Watched Starship Troopers for the Nth time. Then spent too long detailing why I believe Buenos Aires was an inside job on a 4 year old Reddit post.
Way too much ink spilled on a Watsonian rationale for a likely Doylist oversight:
Klendathu is way too far away from Earth for it to be an intentional asteroid strike from the Bugs.
Here’s a picture from the Federation broadcast showing their relative positions:
The Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light years. Those two points are separately by at least 2/3 of that distance, or 66,666 light years. Even at the speed of light, Klendathu would have had to launch their strike before the end of the last ice age. On top of that, at the latest time Klendathu could have launched their strike, the light they’d be seeing from Earth would also be an additional 66,666 years old, placing the Earth they chose to attack appearing as it did 133,333 years ago. Modern Homo Sapiens didn’t even exist until 200,000 years ago and most anthropologists agree that the full capacity for modern language didn’t develop until about 50,000 years ago. You can’t even justify the attack as paranoid genocide, because the asteroid is barely sufficient to wipe out the Buenos Aires region, let alone reset life on the planet.
Some argue that FTL exists in this universe, so maybe the bugs sent the asteroid at FTL speeds. Ignoring the fact that no capacity for FTL travel is shown from the bugs throughout the film, there is clear evidence the asteroid is traveling at sub light velocities. When the ship encounters the asteroid, they are traveling at less than c. If they were traveling even close to c, the light from the stars seen through the cockpit windows in this scene would redshift into the x-ray part of the spectrum, which is invisible to the human eye, turning the sky black. The asteroid is obviously traveling at a somewhat similar speed, which is why Carmen is able to evade at all. That means the asteroid is traveling at a significant fraction under the speed of light.
Assuming that the asteroid allegedly received all of it’s initial acceleration upon leaving the Klendathu system, which seems reasonable, we see no signs of the rock having means of self-propulsion, it left Klendathu at least 100,000 years prior to the start of the film (that’s assuming a much higher fraction of c than is demonstrated in that scene). This seems highly coincidental and unlikely that an asteroid would leave one planet, travel 100,000+ years, and then strike another planet precisely at a moment of rising tension between those two specific worlds. It is the literal definition of astronomical odds.
This is, of course, even assuming the news reports that claim the source of the asteroid are accurate. Much more likely that the asteroid never came from Klendathu. I find it highly suspect that they tracked the source of the asteroid within a literal 2-3 minute time period from impact, with explanatory graphics already prepared. If you recall, Rico literally has the transmission with his parents cut off by the impact, walks out to washout, and then sees everyone running due to the news of the declaration of war. This news comes with prepared graphics and the fact that not only has the council deliberated, but they have already voted unanimously to go to war. Seriously, rewatch this scene. The timing of this whole thing makes everything suspect. The only way it works is if the Federation already had their response prepared and played their hand perhaps a bit too quickly.
Next, with highly advanced computers, why was Carmen’s ship taking a non-optimal path in the first place? Unless her instructor simply took the first route proposed by the computer, but why would the computer be wrong? Unless it wasn’t because the Federation was quietly rerouting traffic away from the incoming asteroid. It took Carmen optimizing their flight path without orders for the ship to encounter the asteroid at all.
Final point, you have a highly advanced interstellar humanity, with colonies and FTL. There are already natural hazards in our own solar system, asteroids, space junk, long period comets, even extrasolar objects like Oumuamua. Watching for and deflecting wayward asteroids and comets would be one of the first priorities (as we see with NASA’s NEO tracking and their recent DART deflection project) of any fully spacefaring society. The systems meant to watch and deflect more local hazards would work just as well on the Buenos Aires asteroid. The chances that an asteroid could just mosey on in with such a technologically advanced Earth is honestly not plausible.
There are a host of clues in the film that suggest a false flag operation. Verhoeven has already shown a bent against the Federation (understandably given his history) and a keen eye towards composition and timing. These scenes and details weren’t a mistake. The Federation was running into difficulties trying to expand into Bug Space, as the bugs defended their territory. They needed a rationale to fully mobilize against the bugs. So they snagged a relatively local rock, nudged it with the correct boost to give it a collision course with Earth, and then added a hidden directive to their fleets’ navigation computers to calculate courses that avoid this asteroid. Then they quietly switched off the planetary defenses to allow the asteroid to finally strike Buenos Aires.
Alternatively, Carmen caused the the Buenos Aires strike and all of the death and carnage of the resulting war. Assume for a second that the asteroid truly was an innocent astronomical chance event. In that case, she impacts a piece of her ship on the asteroid, surely slightly changing the vector of the asteroid. Even slight changes at those distances would result in completely different intercepts. If Carmen hadn’t changed the flightpath against orders, the ship wouldn’t have hit the asteroid. That means the asteroid likely would have never hit Earth otherwise. If you total in all the casualties in the sequels, this makes Carmen responsible for more deaths than any other individual Human in history.
Whether it was a Federation false flag or a chance event caused by a show-off cadet, it certainly wasn’t an intentional strike from the Bugs on Klendathu.
As a complete aside, Rico probably killed Dizzy Flores. She suffers a large puncture wound from an arachnid, but the claw is shot off, leaving it lodged within her. Seconds later, Rico then tugs this large object from her torso, leaving a large gaping wound. Dizzy then dies shortly after, likely from internal bleeding. She might have died anyway, but the clawtip should have been left in place until they got her to medical professionals. EMTs would never remove an object causing a puncture wound, like a knife. Given the advanced medical care available to the Federation, she might have lived otherwise.
) would be involved in anything as cunning as assisting an asteroid strike.