[dogscoff]

If under fire from a house they destroy it, unless they are 100% SURE there are hostages in there.

There are always innocents caught in the line of fire sadly, its just Icarans wouldn't let a few innocents deaths change their ENTIRE warfighting policy

Ok, I see where you're coming from. However I do think you underestimate the extent to which people will resist, even in the face of utterly hopeless oppression.

Basically if they land and take out your military (or your military surrenders) and your people are willing to submit then you get treated rather well, your kids get taken to school for six months out of the year (full course) and then for every other week for the remaining six months (half course). They get to see their family and the culture is slowly assimilated into the Empire.

But no-one will submit, and any military worth its salt would fight to the very last to resist the Icarans if they knew what was in store for them. You say "people will be treated pretty well" but I have yet to see single thing in the Icaran Empire that is in any way superior to the system I am living under now. If I feel that way, why should the members of a space-age society of a comparable tech-level to the Icarans feel any different? They are probably quite happy with their lives, they don't need some squad of totalitarian fascists to come down and impose their twisted utopia. People might even, you know, resent that quite strongly.

You also have this bizarre notion that people will regard having their children sent away to be "educated" (ie indoctrinated into an offensive, alien mindset) as a good thing. Imagine your kid coming home in the evening.
Mum: "Hey Billy, how was school?"
Billy: "Great! Today we learned that the Emporer is supreme and that the blood-drenched subjugation of the galaxy is his god-given and inevitable destiny."
(Mum gives Dad a worried look.)
Dad: "Uh, right. You know Billy, that's just one point of view. Some people might say that..."
Billy: "Ha! Teacher said you might be traitors! You'll have your tongues cut out for this, rebel scum!"

have you made any effort at all to see this from the point of view of the victims?

Suppose someone conquered your country and said "Your culture and way of life are obselete. We will eradicate it and replace it with our own. You will not raise your children in your traditions, they will be raised in ours. You may not reproduce without our permission. You may no longer practise your own religion. You *will* respect our megalomaniacal supreme dictator. You will obey every order given to you because the authority of our Emporer is absolute. You may no longer vote, voice dissent, have any say in your own public life or gather in public for political purposes. You and your children will serve in our military so that we may use you to impose similar barbarity on other peoples elsewhere. Icaran life is more valuable than yours. All of this will be enforced with dispassionate violence, surgery, abduction and brainwashing administered by a bunch of cold, aloof foreigners who will live in gated communities and make no effort at all to understand you, learn about you, or make any compromise to your way of life. Resistance is futile. Have a nice day."

Would you submit and say "oh well, at least I get free heathcare and a job?" Or would you flip them the finger and devote yourself to driving the bastards out of your homeland and back to where they came from? Would you, reading all this in a story, respect anyone that simply rolled over without a fight? Would you feel anything but hatred for the invaders? By all means write the Icarans that way, but don't expect anyone to like them, and don't for a minute suppose that they would be welcomed anywhere.



But let's take a scenario where the Icarans conquer a world of people who do roll over. Maybe the Icaran system isn't so different to the one it replaces, so the Icaran propoganda merchants managed to persuade 99.9% of the population to just accept a new portrait on their currency, call themselves Icaran and get on with life. On a planetary scale, the 0.1% remaining represents a significant number of people who will resist.

So some fighting breaks out. Maybe an icaran soldier or policeman gets shot. maybe an Icaran facility or convoy is blown up. Maybe a high-profile collaborator has his family kidnapped.

The Icarans attempt to deal with the situation the only way the know how: With uncompromising oppression. Except they don't really know who to target. Maybe they catch a few people, but there are plenty more who get away.
So they start being a bit less precise in their methods: Any one of the locals could be an enemy, so let's treat them all as suspicious. Impose a blanket curfew on everybody, take out entire buildings from afar rather than risk sending someone in to take out the few targets in there. I mean we're Icarans now, and all Icarans are equal, but some are more equal than others, right?

Some of the pacified people who submitted will inevitably suffer, find their meagre remaining rights being stripped away. Maybe their children get taken away, maybe their uncle gets blown away as collateral damage in a raid on a suspected resistance hideout, maye a brother gets beaten for breaking curfew, maybe a cousin gets taken away and "has an accident" after looking at a policeman funny. It becomes gradually more and more apparent just how much local life is worth compared to Icaran life.

You might like to think that the locals will blame the resistance for stirring up trouble, but that's not how it works. People will compare how it was before the occupation and how it is now. They will blame the person pulling the trigger for the shooting of an innocent, not the activist who the Icaran gunman thought he was aiming at. Suddenly some of those passive people are no longer passive, suddenly they choose not to submit. And the more of their family members are killed, the more homes are destroyed, the more lives ruined, the less they have to lose. They take up arms. The resistance continues, the oppression is intensified, more people are disaffected, the cycle escalates.

Before long what was a relatively quiet world with a minority of troublemakers is an utter hell-hole in a state of perpetual war. Uttely ungovernable and completely incapable of producing anything in the way of useful industry.

I think I've put forward my case pretty strongly that there WILL be resistance- substantial and determined resistance- on pretty much any planet they invade.

So how do they deal with resistnace? Well...

As far as the "blowing up markets etc" goes that wouldn't work on Icarans because like I said they pretty much leave a conquered population alone aside from certain requirements, the conquered world doesn't see a massive influx of actual Icarans so they'd only be blowing up their own people instead of Icarans.

On a world that fought hard enough to earn the "punishment" I described basically all the Icaran facilities would be mini fortresses that are practically unaproachable with anyhting but a nuke or armored regiment....including the "schools" which would be ON BASE.

And Icarans are patient, they've been bred to be and trained to be so twenty years, thirty, even fifty would simply be seen as a waiting game to a population with SUSTAIN level lifespans. Eventually the dissident population will die off or be too old to be effective, and then your new generation can come in and take over.

Take a look at Iraq. Most of the people dying in suicide bombs aren't americans- they are Iraqis. Do the insurgents really think they can kill all of the thousands of well armed soldiers and tanks the US have over there? Are they even trying to do that? Hell no, and they know they don't have to. All they have to do is cause enough noise and news and expense and death and misery so that staying just isn't worth the Americans' while.

All warfare boils down to economics. The invader wants your natural resources, your industry, your infrastructure, your workforce. However, the value of those assets has to exceed not only the cost of the invasion, but also the cost of maintaining and defending the assets post-invasion. So your Icarans, having conquered a people, can't just steal the children and leave the rest to die out- or they could, but then all they've done is to snatch a load of children and lose everything else. They will emerge from their bunkers fifty years later to find an anarchic wasteland, all industry and infrastructure long ago destroyed by sabateurs determined deny it to the enemy. What is the cost of rebuilding all that? What is the cost compared to simply glassing the world in the first place and re-colonising it with native-born Icarans? Presumably they don't have any kind of reproductive crisis, and so don't actually *need* to steal babies in order to perpetuate themselves. What is the cost of glassing and recolonising an occupied world compared to simply colonising an empty one?


It's not enough to sit in a bomb-proof bunker and guard that bunker. They might as well never visit the planet in the first place. No, once they've conquered a people, they need to police them, collect taxes and resources, supervise production and prevent the locals from plotting liberation. They will have no choice but to send in troops to guard factories, offices, bridges, power plants, mines, ... they will have to send in administrators to and rub shoulders with the leading figures of local industry and production, make sure that facilities are being run properly and that their output os all accounted for...

Those troops and administrators will cost money, and will be exposed to danger. Sure, they can draft in collaborators to do much of the work on their behalf, but collaborators will be far more exposed than any 'true' Icaran, and there will also be serious issues of trust.

Even if their troops and administrators and trusted collaborators are nigh-invulnerable in super high-tech body armour, you're still left with the problem of protecting an entire planet of infrastructure from an enemy within. On budget.

My point (finally) is that I can't help think that invading a population and then attempting to deal with their violent (and justified) resentment by sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING" isn't quite such a straightforward solution as you think.

Of course, this all ignores the possibility that the Icarans don't invade for economic gain, but because they can't stand the thought of someone out there who isn't like them, and isn't under their control. That, of course, is highly irrational and as such requires no further justification, but if they are prepared to incur massive costs on unprofitable holy wars, how the hell are they not bankrupt already?