it would be damn hard. Space is BIG. Even just within the solar system space is HUGE. Tremendous. Mind-numbing titanic. And there is no way to keep track of it all.
Unless Earth has some sort of sophisticated orbital defense system that is several tech levels beyond anything hard tech could produce in the next ten years it is screwed. Forget payloads. Forget guns. Three tonnes of detroit steel traveling at one percent of the speed of light will blow up stuff real good.
Now, I can understand if you want to ignore this for the purpose of genre emulation. But if you're so concerned with weaponized handwave then the problem isn't nukes, since you already have thousands of them in the setting already.
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Epsilon
Why are people so worried about weaponized handwavium when there are already thousands and thousands of weapons of mass destruction in fenspace?
Do you realise how much damage a Buick Skylark will do if it smashes into something at .1c? That's one percent of LIGHTSPEED. That's 29,979,245 meters per second. Ye gods.
All I need is a engine that will send something in a reasonably straight line and and iMac and I can destroy any city on the planet. From the Oort Cloud. Without warning.
Do you realise how hard to intercept something moving at .1c would be? Even for other things moving at .1c it would be damn hard. Space is BIG. Even just within the solar system space is HUGE. Tremendous. Mind-numbing titanic. And there is no way to keep track of it all.
Unless Earth has some sort of sophisticated orbital defense system that is several tech levels beyond anything hard tech could produce in the next ten years it is screwed. Forget payloads. Forget guns. Three tonnes of detroit steel traveling at one percent of the speed of light will blow up stuff real good.
Now, I can understand if you want to ignore this for the purpose of genre emulation. But if you're so concerned with weaponized handwave then the problem isn't nukes, since you already have thousands of them in the setting already.
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Epsilon