Re: XBOAT digest 6

Date: Sat, 13 Aug 94 06:13:37 -0700
From: [email removed] (Erwin Fritz)
To: [email removed]
Subject: Re: XBOAT digest 5
Message-ID: [email removed]


Alvin Plummer ([email removed]) writes:

> Thirdly: There was once a game called Invasion: Earth, where the Third
> Imperium faced off against the Solomani of Terra.  What I want to know
> is:
>      1) What are the main strategic considerations of invading a
>         high-tech, heavily-defended world without just nuking it?


Erwin Fritz ([email removed]) replies:

> Actually, why nuke it?  It's cheaper and more effective to just nudge a
> few asteroids into a carefully calculated course intersecting with the
> world (and with the ocean, if you can manage).  Lucifer's Hammer, by
> Larry Niven, does a good job of describing this, although he talks about
> a large comet.  The advantage of this is that you still have a habitable
> world after it's all over.


   Nukes are more precise, though easier to defend against.  They don't
make a world any more uninhabitable than an asteroid strike or two (the
mess an asteroid would make of weather patterns, and the sheer number of
dead laying about, would leave the world less habitable in the short term).
The main effect, however, of using such weapons is to piss off your
opponent.  It won't make attacking the planet a lot easier in the short
term - it's mostly civilians dying, in the billions.  After a while of
this, there won't be a lot of opposition left.  If your opponent was
limited to just that planet, that will probably be the end of it; if it was
an interstellar state, you've just taken the gloves off.



--
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