[Alpha Kodiak]

The one thing I would like to add to this thread concerns hit probabilities. While it is true that hitting a planet with almost any weapon from orbit would be easy, hitting a pinpoint target such as a weapon platform should be pretty hard.

I would think that planetary napalm should be easy to hit with, do a lot of damage vs. population, but not much against weapon platforms. On the other hand, pinpoint weapons should damage weapon platforms just fine, but be hard to hit with and not do much to population. Alot of this has been mentioned before, but I want to emphasize the difficulty of hitting pinpoint targets through an atmosphere.

Actually, the atmosphere causes another problem. I would think that beam weapon energy would be attenuated by atmosphere, so they would cause less damage. I'm not sure you could even get small projectiles to survive penetrating the atmosphere, and if you could I think that both accuracy and damage would suffer severely.

I'm not sure what the perfect solution to all of this is, especially in light of minimizing the coding impact on the software. Some of the ideas mentioned before sound pretty good, but I think weapon accuracy against planets needs to be addressed.