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Planet Busters

D

Durkin

SOC-6
Hello,

Several sources in the cannon (I think :confused: ) refer to the Michelson (sp?)Thernonuclear device, a.k.a. MTD, a.k.a PLANET BUSTERS !!!!

Using surplus scout/Courior hulls (generally)these massive (???) bombs would be sent to an enemy world, under robotic control. Once on the ground, they'd pop off destroying the planet.

These ultimate weapons of the 57th century were rated from 1 to A, (based on the size of the planet they could crack) and some were even usabel against gas giants.

Yes, I know his is very seimular to the "stone burner" nuke from Frank Herbert's DUNE.

My question(s) are;

Is this indeed cannon?

Does anyone have any idea for the (CT / HG) stats / Tech Levels of such terrible weapons?
 
Matthew Reilly (a realy good Aussie authour) outlined a TL8-9 Planet Buster in his book Temple (Pan, 2000, ISBN 0-330-36214-3) in witch the yanks build one but all they are missing from making it work is a Non-terrestral element found only in its Fossilised (and their fore inerte and useless) form. so the race is on to recover a meotorite containing the "Live" for of the missing element, just so the good old USofA can say do as your told or the whole planet dies.

His first book Contest (pan (orignily Karanadon Entertaninmeni 1996), 2000, ISBN 0-33036271-2) had it's fillim rights opitioned in 1999.
 
That is ringing a bell or two. Might it have been an article in Dragon or JTAS?

I did google for some reference and didn't find much that looked appropriate but I did notice this "discussion". It should probably be posted under random static but as it came up in this serch and does mention Planet Busters... well you decided just how valid it is
file_22.gif
I didn't read it all the way through yet, maybe just far enough ;) (and I thought I was Fringe)
 
Wonderful. Combine this with TNE and crew these with temperamental Virus AI, and we'll have the "Dark Star" movie
.
 
Ah yes, that's the one 313. Thanks, and lucky for me that's one that didn't find a new home yet
And more importantly I still have #23 too, with the missing table to that article, whoo hoo! Oh, except it doesn't have both tables, sigh, so no TL etc. for the Thermostellar Devices.

You have the info about right Durkin Shipyards, even the "destroy critical gas giants" bit. Makes one wonder if they have them have they used them and where and when.
 
"and there was light..."

That does sound useful still could PCs manage to create even a small version of this weapon?

Imagine the devastation that could be wrought. *Imagines Sylea being blown apart*
 
I would say that thease kind of devices would not (apart from the largest ones) have any signifant long term effect on Jupter sized gas giants but insted cause sutch a disruption in the upper atomsphere that it would prevent wilderness refuling at that gas giant for some length of time determand by the size of the device and the makeup of the gas giant it's self (what do you think the scouts do in war time, they sneek in behind enemey lines and do servays of gas giants so navy can nuke them in to short term uselessness) that's part of the reason why scouts are constantaly doing astrographic servays and saying as long as where in system lets check out the gas giants aswell to be shure that no navagision hazards are developing.
 
You do realise these are completely physically impossible though (at least as "thermonuclear devices").

If you want to blow up a planet, you need to impart an enormous amount of energy to it, and it won't happen quickly in an "earth-shattering kaboom!" either.

Even a primary star going supernova would have a hard time actually *destroying* a planet completely - in fact it would vaporise the planet over anything from a few days to a few weeks as the surface is heated so much that the silicate vapour escapes into space and is carried away by the stellar wind. Though this probably would be able to "destroy" gas giants by blasting away their atmospheres.

Another alternative is of course a very fast, very large asteroid hitting the planet (see countless threads about the "near-c rock").

But a simple spaceship with a bomb on it won't do much other than make a small crater (or a big crater if it's loaded full of antimatter - but even if you detonate 1000 tons of antimatter, that's peanuts compared to the mass of a world). And forget about destroying gas giants with this kind of missile - look at what happened to Jupiter when it got hit by a whole wagon train of comets a few years ago (absolutely nothing except minor cosmetic damage which disappeared after a couple of weeks).
 
Malenfnt: that "wagon train of comets" was actually one decent sized that sheared apart due to tidal stresses... Shumaker-Levy 9.

Not thought (before impact) to be a serious danger.

(Then again, people keep arguing about whether tis better to shred or take the single impact...)

For those who don't know, each significannt fragment left "holes" (cloud formation disruptions) roughly the diameter of the earth...
 
I don't think the Journal 22 article can be considered as OTU canon since it also mentions using antimatter as early as TL9, fractional TLs (TL9.0 and TL9.1??). The planet busters could be anything from TL9 to TL15 according to the article, they just get smaller at higher TLs.

If Journal articles are to be considered OTU canon then the same author gives us TL15 APAWS in Journal 20, which can be used to strip the atmosphere from a world and then reduce it to asteroids.

I don't think that the Imperium in the OTU ever demonstrated this technology, even during the Black war years of the MT rebellion.

Planet busters are reserved for the Ancients ;)
 
The secret behind the Ancient planet buster is in Adventure 12: Secret of the Ancients.
It is based on TL25 teleportation portals which can be used to accelerate an object to 99.9% of light speed before crashing it into the target planet.
 
To act as a pleanet buster you don't have to shater the hole thing just blow a large enough chunk out of it and it'll lose orbit and either "fall" in to its star or go spining off in to space, end reuslt -1 planet of enemy combatants or one world out of the way for a new devlopment.
 
re: Shoemaker Levy 9 - yes, I know it was one comet that was sheared apart. The damage done to Jupiter looked like it covered a wide extent, but that's down to the fact that it it something made entirely of gas (and also hit it a lot faster than it would have hit the Earth, since we don't have as much gravity to accelerate the fragments with). Either way, it was entirely cosmetic damage to that planet.

If those had hit Earth though, the damage would have been extensive. The Tunguska blast in Siberia in 1908 was equivalent to an airburst nuclear detonation, and that was a comet/asteroid fragment that was only a few hundred metres across that exploded in the air. The SL9 fragments were between 1 and several kilometres across - they would in all likelihood have hit the surface, sending up massive amounts of dust and debris in the atmosphere to block out the sun, and causing extreme local damage. If it hit the sea, the resulting tsunami would probably wipe out every coastal city as well (watch the movie "Deep Impact" to get a good visual representation of the impact itself). We would have been able to do absolutely nothing to stop all the fragments hitting us, and it's entirely possible that we would be in the midst of a major mass exinction right now if they hit us in '94.

And as Andrew pointed out, our own moon was formed when a protoplanet the size of Mars hit us a glancing blow over 4 billion years ago and blasted material off us. (you can read the paper here, it's slightly technical but it does have some animated gifs that show the effect of various impacts on the Earth as they happen) A direct head-on hit would have totally destroyed the protoEarth, but it still would have reformed and incorporated some material from the impactor too. It doesn't "knock planets off their orbits" - and even if it did, the new orbit wouldn't be significantly different to the old one. Of course, in the short term, all you're interested in is obliterating all life on the planet. ;)
 
If your goal is to simply kill all life on a planet then a good chemical or bio weapon will do the trick. Enough blood agent dumped on a soldier in MOPP4 over a period of time will still kill him once his filters give out. (Fortunately blood agents aren't persistent by their very nature.) The big problem with this kind of attack is to get your vectors right. A planet, that supports life as we know it, by its very nature is designed to stop a bio agent or chemical agent spread. But with high enough tech, that easily trumps Mother Nature.

Besides why kill the planet, what is the point. Kill the people and take the planet. It now serves as a base, in time as a trading post and eventually a colony. Virtually all war is basd on the needs of trade. If you destroy the ability to trade during hte course of war what is the point of fighting the war in the first place.

Oh and for those history buffs, if you want to kill a planet apparently you can do it at TL7. (Late TL7 call it 1960-1970s equivalent) Aparently you can use a Cobalt shell (Or was it nikel cobalt, I forget.) with a nuke and a few of them detonated in the right places will poison the atmosphere sufficiently to kill all life on the planet. (Except possibly the Roaches.
 
I thought the "Cobalt bomb" was a myth propagated by Planet of the Apes movies
.

From what I recall, it's a rather dirty nuke with debris that has a long halflife.
 
It was in Dr. Strangelove first. But yes a study was done before the movies, actually back then it was before the books went to press.) It would take more than one and essentially you are correct it is a dirty bomb that creates radioactive particles with a very long half life. Depending on yield it would take quite a few of them to actually do the job, and they would have to take into account weather patterns and so on Certainly more than the one which happened to be underground when it went off in the Planet of the Apes movie.
I did some research back when the Planet of The Apes series went with the "Go Ape" promotion and I saw all 5 in one sitting.
I couldn't believe that one bomb, no matter the composition would destroy all life on the planet and found that there were actual studies done on the subject. Not everything Hollyweird comes up with is without a basis in fact. (Though even more of it is.
)

Originally posted by Malenfant:
I thought the "Cobalt bomb" was a myth propagated by Planet of the Apes movies
.

From what I recall, it's a rather dirty nuke with debris that has a long halflife.
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, somewhere there is a SW site that includes a rough calculation of the power required for the Death Star's weapon. Based on the gravitational potential that must be overcome to completely explode the entire mass of an Earth-sized planet, and the one day recharging period of the weapon, the power is 5000 times the total radiant output of Sol.

Yeah, sure, they can do that. :rolleyes:
 
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