Glein
Ah, but see, your forgetting the most effective weapon against a planet...
Throwing really big rocks.
If we were to reach that point, we could throw asteriods, meteors, comets, hell, even ship debris, into a planet, and it would prove to be far more effective then any nuke. So, you don't have to turn a planet into a nice big cloud of dust... you just do what happened to the dinosaurs some few billions of years ago, and wipe the surface clean. Also, it would stand to reason, not EVERY ship would carry those materials. What is more efficent? Having a trained crew at a station who have access to far greater stores of supplies, or the ship crew who would most likely barely know HOW to operate those refining facilities, much less know exactly what parts are needed for repairs without having access to the shipyard's log, which, might I remind you, would be classified on a warship, maybe even to hte point of being too classified that even the ship's CAPTAIN couldn't access it.
It isn't smart to leave your ship schimatics sitting in the hard drive of a ship someplace that anyone who can type or vocalize a command to access it. If that ship fell into hostile hands, those 'bad guys' now have access to ALL your technology, ALL your strengths, ALL your weaknesses, all by simply opening a file because there is no encryption or complex encoding.
As for sounding like an a**, not at all. you asked a legitamate question, I gave an answer, and your picked my answer apart to understand it better. that's call discussion of an idea.
Throwing really big rocks.
If we were to reach that point, we could throw asteriods, meteors, comets, hell, even ship debris, into a planet, and it would prove to be far more effective then any nuke. So, you don't have to turn a planet into a nice big cloud of dust... you just do what happened to the dinosaurs some few billions of years ago, and wipe the surface clean. Also, it would stand to reason, not EVERY ship would carry those materials. What is more efficent? Having a trained crew at a station who have access to far greater stores of supplies, or the ship crew who would most likely barely know HOW to operate those refining facilities, much less know exactly what parts are needed for repairs without having access to the shipyard's log, which, might I remind you, would be classified on a warship, maybe even to hte point of being too classified that even the ship's CAPTAIN couldn't access it.
It isn't smart to leave your ship schimatics sitting in the hard drive of a ship someplace that anyone who can type or vocalize a command to access it. If that ship fell into hostile hands, those 'bad guys' now have access to ALL your technology, ALL your strengths, ALL your weaknesses, all by simply opening a file because there is no encryption or complex encoding.
As for sounding like an a**, not at all. you asked a legitamate question, I gave an answer, and your picked my answer apart to understand it better. that's call discussion of an idea.
my point exactly! Once you have a civilization that is so comfortable with living and operating in space that it becomes one of your primary fields of battle, destroying a planet becomes irrationally easy, heck, let's seed that asteroid with nukes and radioactive small pox, even the survivors will be dead, only slightly less so...
In my opinion once we get to technologies that advanced, the captain might be in tactical command but the engineers will almost definitely have significantly higher rank and clearance.
The problem becomes that if you're going to have a ship carry the resources to house, feed, and otherwise sustain a crew of what will undoubtedly become hundreds and probably thousands for any extended period you end up with a massive ship that is very largely comprised of giant holding tanks, which you then have to armor. So ether you have a giant steel balloon filled with corn, liquid energy, and compressed air, or a much smaller giant steel balloon filled with corn, liquid energy, and compressed air and maybe a dozen more people trained in operating a bit more equipment that allows the ship to resupply from objects in space that it comes across.
I'll admit, it's a bit of a huge risk to send a ship out to cruise the solar system, which is mostly empty, with less resources than it actually needs to make the trip and a machine that allows them to derive resources from things in space, but you also have to take into account that space is extremely predictable, aside from the behavior of the sun, and that's just because we can only observe the sun's surface. So you can plan out the trip very carefully so that the ship is never really in danger of running out of resources. Food's a little trickier but I think it's safe to assume we can form edible things out of jupiter's gas once we're making war in space.
The key to the equation is that you're not having the same people doing more things, the fact that the ship is a fraction of it's fully stocked size allows you to increase the crew capacity and still have a net savings of mass and volume, so you just get other people to run the refinery so the people that know how to shoot lasers can shoot lasers.
