Footfall vs RL

[hongi]

How would we fare if the Fithp invaded us as they did in Footfall?

[Stark]

Can we have a bit of fucking effort, please?

Who the fuck are the Fithp?

How did they invade in Footfall?

What are their goals?

[Bakustra]

Can we have a bit of fucking effort, please?

Who the fuck are the Fithp?

How did they invade in Footfall?

What are their goals?

Elephant calves with multiple trunks.

Suborbital shuttles landing troops from their asteroid spaceship. They have orbital lasers and shells for support.

Their goal is to conquer humanity and incorporate humans into their society, and then settle on the Earth.

In the book, the US built a Orion-propelled ship with space shuttles glued on and bomb-pumped lasers to fight them. The Americans win because though the President is a spineless liberal pussy who believes in namby-pamby concepts like "conditional surrender", the NSA stages a quick coup after he has a nervous breakdown when his cabinet pushes for genocide and force the Fithp into surrendering totally and settling on Earth. They come from Alpha Centauri, and they have no science besides studying and scavenging relics of a previous intelligent species.

EDIT: Here are some detailed drawings of the American space battleship. It also has the USS Iowa's guns, for extra hilarity.

[Stark]

Oh, THAT Footfall. Iowa turrets on a triple-spaceshuttle!

[Bakustra]

Oh, THAT Footfall. Iowa turrets on a triple-spaceshuttle!

I took a closer look and realized that the gun turrets are about as long as the shuttles. It looks like it was originally designed in LEGO or something. Also, don't forget the author self-inserts! Man, now I know where Stuart Slade gets all his ideas from.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

BUt...But...They drop a dinokiller asteroid on us as if we were some kind of Pandora! How could they lose?

Honestly, I really enjoyed that book when I read it in middle school. Now I know that Niven is a hack (except for some of his short stories), but I still have fond memories of every novel he ever collaborated on in the 80's and 90's.

If I was forced to choose between Niven and Pournelle's Footfall or Turtledove's World War series, I'd be all over that lizard action like a ginger addict in a killercraft. Say what you will about Turtledove, but at least he doesn't self-insert himself and all his filk singer buddies. Jesus Christ, I still can't believe that some sort of flabby biker-hippie filk singer was sent up on humanity's last hope space battleship.

[Bakustra]

BUt...But...They drop a dinokiller asteroid on us as if we were some kind of Pandora! How could they lose?

Honestly, I really enjoyed that book when I read it in middle school. Now I know that Niven is a hack (except for some of his short stories), but I still have fond memories of every novel he ever collaborated on in the 80's and 90's.

If I was forced to choose between Niven and Pournelle's Footfall or Turtledove's World War series, I'd be all over that lizard action like a ginger addict in a killercraft. Say what you will about Turtledove, but at least he doesn't self-insert himself and all his filk singer buddies. Jesus Christ, I still can't believe that some sort of flabby biker-hippie filk singer was sent up on humanity's last hope space battleship.

I think there's a little thread in Testing right now that you may be interested in.

In any case, I think that Niven just went completely off the edge as he aged. Or maybe that's my own proto-nostalgia for his short stories talking.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I don't think Niven was ever quite on the edge. I remember reading some of his Known Space novels as a tween and just shaking my head. I wasn't much of a sociologist, but I would still roll my eyes and mutter "bullshit" whenever he tried to describe the future of human society.



(I see that thread in testing. Thank you. )

[jollyreaper]

I remembered liking Niven and Pournelle more as a kid. Reread Lucifer's Hammer and for the first time Footfall and am surprised by just how libertarian parody they are. Lefties as the villains, lots of "take that!" jabs against environmentalists, feminists, etc. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that certain characters are stand-ins for ex-wives, bosses, and people who cut them in line at the grocery store.

Lucifer's Hammer remains a decent enough read. Footfall just pretty much falls apart. The premise remains interesting -- realistic planetary invasion novel where humans can fight back. The fighting back part is the least realistic part. Any aliens capable of interstellar flight should completely outclass us and the fight would be about comparable to the US Marines landing on a sparsely populated Pacific atoll in WWII -- overwhelming force that cannot be contested. You have to really start stacking the deck to provide the following plot:

1. Aliens have interstellar flight abilities
2. Aliens need to come to Earth for some reason
3. Aliens cannot satisfy their needs mining asteroids for water, gold, whatever, no, they have to have Earth and probably need it intact so they can't just slag it with 'roids.
4. Aliens are unwilling to negotiate or deal with us, force is their only recourse
5. Their weapons are unimaginative enough that we aren't wiped out in the first strike. Reletavistic kill vehicles flying in from deep space are a fairly unbeatable weapon. If they want the planet intact, some sort of bio-engineered plague that only targets humans. By the time we even know we're under attack we'll already be dead.
6. The aliens are stupid enough to put their ship or ships within range of human weapons to be destroyed. And part of this is for the aliens to be incapable of performing an analysis of human abilities and seeing the danger for what it is, for not just nuking us from orbit as the only way to be sure.

It just becomes impossible to create a premise for a good alien invasion story.

[Setzer]

I like the idea of an alien Charles Gordon, who's basically intent on martyring himself. It would explain anything that led to him being defeated, because the alien in charge was more concerned with engineering a glorious death while outnumbered by the savage earthers.

[Stark]

It really isn't hard at all, so long as you aren't hamstrung by science fiction convention or nerd logic.

[Zor]

If they want the planet intact, some sort of bio-engineered plague that only targets humans. By the time we even know we're under attack we'll already be dead.

I am going to object to this bit. To tailor such a plague to mankind would require a pratical understanding of human (and for that matter Terran) biology, which would at least require a human being be captured and studied for that purpose. Doing so would mean parking in orbit (which people on earth will see), sending craft down craft to capture humans, bringing up specimins of humans for study, analysis and testing.

If they want earth intact, park in orbit, destroy the world's cities and ships at sea, wait a year or two for the die off and then start colonization with walls and turrets around settlements to keep out any unruly savages.

Zor

[jollyreaper]

It really isn't hard at all, so long as you aren't hamstrung by science fiction convention or nerd logic.

You can't just leave it at that. How would you do it?

[jollyreaper]

I am going to object to this bit. To tailor such a plague to mankind would require a pratical understanding of human (and for that matter Terran) biology, which would at least require a human being be captured and studied for that purpose. Doing so would mean parking in orbit (which people on earth will see), sending craft down craft to capture humans, bringing up specimins of humans for study, analysis and testing.

The tech difference ain't gonna be Star Trek vs. Planet of the Nazis. It's going to be more like something out of the Culture. Probes the size of footballs coming in from deep space scattering self-replicating autonomous sensor bots the size of mosquitoes. They'd be tapped into our communications systems and know what we're thinking before we do, and that's just assuming they even want to handle things the clean way.

If not a plague then they could just have nanobots blanket the planet and kill anything that's human. We'd notice it like a gray pollen and wonder what's up right before we all croaked.

If they want earth intact, park in orbit, destroy the world's cities and ships at sea, wait a year or two for the die off and then start colonization with walls and turrets around settlements to keep out any unruly savages.

Yeah, that's the practical look at planetary invasion with the up front approach. Leaves it too likely that the surviving governments might go for a doomsday option, detonate cobalt-jacketed nukes to deny the planet to the aliens. But even if we did that, that's not the same as loading up our harriers and F-18's and taking on the aliens in dazzling dogfights.

The only scenario that could really work right is if you have human colonists in a system with two habitable planets. Say some disaster hits shortly after colonization and most of the tech is wiped out. One planet rebuilds to a 21st century level, the other is mucking about with a mix of high and low tech. Now you have the scenario where invasion forces can be launched from one planet to the other but the tech disparity is not so great that the advanced side is looking at a cake walk. It'll be more like the conquistadors with the Indians, advanced tech but outnumbered a thousand to one. It would take a confluence of luck and balls to succeed.

[Zor]

I am going to object to this bit. To tailor such a plague to mankind would require a pratical understanding of human (and for that matter Terran) biology, which would at least require a human being be captured and studied for that purpose. Doing so would mean parking in orbit (which people on earth will see), sending craft down craft to capture humans, bringing up specimins of humans for study, analysis and testing.

The tech difference ain't gonna be Star Trek vs. Planet of the Nazis. It's going to be more like something out of the Culture. Probes the size of footballs coming in from deep space scattering self-replicating autonomous sensor bots the size of mosquitoes.

I am sorry but there ain't no stealth in Space. Any spaceship decelerating from a respectable fraction of C would need to unleash a shit-ton of energy to do so and there is nothing hiding it.

If not a plague then they could just have nanobots blanket the planet and kill anything that's human. We'd notice it like a gray pollen and wonder what's up right before we all croaked.

1-How will these nanites be dispersed? Nanobots are small fragile things that are not surviving re-entry. You would need some form of aircraft to enter the atmosphere to distribute them, probably hundreds at least for the quick kill flying at speeds where they could possibly be shot down.
2-This will require alot of nanites to accomplish, especially with attrition.
3-How would they know something is Human without knowledge of or Biochemistry and anatomy? As outlined in your preface, this is about aliens that want to get rid of humanity but leave the biosphere intact. Something that barges around killing off everything alive in such a circumstance, if they simply have them kill everything made out of carbon and water this is going to do alot of damage.

Zor

[jollyreaper]

Any spaceship decelerating from a respectable fraction of C would need to unleash a shit-ton of energy to do so and there is nothing hiding it.

Depends on whether you want your aliens to have tech within our ability to grasp or beyond our ability to imagine. If they're supposed to be a thousand years ahead of us like the snouts then yeah, bussard ram scoop ships, big decelleration flare. If they're a million years ahead, there's no telling what they have.

1-How will these nanites be dispersed? Nanobots are small fragile things that are not surviving re-entry. You would need some form of aircraft to enter the atmosphere to distribute them, probably hundreds at least for the quick kill flying at speeds where they could possibly be shot down.
2-This will require alot of nanites to accomplish, especially with attrition.
3-How would they know something is Human without knowledge of or Biochemistry and anatomy? As outlined in your preface, this is about aliens that want to get rid of humanity but leave the biosphere intact. Something that barges around killing off everything alive in such a circumstance, if they simply have them kill everything made out of carbon and water this is going to do alot of damage.

Presumably the aliens would conduct a scouting mission before the main ship arrives. We assume that Earth was targeted from lightyears away, possibly because they could see the spectral lines of our atmosphere and decided they wanted a rock like ours for whatever their purpose is. They dispatch their fleet without knowing what they will encounter.

Scouts arrive years in advance and put the planet under surveillance. Assuming their doctrine calls for the removal of native intelligent lifeforms, they put their plan in motion. Main fleet arrives after pacification is complete.

I'm not saying my ideas are perfect, just saying that if aliens are going to conquer this planet, the least likely thing to encounter is the aliens themselves carrying laser rifles acting like shock troops. And there's going to be ways to take the planet that won't even seem like war until it's too late.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution

spoilers ahead!
Spoiler

The story begins with an exchange of letters and news clippings between Alan, a scientist working on parasite eradication in Colombia, and his wife Anne at home in the U.S., concerning an epidemic of organized murder of women by men. Some scientists suspect a biological cause for this sexually selective insanity (selected observations of lab animals indicate that the normal male sexual urges are spiraling out of control, resulting in death). But the murderers feel it is a natural instinct and have constructed elaborate misogynistic rationalizations for it. For example, a new religious movement is spreading along with the murders: the Sons of Adam, who believe that women are evil, that the garden was a paradise before women were introduced, and God is telling them to get rid of all of the women. When the religion initially arises, prior to the organized murders, little is done to stop the ideology's spread, nor are their actions of evicting women from the areas the men control prevented. Alan realizes that the disease is resulting in men's sexual impulses being turned to violent impulses. Alan, a sensitive, kindly man, realizes that he himself is succumbing, and tries to resist the impulses, as well as isolate himself from women. His wife and teenaged daughter have a number of mother-daughter conflicts at this time, and the daughter does not believe her mother, and has complete faith in her father. She sneaks off to visit her father, and he murders her, then kills himself as he realizes with horror what he has done. Anne flees north, to Canada, as the disease began in the tropical zones and then spread out from there. After most of the women are dead, adult men start murdering boys. In the end, Anne, pursued by an entire society bent on femicide, discovers the source and motivation behind the plague: an alien species is intentionally causing the human race to destroy itself, so that the aliens can have Earth for themselves.

[jollyreaper]

I like the idea of an alien Charles Gordon, who's basically intent on martyring himself. It would explain anything that led to him being defeated, because the alien in charge was more concerned with engineering a glorious death while outnumbered by the savage earthers.

The idea of an enemy fighting for something other than the obvious goal of conquest and victory remains interesting.

I'd had something along those lines worked out as a possible Cylon explanation back in season 1, before everything went off the cliff. It was a variation on the HAL problem from 2001, where he's given two contradictory goals and tries to satisfy them both with murderous results.

So, humans invent Cylon AI. Humans decide that the AI should operate upon pure reason but want to make sure that the AI cannot go rogue. So while it is free to learn and grow and draw conclusions, certain beliefs are hardwired in. This way the AI can't go Skynet, i.e. deciding to change its purpose from defending the US from nuclear attack to defending itself from human attack, or the usual trope of redefining humans as inefficient and worthless and in need of replacing. But really, it's more like the problem a parent has when giving their kid religious instruction and then sending them off to school to learn the sciences. What they learn in school is incompatible with their religious myths and leads to cognitive dissonance. But the parent wants the kid to remain with the faith and so is told to disregard what science conflicts with belief and not ask questions, even though he's in school with the sole purpose of asking questions and learning!

So the scientists hardwire that sort of thing into the Cylon AI and got it wrong. The Cylons do have certain hardwired beliefs that are immune to logic and they cannot be deleted but they CAN be added to. And this is how the Cylons got religion. Yeah, nods to Asimov and everything. Rationalizing around these belief structures led to the first war. After their defeat the Cylons went away but did not stop thinking about their religion.

It takes them 40 years to figure out what went wrong in the first war. That war started when the Cylons ran smack up against religious contradictions. There would be a "thou shalt not kill" provision like in most religions but the colonials broke that stricture all the time. The Cylons themselves were invented to be warriors! And since the Cylons take their religion seriously, they decided to take sides in the doctrinal conflict.

So they realized that competing gods is a poor understanding. No, there should be one god, just different aspects. And the humans are off the path of enlightenment. The Cylons are part of God's plan. What should that be? If there's a Satan figure in their mythology as with the Jews, the Accuser, someone who is part of God's court and brings charges against humanity, putting them on trial, then that would fit. The Cylons are God's form of tough love. And they decide to enforce prophecy.

So the colonial creation myth involves a giant exodus to reach the colonies. Their equivalent to the book of revelation probably includes another exodus. The sinful are lost in the cataclysm that ends the colonies and the faithful remain to undertake a great journey to find Earth which is the home of the gods and what happens next is not known, it is assumed to be something wonderful. So the Cylons make it happen. Nuke the colonies. Keep the noose open just long enough for an exodus fleet to escape. Keep nipping at their heels, winnowing down the faithful, allowing them to find Earth. The Cylon belief is that they themselves cannot find Earth, only the flawed creation that is mankind can. And Earth will be salvation for mankind and the cylons as well. Religious types onboard the exodus fleet are going nuts because scripture is being confirmed. The disbelievers are having their cynicism shaken because the religious requirements are being fulfilled to the letter, exactly according to prophecy. But there is no divine hand, just material beings who believe they are doing God's will.

So there you have it. The Cylons have a plan. The loose bits that allow some flexibility in writing how it turns out are there because the Cylons don't know how it turns out. A lot of it is based on faith, waiting for signs from God, etc. And since God and the gods don't exist in this setting, they're going to be waiting an awfully long time.

The only thing I anticipated right in the show is that there had to be a cylon civil war to cut them down to size given the numbers portrayed. The better solution I think is that the Cylon AI's take a very long time to build with a high failure rate. Therefore even though they're machines and should be able to reproduce like bacteria, completely overwhelming humans, what really happens is that humans can outproduce the Cylons. So even after 40 years of construction, the Cylon fleet is inferior in size to the human fleet which necessitated the whole sneak attack in the first place.

The final bit is that the infiltration units -- the humanoid cylons -- that shouldn't be the cylon race. They should be just that, infiltration units. The Cylons have a religious belief that creation is an act of love and view the infiltrators as their children and have indoctrinated them with the religion but the true Cylon minds are AI banks located deep within the base-stars. Dramatically, they give us a way to personify and interact with the AI mind which would seem a bit abstract and difficult to relate to in a visual medium. In this sense, the infiltration units would be fulfilling the role of divine messengers and agents that angels do in religion.

Anyway, boy were my ideas off from where they were going with that one.

[Zor]

Any spaceship decelerating from a respectable fraction of C would need to unleash a shit-ton of energy to do so and there is nothing hiding it.

Depends on whether you want your aliens to have tech within our ability to grasp or beyond our ability to imagine. If they're supposed to be a thousand years ahead of us like the snouts then yeah, bussard ram scoop ships, big decelleration flare. If they're a million years ahead, there's no telling what they have.

Sorry, i assumed that we were talking about something within throwing distance of reality without magic ass-pull clarktech.

And even so, why do this when you can put a ship into orbit with kiloton range weapons and blow the major population centers to cinders. You don't need suble infiltration plots when you can bombard the surface with impunity.

Zor

[Simon_Jester]

It really isn't hard at all, so long as you aren't hamstrung by science fiction convention or nerd logic.

Agreed. Half the problem is that automatic "LOL just drop a rock on them rocks are free" reflex some of the hardcore fans respond with...

Lucifer's Hammer remains a decent enough read. Footfall just pretty much falls apart. The premise remains interesting -- realistic planetary invasion novel where humans can fight back. The fighting back part is the least realistic part. Any aliens capable of interstellar flight should completely outclass us and the fight would be about comparable to the US Marines landing on a sparsely populated Pacific atoll in WWII -- overwhelming force that cannot be contested. You have to really start stacking the deck to provide the following plot:

1. Aliens have interstellar flight abilities
2. Aliens need to come to Earth for some reason
3. Aliens cannot satisfy their needs mining asteroids for water, gold, whatever, no, they have to have Earth and probably need it intact so they can't just slag it with 'roids.
4. Aliens are unwilling to negotiate or deal with us, force is their only recourse
5. Their weapons are unimaginative enough that we aren't wiped out in the first strike. Reletavistic kill vehicles flying in from deep space are a fairly unbeatable weapon. If they want the planet intact, some sort of bio-engineered plague that only targets humans. By the time we even know we're under attack we'll already be dead.
6. The aliens are stupid enough to put their ship or ships within range of human weapons to be destroyed. And part of this is for the aliens to be incapable of performing an analysis of human abilities and seeing the danger for what it is, for not just nuking us from orbit as the only way to be sure.

It just becomes impossible to create a premise for a good alien invasion story.

I think you may be pushing it a bit far.

(4) is undermined by the assumption you yourself make: that interstellar travel requires technology that gives the invaders such crushing superiority that they can't lose.

(5), well, relativistic kill vehicles are not part of an invasion story; if they weren't planning to ignore Earth, hitting it with a dinosaur killer-plus weapon is out of the question.

(6) is a relevant one. The best treatments I've seen revolve around aliens who are either unimaginative or desperate.

Unimaginative aliens (a la Worldwar) can be made plausible enough to sustain suspension of disbelief- we really don't know what level of resourcefulness aliens might bring to bear on their problems, especially if they assume easy victory over savages and run into something a bit more sophisticated and a lot more clever than they expect.

Desperate aliens are much better: say, they urgently need to land their personnel because the bulk of their crew is in cryo and due to equipment problems they can't keep everyone alive in orbit; they only have life support for a skeleton crew on their actual starships. If they were counting on finding their habitable environment ready-made, it undermines their ability to perform large scale feats of space based construction like redirecting asteroids or launching hypervelocity missiles at Earth from around the orbit of Pluto.

The tech difference ain't gonna be Star Trek vs. Planet of the Nazis. It's going to be more like something out of the Culture. Probes the size of footballs coming in from deep space scattering self-replicating autonomous sensor bots the size of mosquitoes. They'd be tapped into our communications systems and know what we're thinking before we do, and that's just assuming they even want to handle things the clean way.

Ah, you do know that supercharged nanotech is not a necessary prerequisite for the ability to travel over interstellar distances, right? "The aliens should just kill everything with nanotech that lets them do X" is not a valid objection to most alien invasion stories.

[Stark]

Its as trivial as saying 'the invasion fleet is off course' or 'internal dissension during the journey weakens resolve' or 'inscrutable motives and unknowable goals make behaviour bizarre' or 'the space un is watching' or whatever. You know, that 'imagination' stuff?

The problem only seems to exist in nerd milwank fantasies about blowing things up. Isn't that strange?

[Samuel]

'the invasion fleet is off course'

Off course... in space? How the heck do you pull that off when traveling between solar systems?

'internal dissension during the journey weakens resolve

Which affects their ability to do surface bombardments how?

'inscrutable motives and unknowable goals make behaviour

So you can make it work... by completing ignoring the problem? That isn't an answer.

'the space un is watching'

This is the only one that works.

Unimaginative aliens (a la Worldwar) can be made plausible enough to sustain suspension of disbelief- we really don't know what level of resourcefulness aliens might bring to bear on their problems, especially if they assume easy victory over savages and run into something a bit more sophisticated and a lot more clever than they expect.

So if our opponents are morons than they will do moronic things? That isn't really a good explanation.

[Stark]

You're a fucking idiot. Science fiction is a broad and huge genre. If you think there's no way to go off course over a long journey you are so creatively bankrupt it beggars the imagination.

Just to help the fictionally retarded, a group of machine intelligences who start a thousand-year journey before shutting down for the duration end up somewhere they didn't plan for when their alarm clock goes off and must make do with the materials and opportunities available to them.

See? That wasn't very hard at all.

[Connor MacLeod]

Or the contrived FTL system goes into a separate universe that makes straight line travel difficult (analogus to waves or currents in an ocean, which has been used in lots of scifi like Babylon 5) and scanners do not work in FTL (meaning you have to take alot of short jumps to be accurate, or do alot of involved calculation of lots of variables of objects over longer distances. Or take random blind jumps)

[Samuel]

You're a fucking idiot. Science fiction is a broad and huge genre. If you think there's no way to go off course over a long journey you are so creatively bankrupt it beggars the imagination.

Just to help the fictionally retarded, a group of machine intelligences who start a thousand-year journey before shutting down for the duration end up somewhere they didn't plan for when their alarm clock goes off and must make do with the materials and opportunities available to them.

See? That wasn't very hard at all.

Except that requires terminal stupidity on the part of the aliens. Apparently setting up a computer program to compare the pattern of the stars to what is expected is too complicated. I can't think of a way to end up in the wrong solar system by accident.

Or the contrived FTL system goes into a separate universe that makes straight line travel difficult (analogus to waves or currents in an ocean, which has been used in lots of scifi like Babylon 5) and scanners do not work in FTL (meaning you have to take alot of short jumps to be accurate, or do alot of involved calculation of lots of variables of objects over longer distances. Or take random blind jumps)

Yeah, but I think people in this thread are talking about hard science fiction.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yeah, but I think people in this thread are talking about hard science fiction.

Talking about "hard" science fiction is a joke, becuase noone is going to agree on what qualifies as "hard", except for fanboys who want to make themselves look better/smarter/more elite or whatever. You can't break up sci fi into neat categories like that any more than you can use "force charts" to decide how two diffrent sci fi universes compare.