Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

I agree. Terrorists should not be given the legitimacy of being called an enemy anything, they should just be called criminals. I would actually hesitate to call the terrorists because it gives them too much legitimacy. Just call them what they are: mass murders.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

Ehn... There have been a bunch of terrorist groups that were actually backed by governments under the table. It's not the same thing as a privateer because that's an official acknowledged contract. But it's worth bearing in mind that the Golden Age of Piracy was to a large extent because the various powers would go ahead and deal with and shelter pirates who picked on the other powers.

All that being said, no state sponsor of terrorism would give their little friends a WMD, because there's no way anything they could gain from that could outweigh the price they'd likely pay for doing it. That includes giving them a spaceship that can be used to destroy hundreds of miles of Earth.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

Terrorists by their nature are zealots. What sane government would give them weapons easily turned against their own.
Though almost always the source of weapons eventually becomes known. It's possible to hide complicity with "regular" weapons. But it's either impossible to do so with WMDs or you convince the world that you are dangerously incompetent guarding them. Not politically sensible, I think.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

Governments that are themselves zealots, that think the terrorists to far away to bother them, that are in desperate straits, or that in fact gave them inferior weapons so that they could clobber them once it became necessary to do so.

The North Vietnamese did the later to the Khmer Rouge. They are also suspected of having engineered Tet to wipe out the Viet Cong though that is way to convoluted however fun to think about.

Supplying rebels in one's rival's turf is a old strategy though tempting as it is it is probably seldom a good idea as you seldom have good enough intell to dip your fingers in other people's civil wars and your supposed ally won't stop just because you tell them to. And their fate cannot be a part of any peace conference as who knows what they might be doing underground while you and your enemy are burying the hatchet. Rebels are like biowarfare in being self reproducing and hard to eliminate once you have released them. But dealing with them is often done. The temptation to make bargain basement war is remarkably often accepted even if it is mortgaging the lives of the next generation with one's own brinkmanship. And in principle there is no strategic difference between dealing with just any rebels and dealing with terrorists.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

That makes it to hard to deal with what is an organization beyond what any mere "mass murderer" has, devoted specifically toward destroying your state or harming it's interests. If they are classed as "criminals" they are not like any criminals we have been accustomed to dealing with for a long time in places with efficient judiciary and constabulary. They are more like medieval robber barons or the Sendaro Luminoso.

Why not call them Hosti Humani Generis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis

Especially as it is enough that they are fighting (or at least making violence) without armbands and you cannot hang them twice.

They don't care what we think of them. They know we are their enemies. We are supposed to hate them. That is what is done. They only care what we might do and we cannot afford to lawfare ourselves into impracticality.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

Actually they will expecting to be looking for that great big place up in the East part of the major continent to make first contact. What do the natives call it. Some name after a mythical king in the past, oh yes China. Rather on the par with agriculturalists naming their planet "dirty".

What if Taiwan objects to the PRC being the first contacted? The aliens never heard of the Chinese civil war (while that last Chinese Civil War anyway).

On the other hand the Nordic barbarians once ruled jointly by the Pope and the Emperor (except when Kings and Dukes and Barons and Patricians disobeyed both by doing things like marrying six wives or fighting wars in support of Sicilian rioters on Vespers) now hold a lot of technology they did not at the time. Maybe they should talk to that nerdy guy named doors, hatches, portels oh what the heck was his name boss?

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

That's what those piebald barbarians call the place (and in fact not for a mythical king, they're so clueless they don't know where the word came from themselves). The natives call it Zhungguo - the central state or middle kingdom, which makes a kind of immodest sense.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

I don't think he counts as a terrorist either. He wasn't trying to terrorize anybody, just remove the direct obstacles to the ascension of his chosen king. He wanted to kill the King and House of Lords to create a change of government, which it would have after all. People directly attacking a hated government are revolutionaries, not terrorists. We use that term too freely in modern politics, it robs it of its usefulness.

Though it wasn't a particularly well thought out plot - kill the King, kidnap his daughter and raise her Catholic, and we're sure the replacement Lords and the rest of Parliament aren't going to do anything while we're hiding her to indoctrinate her....

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

Could be interesting if they came back and said, "Where's those nice chaps who had that civilization over here, all up and down the Indus River Valley?"

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

It's not about them caring what we think, it's about us living up to our own legal and ethical standards. Since they're criminals, we have a clear roadmap about how to deal with them.

If they're in the midst of a violent act, we can shoot them, just as we would a bank robber or a gang-member on a drive-by. If they're planning criminal activity, we can get warrants for surveillance, or possibly put someone in undercover. Since the evidence was attained legally, we can then use it for an arrest warrant, and in a trial against them.

If they've actually committed criminal acts, we can go after them and arrest them. If they're being protected by an enemy nation, or just hiding in a place with no governance, then I think we we can use military force to go after them, certainly.

But, once captured, they get legal representation, and they go on trial. If found guilty, they get punished in keeping with our own ethical and legal principals.

If the evidence doesn't exist, then why did we arrest them, in the first place? And how can we justify keeping anyone incarcerated, in the absence of any evidence of wrong-doing?

That violates our own values.

To pull this back away from reality, and into science fiction, I'd say that any theft of a spacecraft would deserve a military response, because the potential for destruction is so high. Moreover, military craft of all sorts tend to have capabilities that civilian vessels can't even begin to match.

Finally, in any realistic space campaign, it's impossible to conceal a spacecraft's movements and activities. Against the cold background of space, any vehicle's activity shows up like a small flashlight up in the third tier of a blacked out stadium.

It's gonna get spotted, pretty quick, by anybody charged with keeping an eye on things.