Good sci-fi usually treats this on par with using nuclear weapons (which it kinda is?). In Babylon 5, mass drivers are banned by intergalactic treaty, and when one race uses them anyway it literally bombs their victims back into the stone age, and it’s treated as a horrifying event --one of the character’s defining moments in the show is just him looking on silently in horror.
Kinetic drives are mass drivers. Unless you use some kind of teleportation or space warping for travel, every ship is a weapon of mass destruction. Every old boat is a surprise WMD, every craft a viable nuke with zero preparation.
Good sci-fi usually treats this on par with using nuclear weapons (which it kinda is?). In Babylon 5, mass drivers are banned by intergalactic treaty, and when one race uses them anyway it literally bombs their victims back into the stone age, and it’s treated as a horrifying event --one of the character’s defining moments in the show is just him looking on silently in horror.
Kinetic drives are mass drivers. Unless you use some kind of teleportation or space warping for travel, every ship is a weapon of mass destruction. Every old boat is a surprise WMD, every craft a viable nuke with zero preparation.