avianmosquito wrote:Thank you, but it might be better off locked. This is going nowhere fast, and no new ideas have been given.
Now, that's just silly. To an intelligent person, criticism
is a potential source of new ideas, because realizing a problem exists gives you a motive to come up with a new idea to fix it.
Lord Relvenous wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Which also renders them sterile.
Shush. If you hadn't have mentioned it, Skeeter might have considered it, leading to more hilarity.
Lord Relvenous, I am not a cruel man. Some ideas need to be put out of our misery before
anyone considers them.
Dark Hellion wrote:Not really dude. Japan has a population of 128 million people and it sure as hell ain't 5% of the land area. Especially with the species having good genetic engineering skills they can turn some of that ocean space into food production as well.
You also run into problems with limited supply of metals, though. Japan isn't self-sufficient in
anything; a modern civilization needs a steady supply of more than just food to keep its population alive.
If the Simini live on a planet with roughly the overall land mass of Australia, their population is sharply limited even if they can catch enough fish to feed billions.
avianmosquito wrote:Revised version of the plot:
At ~1200bc, The simini, who have a total population of ~134 million of a small planet and facing overpopulation issues, selected 4 different systems to invade...
Invade how? Do you mean "colonize?" Or do you mean "military conquest of the target?"
Also, for a
planet to face overpopulation at ~134 million... there are about three ways to rationalize this. One is to make the habitable surface of the planet extremely small: think Polynesia World. In that case, the available land for living on is painfully limited, and the Simini will be forced to make very serious compromises between having places to put their cities and having places to put mines and stuff... especially if they don't want to destroy the land-based part of their ecosystem.
Another is to make the planet extremely inhospitable: think New Mexico World. There are places where large populations can survive, but not many, and the lack of good farmland limits the carrying capacity of the planet. It's also possible for the Simini to have done this to themselves in the distant past, with a biowar that got out of hand or something. Which might explain their aversion to the use of WMD.
The third is to make it so that each Simini requires a very large amount of habitable land to support them. This works best for very large intelligent beings (who eat a lot, and thus need many acres of farmland per member) or for intelligent carnivores (who eat
meat, and thus need a lot of grazing/fodder land to support a herd of cattle for each member).
The catch is that even with these factors, overpopulation alone does not explain invading other planets, because if I have the technology to build an STL sleeper ship, I have the technology to build orbital habitats that can solve my population problem at a much lower energy cost. What's more plausible is that there was a "lebensraum" movement on the Simini homeworld that
wanted to control planets with larger available landmass.
Kakara was easy, the only intelligent species on the land didn't really care. The simians response was universally "As long as you're pleasant, and we'll be glad to have you as neighbors." while the dragons, being nomads, had nothing at stake in the matter. The sea-mammals were overlooked due to their aquatic nature, and were too primitive to mean much anyway. Even later, when they started raiding simini cities, they never amounted to anything.
Conflicts between nomads and settled people are common, because nomads aren't equally happy to live everywhere. Both sides want the most fertile available land. The nomads say "we want to forage/hunt/graze our herds in this valley" and the settled people say "we want to farm this valley." That can easily lead to violence.
avianmosquito wrote:As far as stargates, simini simply lack the technology for FTL travel in general.
You can make them ancient artifacts.
The reason this is such a good idea is that it destroys all questions of the form "if the Simini have starships, they should be able to do X." That's the point: they don't. Nor can they move heavy equipment through the gates, except in pieces and slowly. So suddenly the idea of carpet-bombing their enemies with nukes becomes a bit less practical.
Only Sentrus posed them problems... They had tough, but not impenetrable, immune systems, were resistant to thermal weapons...
Again, one wonders about your definition of "thermal weapons." If you mean "like having boiling water poured on you," I can imagine a living creature that would shrug that off pretty well if they had a thick coat of scales and a layer of heat-resistant tissue underneath the scales. If you mean "like napalm," nothing made out of meat can survive that, because the stuff is burning at temperatures well over what it takes to ignite organic matter.
Their enemies were ferroningen, reptiles 100 million in number, a 200-1 numbers advantage for their infantrey, used mostly bows and other primitive weapons. They also used seige weapons, including ballistae small enough to be carried and set up by a single ferroningen, and catapults that could be assembled on-scene and carried in a backpack. (Shoot&scoot. You know how it works.) They could bombard simini bases and get the hell out of dodge in a heartbeat.
Ballistas and catapults aren't enough firepower to be all that effective as bombardment weapons against an enemy with helicopter-mounted machine guns. I don't care
how fast your crew can set up and knock down a trebuchet, it just doesn't pack that kind of punch. You'd be better off just sneaking into the settlement and stabbing your enemies in the neck or something.
This didn't work worth a damn. Armoured coaches, although too much for most infantry, were no match for simini tanks, and were usually killed in a heartbeat, even if their ballistae could pierce the armour on the simini tank.
!?
...It would be really, really difficult, if not impossible, to build mechanical artillery that could penetrate a vehicle armored to resist even small arms fire.
They would ambush patrols of infantry, hitting them from behind and usually either killing them before the patrol could return fire. Against small patrols, a quick volley at a distance with bows was sufficient. Against larger patrols, they would sneak up to point blank and engage them with mellee weapons, which simini were defenseless against due to their small, frail bodies and lack of physical strength. (Rifles are useless at that range.)
?
Automatic rifles have proved quite effective in close combat, as shown by the fact that modern armies have stopped bothering to issue bayonets to the infantry. However, with the Ferroningen being big tough saurian types and the Simini being monkeys with accordingly sized weapons (their infantry LMGs would probably have to be smaller and lighter than most human submachine guns)... I suppose I can see it.
When dealing with armour, the ferroningen were smart. They set an ambush in the swampland, where the warm mud made it so they didn't need sunlight, and used a ballistae or rocket (they did have them, after all) to shoot the tank in the back of the turret, the 1kg bolt or cannonball penetrating the thin armour on the tank's rear and causing a casualty, killing the gunner or disabling the cannon.
Just how thin was this armor, anyway? Also, rockets are not effective against tanks unless they have a shaped charge warhead or are artillery-sized; a tank will laugh at a firework rocket, even a big one.
Helicopters were a bigger threat, as they could clean up an artillery site in less than a minute and weren't vulnerable to their fire, however, they were rarely armoured significantly to defend from ferroningen shooting them with bows or even throwing fucking rocks. (Not to mention the molotov coctail and the ferroningen sticky, a hand grenade coated in adhesive, which stuck to the helicopter and exploded.)
Could they not just fly too high to be reached by muscle-powered weapons? I mean, I can hit the ground with a minigun from much higher up than some guy on the ground can hit me with a thrown spear.
2. Bombard the northern hemisphere into oblivion. They didn't have that kind of firepower, as they had long since used up all their nuclear weapons trying to get the ferroningen to yield, manufacture of nuclear weapons anywhere but Canabi (their original system) was illegal until 512 years of war had passed.
...WHY? Seriously, this is retarded. First of all, because 512 years of war is an extremely long time; any war in human history resolved itself long before that point. It would make far more sense to simply ban the nuclear weapons outright.
Even if they could, they couldn't obtain enough uranium to nuke the planet, let alone enough to nuke the planet and fly their ships. Dragging asteroids to impact the planet was unsatisfactory, as it would consume more fuel than they could produce, and doing that kind of damage would ruin the environment of the entire planet they were trying to capture.
Now... this makes
somewhat more sense, but I'm not sure how much more sense. Refining weapons-grade fissile material takes a lot of resources; so does making thousands of tons of rocket fuel.
It's still pretty arbitrary, but it's not completely insane.
1. Necros, (a human nickname given to them over 2200 years later) introduced in ~200bc, were designed to be virtually indestructible. They were the first design made, and by far the cheapest. The initial design, the cadavre, could take 4.5 times the punishment that regular humans could, didn't bleed as much from damage to the liver or kidneys, had 10 times the physical endurance, slept only half as much, and felt no pain. To top this off, they had a toxic saliva that swiftly blew out the target's renal system in large amounts, worked on almost all forms of carbon-based life that had such a system, wouldn't harm the necros in the small amounts that entered their blood and could not be treated by ferroningen technology. Their design blew out their adrenal system, ruined their health, and caused them to never last more than a few years before they died. Their health deteriorating lowered their physical strength, they suffered serious brain damage due to the chemicals responsible for their mutation, were rendered sterile, and so forth. In the end, they were no more capable than regular humans, (possible less) and were therefore deemed unfit for combat and used simply as slaves, humans handling the more complex tasks they were incapable off, simini commanding them.
OK. This kind of makes some sense. They lack the supercharged metabolism and other contrived stuff; you could accomplish a lot of this by just engineering out their pain sensitivity and other tricks like that.
2. Nosferatu, (also a nickname they didn't have for millenia), introduced in ~140bc, were designed for speed. The initial design, the feral, was a little tougher than a regular human, was a little stronger, but averaged speeds normally seen in world-class human athletes and could maintain them for longer. They were also smarter than cadavres, but still brain damaged to the point of being animals, (cunning animals, but animals)...
The problem with this is that animals aren't really smart enough to take orders.
The nosferatu and teras were designed to breed with one another, when they had a male child it resulted in a teras, when a female child it meant a nosferatu. Both failed 25% of the time, but when the genes failed to carry properly it created a human, who was cheaply converted into a necros.
Where did they find humans again, anyway? It might actually make more sense to avoid using humans, because human genetics make it hard for this kind of thing to work. An alien species that uses a different type of sex chromosome system might be much easier to modify this way into two highly dimorphic sexes.
They were between the first and second grade of necros in tolerance to damage (5x that of humans) and healing rate, (25x that of humans)...
Remember the criticisms of that super-accelerated healing rate. Realistically, it's more important that wounds heal well than that they heal quickly, because only a tiny percentage of your army will be down with wounds at any one time. Giving them the ability to recover fully from things like damage to nerves and joints makes far more sense than just making them heal from anything in three days. It's more realistic, it's more useful, and it doesn't make biologists want to claw their eyes out so badly.
Also, when in combat or injured, their metabolism goes up to 16 times a normal human's, allowing the body to free up resources and energy to improve their athletic performance in combat and heal faster.
Again, this really is too fast. Maybe... four times? I don't know. Not sixteen.
Kokome also had tails added, although not for all of them. The addition of a prehensile tail meant they were to be used in the special forces, (shock troops and commandos are both counted in this) and served as more than a marker.
I submit that this was probably unnecessary and not very helpful, BUT to the simini (who are basically sentient monkeys) it may have seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, if they (I still don't know how) were familiar with Earth biology, they would have found prehensile-tail monkeys whose DNA is already fairly close to that of humans. You probably
could modify humans with a prehensile tail, because we're closely related to other species that have it.
Kokome were designed entirely partially for usage on Sentrus, but also saw use on other planets cecause a couple hundred years before the ferroningen decided to reveal they had spent the last thousand years in their little tunnels using stolen simini equipment to build a naval fleet bigger than the simini one, and simini simulators to train a crew. (Although they couldn't reverse-engineer much of the more advanced stuff because of their low intelligence and lack of creativity, with enough study they figured out how to use it, and how to read simini characters.)
How did they do all this without it being visible from space? You can't build an entire self-sustaining industrial civilization underground.
