Science fiction always challenges my suspension of disbelief is when people land on planets to skirmish with conventional weapons instead of, say, throw a big heavy aerodynamic solid rock from space.
You can make good reasons or at least plausible ones. 40k has planetary shields. There could be a civil war so neither side might want to destroy the surfaces of each planet and civilians. Battletech has spaceship tech being rare and irreplacable, and there are treaties limiting orbital and nuclear bombardment.
Sometimes the most realistic route just isnt fun though so i can usually look past the contrivances.
Good sci-fi usually treats this on par with using nuclear weapons (which it kinda is?). In Babylon 5, mass drivers are banned by intergalactic treaty, and when one race uses them anyway it literally bombs their victims back into the stone age, and it’s treated as a horrifying event --one of the character’s defining moments in the show is just him looking on silently in horror.
Kinetic drives are mass drivers. Unless you use some kind of teleportation or space warping for travel, every ship is a weapon of mass destruction. Every old boat is a surprise WMD, every craft a viable nuke with zero preparation.
Science fiction always challenges my suspension of disbelief is when people land on planets to skirmish with conventional weapons instead of, say, throw a big heavy aerodynamic solid rock from space.
You can make good reasons or at least plausible ones. 40k has planetary shields. There could be a civil war so neither side might want to destroy the surfaces of each planet and civilians. Battletech has spaceship tech being rare and irreplacable, and there are treaties limiting orbital and nuclear bombardment.
Sometimes the most realistic route just isnt fun though so i can usually look past the contrivances.
Good sci-fi usually treats this on par with using nuclear weapons (which it kinda is?). In Babylon 5, mass drivers are banned by intergalactic treaty, and when one race uses them anyway it literally bombs their victims back into the stone age, and it’s treated as a horrifying event --one of the character’s defining moments in the show is just him looking on silently in horror.
Kinetic drives are mass drivers. Unless you use some kind of teleportation or space warping for travel, every ship is a weapon of mass destruction. Every old boat is a surprise WMD, every craft a viable nuke with zero preparation.