It seems to me that Cia's comment that "The limitations and extent of planetary interaction are a live and unresolved issue" covers all kinds of planetary interactions, not just the ones using the PI interface.
One plausible extreme:
- our ships would explode if we took them into atmosphere;
- our targetting systems are incapable of doing that sort of thing with a planet;
- our currency is an interstellar scrip used solely for trade in "capsuleer market" commodities, and does not have an exchange rate with local currencies;
- our immune systems are too delicate from our pod-time to support regular contact with baseliners and their bugs; and
- we're either limited to or strongly encouraged to remain in certain podder portions of stations when we dock (heck, we might even be isolated in our captain's quarters ).
Likely extrapolations from these:
- Faction War is a kind of capture-the-flag play war which doesn't affect the people on the planets.
- Even in null, the empires capsuleers build are space-dwelling, and sit relatively lightly on top of whatever planetary population and infrastructure may exist there.
Over time, though, the types of interactions happening between capsuleers and planets-and-their-populations seem to have grown.
Does moon-mining require interaction with ground-based populations? More than crewing your ships does? I don't know. I think it's plausible to play that it does, but I'm not convinced it's "true".
Planetary interaction itself is... a bit vexed, really. You buy a capsuleer commodity and arrange to dump it on a planet. Are there ways things get through the conceptual bubbles between podders and planets? Do the "podder bubbles" just reach out to encompass a the portion of the planet that's directly worked on? Instead, do the customs offices or whatever act as go-betweens or overseers between those "bubbles", but permit only very restricted types of activity? In what ways, if at all, does it affect the local economy?
After the regular reminders that it takes serious time and a different kind of infrastructure to land on and leave a planetary surface, and that this was not something you did in the middle of a fleet, it was a real WTF experience to find that Sansha were doing just that, in just that timescale, with their dropships. If
they can, presumably in non-capsuleer ships, it should be plausible to use something similar to go home to a planet for dinner after a hard day shooting Angels, yes? Would I want that?
What's already going on with the pirates and their "empires" in null? What would the Blood Raiders have to say about Querious and who did what, where?
For now, I don't know. I could understand playing that you have the planetary populations of null terrorised, and are the drop-ship-dropping exploiters of Querious. I could also understand a view that capsuleer sovereignty and changes in it might largely wash over any baseline population except for the occasional unscheduled meteor display.