Awesome / Lensman

• The endgame sequence of Galactic Patrol, when Kinnison storms Helmuth's lair and fights him face to face. That scene was made of pure awesome.
• The Galactic Patrol throwing entire planets against Boskone's forces.
• In Second Stage Lensmen, the bad guys are invading Tellus (aka, Earth) via the "interspatial tube", a means of traveling from one galaxy to another without the inconvenience of traversing the intervening distance. After the shock globe of bad guy capital ships has been disposed of by sending in wave after wave of powerful mines, after the bad guy's main battle fleet has been disposed of by the superior coordination and efficiency of our main battle fleet, the bad guys up the ante, by showing their true strike force: "Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered, with fixed-mount weapons impossible of mounting upon a lesser mobile base." The good guys dispose of the planets by turning the entire solar system into a vacuum tube and concentrating 100% of the Sun's output into a tight beam upon those planets, such that their ice caps boiled, seas exploded into steam, and mountain ranges melted in and around the afore-mentioned weapons. Smith also gets it right when he describes how the planets cooled off quickly after the good guys turned off the sun-beam, recognizing that "even the Titanic forces at work had heated those planetary masses only superficially".

---