Not sure if it's overkill. Try to land a heavy armed aircraft on a US carrier without permission and see how it goes. If civilian airports wouldn't lack the firepower and cynism of their Elite counterparts I am pretty sure they would blow you up to pieces as well when you decide to block their runway while an aircraft tries to land. Blowing you up seems like a reasonable reaction to your unreasonable decision to land your ship at the wrong spot, especially in a cut throat galaxy.
Unfortunately, your analogy falls apart on multiple levels. First off, we're talking a military aircraft vs. a civilian facility. Any military craft will not let an approaching vehicle even near it unless they're 100% confident of who it is or of the vehicles intent. Second, if they do allow said craft to land, what pad that craft chooses is not up to them. The carrier landing crew would determine that. If, by chance, they locate him to the wrong location, chances are, unless it's over-sized, the craft will stay there and the next craft will go to an equally sized spot.
Your better analogy is a civilian airport, but the same rules I describe for the military apply just as equally. If the aircraft somehow parks at the wrong terminal, then they'll just reroute the next aircraft to the original one or, at the very worst, make the errant aircraft move.
Can you imagine the uproar if, for example, Laguardia blew up an airplane (passengers and all) simply because the pilot parked in the wrong place? There'd be hell to pay times 1 million. But it's Ok with Elite because no one actually dies when our craft vaporizes. The worst we get is a rebuy screen.
But, let's not stop at the real word scenario. We're not talking just about the craft and pilot being vaporized along with any crew and passengers he might have. We're talking about wreckage flying everywhere, some at bullet speeds, penetrating walls and buildings everywhere potentially hurting and killing by far more than just the errant ship.
Yup. You gotta love the lunacy that is Elite.
