Ruins of Alien Suns: Weapons of Mass Destruction

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Or: Why your ship can't kill a planet all by its lonesome.

Despite the popular depiction of spaceships as being weapons of mass destruction unto themselves, the reality is somewhat different: most hulls are no designed for re-entry, so atmospheric ablation typically results in somewhere between 5% and 10% of the original mass of the ship actually impacting land. Most warship missiles are designed to detonate at a range of less than ten meters in order to maximize saturation, so warheads are necessarily sub "tactical yield" things to maximize ability to close range and negate PD solutions. Common lasers and plasma weapons are constrained by reactor output and thermoregulation, so "glassing" a planet, that is to transform the entire surface of a planet into a glassy homogenate barren of life or water is a labor of literal years, if not decades, akin to terraforming. Torpedoes, the most destructive weapons created before the arms race of the 2750s, are slow armored pods that use bomb-pumped grasers to knife through ships- a combination of factors that make them useless for despoiling planets or doing little more than perforating especially large habitats jacketed in sufficient quantities of rock or ice.

Among shipborne weapons only it is only the mighty autocannon, firing nuclear payload shells that acheive criticality by squashing against their targets at supersonic speeds, that comes close to being a genuine weapon of mass destruction. Even then, the results of massed autocannon fire can be dozens of low yield tactical nuclear detonations per minute at best.

Warship weapons are simply not made for such purposes, but to drive off other warships, support conventional forces, silence air defenses and hold territory. To annihilate planets, one must think bigger.