For the current tech level I can prefab a 100 armour PDC for 9k DUR and 3k NEU, not too bad mineral costs really. All I need do then is ship it to locations get them bolted together and transfered over to the other colony population. Pretty sure doing things this way I could even pull down the temperature on venus to levels that can be managed until the atmosphere becomes reasonable.
Beam weapons are ineffective when targeting worlds with over 101.325 kPa of atmosphere, so this technique would be useless on Venus. Orbital Habitats would probably be more efficient in any circumstance.
True beam weapons are pointless, but a ship design that is full of size 1 launchers allows for this to work on bodies with an atmosphere of 1.0 or greater. A couple of 100 armour PDC's can take a fair amount of damage before giving it up, and at 5 second launch intervals you could feasibly drop a body surface temperature by 50 desgrees or more in the space of a couple of minutes tops. Granted it will take years for all that dust and radiation to clear, during which time the population would have to be on a short cycle time, heading back to a colony with high tech midical facilities to prevent them dying off from radiation poisoning and such. But during this time the colony cost would have dropped to allow you a greater population for terraforming per infrastructure than before. Assuming of course you get below the magic colony cost 20.
Hot worlds with little atmosphere though can be dropped tremendously fast with a few beam weapons, and no need to waste missiles.
I do agree completely that this is far from an efficient method of doing things, for me the entire concept just added more RP flavour than the magic terraformer vaccums that fix everything. Also this is a case of doing something simply because it "can" be done.
