Re: Planetary defenses

Los wrote:
> 
> I'd like to throw it back at everyone and ask, if you had to design a
> planetary defense to counter such a situation what could be done? How
> effective would be ground based wepons? Obviously they could be very
> effective against atmospheric craft but what about Stuff in space?
> 
> I know fixed defenses may be a problem but what about underground
> defense complexes connected by hundreds of kilometer of underground
rail
> where heavy weapons fuel with the vast power reserves available to a
> planet could pop up shoot and scoot? Any ideas? I'm thinking about
> defensing the planet here not subjugating it.

	What about something like the "Grand Cannon" from
	the anime "Macross" (or the first third of "Robotech") ?

	The barrel was several hundred feet in diameter, and
	went miles into the ground.  The weapon beam was somehow
	"steerable", like the electron beam in a computer monitor
	cathode ray tube.  Raster-scanning the sky.

	Failing that, there was an ancient SF novel named
	"Seige of Earth" by John Faucette.  It featured 
	fleets of defending starships lurking in the ocean,
	thousands of missile launching sites, huge laser batteries
	mounted on tank tread bases, and thousands of interceptor
	spacecraft just outside the atmosphere.

	There was some sort of interstellar law that made it illegal
	to blow a planet to dust with one huge bomb (a la' Death Star),
	which made seiges possible.