SSPS military applications - crit please

John,

I think you could make a case for success of the 'spacers' over the
ground-lubbers barring the interference of 3rd parties. The only
particular problem I see is 3rd party aircraft flying over said evil
nation's territory and getting zapped by your weapon. This could lead
to undesirable retribution causing damage to the spacers facilities.

Your embargo will not cause the end of communications by the 'bad
guys' and third parties. Any of their allies could achieve space
flight or effective beam type weapons and build or buy them for use
against your spacers. In other words, if you are going to take them
out, take out their power generation and transmission capabilities and
throw them into the stone age again.

Also, there is the possibility of tunneling under the border. (check
the DMZ between the Koreas and the Mexico/U.S.A. border, among others)
I doubt your zapper can hit it if it cannot see it.

Good luck with the novel. Sounds interesting.

Harvey

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "ANTIcarrot"
wrote:
>
> We all know that SSPS can in theory solve the world's energy
problems. But
> could it also solve others? I'm toying with a novel in which a cylinder
> colony has to deal with an uncouth planetary nation which lacks space
> capacity.
>
> Their solution is to place an SSPS in GSO, mount cameras and
> JHPSSL-descended gigawatt lasers on it with 200m wide adaptive
mirrors, and
> programme it to destroy anything human or man made crossing the nation's
> borders. Without international trade (the colony believes) the
nation would
> fall into the dark ages and become more moderate, either because
survival
> takes a higher priority than extremism, all the extremists die out,
or the
> majority population rebels against idiocy.
>
> Assuming that no third party interferes, and a reasonable amount of
second
> world industrialisation, what are the problems of this proposal, and
what
> might the planetary nation do to either destroy the satellite or
make border
> crossing survivable again? Personally I think they're probably SOOL,
but I