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>
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[ . . . ]

> This reminds me of the idea mentioned decades back.
>
> Somebody decides to invade this backwater system. Maybe after the
> Long Night, or maybe it's a minor human race or an alien race.
>
> Anyway, they're still using reaction drives, and don't have
> contragravity nor standard manuever drives.
>
> This has been determined by observation from a distance and maybe
> capturing some isolated asteroid miners or the like.
>
> the one unusual bit is that there's *lot* of ground to orbit traffic.
>
> So the bad guys assume orbit and transmit demands. And start taking
> *heavy* fire.
>
> Y'see, all that ground to orbit traffic is done using laser launch
> systems. individual lasrs in the array at ny given launch site are
> decent weapons.
>
> But working together like when they launch something, they are a
> *nasty* weapon.
>
> Forget missile attacks, or landing smaller vessels. They'll be shot
> out of the sky without much effect on the"main weapon" effect of a
> launch site.
>
> It's going to take *heavy* ortillery, massively armored ships, and
> major weapons.
>
> Sure, they can get knocked out and the planet taken. But it's gonna
> be costly.
>
> Of course, no GM would ever do this to the PCs, right?
>

It’s a feature of Niven’s Known Space series. When the Kzinti first meet Humans, the Kzinti use their telepaths to scan the human’s minds. They find a race that has given up war for 4 ~ 5+ generations. From the Kzinti’s point of view, the Humans have gone so far as to ignorantly assume that the path to other planets must have a step where you give up war. So the Humans, have no weapons, and assume incorrectly that every race that they meet in space will be friendly and benevolent. But the human’s aren’t quite that “peaceful”. While they’ve given up conquest, believe that they will find only allies in space, and indeed have bred the instinct to fight out of their general population, paranoia and the instinct to fight are bred into a select number of individuals. These individuals are chemically controlled and tremendously inventive in combat when off of their meds. In one of the first encounters between Human and Kzin, described in the story: “The Warriors”, the Kzin Captain possesses much better technology than the humans. The Captain  assumes that he can take his time capturing the alien ship and chooses to kill it’s occupants by roasting them alive with induced heat. He realizes his mistake an instant before his death. The humans defeat the Kzinti in this encounter by using their communications laser as a weapon. By the time you get to Niven’s “Ringworld", you discover that Humans won their battle in the Sol system against the Kzinti by using Launching Lasers stationed on Mercury to fry Kzinti ships attacking Earth.

Chris