Somewhere between “I want to play sci-fi video games all day,” “I want to invent everything ever,” and “I want to go on a 6-month backpacking trip in the wilderness.”

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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • HaphazardFinesse@sh.itjust.workstoStar Trek@startrek.website•Kinetic impulse weapons
    2·
    1 year ago

    In the Star Trek universe, if you’re intent on “glassing” a planet, it’s in one of two scenarios:

    1. The planet inhabitants can’t fight off a single star ship, in which case you could just park in orbit and bombard to your heart’s content, with the option of either precision strikes or complete annihilation, without expending anything other than the energy it takes to power the ship.
    2. The inhabitants can fight off a star ship, in which case they likely have the technology to detect such a weapon at sufficient range to intercept/destroy/redirect it, or planetary shielding powerful enough to stop it.

    In the latter case, you could put the effort into adding a cloaking device to the weapon to get around that. But in that case, why not just use a regular cloaked ship to delivery some other payload? There are tons of examples in TNG of narrowly-averted planet-killing disasters only prevented by careful engineering. Probably way easier to actually cause the disaster. Examples include igniting the atmosphere, causing geographic instability/earthquakes/volcanic reactions, exploding the system’s star, crashing a natural moon into the planet, unleashing a biological weapon…