There’s a wide spectrum of options between dropping conventional bombs from space and literally turning the entire planet into a ball of smoldering glass. Given that they had no problem with slaughtering piles of Na’vi, blowing their home to hell and using military hardware the first time around, it’s perfectly plausible that they’d do the same the second time around while staying out of range of the dragons and six-legged cats.
Or that the deposits are deep enough that some surface damage is acceptable if the alternative is getting none at all.
Why bombs and not just chunks of rock at high velocity? No evidence left behind other than craters with ‘meteor showers’ as an explanation if someone complains. Jezus people. We are talking a space faring race vs. smurf monkeys, after-all.
I don’t think you’ve got a clear picture of what orbital bombardment potentially encompasses. We’ve got that hypothetical capability now, and though it’s some scary shit nobody AFAIK is up in arms about it potentially destroying the biosphere. Just lob a simple piece of rebar from orbit and boom, no more Home Tree.
One of the other benefits of orbital bombardment is that the Navi would have no proof you were doing it to them. If you were smart you could claim that it was there god punishing them for not helping their human guests as much as possible. All sorts of mind games are possible with stone aged societies. Fighting hand to hand with them would be the last option. Or some form of Bolo MKXXXIII adapted for mining and impervious to spears and jungle beasts would work just as well.
I think the scientists were just there to help them negotiate with the NaVi, maintain the Avatar equipment, and whatever research they did was their own curiosity mixed with some public relations. I got the sense that the “Earth is polluted” narrative was solely for the purpose of contrast with the ecotopia of Pandora.
It was heavily implied that they were not authorized to wage war with the NaVi. The gun happy people included a lot of ex military folks, but they were not there as part of the military. They were company security. They didn’t even have real bombs - they had to cobble together mining blast packs to create makeshift bombs. And the bureaucrat was hesitant to cross that line while there was still stuff to mine outside of NaVi hotzones. Even as it was, he probably justified to himself that he could make it look like the NaVi got aggressive and he just fought back. But orbital bombardment? There was no way to do this without governmental approval, and it would be a much more difficult thing to keep secret. And also, they didn’t actually have the munitions for that available. It would have taken another multi year round trip journey to get that. That could happen now, but it couldn’t have happened then.
Does anyone know what happened at the school? I heard there was a deleted scene about it on the special disk.
I always wondered why they didn’t just hook one of those floating mountains with the bigger gunship and tow it away to a refinery, rather than digging in the dirt. To be floating like that, they must have cores of pure Unobtainium.