The Zerg with you as their leader vs an evil Starfleet

[Rossum]

Okay, a crazy idea:

Suppose that tomorrow evening Earth comes into contact with the first signs of extraterrestrial life... and it turns out to be the Zerg! However, the Zerg we encounter are more or less friendly (as far as alien bugs go). They land on Earth, grab YOU, infect you with their Zerg cells, and declare you their new leader. You now have full command of a fleet of dozens of Zerg bioships along with hundreds of drones and combat units and one cerebrate to explain things to you. You also have a sort of telepathic ability to understand and communicate with them... and your body is covered with bony armor and tentacles.

It turns out that the Zerg had developed some sort of inter-dimensional travel and tried invading another universe, only to run into an evil version of the Star Trek universe (not necessarily the mirror universe... just imagine an exact copy of everyone as of the last Voyager episode except they all have goatees and act like space nazis). The Zerg started getting their asses kicked and their Overmind was destroyed due to a technobabble weakness. Before its death, the Overmind sent this group of Zerg to our Earth in the hopes that it would find someone smart enough and willing to conquer the Evil Star Trek galaxy.


The Zerg at your disposal can do the following things:
1. Create units capable of interplanetary or quick interstellar travel: They don't know the exact principals of how they work and it would take years or decades to build a mechanical engine capable of the same thing... but their various Overlord units would be perfectly happy to carry around human technology for you.

2. They can survive almost anywhere and digest a wide variety of compounds: It turns out that the Creep (the purple substance that spreads all over Zerg territory) is their chief food source and they create more of it by having huge organic structures digest the various foods or mineral rich soils they come across... it also turns out that Creep can be turned into a biofuel kind of like Ethanol or Diesel. Feed them garbage or have them colonize Mars and you can either grow more Zerg or fuel human infrastructure.

3. Assimilate, modify, and grow various creatures: The Zerg were able to turn you into a zerg-like life form capable of surviving in space and would happily do the same for anyone or any other creature you can think of. With some work, you could create a Zerg Overmind capable of resurrecting Zerg life forms after they die... none of that "backing up their personality into a new body" thing, the Zerg can effectively make their intelligent members immortal. You could also grow herds of giant crocodiles or elephants if you want to.

4. Inter-Dimensional travel: The Zerg recently found a way to travel to different universes by creating massive portals, although they are not 100% sure of the principals involved. Their first attempt resulted in their run-in with an evil version of Starfleet and they got their asses kicked in the resulting space battles. This is their second attempt with it and they feel OUR Earth has the brains to deal with the situation. They are reluctant to try exploring any more universes until they deal with the ones they already ran into.


The Zerg don't know if evil Starfleet knows how to follow them to this universe, but they do know that using the Inter Dimensional portals leaves behind tiny micro-wormholes that could allow someone to track where they went. They think its only a matter of time before an evil Starfleet ship or two manage to follow them with some sort of modified engine... maybe a year or two tops. The micro-wormhole they used to get here is in a nearby solar system that is about a two day travel using Zerg FTL.

Your Zerg troops are completely at your command and would be totally okay with carrying around human technology, having actual metal armor and weapons hooked up to their bodies, or just eating garbage and spitting out the fuel humans need to run their machinery. They know their current tactics won't fly against their enemies and are thinking that modern day human intelligence will help them grow in power to better take over the universe and defend themselves... plus, modern day Earth would benefit more from an alliance with the Zerg than an existing space capable race.

So, what do you do with a fleet of biowank Zerg ships, the modern day Earth, and the threat of running into an outright evil version of Starfleet? Or... alternatively, suppose the Starfleet the Zerg ran into were just the normal ones and the they deemed it better to team up with modern day Earth than any of the powers in the Star Trek galaxy.

[Night_stalker]

Begin immediate treaty negotiations with MD Earth, to secure nice gear and weapons for my Zerg followers, while at the same time begining to see about evolving some infiltraitor units to get into the evil Starfleet and begin subersive operations.

[Guardsman Bass]

I think this is going to probably run into the same problem we had with the last "Starcraft vs X" debate, which is that we have very little in terms of quantifiable material from the games for us to work with in terms of determining Zerg capabilities.

[Hawkwings]

Call up South Korea and ask for their best and brightest. Make them my field commanders.

[Rossum]

I think this is going to probably run into the same problem we had with the last "Starcraft vs X" debate, which is that we have very little in terms of quantifiable material from the games for us to work with in terms of determining Zerg capabilities.

Yeah, thats what I was afraid of. I suppose I'm basically wondering how one would go about using a swarm of bioships/alien bugs as way to bootstrap your way into a decent space capable civilization.

I mean, bioships have obvious technical disadvantages when compared technological equivalents, but you can grow them without having to build them. If you have a relatively friendly race of space bugs who can grow bioships for you in exchange for you giving them lots of sugar and oatmeal then it could at least get you off the ground and setting up a colony on Mars even if you don't have any decent ships of your own and your squishy bioships get shredded by the weapons that more capable space faring races are using.

The Zerg were my first thought because they are the only bug race I know of that A) actually assimilated a human and put them in a position of power in their group. B) Seem capable of colonizing completely barren wastelands and setting up their own ecosystems to support themselves and thus might be just as eager to colonize Mars or Venus as they would be of devouring all life on Earth. and C) Are demonstratively and explicitly known to be squishy and are only a threat due to their ability to grow huge numbers of troops and throw them at their enemies.


So... are there any other races of bioships/space bugs that humanity could conceivably ally itself with? The sort of allies who don't really have any technology we could learn, but they could use their bioships to lift us into space and they could conceivably gain something by having humans with the capacity for scientific reasoning and technology? I suppose having to fight an enemy right off the bat would be pushing it.

The only low-tech space faring races I can think of would include the Zerg, the Tyranids, the Orks, and maybe those space bugs from Starship Troopers but I don't know enough about them to see if they might be useful. I suppose Orks could be tricked into being our allies if we paint ourselves green and things go really really well but the Tyranids seem to be so alien and voracious that we couldn't even communicate with any one of them. Well... maybe if we make a really convincing argument to a genestealer then there could be a chance. After all, many of these alien bugs seem interested in adding useful traits to their gene pool and humanities ability to use tools and science has made us the dominant species on our planet. If we could sell that to the space bugs in such a way that doesn't result in them just eating our brains then it would be a bonus.

[Cykeisme]

I mean, bioships have obvious technical disadvantages when compared technological equivalents, but you can grow them without having to build them. If you have a relatively friendly race of space bugs who can grow bioships for you in exchange for you giving them lots of sugar and oatmeal then it could at least get you off the ground and setting up a colony on Mars even if you don't have any decent ships of your own and your squishy bioships get shredded by the weapons that more capable space faring races are using.

Growing a ship or building it is the same thing on a strategic scale. What matters is the rate of production with a given amount of resources.

As Guardsman Bass stated, without quantification, we cannot evaluate the abilities of an armed force (fictional or not). If no one minds, I'll elaborate a bit on that.

On a tactical level we can't quantify certain important attributes of Zerg space and ground organisms, such as speed, durability, firepower, communications/command response time etc.
On a strategic level, we can't quantify the kind of resources they need, what kind of places they can exploit to obtain them, the speed at which the resources can be extracted, etc. On top of that, we don't know how long they need to process those resources into usable forms and what kind of industrial ("bio-industrial"?) capability they have.

Basically the game mechanics offer almost no usable information, and without hard figures on those things, it's impossible to have a versus debate of any sort.
Depending on the figures, the possibilities range all the way from steamrolling the Evil Federation without a problem, or getting similarly steamrolled in return.

[Rossum]

Okay, there is not enough data to make a proper call on this. I think this thread is closed in that case.