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Re:Alone in a Crowded Milky Way by Retric on Thursday January 02, 2020 @06:54AM (#21934650)
That assumes the Lagrange points are empty. A civilization capable of interstellar war is going to have a lot of space based assets.

Further starship drive capable of reaching a significant fraction of the speed of light make one hell of a weapon. But you still need to deal with space based assets that can dodge your initial bombardment and at a minimum are armed with powerful engines. So sure you can destroy planetary populations etc, but now your still out gunned 1,000:1 locally and pissed off a civilization capable of doing the same thing to you. Net result MAD.

A large technical advantage may make up for this, but that means the winner has better tech is much harder to take over a second time. On top of this the only thing worth shipping between stars is information at the speed of light. Making conquest largely pointless without FTL.

Re:Alone in a Crowded Milky Way by pfdietz on Friday January 03, 2020 @11:18PM (#21952847)
> On top of this the only thing worth shipping between stars is information at the speed of light.

It could be worthwhile to beam energy out to interstellar distances (also at the speed of light). This is probably needed for interstellar travel anyway.