Glassing the Planet. Is it Doable? What's the pricetag

Glassing the Planet. Is it Doable?Glassing the Planet. Is it Doable?

Turns out, yes, but it’s a lot more work than people seem to imagine.

One of the tiresome overused tropes (clichés) is "Glassing the Planet". Sooo many people arrogantly think they have enough destructive power at their disposal that if they wis/hed they could destroy the planet, turn it into one big glass coated parking lot.

I can think of three people who even claim to have weapons this powerful quite literally shoved up their anal cavities. What kind of a morning routine that must be? Shower, check, lotion, check, floss and brush teeth, check, powder, check, makeup, check, Super-Nuclear Enema, check. It’s really kind of sad and pathetic, the implied threat is that we better be nice to them because they have enough firepower ordinance up their butt to destroy the planet.

Anyway, pfft, amateurs. So I set myself down to calculate how much destructive power and hardware it would take to "Glass a Planet".

Turns out GINORMOUSLY HYUGE-O-MUNGUSOID Superdy-Duper Peta-ton Nuclear weapons are not the way to go. Because when "Glassing the Planet", it is all about surface area.

For example, Tamaris’ standard go-to off-the-shelf Orion ACME (Antimatter Catalyzed Microfusion Explosion) pulse nuke ortillery is 1.75 Megatons TNT Equivalent. 1/5^th nanogram of antiprotons shot into a shell of 8.4 kilograms depleted Uranium containing 75 kilograms of liquid deuterium and tritium. Depleted Uranium (Duranium) will fission when impacted with antimatter, just not a runaway fission reaction. We pick up the Duranium on the cheap because the rubes think it has no value. The Fission reaction implodes the Duranium sphere and acts as the tamper for the implosion induced fusion of the 75 kilograms of liquid deuterium and tritium. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy. The fuel injector on an old fashioned internal combustion engine is more complex. No need to keep a stable of Nobel Laureate Physicists on standby. The ACME’s fireball will last a terrifyingly long 5.8 seconds and will incinerate everything down to its constituent elements for an area of 4.75 square kilometers. It will cause widespread for 1360 square kilometers, but we are strictly speaking about 'glassing', which means only the fusion fireball. A nuke with twice the fuel will 'glass' 9.05 square kilometers, only 90% more. You lose efficacy over the surface area as you go larger. Typically only 1.6x increase in surface area for every 2x overall destructive power deployed.

The first words out of the untrained amateurs mouths is usually, "but we use antimatter". For the love of Tau, please stop embarrassing yourselves. Sorry, cupcake, the math don’t care and neither do I. We’re talking about tonnage to glassification area, not how you get there.

If you happened to have 200,000 tons of antimatter, you could do it with one tremendous Billion Gigaton Blast with a fireball lasting a remarkable (admittedly epic) 26 days. The livestream and video would trend on WeTube for months. It would also make a 6400 Kilometer crater about the radius of the planet. But that’s hollowing out, not glassing.

Words have meaning, people. If you don’t know what words mean, you are just vomiting out word-shaped noise. If you don’t know what words mean, either look them up or don’t talk. I know it is easy to just assume we really know what you mean, but mostly we are just carrying on without your input. Just because we don’t call you a subliterate idiot to your face, doesn’t mean we’re not thinking it. By the way, I’ve tried it, it has no effect. Although in weak moments in a wanton impulses of full disclosure, I do occasionally let people know that they are subliterate idiots, but it is a waste of time and not as emotionally satisfying as they show on television. To be fair, it’s redundant, they have done most of the heavy lifting in letting people know that they are subliterate idiots and epic lack of self-awareness is probably how they became subliterate idiots to begin with. It’s as productive as yelling at Alzheimer patients. The first step is recognizing the problem, and most importantly that the problem is you. Sadly, there is no 12-step recovery program for being a willfully ignorant twit.

I digress, moving on.

A standard terrestrial-sized planet is 500,000,000 square kilometers. At 4.75 square kilometers for each 1.75 megaton ortillery (means we drop it from a shuttle instead of fired like a missile). Then we are going to need 105 million such ortillery. Your total bill is 1 TRILLION CREDITS. That’s just for the ortillery, which are cheaper than missiles. You still have transport and deployment costs. If you’re using Antimatter (because you think that makes you sooo cool, but only because you’re a moron and an amateur poser), then the antimatter costs alone will be 21.4 BILLION Credits. Using my Orion ACME, I only have 2 Billion Credits in fuel costs, but that is peanuts compared to the trillion credits for the ortillery.

I decided to go with ortillery instead of missiles to maximize my yield. I am all about efficiency and effectiveness. Also, I am keeping it real, not talking about fantasy weapons to be stored in someone’s anal cavity like some people I can name. Ortillery means that instead of firing them like missiles, we drop them like bombs. We are 'glassing' them about 1.74 Kilometers apart and have to so every 5.8 seconds minimum. Sounds frustratingly slow, but it is actually Mach 1+. If we work it 8 hour work days, it can blanket about 23,600 square kilometers per day. Which sounds great, about twice the size of Connecticut, but we don’t want this job to take 58 years, we got other places to go, things to see, people to do. If we have 60 such Stratospheric Supersonic Bombers for our deployment working 8 hours a day diligently, it will take a year. Sighs. This is why people pay the Vogon Destructors money, because it’s real work.

That makes 60 Stratospheric SuperSonic Bombers which have to carry 3600 cubic meters of ortillery each day. Yow.

But you have to transport all that to the planet to be glassed. The volume needed just for the ortillery is 80 MILLION Cubic Meters, about 430 meters on a side, a quarter mile or 3 city blocks (depending on what city you’re in). Meh, break it up into weekly shipments.

Plus you have to transport the 60 Stratospheric Supersonic Bombers, but you need those from the start.

Now maybe you’re having second thoughts, not just about the trillion credit pricetag or that you just can’t shove that much hardware up your prodigiously voluminous TARDIS-like bung, but maybe you really only want widespread destruction instead of overt glassing. No one will know, I won’t tell.

Good news, your price tag except for deployment and transport is now only 4 Billion Credits, much more doable.

More good news, because I am good like that.

The Junior Deathstar Option

Let’s say you happen to have scored the 23.22 KIlotons of Antimatter needed and you are really preferring to channel your latent deathstar fantasies. Turns out, if you only want to glass the planet, it is actually doable. 23.22 Kilotons is about 16 times the antimatter carried aboard a Galaxy-Class Starship like the 24^th century Enterprise (46 times how much they list in their technical manual), it’s a lot and it’s not available in stores or online. Keep that in mind. My calculations indicate the Galaxy-Class Starship carries at least 1500 tons of antimatter, which is a lot more than what they claim in their tech manual.

For this project, I am going to use Disruptor Beam Weapons, 1 Megaton TNT Equivalent. These are 250 Tonnage each, that’s 3500 cubic meters, and you are going to need 420 of them if you want to get the job done in a year. So your bill so far is 26.25 GigaCredits for the Disruptor Beam Weapons and 57.8 GigaCredits for the fuel, and 1134 GigaCredits for the reactor to power it (P-9.6 by the way). Reactors are pricey. 1.2 Trillion Credits total, but you get to look cooler while doing it I suppose.

If you go for the high end Dilithium Matter-Antimatter Reactor, you are going to need about 2824 Tonnage (nearly 40,000 cubic meters) of volume to put it in. 40 Times that if try to save a few bucks with a generic Rocketdyne Magnetic confinement. Sometimes it is all about size.

The volume, just for the fuel, weapon array, and reactor adds up to a spectacular 1.83 MILLION cubic meters. A nice deathstar type sphere about 150 meters in diameter. Probably not a ship in its own right, but dropped off by someone with a ridiculously large cargo hold. Turns out there are only 13 standard starship classes that have that much cargo volume: Cardassian Det'tar Prospecting/Mining Transport, Federation Freedom Frigate, Romulan D'deridex Heavy Warbird Battleship, Federation Andromeda Explorer, Ferengi D'Kora Cruiser, Federation Galaxy Explorer, Klingon Huc'ta' Merchant Transport, Federation Akira Heavy Cruiser, Federation Ambassador Heavy Cruiser, Federation Sequoia Heavy Cruiser, Civilian Class III Neutronic Fuel and Carrier, Cardassian Sho'vash Science Vessel, Federation Olympic Science Vessel.

But that does not mean it is not doable. It means you gotta make some calls and shop around, and maybe pay retail or owe major favours.

You can save a little bit of money by taking a little longer

1 year: 1.2 Trillion Credits

2 years: 651 Billion Credits

3 years: 273 Billion Credits

4 years: 147 Billion Credits

5 years: 100 Billion Credits

6 years: 87 Billion Credits

7 years: 84 Billion Credits

Minimal savings for taking more than 7 years.

You can pretty much kill everyone on the surface of the planet in the first 11 hours, a little overtime. And then take your time, 7 years to really glass over the place if that is what you really need to.

You can really do this on a budget if you want to fake it. If you ‘glass’ only a third of a percent but there are not two boards nailed together or two stones with mortar left, who’s gonna know? I won’t tell.

First of all, only 5 days work, and that is without overtime. (I was writing this originally for the Vogons)

Second of all, we’re down to 3 Billion Credits and only 100,000 Cubic Meters for our mini-deathstar. Only 60 meter diameter mini-deathstar which greatly expands out deployment options to 22 different standard starship options for haulage.

I am going to imagine that sometime there is going to be a situation where you really need to decimate a planet, not just be mean and cruel to show off. It is good to understand the options.

I wanted to clarify some details about the glassing.

Using Tamaris’ go-to 1.75 Megaton Ortillery ordnance, it has slightly different results depending on the material impacts

I used the Fireball diameter, but I later figured out I could clarify that somewhat.

Let’s say we let that hit on soft ground, with lots of organics, soil, trees, grass, moss, etc. It will crater a hole 3.3 kilometers diameter, 1.67 kilometers deep. A hole 175 m will be completely vaporized. A 300 meter hole will be molten slag. Not usually soft organics that deep, but the width of the crater will be about that.

Hit hard stone, about a 3.5 square kilometers crater filled with debris, about 2 kilometer diameter and 1 kilometer deep. 77 meter diameter hole vaporized, 130 meter diameter puddle of magma slag. This is the most frequent result overall.

Hit something metal, like a major city for instance. 720 meter diameter crater, 360 meters deep filled with debris. 60 meter hole vaporized, 110 meter diameter puddle of foundry slag.

Hit the ocean, a volume of 16 kilometers diameter will turn to steam. About a million times larger than the average cloud and roughly doubling the amount of water in the atmosphere. Overall we will be vaporizing 420,000 times the usual amount of water in the atmosphere.

There will be airborne soot, smog, and rain like what has not been seen in the Hadeon Epoch 4 billion years ago.