A Gilbert & Sullivan-inspired satire with tongue fully in cheek for the entire length of the novel? It doesn't really scream hard sci-fi, you'll want to justify it more than that if you really see it as a hard sci-fi novel. I mean, it literally had inflatable Starship decoys.
No, I'm saying that that literally wouldn't work. Not only that, but there's no usage of scientific principles anywhere in How Much For Just The Planet? from what I can remember of the book. UncleRogi, what's your definition of hard sci-fi?
Surprised no ones brought up the TNG novel Dyson Sphere.... probably my favorite of the numbered TNG books and iirc it was some fairly hard core scifi in it, at least to me...
^I did mention "anything by George Zebrowski" (and his co-authors), so that implicitly includes Dyson Sphere.
Since I enjoyed much of Pellegrino's non-fiction writing, I read Dyson Sphere when it first came out (though I must admit that I prefer the novelization of Relics by MJF in how it deals with the Dyson world).