If I may be a little gauche

General
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Random 'verse xeet of the day:

“One day, you must explain to me exactly how closing to meleé is ‘brutish and uncouth’, while raining enough razor-sharp shards of cubic gauche nitrogen from the sky to blot out the sun is the quintessence of military elegance.”

See, I was thinking about ciseflish contributions to Imperial military theory, and they are not fond of meleé, on the whole, while also having a doctrine one might describe unfairly as “Press ‘X’ to spam missiles.”

And then I was thinking about the Red Sea issue of using very expensive missiles and countermissiles to shoot at people who are using cheap drones, and contemplating the virtue of blotting out the sun with flechette-shards of diamondoid, which can be very cheaply fabbed from atmospheric CO₂. But that leaves behind quite a mess.

And then I recalled that cubic gauche nitrogen is stable to an incredible 760K, so what if you made your flechette-shards from atmospheric N₂ instead? With a little inexpensive detonator in each one such that after they have wrecked the shit out of whoever chose to fight in the shade (or happened, well, to be in the same grid square at the time) they all revert to nitrogen gas, being therefore both environmentally friendly and prone to wrecking explosive hell out of anything that the bombardment didn’t already finish the job on?

Meanwhile, the battleship offshore or the flying wing overhead is almost done with inhaling and fabbing the next bombardment…

Press ‘B’ to delete enemy, more like.

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It would have to be from an on-world source, since 760K will be very readily achievable on even a mild deorbit. Not suitable for k-rods of any sort.

I take it you’re using the same nanofab techniques as the diamondslab assemblers? Don’t forget that N2 is a triple bond; gonna be a wee bit tougher to brute-force it even with atomic-scale manipulation. Might want some potassium (or other alkali) catalyst in the process…

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Slap some ablative insulation on the outside of the cluster-bomb, no worries. Although for delivery, I had envisioned mostly shelling or, for removing several grid squares, the drone equivalent of a couple of grunts emptying crates out the back of a cargo plane.

Probably easier to make the cg-N the traditional way, given that N₂ is all N and you don’t have a bunch of O to separate out the way you do in CO₂.