RE: meteors vs. missles

> The Problem with meteors is that they are very visible, and easily disrupted
> sufficient TL weapons, whereas a missle could easily have stealth capabilitie
> and be hardened.

	Uhmmm... let me get this straight... a tiny cylinder of sophisticated
electronics can be "hardened" more than a huge lump of nickel-iron??

	Regardless, if the TL is high enough that the one side might have
weapons with enough brute force to virtually disintegrate the meteor (and
it would have to do so to prevent any damage.  Perhaps there would be less
direct damage from a shattered meteor, but the amount would still be
considerable) then the other side would have sufficient resources to move
a truly massive meteor, making it just as difficult to destroy/divert as
the smaller meteor at lower TL.

	Heck, if things are that high level, they could just hook up some
sort of stealth system to the meteor, or perhaps a black globe (think now,
with an entire meteor (and truly massive meteor at that) to act as a heat
sink, the black globe could absorb a heckuva lot of damage, and even before
that, the globe would enable the meteor to get much closer before detection.
Also, if the meteor is roughly spherical, and the globe is calibrated so
the outer edge is only a few feet out from the surface, it would be almost
impossible for enemy ship to land on the meteor.

	Of course, by that time you might as well get creative with your
TL18 devices, like linking a teleportation gate to the heart of a star,
and hooking the "output" end to a planet's atmosphere, or perhaps even
hooking several stars together to accelerate the aging process and cause
a spontaneous nova.  If that's too esoteric for your tastes, simply put
together a VERY powerful gravity generator (the size of the deathstar,
perhaps) able to survive solar temperature for a short (or even not so
short) length of time, then drop it into a star and turn on the gravity.
Bingo, instant disruption of the star's structure, resulting in something
similar enough to a nova to severely screw up the other side's control of
a system... not that anybody would WANT the system after this has been done...

Steven J. Owens  |  [email removed]  |  [email removed]

"He knew how machinery moved, and this wasn't it.  All he could
 think of was a man and woman making love.  Slippery-smooth rythmic
 motion, absolute single-minded purpose, motion for the sake of motion.
 It was terrible in it's beauty, the flight of the horse."

	-- _The_Flight_of_the_Horse_, Larry Niven