Could the Federation destroy a planet?

[Baffalo]

Bad newbie, bad *swats with a newspaper* no reviving necroed threads.

[mutanthamster]

Bad newbie, bad *swats with a newspaper* no reviving necroed threads.

It needed to be said.

[SpaceMarine93]

The Federation don't have the guts to do that sort of thing.

But if they do want to do that, they should go with the Starcrossed option and modify the Genesis Device for use. That is, if anyone wants to massacre billions of people and render it uninhabitable for eternity.

[Cesario]

It doesn't take guts blowing up a habitable world. It just takes a special kind of stupidity. One even Andromeda's Nietzschians didn't have.

Seriously, those things are way more valuable conquored than they ever would be as a newly minted asteroid field.

[Batman]

That depends entirely on what you want them for. Sure, colonizing planets is a lot easier if they're still in one piece, as is getting ahold of their infrastructure/valuables, but for getting the planet's mineral resources it being turned into an asteroid field (if not necessarily Death Star style-hunting down all those fragments is going to be a bitch) might actually make things easier. Blowing up a planet, assuming you actually have the tools to do it, is relatively easy. Conquering a planet is inevitably going to be messy and require lots of manpower (real or artificial).

[Stofsk]

There's also stuff like whether it's even possible to conquer a planet. A potential story idea would be a Starfleet ship or task force responding to a planet that's been assimilated by the borg. They managed to kill the cube (just barely), but let's say the borg were successful in assimilating the entire population, and the colony was tens of thousands strong. What do you do? Go down and try to de-borgify everyone? It's possible but risky - your away teams might get compromised especially since the borg won't go willingly.

TOS did this story in 'Operation: Annihilate' but they had a tech solution to the parasites. The borg would be more difficult to deal with in my opinion.

[Cesario]

If you're going to blow up a planet for mining, do it to one of the ones that isn't suitable for habitation.

As for situations where conquest is impossible, you can exterminate the threat by sustained bombardment long before you destroy the planet. Most species don't live in their planets' mantles.

The more damage you do to the planet, the harder it'll be to fix it when the time comes for your people to move in.

[Batman]

If you're going to blow up a planet for mining, do it to one of the ones that isn't suitable for habitation.

Why bother if it isn't inhabited to begin with? The purpose of going Death Star on a planet is not to make mining easier but to get rid of the people who would oppose you doing any mining to begin with.

As for situations where conquest is impossible, you can exterminate the threat by sustained bombardment long before you destroy the planet. Most species don't live in their planets' mantles.

If you've decided to invade at all you're either abysmally stupid or have decided that catching as much as much of the planetary infrastructure as possible intact is a worthwhile undertaking. Sure, you can probably annihilate the enemy's forces from space-along with all the stuff you're trying to snatch. Not the smartest course of action.

The more damage you do to the planet, the harder it'll be to fix it when the time comes for your people to move in.

Presupposes you're actually intending to move in in the first place.

[Cesario]

Generally you want to have more planets when you're running an interplanetary civilization. Planets being a finite resource, you fuck yourself over in the long run when you blow the damn things up.

Again, even the Nietzscheans knew that much.

[Baffalo]

Probably the easiest way to conquer a planet is to first release a bioweapon or poison gas that's odorless, tasteless and lethal to the species you're trying to kill off. Most buildings aren't air-tight, so if you release it right, you can kill millions with the right conditions. Might not help the military situation if they figure it out and get gas-masks on, but it greatly consolidates your targets. That's assuming the enemy is a different species. If it's the same species, probably poison gas will work the best.

Orbital bombardment has its pros and cons, even in Star Wars. On the one hand, planetary bombardment may be thwarted by ion cannons or other ground based weaponry, making it difficult to position your ships for optimal firing solutions. Also, shields make it difficult to bombard the surface with any reasonable success. Combine the two and you've created a siege situation, where one side has the other surrounded and its a game of who has the most resources and can hold out the longest. Those are going to be difficult to maintain because of the forces you invariably tie up just trying to hold the siege together.

That's why the Empire went ahead and simply invaded Hoth on the ground. They knew the shield generator would keep them from effectively bombarding the surface while the ion cannon dished out crippling attacks on the star destroyers. The rebels were more vulnerable to a ground assault and so the Empire went ahead with it. They just didn't count on the one or two Imperial walkers taken out by speeders, but that was probably just luck on Luke's part. I don't think Vader would've been happy with a prolonged siege waiting for the rebels to freeze to death or get eaten by Wompas (is that the critter that tried to eat Luke?)