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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6016760" data-attributes="member: 177">Doing *anything* on a planetary scale requires either huge amounts of power, or sophistication.  1960s mainframes had neither.  It is your universe, mind you.  I'm just telling you where you deviate from real-world science, as your players may notice...Here's the thing:  for something like Earth or Mars (meaning, a body that is small compared to the Sun), the orbital period is a function of the radius of the orbit.  In order to "synchronize" so the distance from Earth to Mars is constant, Mars must be pulled into the same orbital path as the Earth!  And, since Mars is of size and mass comparable to the Earth, you wouldn't get to simply park it in a Lagrange point.  Now, Both planets would need massive forces applied to them pretty constantly to avoid catastophe.Yep.  You just flip it around, and come at your destination torch-first.  Easy-peasy, for someone who can manage a fusion torch.Dude, we can hit a distant planet *today*.  If you've got the fancy computers that can run such a beast, hitting a planet should be child's play.  In Star Wars, there's a simple defense - the hyperspace drives don't work in the gravity field of a planet, and the ships only come out of hyperspace with the momentum they went in with.  Star Wars hyperspace drives cannot produce a relativistic Kinetic Energy weapon.  So, they have to build Death Stars.Star Trek has no excuse.  If the Romulans or klingons really hated Earth, they just needed to slap a bunch of drives on an asteroid, and point it at Earth.  None of this "red matter" crud <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Mind you, they have a script and writers that can force nobody to think of it.  Meanwhile, you have *players*, who are not beholden to a script.  Just sit back and hope that none of them realize that you've put the mother of all Chekhov's Guns on stage...</blockquote>

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