Well, I'm reading the book Lucifer's Hammer and it's essentially an 'end of the world' novel brought about by this comet that strikes the earth in three different places. Two in the sea, one on land. The comet wasn't very large, either, just a 'hill' in their words, about a mile across, of dirty ice and dust.
Now, imagine a battleship exploding in orbit. Half a kilometer of solid, burning metal striking the planet's gonna do some serious freakin' damage. Sure, planetary shields and all that, but how do you stop something with enough energy to blast a crater the size of a small town? Now image that ALL of the debris from the fallen capital ship land in many different places on the planet. There's no shield strong enough to stop it all.
What I'm saying is that planetary battles need to be re-thought. Losing a carrier or dreadnought or whatever in planetary orbit is going to hurt. A lot.
I think you're overestimating the size of battleships, and underestimating the size of planets, current planet models are terribly scaled. Who's to say the Battleship will even 'crash' into the planet? It could make an emergency landing, dump in the sea, break up into small pieces, pieces which inevitably burn up in descent. Relative to the size of the cities on planets, I imagine there'd be spaceports capable of landing a Battleship, bit like in Star wars, remember the battle over coruscant? They landed 1/2 the Battleship on an airstrip. There are likely tons of counters to crashes, tractor beams and the like.
It's nice that someone is reading a science fiction classic. That one came out when I was a kid.
NOW you understand why when we were talking about the ultimate weapons and such that I'm a fan of KEW - Kinetic Energy Weapons. You don't HAVE to have anything big, mean, and nasty. To paraphrase Mycroft Holmes from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" - Throw rocks at your enemies...
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
Debris landing in the sea is far, far worse than crashing on the continents. You're evaporating millions of gallons of water, and displacing much more than that. And I realize that scale is off, but realistically, those battleships look to be at least half a kilometer long, and that's a lot of metal.
I'm ignoring NPCs. As far as roleplay goes, they don't exist.