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Comment by ampdepolymerase | Hacker News Reader

Brush up on Factorio and arm the rockets. Our current spacecrafts are not designed to survive sustained damage (and unlike on earth, the attack vehicles have no easy way of refuel in space, so they are limited when it comes to evasive maneuvers). Attacking a planet is limited by the (current) laws of physics. Defenders are at a great advantage as long as they have a proper production line for orbital rockets.

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Not really. The attackers have nuclear weapons, the defenders don't. That's it. It's over.

I big rock tossed at earth could do way more damage than a bunch of nukes. Like I said, it's MAD in space.

This is a game of energy. The energy necessary to deflect an asteroid from earth is undoubtedly lower than to put it on that course to begin with. It's really not MAD.

Also, sending a nuke could be done much faster than an asteroid intercept mission. It could get there in as little as a week.

Putting a few 100 rocks on course for earth all with different trajectories and arrival times is quite a doomsday game. Mars could be nuked but with 100s of big rocks, a few are going to get though and it will take only a few. It is MAD.

They need to be massive enough to do some real damage, and this will require a lot of energy and luck to divert as there is a low chance you'll find a few hundred on such a trajectory.

Just getting the ships in position to shift their orbits will take weeks to months. Meanwhile, nukes already hit. You'd only need 100km/s of delta-v, which is very doable at those timescales with a sub-ton payload.

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