“Honestly, I think the primary motivation to develop warships that can descend into the atmosphere and hover in a menacing, fight-in-the-shade manner has nothing to do with any of the technical rationales you hear bandied about.
“It’s so that when someone says to you, ‘You and what army?’, you can just point upwards and say, “No, no, me and that Navy.
“Who wants that? Everyone who’s ever led a shore party in hostile territory, just about. It’s nice to be able to intimidate people without a telescope.”
"Hi there! I’m with Union Navy and that new, 1500km moon you have in geosynchronous orbit of your planet? That’s one of our smaller battleships. If we opened fire with just the secondary weapon batteries, we could shatter your planetary crust with a single salvo. We know where everything up to fifty kilometers underwater and underground is, including that very nice bunker that your leadership is communicating from. The artificial delay in your replies to conceal the location is actually pretty good, it took us about 90% longer than usual to find your facility.
"We have a marine transport in a trailing orbit that carries enough ground troops, AI drones, panzers, and supporting gunships to invade your entire planet. And conquer it in under a week. We’ve got six of those. And we have a full fleet support train that can build a complete planetary infrastructure up to Tier III Union standards in four standard months or three local months.
"We want to point this out, this is the Union being polite. We will respect your sovereignty and autonomy while we are guests here. A full Contact package is being provided to all national governments and major branch libraries in every nation, and we will respond to questions and requests for as long as you wish us to remain here. Please make sure to sign the receipt when the remotes come to drop the Contact package off. National governments will be provided with specific contact information for negotiations and diplomatic needs.