Part of the 'Star Wars' missile defense included x-ray beams that would fire through the atmosphere. Yes, there would be some loss of power to the atmosphere but not that much. The thing that is unrealistic in most SciFi portrayals of ship's weapons hitting the ground (like Star Trek) is there is no secondary effect. It would be like a lightning strike, with a huge 'BOOM' after the beam stopped because the atmosphere would rush back into the vacuum left by the beam turning everything in its path to plasma. Weapons firing 'up' would be the same as ship's weapons firing 'down' in this regard.
Rail guns firing through the atmosphere are not improbable. The projectile just has to be able to survive the heat from friction with the atmosphere. You might well be able to take advantage of that heat to make your projectile a more effective armor piercer.
Missiles are even easier. NASA launches have to be as
cheap as possible. They are going for efficiency, not speed. And of course they are launching large payloads. The old ABM missiles were much faster than any of the cargo launches you see today. They used a different (and much more expensive) fuel, and they only had to carry a warhead. As they develop this new defense system that GWB is pushing they'll probably develop new ABMs that are even faster. Assuming a few centuries of technology advancement there's no reason that huge numbers of (relatively) cheap missiles capable of reaching orbit and beyond very quickly could not be stocked up for planet defense.
I don't think weapon platforms are unrealistic at all. It's the planets themselves that are unrealistic. The generic 'conditions' (meant to be 'weather' I guess?) is just too vague to describe a planetary environment. We need gravity, radiation, and temperature ranges. I hope we'll get them in SE V.
And yes, the 'cargo capacity' of planets is arbitrarily limited. Realistically, even a medium-size planet like earth could hold more weapons that appear in an entire game of SE IV.
But if we allowed all planets to have seven-digit cargo capacity it would be faily easy to stalemate the game by stocking one planet with a huge pile of weapons.
[ January 25, 2003, 16:20: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]