OR, if you're planning on making more than one game in a series from the start, make it so that the first game ends with a reasonably competent character, but not one that is overpowered. This would allow for a greater breadth of character development over the series, as opposed to ending game 1 as a god. The often mentioned Baldur's Gate series did this well, and it wasn't until the expansion to the sequel where the players reached godlike status. I'm curious to see how this works in Mass Effect 2, because while the character is a member of an elite order, all of the skills were relatively mundane (i.e. you get better at shooting , hacking, magic, etc) and left a lot of room for expansion. Really, though, I'm not a fan of the whole idea of 'levels.' I thought White Wolf's D10 system was a better alternative to D&D, and liked how it de-emphasized the vertical scale of power that level based systems seem to revel in. Of course there were still vertical power dynamics, but you couldn't really think in terms of "Oh no! That monster is 5 levels above me, there's no way I can beat it!"

When dealing with weapons dropped from orbit, anything with a decent amount of mass, lets say a telephone pole made of tungsten for example, will cause a large enough impact that you can be pretty sure that there won't be any copies of IE6 running particularly close to your target.