The Race invade Pandora

[TithonusSyndrome]

Since the Race are hopelessly stupid and culturally ossified lizard-men who can't wipe their own asses rargh argh etc etc, let's give them someone they might have better luck with. Their Emperor sends Atvar's conquest fleet to Pandora instead of Earth in 1942, with the exact same set of equipment and weapons with the notable addition of breathing equipment for each and every member of the fleet. They touch down, they make noise, they don't bother with trying to build them roads and schools at first and just set about the business of conquering them, Enya sings weepy songs Eywa rallies against them, etc.

How does it go?

[Mystikal]

Race takes a massive toll on the Ecosystem. Maybe even taking out the planetary mind thing with a well-placed nuke. However, I am not sure how a tank would fair in such a situation.

[Junghalli]

I think they'd do a lot better initially. One of RDA's major problems was the difficulty they had getting equipment and personnel to Pandora. The Race is bringing an army capable of fighting WWII Earth to a standstill.

Just think of how the Soul Tree mission would go with them force-subbed in. The RDA only had so much trouble because of the jury-rigged nature of the equipment they were using to blow it up. The Race would just fly a killercraft over the Soul Tree well above the level the banshees could operate at and blow it to kingdom come with zero casualties. As for operating on the surface, they'd probably want to avoid the jungles (at least without clearing a big perimeter around any base they make) but we know Pandora has grasslands. Set up shop there and a perimeter of anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns should take care of any marauding beasts.

I think the biggest worry for them would be Eywa getting the idea of using bioweapons against them instead of big angry animals.

[Covenant]

Well, at least they won't be confused by the use of boats or addicted to ginger! Victory for Atvar!

More realistically, the Race has a huge highground advantage and can control the entire planet without even putting boots on the ground. "Rule from space" is fine by them, so they'd probably call it a win and avoid contact when possible. Their home is arid and dry, so Pandora will be extremely unusual for them, even with the breathing apparatus. I doubt they'd colonize it. Their version of aircraft are capable of extremely high-altitude atmospheric flight at supersonic velocities, the Race's fleet of starships is quite happy to sit in orbit, but a lot of their very accurate weaponry (partially making up for their complete lack of tactics) rely on Radar--which apparently has issues on Pandora, yes? I'm calling this "technical victory due to lack of effective anti-space response from Pandora."

Politically the Race is more adept, and if there's factional differences between the Na'vi tribes that they can exploit, then that's how they might get it to work. The Race has no issues working with groups, they just don't see them as equals. In the case of the Na'vi it'd be obvious that they're not technologically equal or terribly that creative either, so it boils down to the question of if the Race chooses to enslave them or just buy them off.

Assuming they're forced to land or decide to mine the Unobtanium for some reason, they're awful fighters who depend entirely on a technological advantage that may not be valuable in the portion of Pandora the movie highlighted. Their big ships can probably blast out areas to sit in if they want to land, park on the ground if they so choose, and I don't honestly know what Pandora's ecology can do about it. The Race's footsoldiers are pathetic, but armed with machineguns, and there's quite a few of them. Landcruisers are basically T-62's but how can you operate heavy armor in a jungle like that? And the Na'vi are crazy insane, and even less agreeable to reason with than Humans, and the race has shown incredible disregard for human religion in the books. It's not unlikely they'd nuke the Big Tree just to spite the Na'vi and show them their nonsensical religion has no power over the mighty scaled ones. That's probably what would set off the Dinosaur Tsunami and basically require them to either begin a scorched earth policy with nukes and landcruiser squadrons or take off and reconsider your objectives.

[Plekhanov]

The contrived reasons for the Race failing on earth:

- humans possessing near equivalent technology
- humans having massive trained & equipped armed forces
- ginger

don't apply on Pandora nor do the contrived reasons for the human mining efforts on Pandora failing:

- very small numbers of humans
- PR concerns limit weapons able to use

apply to the Race.

The Race are far from suited to fighting in the jungles most of the film was set in but much of Pandora isn't like that (Horse Clans of the Plain, Eastern Sea people...) and given their numbers, tech and lack of PR concerns the race will almost immediately establish control over the non-jungle areas. The jungle areas they can either leave to the Navi (there's no reason they'd be that interested in the jungles having no need for unobtanium which for some reason seems concentrated in the jungles hence the human presence there) or bomb the shit out of, world tree included, if as seems likely they seek to dominate the entire planet.

The race aren't cruel but they are utterly ruthless and they'd walk this scenario.

[Kodiak]

Well, the race could probably colonize the plains areas easily enough. I wonder, though, if they can keep their ships on the ground as contained habitats since they can't breathe the air.

Edit: Sorry, this is Chewie. I'm at our parents' house and didn't realize Kodiak was last logged in here.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, at least they won't be confused by the use of boats or addicted to ginger! Victory for Atvar!

More realistically, the Race has a huge highground advantage and can control the entire planet without even putting boots on the ground. "Rule from space" is fine by them, so they'd probably call it a win and avoid contact when possible. Their home is arid and dry, so Pandora will be extremely unusual for them, even with the breathing apparatus. I doubt they'd colonize it. Their version of aircraft are capable of extremely high-altitude atmospheric flight at supersonic velocities, the Race's fleet of starships is quite happy to sit in orbit, but a lot of their very accurate weaponry (partially making up for their complete lack of tactics) rely on Radar--which apparently has issues on Pandora, yes? I'm calling this "technical victory due to lack of effective anti-space response from Pandora."

Their guided munitions are LGBs, and the radar-fucking-field doesn't affect laser guidance.

Assuming they're forced to land or decide to mine the Unobtanium for some reason, they're awful fighters who depend entirely on a technological advantage that may not be valuable in the portion of Pandora the movie highlighted. Their big ships can probably blast out areas to sit in if they want to land, park on the ground if they so choose, and I don't honestly know what Pandora's ecology can do about it. The Race's footsoldiers are pathetic, but armed with machineguns, and there's quite a few of them. Landcruisers are basically T-62's but how can you operate heavy armor in a jungle like that?

A question: how did you settle on T-62?

[Covenant]

Their guided munitions are LGBs, and the radar-fucking-field doesn't affect laser guidance.

I think that the Killercraft guns are actually radar assisted and I was pretty sure their anti-missile systems were based on radar guidance as well. I think we're less concerned about dropping bombs on Brontosaurs than we are at smacking Blue Kittyperson Dragons out of the sky. But if they're just passive radar and actively radar guided then visual-range lidar or such things should work just fine in the Pandoran Plot Device Field.

A question: how did you settle on T-62?

The Race and German forces went to war in 1965, at which point the German tanks had achieved rough parity with the Race's landcruisers. I picked the T-62 because not only is it a tank that came out roughly at the same time (shared a similar design philosophy) with a main weapon roughly the same size (115mm vs a Race's standard 4 or 5 inch cannon) and reproducable, unlike something like a Tiger II (which could have gotten the 5 to 1 kill ratio Landcruisers had vs. WWII tech).

The 1950's and 1960's saw much increased use of anti-tank rockets and missiles, something the Race had when they invaded Earth. It makes sense that a Landcruiser would be an advanced medium tank, given the size of weapon it carried, and the T-62 is a good base-line 60's era tank.

Given that humanity is expected to surpass the Race's tech level, despite getting the shit pounded out of us, by the year 2030, I figured that anything too much more advanced than the T-62 was beyond Landcruiser-era, on the assumption that something like a T-90 or M1A3 might be in service during the 'surpassing' of Race tech tilting point, but were actually designed much earlier.

Generally, I presume that the big advance that the Race had (given the descriptions) was a more efficient fuel source, a bigger gun, and advanced composite armor.

But this isn't an in-depth analysis. I have an easier time tracking soviet tank development than NATO forces because it was more unified and focused, so I can make a more likely analog to them than, say, a hypothetical 1965 German Panzer.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Didn't the landcruisers have autoloaders? If we're comparing them to Soviet tanks, that'd make it more like a T-64 or a T-72, assuming parallel development. I'm not sure, though, how those tanks compare to a T-62 in other respects and if they might be too advanced to make the 5-1 kill ratio realistic. Was landcruiser armour composite or purely steel?

[Mystikal]

Well, the race could probably colonize the plains areas easily enough. I wonder, though, if they can keep their ships on the ground as contained habitats since they can't breathe the air.

Edit: Sorry, this is Chewie. I'm at our parents' house and didn't realize Kodiak was last logged in here.

Ya'll are bros?

Cool.

[Covenant]

Didn't the landcruisers have autoloaders? If we're comparing them to Soviet tanks, that'd make it more like a T-64 or a T-72, assuming parallel development. I'm not sure, though, how those tanks compare to a T-62 in other respects and if they might be too advanced to make the 5-1 kill ratio realistic. Was landcruiser armour composite or purely steel?

I'm pretty sure it's mentioned as a composite.

The problem really is that we know three things off-hand, without a quote bank. First, they had a roughly 5:1 kill ratio versus WWII medium tanks. Secondly, the Tosev-timeline 1960's had given birth to armor roughly equal to alien Landcruisers in a fight, without context as to what made this an even fight. Could be several features. Thirdly, by the year 2030 our technology had already surpassed them in several places.

So my guess is that a Landcruiser is just a fast-moving tank with a mechanically stabilized turret, a big gun, and a reliable engine that runs on natural gas. But I'm also guessing that an M1A3 would rip it to shit, since the only thing that really stands out about the Landcruiser isn't the durability--it's the kill power of it's massive (for the time) main weapon. A lot of the early WWII tanks had tiny little guns, and one of the obvious and dramatic evolutions of tanks over the course of the war was ever increasing size of cannon. Given that the Race invaded in 1942, you can consider a tank like the Matilda to be a good example of a tank of that historical moment--with it's whopping 40mm gun, and the Panzers slowly adapting by mounting a 50mm cannon. Given that a 4-5 inch Landcruiser gun is about a 115mm cannon, it's not hard to see how a stabilized monster gun like that would chew through human tanks--what's hard to see is how such a weapon platform could get killed off by 5 tanks of that era. The Race is famously easy to deceive, but I don't know how many Matildas it would take to kill a modern MBT...

I mentioned the Tiger II earlier because the shitty-ass Wikipedia article on it says that a group of them killed about 500 enemy armor of various sorts for the loss of 45 Tiger II's, mostly lossed due to the Tiger's grabastic construction failures. 5:1 sounds like a moderate improvement in firepower combined with a modernized fire control and armor design layout. A Tiger II is not a good tank, it was just very hard to shoot through that armor.

Obviously, the Tiger II was a gas-guzzling piece of shit, but that's a supposed ratio even better than a Landcruiser, which would lead me to believe that the difficulty in killing a Landcruiser didn't come down to armor plating (especially given that heavy artillery can take out their landed starships, this isn't Neutronium Plating here), just a number of small modernizations that added up to a massive firepower advantage.

[NecronLord]

The sensor fucking field (and I'm still not convinced it wasn't RDA radar being unable to cope with being surrounded by flying mountains) only occurs over the Soul Tree. The Na'vi don't normally live there (though it's a pilgrimage site) and can't stay there forever.

Of course, why would these lizard guys actually fight the Na'vi? Sure, they like annexing primatives, but they can probably do that a lot easier with words than guns. It's not like they're there for Unobtanium in particular is it?

[Chris OFarrell]

Hell, even if they ARE there for the mineral, then who cares?

Put the ships down in a far more 'hospitiable' -for The Race- area on the planet, and build a basis for the colonly there.

Then if you REALLY have to mine Unobtanium from the Home Tree area, if they don't leave, then drop a really REALL big rock from orbit on it, the ultimate daisy cutter if you will. Clears the jungle away for a huge radius and anyone living it in who might object, then you can land, set up an airtight defense in depth from either land or ground attack, and get the mining underway in the center of it.

The race came in numbers and strength to really beat the hell out of WW2 era Earth, despite Earth having a lot more numbers, technology and firepower then anything on Pandora has. This isn't a couple of hundred idiot Mercs, this is an all out planatery invasion force. And they have the numbers and equipment to defend their claim.

And the kill craft to drop Exploding Metal Bombs all over key concentrations and targets if they have to.

[Junghalli]

Then if you REALLY have to mine Unobtanium from the Home Tree area, if they don't leave, then drop a really REALL big rock from orbit on it, the ultimate daisy cutter if you will.

The Race seems completely unable to wrap their mind around the concept of orbital bombardment. It would have been pretty useful against WWII Earth but they never did it. Dropping incendiary bombs from an aircraft should have the same effect, however, and they clearly had a concept of bombing things from the air, so it really doesn't matter.

There's also the factor that with the much greater quantity of equipment the Race could bring with them they wouldn't have quite the same pressure as RDA to use the cheapest mining methods possible, so they could maybe, say, tunnel under the Home Tree to get the unobtanium and leave it intact. They may not care enough to do so though.

[Covenant]

Actually, they comprehended the value of bombardment, but Atvar didn't want to ruin the planet. Later on when humanity begins to advance close to parity, they once again mull over the idea of a massive orbital nuclear bombardment to finish us off. They even started their invasion with a flurry of nuclear blasts to create EMPs with the hope of knocking out critical infrastructure. They didn't nuke us because they didn't want to--the Race is not genocidal in nature unless the foe they're facing is capable of threatening their homeworld. When they got a colony ship nuked they still held to a doctrine of proportional response, and only nuked one of our cities.

I doubt they'd change their minds when dealing with Pandora. If the Unobtanium is that valuable to them they'd just move somewhere else. The Race does have helicopters, so it's not like they would have a problem accessing fairly remote areas or keeping them Dinosaur free.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The problem with the Race is part of their conquest objectives is to compel the natives to worship the spirits of dead emperors. THAT is going to cause some big problems when they start trying to tell that to the Na'vi.

[TithonusSyndrome]

"Rule from space" is fine by them, so they'd probably call it a win and avoid contact when possible. Their home is arid and dry, so Pandora will be extremely unusual for them, even with the breathing apparatus. I doubt they'd colonize it.

The Emperor doesn't commission a Soldier's Time without intent to eventually colonize the planet in question, especially since it'd be a vital staging ground to launch attacks against Earth from. They're going to need to alter the atmospheric content of the planet by introducing a lot of their own flora, and killing anything that tries to throttle it.

[Mystikal]

What if this was the other, far cooler Pandora from Borderlands?

[Covenant]

The Emperor doesn't commission a Soldier's Time without intent to eventually colonize the planet in question, especially since it'd be a vital staging ground to launch attacks against Earth from. They're going to need to alter the atmospheric content of the planet by introducing a lot of their own flora, and killing anything that tries to throttle it.

They can't, however. The atmosphere is hostile to them, so it would be hostile to all the livestock they like to bring along. Without food stocks or even plant life based on an edible, breathable ecology, I sincerely doubt they'd colonize it for the purposes of living there. At best Atvar has been sent here to establish a permanent mining outpost, but the Race doesn't seem like the type that can actually terraform Pandora's atmosphere nor does it automatically jive that they'd be able to make massive domed cattle ranches for their farm critters.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Well, why insist on imported livestock then? Why not just more or less do what RDA did; have a sealed main base of operations, not anything terribly difficult for a species that can build spacefaring vessels, and conduct agriculture with local produce and manufacture missiles in similarly sealed environments?

[Sarevok]

Living in enclosed space station like domes defeats the purpose of colonization of Pandora. They might as well settle an airless moon somewhere or mars like dustbowl.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Okay, so don't call it "colonization", call it using the planet as a factory platform to strike at Earth from.

[Sarevok]

Pandora has a high gravity well that hampers rocket launches. A thick atmosphere that makes mass drivers or space elevators impractical. It orbits in the gravity well of a massive gas giant. All of these factors make Pandora extremely unprofitable as a source of resources. Unless of course you need unobtainium. In which case the planet can be simply nuked from space untill it can no longer offer serious resistance and unobtainium gathered in peace. The entire operation to secure the unobtainium could take place without landing a single soldier on the ground first.

[TithonusSyndrome]

And yet, for all of that, Pandora has the vastly significant property of being approximately a third of the distance to Earth that the Race homeworld is. I'm not arguing that Race colonists should try to extensively settle the surface, but rather that they should industrialize every last asset they can, farm and herd what local flora and fauna they can, and live both on the ships and on the surface in order to maximize their assets. Whether they like it or not, they're going to be drawn into conflict with Earth eventually, since it's hard to imagine the Emperor's surveys missing our planet, so their best bet is to make the most of what they have.

[Simon_Jester]

Living in enclosed space station like domes defeats the purpose of colonization of Pandora. They might as well settle an airless moon somewhere or mars like dustbowl.

Well, there are matters of degree. On Pandora, you can breathe with what is more or less a gas mask while walking around in shirt sleeves. That's a much less hostile environment than Mars or the Moon: the atmosphere provides temperature regulation, for one.