And yes, that's how - I think - the author portrayed that incident; that there was no depth Malvina would not plumb to terrorise her potential future opponents by visiting destruction on her current opponents. That's the Mongol doctrine taken to an extreme.
or, just a new twist on 'Standard naval tactics'. (See below)
The FedRat Ramming Lust? I suspect it sounded cool at the time, but like most joke tactics it's faded fast. First time you're a wit, second time you're a half wit, and it decays exponentially from there. And let's just agree not to discuss the naval 'brilliance' in HotW. IMHO, lazy writing.
It's not just Fedrat, Aleksandr Kerensky did it too...quite a lot actually, though mostly only on-screen for the 'liberation' of Terra. It stops being a joke when everybody does it, and thus far, more are doing it than are not, given the canon equipment lists and battles we've seen since day one. that makes it
Standard, something that large-scale military commanders must be getting
taught to do back when they were trainees.
Given our earliest examples ARE so early within the universe's timeline, what makes Malvina's move innovative is combining it with another tactic in a quite efficient package in which the ship is rammed into the ground target instead of ramming merely to reach it for bombardment purposes.
Given that EVERYBODY's naval doctrine is based on SLDF doctrine, this shows a thread of continuity in the
training and tactics. So congrats to the Jade Falcons for introducing the first significant innovation in naval tactics since 2781-the ramming orbital bombardment of an inhabited city.
(This also suggests we're going to see more of it, if we see more naval, from all current owners of naval assets, not less.)
See, a 'joke tactic' maybe gets used once or twice, when it gets used as the 'go to' and succeeds, it becomes standard-and ramming doesn't tend to appear in the fiction with the LOSING side of a battle as often as the winners.
HoTW underscores this, because that's how Alaric opened up his naval phase of the campaign (same way Aleks did at Sol system! ramming ships into things!!)
Thus, going back to where this all started, The remnant Falcon Navy has a limited number of ships to execute standard tactics with before that number is zero, but they would potentially face even FEWER ships, so the math still works out for them alone, never mind that the Snow Ravens are technically allies and have a few more they can crash into things (but won't, because that would deplete them below viability).
In short, it's not 'lazy writing' it's a carefully crafted illustration of the setting, the tactic would be a 'joke tactic' if it was
rare, but it's
not rare, therefore it's simply 'how business is done'.
