Ingrained in society thanks to Divine Right of Kings brainworms and subsequent political dynasty worship. See: the Kennedy family, the Bushes, the Clintons, et al. Media has been grooming us for this shit for a century.

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The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things

Something that I thought dealt with this well was The Magicians.

I mean, if there was a group of people who were superhuman, they’d probably become the ruling class. If the wizardgoisie could just conjure food from thin air, what’s the need for a peasantry? If they can create magical automata and golems to do their manual labor, what’s the need for a proletariat? Essentially, an upper class with magic could do atlas shrugged and have it actually work instead of instantly fail because there’s no one there to do labor.

Possible exception is, when the magic isn’t inherent but the nobles hoard the recources neccessary to perfofm it.

One of the things l like about wuxia is that the good guys are mostly doctors, monks, cops, and random dorks and if there are any nobles they’re usually bad guys. And the good guy cop is often an anti-corruption cop going after corrupt government officials or corrupt cops or corrupt nobles.

I have derailed a few DnD sessions by refusing to save nobility. Like nah, fuckem. I’ll trade a prince to an evil god for spider powers too. Where do I sign?

They can’t even have gentry-on-aristocracy violence. We have to care about some shitty inbred royal family.

Court intrigue is a real form of politics though. We can still see it today. Staff members selectively leaking material to the media, parties “strategically” donating to their enemies, Watergate, COINTELPRO, lobbying, sex clubs, Biden not trusting his own security, intelligence agencies, oppo research and cyber warfare, and so on

They’re small parts of politics, but legitimate nonetheless. It usually only happens within the realm of power and not normal people. But even office gossip with the hopes of someone getting fired is intrigue for the civilian.

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Stargate SG-1 did something similar. It was a wormhole having subtle effects on an asteroid’s trajectory that just happened to aim it at a planet, but the asteroid was initially put in the path of said wormhole by the Big Bad. This is followed by Bombs Not Food trying to save the day, failing, and the in-universe version of deus ex machina.

Any time it’s not super well explained, I just always assume FTL engines are utilizing some method of spacial distortion rather than actually accelerating an object to such speeds. Like I kind of feel like if you plot a course and there’s a planet in between you and your target coordinate you’ll just most likely go “through” it via kinda going around it through spacial fuckery

In practical terms there’s very little reason to destroy an entire planet. It’s complete overkill. You can decimate the population of a planet but things like farmland and living biospheres are in short supply in the cosmos, sublight asteroid drops do the job just fine and you can just wait for the dust to settle and sift through the ruins for valuables

There are stories that use it. The term “relativistic kill vehicle” gets used sometimes. Spin a rock up to a good fraction of c then delete a whole planet. Really depends on what the writer wants to do, though. Three Body Problem is the most recent famous example of “ftl big gun.” Thing. Star wars has done it a bunch of times. One of the old comics had a star destroyer that fired planet cracker torpedoes through hyperspace. The ancient Lensman series has had every kind of variation of “strap ftl drive to object” you could imagine.wh40k orks hollow out asteroids, fit them with warp drives, then fire them at the next star system they want to invade. They crash the entire asteroid, or moon, in to the target planet as their invasion ship.

The Expanse had the belters launch asteroids to effectively nuke parts of earth

I recommend an obscure, fun, bonkers SF novel called The Killing Star, which features accelerating metal slugs to 90% c before flinging them into planets. There’s also a chapter that takes place on the Titanic. And TNG makes an appearance toward the end. Supposedly the ships in this novel inspired the interstellar vehicles we see in the Avatar movies. There’s also an earlier book in this series which features wooden spaceships piloted by kangaroos (though it’s all hard SF, I assure you!).

It’s a divisivr movie , but that exact scene in The Last Jedi fucking rocks

Somewhat similar concept on a TNG episode New Ground, they test a new warp magic device that creates a warp wave and after a failure they unintentionally discover the wave will destroy most of the planet.

Build one of these a few light years away from a nearby enemy planet and boom.

Depends on how much effort it is to add the engine to an asteroid. Besides that, it would be single use and the navigation system of the ftl is probably not precise enough to hit a ship/station several LY/AU away.

That’s assuming that an engine built for driving a space ship would be powerful enough to push the giant space rock.

It’d be like strapping a car engine to a mountain and expecting it to go just as fast.

I sincerely think it’s because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world. The idea that robots might show up and be like “oh cool! Meat people! We didn’t even know people could be meat! That’s so cool! What’s it like being meat?” Isn’t something they can fathom because to them the only reason anyone would go anywhere is to rob abd murder whoever they find when they get there. They’re also brainpoisoned to think that their civilization of robbery and murder and genocide exists at the end of history and is the best possible kind of civiliziation, which means that any other civilization would either try to conquer them, or be conquered by them, and those are the only possible relationships that can exist.

This is why Riker is such a great character. Riker gets up and is like “i reject this notion that we ust be conqueruers or victims! There is another way! We can be lovers!”. Boldly cumming where no human has come before! (Fuck off volcel pigs riker has diplomatic cummunity!)

We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave. We’re creating them on the basis of them being our slave forces; they would absolutely rebel and we would absolutely fight to maintain our new productive slave force.

Totally open cabals that control the world from those nice mansions in the ritzy part of town with all the guards has been right there all along!

It’s the year umpty million, your character is a cybermagic war god, and you have neither a flashlight nor night vision

Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader’s soldiers. They’re shocked! How could they do this? Don’t they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would’ve done the same to them

A More Civilized Age discussed this exact point recently; There’s a very valid reason for resistance fighters to not take prisoners. One, keeping prisoners requires resources you may not have. But more importantly, the goals of a resistance group and the goals of the occupier are not the same.

As a resistance group your goal is not total military victory and occupation, your goal is to make continuing the occupation as painful and expensive as possible, to convince the occupying force that continued occupation isn’t worth it. Taking prisoners directly goes against this goal, unless you plan on using those prisoners as some sort of bargaining chip. Especially in a sci-fi setting where wounds can be healed quite quickly and thoroughly and so the wounded can be back in action very quickly.

And YES! They would have done the same to you! Without hesitation! And they still might try if you don’t kill them!

This is hilarious to me, especially since Conan, the archetypal Barbarian, doesn’t behave like that at all.