My Life As A Writer: Warfare In Galactic Christendom - Space Is The Place

Warfare in Galactic Christendom is, on the whole, a limited affair. Outside of the Crusades, the belligerents aren't out to actually obliterate the planet or wipe out all live on it and so on. They're fighting the party holding the objective; they want to take and hold it for themselves, so destroying it is not on the table because they don't want to incur the costs of rebuilding it from scratch.

Sure, space colonies can get wrecked and castles can get smashed, and so on, but outright Exterminatus and similar weapons and techniques are not done because it crosses the line from "We accidentally shot up the reactor core" to "Fuck this planet, with orbital kinetic-kill bombardment using asteroids. The terraform corp can clean up the place for occupation."

Not that it hasn't happened, or that the means do not exist. It has, and they do. It's that the Church has successfully restrained the nobility from doing so, sometimes using self-interest and sometimes using sanction, and it helps that the Church being ubiquitous ensures that a noble wanting to glass his neighbor fears the Church retaliating against him for doing so.

Which means that planetary warfare, as one would expect, is automatically going to go bad for defenders once they lose orbital supremacy and the invaders attain that high ground. Without severe defensive measures to thwart it, and offensive systems to counter-attack, an attacker can just besiege and englobe a planet--blockading it--and starve the enemy out; only if the timetable disallows this does the script deviate away from this.

Most warfare, therefore, not only happens in space but also within a planetary system and not in deep space. Most of that action happens in orbit over the target planet or its Lagrange points. This is why the Navy is the dominant form of the military institution, followed by their Marines, albeit influenced significantly by the feudal nobility and its own norms.

All of this will be seen in the following Star Knight books, though I won't be spending paragraphs doing "As You Know" infodumps on it.

As for why warfare runs on giant robots? Nephilim. Giants of inhuman flesh and bone required giants of super-powered steel to slay them, and there were legions of them as well as those men who served them. Yes, Red Eyes, Zuzu, and Gori are all of that cursed blood- and they are not all that remains. Then the similarity to a knight's panapoly allowed the institutional inertia to accelerate and now we're here.