>>Be fair - I don't think they had an one shot planet-busting weapon
>>until the third book and that was a missile. (Until then it was a
>>matter of tractoring a really big rock for a major kinetic strike -
>>which takes months) The super laser would have impressed them.
>>
>
>Hmm, not really. They did have planetbuster capability - even Dahak
>could do it with an appropriately-targeted set of hyper missiles.

He states it outright in that first conversation with Colin- "Essentially, Commander, this vessel could vaporize your planet."

BTW, given that it's Dahak talking, we can probably take this statement literally... And the superlaser left a _lot_ of debris behind.

>The superlaser as a concept, they'd find interesting, having the
>entire DeathStar/AT&T built around that weapon and no other real
>anti-capital-unit weaponry (that we've ever seen in use, anyway)
>would leave them rather less than impressed.

Nn-nn. I might be misremembering dialogue, but I think that it was actually said in dialogue that the reason the Rebel snubfighters were able to get so close was that _all_ of the DS's defenses were set up to bust capships. Of course, those selfsame defenses would be utterly pathetic in the face of beam weapons that can yank matter out of the sidereal universe or rip atoms to bits, but you can't have everything. ^_^

Blessed be.
Nathan Baxter
(Would really like to see those books made into anime, someday. That'd rock.)