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Omnivore
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Planet busters
- Thread starter bardbear
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Omnivore
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Just as the Great Pharao Ahlmos the First had Mount Everest levelled?
Oh, wait... that didn't happen either.
Hans
Gray Pennell
SOC-12
I do have to point out the Greek civilization made massive tunneling projects using water, the Romans washed away whole Spanish Mountains in search of gold. So if Mt. Everest needed to be a target it could happen.
So imagine what a group of people could do if they really wanted too. That is what makes humans such terrifying successful our wish to have imagination come true.
So imagine what a group of people could do if they really wanted too. That is what makes humans such terrifying successful our wish to have imagination come true.
That's TL 16.
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Did Ahlmos the First rule a fictional space faring TL15 culture of 10s of billions?
My nano oranges are bigger than yours
The star trigger, to me at least, has always been fairly dubious. I've never used it in any of my past gaming sessions, nor will I include it in a piece of fiction or adventure.
Of course not, don't be ridiculous. He's the ficticious ruler of a TL1 society on Earth. Which is why the utterly impractical project he didn't do was levelling Mount Everest. If he had ruled a fictional space faring TL15 culture of 10s of billions the utterly impractical project he didn't do would have been moving a planet.
Try to keep up here, Dan.
Hans
... a devil's advocate steps up on the stump.
Money? What is that in the grand scheme? Nothing...
Precisely, though we may have different ideas of what and how to measure the return
What could a King or Queen of ancient Egypt, a Pharaoh, have done with all that comes of TL15 and a homogenous culture of 10s of billions or more? With practical immortality for the Pharaoh and those worthy?
"Wipe that planet from my sky, it is a blot on the heavens. Then build from the rocks and dust and ashes a pyramid worthy of your Pharaoh. Let it be done."
...and so it was in the year of the undertaking 1137 that the great pyramid of the heavens was completed and all the living gods and their servants took up residence there.
First scribe of the Pharaoh
Enerii
I LOVE how you think, Dan
Tell me the Emperor wants a ringworld built in his honor, or wants a sun to be made to go nova for his glory, and I'll try to figure out some way to make it happen. Tell me he's going to spend MCr 1600 billion over a thousand years to crash a couple of planets together in an effort to get at an element that's cheap and abundant, and I'm going to be having words with Varian about finding Strephon a nice out of the way summer palace where he can enjoy his dementia in peace. Pharoah was Pharoah in part because his monuments inspired awe; I'm not feeling much awe in this project.
But then again, I'm the kind that thinks in terms of ringworlds and novas. Maybe Pharoah's just a bit timid.
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Omnivore
Guest
After you've housed over 1.6 trillion people in space habitats and created a Dyson swarm around much of your sun, raw materials are neither cheap nor abundant locally. A ringworld would be a step down, in addition to being impossible at the tech level.
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If you can send probes to the magma, them maybe you can use the Darrian Star Flare system, as I guess their shileding may be somwhat like the one on the stellar probe the Darrians sent and that produced the Maghiz... But, as someone said, that was at TL 16 (and incipient 17, IIRC Darrian Alien Module).
DangerousThing
SOC-13
How about something an order of magnitude (at least) less expensive than busting the planet? Unless you really need it busted for narrative purposes; in which case have the civilization develop an early "planet-buster" bomb.
Send a swarm of *mining* robots with a couple of automated mining factory (that automatically makes more factories and mining robots as needed). The mining robots can mine the ore, smelt it, and send it up into orbit somehow. Perhaps using an orbital elevator or perhaps some use of gravitics (have the factory make large ore ships that bring loads up to high orbit and then go back down for the next load or just have a large repullsar beam to send the products where you want them).
That way you don't have to make an asteroid belt, and you have the final product waiting for you.
This would be far less expensive and require less resources than any other solution I've seen proposed. This is a game, not a detailed economic simulation. As GM, do what seems reasonable to you.
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D. Jay Newman
Send a swarm of *mining* robots with a couple of automated mining factory (that automatically makes more factories and mining robots as needed). The mining robots can mine the ore, smelt it, and send it up into orbit somehow. Perhaps using an orbital elevator or perhaps some use of gravitics (have the factory make large ore ships that bring loads up to high orbit and then go back down for the next load or just have a large repullsar beam to send the products where you want them).
That way you don't have to make an asteroid belt, and you have the final product waiting for you.
This would be far less expensive and require less resources than any other solution I've seen proposed. This is a game, not a detailed economic simulation. As GM, do what seems reasonable to you.
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D. Jay Newman
steventirey1985
SOC-12
If the technology exists to make artificial gravity, then it also exists to cancel out gravity as well. No reason the aliens couldn't still be on the planet, just in artificial habitats, using drones/robots for mining.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
I'm with Dangerous Thing and others on this.
What is the purpose of creating an asteroid belt from this planet?
If the sole purpose is to access minerals from the core, I think it would be not one, but several orders of magnitude cheaper to perform a core-mining operation rather than trying to shatter the planet, and you'll get immediate returns on your operational investments rather than having to wait millennia to build up the resources to make your single strike. Asteroids are mined in a TU because they're cheaply available and because it doesn't damage a planetary environment. Creating an asteroid belt from a planet nullifies both of those advantages.
With Traveller's anti-grav, it is no more costly to ship minerals out of a gravity well than it is to ship them across space, so mining asteroids should be no cheaper than mining a planet (and let's face it, you still have to mine the minerals from the chunks after you've ripped the planet apart).
Not only that, but core mining will probably require lower TL than planet busting, so you can start your project many generations earlier.
So I'm afraid my answer to unpicking the OP's planetary Gordian Knot into boulders is instead to slice it to the core and ransack the minerals in situ in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
What is the purpose of creating an asteroid belt from this planet?
If the sole purpose is to access minerals from the core, I think it would be not one, but several orders of magnitude cheaper to perform a core-mining operation rather than trying to shatter the planet, and you'll get immediate returns on your operational investments rather than having to wait millennia to build up the resources to make your single strike. Asteroids are mined in a TU because they're cheaply available and because it doesn't damage a planetary environment. Creating an asteroid belt from a planet nullifies both of those advantages.
With Traveller's anti-grav, it is no more costly to ship minerals out of a gravity well than it is to ship them across space, so mining asteroids should be no cheaper than mining a planet (and let's face it, you still have to mine the minerals from the chunks after you've ripped the planet apart).
Not only that, but core mining will probably require lower TL than planet busting, so you can start your project many generations earlier.
So I'm afraid my answer to unpicking the OP's planetary Gordian Knot into boulders is instead to slice it to the core and ransack the minerals in situ in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
That's not enterily correct, as I understand it. Grav technology may interfere with gravity and cancel most of its effects, but not all.
Should it cancel all gravity effects, there would not be any problem in jumping from inside a gravity well, if you have enough grav plates on your ship, so some of th effects of gravity may not be cancelled by the use of gravity technology, or at least that is how I understand them.
steventirey1985
SOC-12
Well, the grav plating could totally negate gravity inside the ship. The exterior of the ship, however, would still be affected. Maybe the grav plating requires 2 opposing surfaces to work properly - normally, the ceiling and the floor. Without that 2nd surface, you can't remove the effects of gravity totally, just reduce them.
The MegaTraveller book Starship Operators Manual suggests that: "In addition, the hull is gravity shielded to prevent the internal artificial gravity field from extending beyond the ship. Without such shielding, a crowded starport would quickly become a chaos of conflicting gravitational fields." Presumably, the shielding itself is inside the hull, so at least part of the ship is beyond the gravitational shielding, and so subject to any normally occurring gravitational fields.
A little bit later, the same book also says: "For example, Dolphins, an aquatic minor race from Terra, normally maintain zero gravity on their ships so they can move freely about". So zero gravity on the inside of a ship is possible, at least in MegaTraveller.
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I said I'd try. Didn't say I'd succeed. But, you know, I bet I could make myself rich trying - and if I stretch it out long enough and play the politics game right, he'll be dead before he realizes I can't possibly succeed.
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