tlb wrote:When King Richard was captured, the English government just carried on with Prince John.
I really doubt that would be treated the same as capturing the orbitals, more like what happens when the head of government is in a coma.
I tend to agree. Sure you could try to coerce the head of state into ordering the military to stand down and the government to surrender -- but I doubt there are any rules of war that say a system or empire should then actually obey.
After all controlling the orbitals is supposed to force a surrender because the planet is effectively defenseless against the attacking fleet -- and should they refuse to surrender at that point the rule of war then authorize the attacking fleet to begin limited orbital strike to destroy their remaining military on planet and compel them to surrender.
That rule was enacted to try and avoid the need to actually carry out those orbital bombardments (which a planet can't effectively block or prevent once it has lost control of its orbitals)
But there's no such risk of mass loss of life if you don't surrender when your (current) ruler is captured. The ruler might lose their life; but that's not a scale of death and destruction that the rules of war need to care about. (And so I doubt they do).
Plus, as noted, the rules of war understand that the planet's government might behave irrationally and refuse to surrender after things are hopeless and that's why they lay out how the attacker is then allowed to escalate things. But what escalation could the attacker do if they only hold the ruler? Sure, they could kill them, but how does that materially prevent the planet in question from continuing to effectively prosecute the war or remove the ability to provide effective armed resistance to ground forces the attacker might want to land?
So, I suspect if their navy was still able to carry on fighting that the rest of the government would just activate whatever succession / continuity of government mechanism existed and continue the war. (Sucks to be that ruler, but maybe you shouldn't have been doing something so foolish as to expose yourself to capture from an enemy that didn't first have to fight their way through your navy and system defense)