Meteor Kill Chain (IF)

Hard Science-Fiction Setting

Meteor Kill Chain

Pre-seed a “string of pearls” — inert kinetic slugs (100–1000 kg slag cans) on high-eccentricity, ~2-year Jovicentric orbits. Keep them cold and passive. When you want interdiction, arm by tight laser code and geofence perijove kill-boxes that overlap Ganymede/Callisto approach corridors. As each pearl swings through perijove, it adds only tens–hundreds m/s of trim; orbital geometry supplies the rest. Result: hypervelocity closure (≈11 km/s prograde, 20–26 km/s retrograde near moon lanes). One clean hit catastrophically kills a ship; to hurt a habitat you must pick spines and bays.

Ops: stagger 24–200 pearls for monthly–weekly windows; push time-on-target salvos from multiple azimuths. Precede with blinder dust/foil. Control with two-factor arming, IFF whitelists, and logged aim/fire events; range-safety can shove a pearl to a safe track.

Costs: cheap mass, tiny Δv per shot, minimal station-keeping; real cost is command-and-control and politics. Counters: lane rolls, gas curtains, decoy cans, tug sweeps, treaty pressure, and SSA cataloging — hide pearls in “dirty zones” and rotate codes.

Framed as Jovian point defense, it’s a deniable lane gun against ships, not missiles. Terror in war; lawsuit magnet in peace. Physics does the killing; you just schedule it.