But things soon escalated beyond that and several capsuleers started landing armies by the hundreds or even thousands and even set up staging areas in space, and that to me felt very weird and kind of unrealistic, since when can we invade a planet like that? If we had a fleet in orbit keeping the Khanid at bay, okay, but appearantly Kahah's airspace was just constantly being breached by entire army transports, or so it seemed with all the people claiming to land troops and bioweapons and what have you.
Agreed, though something to keep in mind is that a few hundred people spread across several several populated planets each comprised of millions-billions of people winds up being quite a small number. Though most people are focused on Kahah III, the uprisings are spread out across the system (including the Khanid space station). I could see how it might feel a bit on the high side, though (but something to keep in mind is that there's a difference between how many you try to land, and how many get through. Same thing will of course be the case with the freighter army. Only CCP can say how many of the attempted number actually gets through).
Bioweapons are a bit iffy. They can have a big effect, but they're realistically something very easy to smuggle in, possibly even easier than smuggling in personal firearms. Even IRL, bioweapons are one of the easiest means of conducting terrorism. Nukes are a different story, though even there IRL there's growing fears of nukes being miniaturized enough to fit in a briefcase. Obviously though, the ability for such things to have an effect, or just how big of an effect that might be, would be entirely up to CCP. No one should be RPing 'lol I just set off a 30 kiloton bomb in this planet's capital city!' or 'I unleashed a deadly plague across the planet!'.
Staging areas in space are a non-issue to me. CONCORD capsuleer policies basically legally allow you to move wherever you please and set up whatever you please in space. However, there's
no way those facilities are actually launching shuttle craft back and forth from the surface. I don't think anyone has claimed that, but that should definitely be a no-no. At best they can function as communication hubs. Depots are nice though, for the same reason the UK/VA thing is nice -- it's something in space, that people can hunt down and shoot.
But people seemed happy enough to go with it, so I was happy enough to not make much of a stir, but now that a fleet's involved it's suddenly problematic?
It's more the '100,000 troops' than the fleet. The
fleet is the awesome part of all this, and something I commend of you all. But with that number of footsoldiers, it's a moment where you can no longer feasibly hide what you're doing by sneaking aboard normal baseliner transport activity or the occasional blockade runner (as in function, not ship class). That's where you have to start RPing launching fleets of assault craft.
I find the fleet to be the least questionable part, in part because the devs have shown a willingness to deploy NPC's (friggin' Concord!) to handle troublemakers in orbit, so I figured at worst maybe Chakaid will show up and summon a few dozen fleets if this was really deemed to be unrealistic and we'l be pasted the moment we enter system. And if not them, players also have a very big option to field their own fleet and make the operation a failure, there is a lot more forewarning involved here then with most "real" ops, so it seems like there are plenty of tools.
It should be noted CCP has yet to demonstrate any ability to dynamically spawn NPC fleets on people. In the past, for them to put together a fleet, they needed to get everyone in the office to log on individually, which made counters to player activity difficult (though there has been exceptions, like the original sansha incursions and the drifter attack on Jamyl. I assume those were pre-arranged). Actually, one of the reasons why they stopped live events a few years back was because they didn't feel they had enough dev tools to do it justice.
The CONCORD thing was most likely a mistake. They generally set players to suspect, not criminal. Suspect allows for player agency, while CONCORDing doesn't. I don't see them CONCORDing the freighter. What they might do, though, is set everyone in the area suspect, to open it up to people not in FW/not under war decs.
Ultimately it'll be up to players to stop the space side of things.
As for what happens on the ground/air if the space battle is won? That'll be up to news reports.