mmm boobs

We all know the Terran Accord cannot win a war with the Affini. They are technologically outmached, have terrible logistics, and are unable to win fights on the ground or in space. The only readon it took the Affini as long as it did was because they a) spent time ensuring that every colony they bought under their wing was triaged for their needs and fully stable before their fleets moved on, and b) the Terran Cosmic Navy was considered more of a threat to itself than a legitimate fighting force. The Terran Domestication Campaign was not a war, it was animal control.

So how does the TCN and the Accord make it as frustrating as possible for the Affini? How do you make every domestication effort as challenging as possible for the Affini?

The answer is fight smart, not hard. If your weapons do nothing, switch tactics.

An Affini ship is protected from harm by firebreaks, and can just shunt anything that might hurt it into hyperspace. So forget a shootinv war. If you use your own ship as a projectile, the Affini’s primary (and only) “weapon system” on the civilian ships that were the frontline of the Terran Domestication Campaign were grappler vines that were more than capable of restraining Terran warships regardless of size. So ramming them is doubtful, and any kinetic projectile would have to outmass a several kilometer long vessel to have sufficient inertia. The projectile would also have to have people on or inside it so that the Firebreak doesn’t trigger.

The answer is use rocks. Big rocks. Really, really big rocks.

Take a asteroid, preferrable one with a high metallic composotion, and dig tunnels into it. It has to be at least a few kilometers in size, with as high of a mass as you can get. Fit it with the largest, heaviest, most powerful boosters you can, and slap radiators and sensor arrays on it. Fit life support and command and control systems deep inside the mass as far to the rear as possible. Ensure it is as obvious as possible that there might well be sophonts onboard this killer crazy rock. Ensure that this object can hurtle dead through space in a system you know the Affini are present in, crew asleep in cryo. When you detect an Affini ship in orbit of a domesticated colony, hard burn towards it with the crew awake.

The Affini have two choices. They can just move out of the way, in which case this rock goes careening past it towards the planet, and causes the death of everyone on that colony world. Or, they can place themselves between the rock and the colony, placing the needs of the many over the needs of the few. They might even survive impact, but the laws of physics are against them at this point (Sir Isaac Newton is a bastard).

It’s a lose-lose which garuntees whoever came up with the plan gets domesticated posthaste, and there’s a lot that can go wrong. The Affini could easily detect the rock early before it comes close enough to the colony to present an issue. The Affini might simply move the rock into hyperspace seeing no other option than to let a few sophonts suffer for the greater good. They might land a few Affini on the rock and have them bring it safely into a stable orbit around the colony with its own thrusters. But the thing is that their saviour complex will ultimately be their downfall in 1/1000 scenarios.