Idea fusion

I'm at that stage in planning my next book where I need a big battle scene to finish it off,  but I'd been having a bit of a mental block as to how to do it.

The book has a planet which includes sentient forests and telepathic big cats, and I knew that I had to use the planet itself to defend the planet.  The humans who settled there were colonists, and not heavily armed, and anyway I didn't want to create that kind of carnage.

The truth is I don't like killing characters or destroying their worlds.  I don't think I could ever bring myself to kill a major character I've come to know and care about.  I've read books by writers who have killed off major characters quite early in the book, and I can never love those works.  I didn't want to do that in my novel.

I wanted a battle scene that didn't kill my sentient trees, and that kept my main characters alive.  But the colonists had minimal weapons, so I had to use some of the ideas I'd invented for the planet as means of defence against the incomers.

The big trees have moveable lower limbs, so I could get them the strangle some invaders.  Then I have a bioengineered cat designed for jungle warfare.  She'll be perfect for stalking and killing invaders in the dense forest.  Then I have a sentient AI communications network in geostationary orbit above the planet.  Upgraded with military defence code, the individual units could direct their printers and self-repair bots to create armour for them, and weapons.  That takes care of defending the vital communications infrastructure, and taking down the mining ship in orbit.

Once I started fusing ideas together I could see how the colonists could fight off an invasion.  It helps  that it's a illegal incursion by a mining company.  They don't want to attract attention to themselves, so they only sent fifteen people to land on the planet.  They're relying on their element of surprise, and  attack drones, to kill the colonists.  But the colonists are forewarned and forearmed, and fight back.

This fusion of ideas often comes from other authors' work.  Over Christmas I read Philip Reeve's Black Light Express and Gareth Powell's Embers of War.  And fusing the their ideas, I now have guardian big cats taking humans to forbidden places in the galaxy.  But that's for the book after next.