Lane turned. "Billy says we could, but why? Takes that much more power, and the ultimate explosion would do little harm. This way we can grab a hunk the size of a baseball and make quite an atomic blowup out of it. Takes much less power, and the explosion is great."
"I think you'll find," offered Downing, "that it takes just as much power to wreck a ship by crushing it physically as it does to compress a small sphere and then let it explode."
"The atomic explosion takes more," said Lane.
"Then why?"
"Projector-size. We're getting away with swinging a ten-foot bowl around. If we wanted to inclose a whole ship, we'd require a paraboloid about forty times the longest diameter of the ship, just as the ten-foot bowl is forty times the diameter of the compressible sphere. And cutting a section out—well, that's the weapon we had before and decided against because it left a chance for a well-designed ship to lose a section and still carry on, or be repaired. Complete destruction is the only answer."
"In other words, the power input is greater, but the operational power—?"
"The overall power requirements of the atomic sphere projector are about even this way to just crumpling a ship."
"That's what I said," objected Downing.
"I thought you meant just the crushing factor. The difference is made up in the projector elements. Well, that's those. Billy says we can turn this over to the secondary crew, now."
"Then what?"