Smearing orientifolds in flux compactifications can be OK.

We present explicit examples of supergravity solutions corresponding to backreacting localised (non-intersecting) O6 planes in flux reductions of massive IIA supergravity and address some criticism towards the very existence of such solutions. We verify in detail how the smeared orientifold solution becomes a good approximation to the localised solution in the large volume/weak coupling limit, as expected. We also find an exotic solution where prior to backreaction the internal space has a boundary and when backreaction is included the boundary disappears and the space closes off. The exotic example is however outside of the supergravity approximation everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]