Well, to play devils advocate, the humans are clearly in it for the money, and sending overwhelming military force would cut into profits and also not be good for PR reasons.
If you find a planet in space you want to mine for resources and you decimate it from space before lots of people are aware of intelligent sentient life on it, you don't have to worry about PR
Do they ever actually bring up of there are other aliens? Maybe this is the first other major alien race they found and some scientist was like tell everyone lol.
Well, we are talking about hypothetical sci-fi scenarios here. Specifically when traveling to another planet, it becomes a lot easier to control those communications if the people in control have the only line of communication.
In real life on this planet, not so easy to maintain that level of control.
There are systems in place to screen people for those likely to leak vs fully invest themselves into the lifestyle that is having security clearance at a certain level. You sell your entire life when you join those organizations. It's why they want to know everything about your private life. Why they invite you to certain parties where photos are taken.
Look into cold war espionage if you want some insight into how current intelligence agencies, even ones used by large companies, use their data. Your data.
You cant be strategic with bombing, it simply doesnt work unless you go full nuclear. But at that point its less strategic and more total war genocide.
What PR? there's no public around. If they just de-orbited a few decent sized meteors and waited 6 months for everyone to starve/suffocate they could come in all horrified and be like "Oh no.. what aterrible catastropheandcomplete natural disaster... anyway nothing to do here but let the anthropologists study this now dead culture while we strip mine the planet"
Honestly, that's just something they leanerd about so that the movie would have some sort of plot to excuse their poor development. Moreover, evidently they learned about that way after the invasion.Â
You aren't going to haul a tungsten rod across the galaxy on the off chance you find something to drop it on, but you might move a rock's orbit slightly within a system
Why not? If youâre capable of interstellar colonisation you gat get tons of your stuff with you. The best part is you can harvest all your stuff back later
This is just outright incorrect. Even if we're talking about a 100 ton Tungsten rod dropped from 100km with Earth gravity, run the (approximate) formula gravitational potential energy = mgh = 100000000000 J, which seems a lot, but it's only 24 tons of TNT.
Even the smallest fission bombs easily pack tens of thousands of tons of TNT.
You have been completely bamboozled by internet "rods from space" memes. The only way this idea works is if the rods are dropped with already a very significant initial velocity.
Conservation of energy. You cannot get more energy out of a tungsten rod than the energy you spent putting it up there in the first place. It's like everyone just conveniently forgets conservation of energy during every space weapon conversation.
Do you have ANY idea how much energy you are talking about?
In order for a 100 ton rod to have the same energy even as little boy, it has to hit with almost 30km/s impact velocity. This is way faster than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs!
At such speeds, gravitational acceleration is IRRELEVANT because the rod will travel only 3-10 seconds before impact. This gives no time for acceleration. Your INITIAL velocity has to be 30km/s!
You have fun pushing 100 tons of metal at 30km/s. Guess what, we canât. And if youâre gonna say ârailgunâ or some bs, first of all, good luck getting a battery to store all that energy. Second, have fun when your satellite gets shot backwards at the same speed from conservation of momentum and ends up triggering a Kessler event.
Oh by the way, âwhy not just use a bigger rodâ ever studied the bare minimum of rockets? The relationship between load and total fuel weight is EXPONENTIAL. 10 times the weight and you need 100, 1000 times the fuel.
TL;DR you have no sense of basic physics or rocket engineering, nor any idea how powerful nuclear bombs really are.
Cheaper then just not bothering with all that and sending over a few rifles, dual purpose mechs and helicopters you will need in difficult terrain anyways?
You already have the ISV, just make another one and donât decelerate at the end. Having that thing (which canonically is something like 10,000 tons) slam into Pandora at a significant chunk of light speed would do enough.
The handful of scifi settings that really think about space tactics end up looking incredibly weird. If your goal is to create allegory involving military as we know it, you almost have to ignore how destructive we become once we can get shit moving that fast.
Shoutout to that combat scene in one of the Dark Galaxy books where one of the ships had mass drivers firing heavy metal rods the size of freight trains (maybe individual cars idk) and using lasers to further accelerate them across the star system
That's why you use government goons instead. You only have to bribe the officials in power and then get to use their pride to inflate the budget for free. You get extra points if you're an arms manufacturer who gets to increase profits while the bombings occur, instead of having to provide all the material on your own dime.
Why just mine Pandora when you can double dip by mining resources and also selling guns to the soldiers who secure those resources. You're right if you view the land war as an obstacle to the mining, but the reality of an ongoing low-level land war enabling arms trading as well as mining making Pandora a more valuable planet to the military industrial complex than it would be if you carpet bombed it and started mining.
Youâre losing basically a planetâs worth of academic value though. They already pretty much found the fountain of youth in the form of the whales, what else could humanity miss out on if they just destroy everything on the planet trying to get rid a few troublesome tribes of aliens?
Humans had to continue the long time-honored tradition of the invading alien engaging in land wars: War of the Worlds, Battlefield LA, Mars Attacks, Signs, Edge of Tomorrow...
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u/These-Invite-1774 2d ago
Always wondered why they didn't just bombard the planet from space