At 01:22 PM 7/6/97 -0500, Ki'var wrote:

        So.. here's a little bit of "In Dangerous Ground".

<MEGASNIP>

   The blond ADP office carefully traced the lettering on the side of th
object with a finger. "Property of Warner Bros. Studios, Prop. Dept." An
below that -- "Mnfctrd Acme Anvils, Lmtd., Acme Inc."

   "Anvils," Leon moaned. "My god, we're living in a cartoon."

[ >Barry Cadwgan <bcadwgan@fl.net.au> thinks this is capital idea. ]

Yeah...Who needs hi-tech orbiting laser cannons anyway?

If they aren't chemical lasers, they won't have much in the way of
consumables except for station keeping (and dodging) propellent; an
advantage as long as servicing them is somewhat expensive.

Hmmm. What exactly would be the physics involved with dropping an anvil on a
boomer from orbit anyway?

Simply a de-orbit burn.  Although to hit a small object, you'd need pretty
good terminal guidance.  You also need 15-20 minutes lead time (as I
remember), assuming you have one in the right position to begin with.

This is actually a full fledged weapons system concept called Thor.  It
was developed by Jerry Pournelle back in the late '60s or '70s.  The basic
idea is to take iron from an asteriod, fashion it into simple spears
(or you can call them crowbars), bolt fins on the back and a *simple*
sensor package on the front (sort of like how an iron bomb is turned
into a smart bomb with a kit), and put *thousands* of them into barns.

De-orbit 10,000 on top of an armored division, and statisticly you'll
get just about every target, even if there are lots of decoys mixed in.
The Gulf War would have been over before most people in the US would have
known about it if we'd have had this in place back then; you can imagine
what it would have done to Warsaw Pact planning....

As Stalin said, quantity has it's own quality, and the key to this
concept is in the economics of mass production.  Anyway, you can read
all about Thor plus what having command of space in general means in
_Footfall_, Niven and Pournelle's excellent novel of alien invasion.

					- Harold