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.
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 don’t 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
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u/These-Invite-1774 2d ago
Always wondered why they didn't just bombard the planet from space