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bcoburn comments on 60m Asteroid currently assigned a .022% chance of hitting Earth. - Less Wrong
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Where on earth did widely dispersed efficient-life-killing thermonuclear strikes come into it? Multi was considering a bomb (or cluster thereof) at a single location. The closest to 'dispersion' was when you brought Orion into it, with it's chain of bombs spread out over the launch distance.
Or, alternately, it would be overwhelmingly inefficient because the projectile is aimed away from the planet - or at best along the surface of it.
I incidentally dispute your efficiency claim anyway. I'd be willing to bet that if you collect every one of the bombs you were using for your Orion weapon and place them in single location then it would be more capable of slippiting the planet than the projectile would have been. Even if you managed to make it target the earth directly. If necessary you would of course use several years worth of the entire earth's production of steel (and maybe lead, gold and anything else hard or heavy) and use it to cover the bomb and keep the energy around a tad longer.
Why does it need to be aim along the planet? Use orbital mechanics: Send your spacecraft on an orbit such that it hits the planet it launched from at the fast point of a very long elliptical orbit. Or even just at the far side of the current planet's orbit, whatever. It can't be that hard to get an impact at whatever angle you'd prefer with most of the Orion vehicle's energy, launching direction barely seems to matter.
No particular reason. It's just that the arbitrary task of planetary self destruction that Multipartite specified happens to be that of destroying the planet with a bomb on the surface. If you were just trying to destroy the planet then doing so from the surface seems like a terrible idea.
(For thoroughness, noting that the other approach was also wondered about a little earlier. Surface action is an alternative to look at if projectile-launching would definitely be ineffective, but if the projectile approach would in fact be better then there'd no reason not to focus on it instead.)