How does one annihilate a planet..?

So indeed, how does one annihilate a planet..? I was wondering and found some nice solutions:
(also it gives some nice methods to move a planet or star)

• Annihilation with antimatter
• Suck into (micro) black hole
• Evaporate with focused solar beam
• Hurl into sun
• Blow it up with explosives
• Accelerate rotation to over-spin
• Deconstruct and hurl pieces into space
• Hit it with large blunt instrument

...How would you want to do it?

From a realistic standpoint this is the only method that is even close to practical. And since its part of the game already and looks awfully cool I don't think any additional methods are needed. Still, there is always room for mods.

Blow it up with explosives

How about some realy big explosives? (Tsar Bomb 2.0??? )

I can't wait to hear the sound design for the metal planet weapons.

I would actually park a heavy asteroid with solar sails close to it and use gravity to pull the planet onto a a different orbit. 10-20000 years later... :ugeek:

I would rather hit this planet with enough inertia (asteroid bombardment) to change it's orbit path to crash and burn in sun far much quicker. This method has an advantage of not waiting around for another army to come and stop you.

It would be cool to be fighting on an asteroid for control of it, while it's at a collision course with a planet. Whomever controls the rocket thruster, decides on which base it will finally crash.

What about changing the orbit of a planet to change the temperature. Or maybe stop its rotation so one base is always in the sun and the other in the dark.

Maybe one could accelerate an asteroid by continuously nuking it on one side? There even exist designs for space ship propulsion based on this concept.

There was a good reason why the nuclear propulsion program never took off the ground. (Pun intended)

Do you really believe anyone can build a shield that can withstood a full front on nuclear blast once? One thousand time? How do we even test a such shield? How do we know the sustain radioactive/emp background won't fry everything inside?

That reason was nuclear fallout from ground launches, not the engineering challenges of the pusher plate design.

Actually I think the real reason the project never got off the ground, since we coulda got the components into space through conventional means, was the whole "no nukes in space" treaty that most of the world signed back in the cold war days lol :lol:

"No nukes in space" treaty is a part of that yes. There are other practical reasons for not using nuclear bomb as propulsion.

Image you only have 100 bombs in a hypothetical situation and assuming all of the other problem have been solved that I mentioned above. If I start and used up 50 bomb half way to Alpha Centauri from here. If I need to make a course adjustment using 5 bomb then I still only have 45 bomb left. I would need about 48 bomb to fully reach Alpha Centauri. So where I am going to get 3 extra bomb in outer deep space? For this situation I am assume no mass fabricator exist to make nuclear bomb.

Same problem exist if you need to stop yourself from moving forward because you would have to use one bomb to stop the forward momentum. Then use another bomb to start moving forward again in effectively diminish your potential travel distance.

Having said all of that. I am actually in favor of the vasimr propulsion model because it use so little matter and doesn't need a huge nuclear bomb shield that drag speed down. The con is huge energy usage and you need very strong magnet to hold the engine chamber together.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket

How is that any different from conventional fuel?

If I was to hazard a guess or two as to why this "never took off".
I'd say that this would only be usefull for unmaned ships. No one would survive the g-forces from such an acceleration, since you still do excperience gforces in space.

It would also be way too unstable, no matter how tough the ship it will come apart from the tinyest imperfection. I doubt we'll ever be able to make anything capable of sustaining multiple nuclear blasts, unless we go into energy shields and stuff, which is a little too much like magic and sci fi for us right now. And well, if we had to use nuclear blast to decelerate, I mean, the ship would just flatten lol.

Spreading trails of radiation in our galaxy isn't maybe the best idea... yet.

And I think we are running out of uranium or something, aren't we? There already isn't enough to mantain the current need for nuclear plants.

:roll: There is a massive quantity of uranium fuel on this planet. If it's not ready to be put in the reactor and it hasn't been mined its because people are afraid of it or haven't needed it.

How would one annihilate a planet? Land on the planet drill a hole to the core of the planet and then reverse the gravity pull of the planet thus forcing the planet to be unstable and push apart it self.

Another idea how to destroy a planet

Land on the moon or rock of a nearby body object in space then build a laser drill of some kind that would simply fire at the core of the planet to make it unstable and break apart. Something from Star Trek used on the Volcan homeworld.

I find your lack of science...disturbing.

Or at least pseudoscience. Seriously. There are plenty of realistically awesome ways to destroy a planet. (At least in plausibility as could actually be accomplished, especially with the expected technology level of PA. Not plausibility in a reasonable time frame.)

Like here, in number 11, paragraph 4. Just build a hydrogen/helium fusion thruster into a gas giants atmosphere, where the bottom in takes in the fusionable gases, and the resulting thrust is output from the bottom and sides for station-keeping in the atmosphere, and from the top to slowly thrust the planet to the imminently doomed (eventually!) target planet, which will (eventually!) be ripped apart by tidal forces.

Who needs fakey fake reversing gravity ideas when...

earth is literally under siege by planet ******* jupiter.

Uh... death star? duh :mrgreen:

Its more along the lines that due to the fear of nukes in the 60's the infrastructure to extract is is quite rubbish.
To be fair thorium fluoride salt reactors would be orders of magnitude better. 3x the amount of thorium then there is uranium, almost all the waste has a 1/2 life of between 10years and 30years (a small percentage has a 1/2life of 300years still orders of magnitude lower then 10,000years), it is fail-safe, almost all the fuel can be "burnt" as oppose to something like 30% of the rods...

Conventional fuel need to burn large quantity that it take up hypothetical half of the entire vehicle weight to move from a point to b point.

Let take a real life world example to put power of vasimr into perspective. ISS (International Space Station) use chemical propellant currently to stay in orbit.

For a cash stripped USA that sound attractive yeah?