You make many good points, Morbad, but you're also thinking like a land lubber. For people born and raised on a space station, dependent on it and its space worthiness for their very lives being able to react to loss of air emergencies would be 2nd nature. People on airplanes don't live on 'em or work on 'em. Soldier, sailor, airman or civilian - survivors do what they need to do to survive. The rest - well - the gene pool is better off without 'em and in the ED universe that is doubly true. [woah]
People do live in cities though, and even in cities where there are known threats, people are often wholly unprepared for them. Think of all these major hurricanes or blizzards that overwhelm local infrastructure and emergency response. Thargoids would be much worse, the rough equivalent of the 2004 and 2011 Indian Ocean and Japan tsunamis.
You're a 40th generation occupant of space (space has been permanently inhabited for longer in the ED universe than non-handwritten books have been around in our world) and everyone has gotten used to space being nothing special. Almost nothing ever goes wrong with the critical systems in space habitats at this point; they are heavily automated, fully mature, collections of redundant systems. The station defenses can hold up to almost any attack you've ever heard of and almost all attacks on starports are insurrections to seize them, intact, because they are valuable real estate...to human people. Early disasters are ancient history. People are complacent, and even if they weren't, many people aren't exactly priority anyway. Half the non-critical subsystems in many of these starports haven't worked in years; it may be in space but it can still be a backwater, ghetto, or ghost town.
Then the Thargoids show up with corrosive weapons that put gaping holes in something you had always thought of as an immutable, virtually indestructible, terrain feature. They aren't here to claim your home, put their banner on it, and charge you rent...they are here to kill you all, or at least prove that they could. You've never conceived of this. No drills or emergency prep, if you even had any (those were for the rich kids), has ever come close to preparing you for this. Everyone panics...it's a riot. Whoever gets to the emergency supplies first hordes them out of fear or greed. People are killing each other over survival suits, access to oxygen generators/hook ups that could fail at any moment, food, ships, etc...causing even more damage in the process. All the secondary infrastructure that supposed to help in these kinds of situations starts to fail cause it's never really been maintained (budget cuts, human capital flight, penny pinching, whatever). Only the fact that the starports were originally designed to last for centuries, and stand up to frequent wars as they changed hands, keeps them from popping like balloons under the onslaught.
I think Morbad, that somewhere in all this there's a hell of a good ED Universe novel to be written... any volunteers?
Where's that Drew guy?