A craft of unknown origins crashes in Roswell, New Mexico; the US government covers up the crash as an off course weather balloon. Two deceased humanoid shark-like beings are recovered from the wreckage. While the technology of the craft is far beyond humanity in 1947 it sends the US industrial complex in new directions.

Soviet KGB agents venture far into Siberia to the site of the Tunguska Event, following very faint and strange radio transmissions coming from beneath the permafrost at the center of the occurrence. Soon what they discover triggers a flurry of activity and excavation. What was found is unknown to this day but soon afterwards the Soviets would put the first manmade object known as Sputnik 1 into orbit.

A Imperial exploratory craft arrives in the Solar System to conduct a detailed survey and discovers first the radio and data transmissions from earth and then the actual article, keeping its distance, they document as much as they can before jumping away and bringing news of yet another potential addition to their empire. This entry and exit however isn't unnoticed, while most of humanity was blissfully unaware two organizations buried within the bureaucracy of their respective superpowers note a change in behavior from the otherworldly technology they've been charged with unlocking.

For the Imperial observers this period of time in global history nearly resulted in their intervention, watching from a god's eye view, monitoring nearly all military and civil communications and watching as a species stepped right up to the brink and then stepped back. Most without realizing they where a few steps away from their civilization being obliterated in a few days of nuclear war. The crews of the monitoring ships could only lean back in their seats and let out baited breaths before filing their reports and sending them back on the courier ships. Unknown to them, it would set the precedence for the war thirty-six years later.

A combination of wanting to secure one's lineage for all time, the steady push of the noble class eager to take up control of a new world, and the simple drive and belief that all worlds should be under the light of the Imperium leads to the decision for earth to be annexed via conquest. Aside from the vanity of the upper classes the reports of humanity's several near misses with their own destruction cement the decision.

Major military sites, communications hubs, government sites, major military oriented manufacturing centers, military depots, naval facilities. All of these are often either nearby major civilian centers or surrounded by wilderness in a state of drought.

Total collapse of interconnected electrical grids across the world, the total shutdown of all transportation infrastructure, the delicate threads that link and keep modern human society running snapping free in a manner which cannot be fixed anytime soon.

A general drought state for the northern hemisphere, the sheer energy pumped into the air from the use of orbital laser systems, and the general proximity of targets to settlements or vast wilderness areas leads to a unprecedented number of fires which quickly begin to fill the air with smoke and soot.

Space based illegal thermonuclear weapons turned on the fleet when they go unnoticed, three 25 megaton enhanced radiation explosions occur over South America, Russia, and Europe.