Imperial Laws of War

phavoc said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
What if the Belters get mad?

The scenario is a greedy Megacorp based on this planet puts the squeeze on the belters located further out in the system, their are a bunch of independent miners that the megacorp wants to drive out of business so they could have exclusive access to the mining resources of this belt, so their is a war, the World has a lot of resources and a population of hundreds of millions to back them up, the belters are only a few million, and so they attach a maneuver drive to one of the large asteroids and push it onto a collision course with the planet and the city upon which the Megacorp is based. No nuclear weapons are used, but millions die as the asteroid hits! Now that is a ghastly scenario don't you agree?

(a) it's still a weapon of mass destruction. the belters just lost whatever they were trying to gain.

(b) unless the asteroid had defenses, it's easily intercepted, destroyed or just nudged off course. And if it had defenses, and the planet was that much larger, then they'd probably be able to destroy or turn it away. It's not like they wouldn't see it coming.

They would be better off nudging a smaller nickel-iron asteroid onto a collision course and 'ooh, it musta been nature'. It might still not get there (asteroid detection would be pretty basic in a space-faring society), but who knows if they got lucky...
I agree, unless the world is below TL 8 the odds of actually getting the asteroid through the defences are not that great. I could still see that scenario happening, especially if the manager in charge of orbital defence embezzled the funds.

In the scenario I doubt the Imperium would care if the mass destruction was caused by nukes or not. Nukes are under special control because they are a cheap, readily available means of mass destruction.
 
I think the Imperial response has a lot to do with prevailing subsector and sector policies, as much with anything that the Emperor feels deserves his attention.

While a clear threat to stability would get rectified, something like the Rwandan genocide or Syrian insurrection might be allowed to continue because there's no political will for whatever reason to intervene.
 
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