Footfall vs RL

[Samuel]

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.

Than just lacking FTL. If you have it, alien invasions become significantly more lopsided.

[Stark]

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.

This is why nerds make shit authors. If you only like stories where nothing goes awry, there's no wonder you're a dry, boring unimaginate idiot. Frankly, declaring they shut down to avoid the space ninjas and were rerouted en-route by an encounter with a previously undetected planetoid and are now forced to get enough blue triangles to start another journey basically writes a story. Hell, declare the machine intelligences aren't even all activated and they're even more hamstrung.

I'm sorry you're so fat you think 'massive effort by striving individuals fails enroute creating drama' sounds less interesting than 'HAAHAHAHA POW BOOM HAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA BOOK OVER AT PAGE THREE'.

[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.

Than just lacking FTL. If you have it, alien invasions become significantly more lopsided.

I don't see how not having FTL suddenly makes the scenario more "realistic" seeming, since there's more to that sort of scenario than just "how they travel". For that matter, how does FTL automatically guarantee the situation becomes lopsided?

[Connor MacLeod]

Frankly i don't see why "stupidity" is automatically assumed to be a bad thing. It depends entirely on how you write the topic. Humans being humans (EG irrational) is stupidity, but it is not neccesarily unrealistic or boring/dull/stupid. People do make mistakes, get arrogant, or fuck up. But the manner in which you WRITE this does affect things - it is quite possible to make stupidity seem like an utter contrivance. People are not machines and sci fi should not be written as if we have godlike superhuman "THIS IS THE MOST PRACTICAL WAY TO GO ABOUT THINGS" deciding everything.

Frankly the issue is always one of "plausibility" and "contrivance" in writing, and the to which it occurs (a little is not a problem, but alot can ruin it. And this applies to the technical as well as the story and character aspects.)

[Stark]

It'd be trivial to create a situation where a group arrives at xyz after one-way FTL travel and due to damage/confusion/sabotage/magic they are at Earth and need to conquer or negotiate to leave but can't actually do much SUPERTECH wise themselvs because they're a courier or whatever.

Amusingly 60s Doctor Who had like a dozen of these stories a year. :V

[Connor MacLeod]

Whenever I hear someone mention "hard sci fi" I always think of a group of people who are trying to "BE DIFFERENT" than the older and for some reason hated earlier versions of sci fi (either the "Flash gordon" style Death Rays and rocketships style, or the more middle ground B5-esque type style where you saw reactionless/gravitic drives and "mass lightening" crap as all the rage.) Some of the "harder" sci fi fans I've observed react with absolute venom to softer stuff, or even teh hated "space opera" as if it is some virulent disease. Which it may be to some of them, threatening the purity of "teh holy hard sci fi".

Now, it isnt that ALL hard sci fi fans are that biased or irrational or anything, I imagine that there is as much variation amongst the so called "hard" sci fi crowd as there is amongst the "soft" sci fi. Any genre is going to have its fanboys after all, but I DO object to the absurd sort of "categorization" that goes on, since sci fi cannot be neatly fit into discrete little pockets. Nor should it, since it becomes restrictive in terms of creativity (YOU CAN'T USE ANTIMATTER AND ION DRIVES TO MOVE AT TEN GEES ITS NOT HARD!)

Also, "Hard" and "Soft" sci fi has disturbing sexual connotations behind it, the psychology of which I would rather not delve into too deeply. Especially in phrases like "ITS NOT HARD ENOUGH!"

[Gil Hamilton]

Footfall was another exercise in alien race building with a somewhat silly story tacked on. You can bash Niven for there being a self-insertion character, but TONS of science fiction stories have people stick their friends in their writing circle or whatever in. I mean, there was at least one Philip K. Dick story that made potshot references to a bunch of different contemporary writers (including a self-depricating description of himself) and the story starred Poul Anderson travelling to the future. Don't take it so seriously. "A Mote in God's Eye" was practically the same basic idea; an exercise in alien race building with a story tacked on and the odd character based on people Niven and Pournelle knew in real life, but people seem to like that one.

As for the F'thip, as an alien invasion story, they were decently well done in the grand scheme of alien invasion stories. People can nerd rage about how the alien invasion should match the story they have batting around in their head, but the F'thip's invasion and why it went the way it did was reasonably through out (right up until Archangel).

As for Real Life Earth versus the F'thip, remember that the Earth in Footfall is ahead of the Earth in spaceborne military technology, because Niven/Pournelle had the Cold War go on for another twenty years and let all the wackier Star Wars program stuff develop (space borne lasers and the like). Real life Earth has no orbital weapons and no experience fighting in space at all, with no weapons that can engage the F'thip in orbit. At a certain point, that's a deal breaker for Earth, since the F'thip can drop as many Foots as they need if humans are intractible as real life Earth doesn't have the technology to make an Orion that shoots gamma ray lasers like the humans in the book did. Since there is nothing we can do really with the digit ships and we don't have as many nuclear devises currently as the USA/USSR did in the book, they can stay in orbit and keep dropping rocks, crowbars, and lasers until we give up and one of their invasions works.

[Connor MacLeod]

Actually the first thing I thought of when reading this is "Did John Ringo Ghostwrite this?" It certainly sounds no better/worse than Ringo's stuff, and possibly better. I always did like Niven more than I did the Aldenata stuff (although later Ringworld stuff can get pretty absurd too.)

[Simon_Jester]

Actually the first thing I thought of when reading this is "Did John Ringo Ghostwrite this?" It certainly sounds no better/worse than Ringo's stuff, and possibly better. I always did like Niven more than I did the Aldenata stuff (although later Ringworld stuff can get pretty absurd too.)

Niven, whatever his vices, had imagination: enough that he wouldn't write a story based purely around Slavering Alien Hordes that live purely to consume. Or Exaggerated Damnlibrul Aliens that refuse to defend themselves and need Righteous Humans to fight on their behalf against the slavering hordes.*

The Fithp and the Moties are both fairly well-imagined and interesting (the latter much more than the former, but you can't strike gold every time you swing a pickaxe). Neither is purely a walking caricature, and in both cases much of the action of the novel depends on the unique biology of the aliens- the Moties because of their general weirdness and high breeding rate, and the Fithp because of their psychological weirdness revolving around their notion of surrender and how it differs from that of humans.

*(Well, I don't have clear memories of the later Ringworld stuff, so I don't know about that).

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.

Than just lacking FTL. If you have it, alien invasions become significantly more lopsided.

Debatable. On the one hand it makes it easier for the aliens to move supplies and reinforcements. On the other, it means they don't necessarily have highly advanced propulsion systems for their invasion fleet, such as the kind of continuous-boost fusion drives that make redirecting asteroids so trivial in the classic 'hard' setting.

FTL potentially lets a civilization bypass a lot of the technological problems that must realistically be solved for the construction of starships, because they remove the need to reach relativistic speeds using a reaction drive or to keep the ship running for years at a time. In some cases that could make an alien invasion fleet less dangerous, not more; if their ships are designed to jump between star systems in a matter of hours and then land on a planet immediately thereafter, they don't have the endurance to float around in space for a long time while setting up orbital bombardment assets.

[Temujin]

Good memories from reading this as a kid, though some of Niven / Pournelle's political views that infiltrated the story certainly made me raise an eyebrow even then.

One thing the Fithp do have going against them is that they are only users of their advanced technology, not the developers. Likewise, IIRC, they also amassed into one herd before truly adapting all of that tech, so they lack some of the practical experience in using it in warfare. That said, they still did a pretty good job in the book, and would probably force much of Real Life Earth to capitulate even without an asteroid drop.

[Junghalli]

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?

Dispense with the idea that the aliens are completely amoral and have no problems with inflicting megadeath on humanity by bombarding us back into the preindustrial age with rocks.

Or as Stark suggested they can still be completely amoral but the Space UN is watching them and it turns out mass bombardment of population centers is a war crime.

A lot of the "lol asteroid" thing puts me in mind of somebody complaining about Iraq and Afghanistan being unrealistic because realistically the US should just have nuked those countries until they glowed in the dark. Turns out the aliens invasion strategy may be influenced by politics and other factors besides simply the best method of destroying the brown people humans.

[hongi]

As for Real Life Earth versus the F'thip, remember that the Earth in Footfall is ahead of the Earth in spaceborne military technology, because Niven/Pournelle had the Cold War go on for another twenty years and let all the wackier Star Wars program stuff develop (space borne lasers and the like). Real life Earth has no orbital weapons and no experience fighting in space at all, with no weapons that can engage the F'thip in orbit. At a certain point, that's a deal breaker for Earth, since the F'thip can drop as many Foots as they need if humans are intractible as real life Earth doesn't have the technology to make an Orion that shoots gamma ray lasers like the humans in the book did. Since there is nothing we can do really with the digit ships and we don't have as many nuclear devises currently as the USA/USSR did in the book, they can stay in orbit and keep dropping rocks, crowbars, and lasers until we give up and one of their invasions works.

I never actually read the book, only summaries of it. Were the aliens a particularly evil bunch who wanted to eat our babies or would surrendering be a good option?

[dworkin]

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

Dispense with the idea that the aliens are completely amoral and have no problems with inflicting megadeath on humanity by bombarding us back into the preindustrial age with rocks.

Or as Stark suggested they can still be completely amoral but the Space UN is watching them and it turns out mass bombardment of population centers is a war crime.

A lot of the "lol asteroid" thing puts me in mind of somebody complaining about Iraq and Afghanistan being unrealistic because realistically the US should just have nuked those countries until they glowed in the dark. Turns out the aliens invasion strategy may be influenced by politics and other factors besides simply the best method of destroying the brown people humans.[/quote]

This. It's why I like The Uplift War, Megadeth weapons are not much use if Space Greenpeace sues your ass for every native tree / critter incinerated and gods help you if any were tool users.

As for going off course, what if some nasty civilisation has 'rotated a system out of existence'. They did that 20 years ago on a star 50 ly from your home. If that star's gravity well was part of your 'perfect calculations' you are so screwed.

As for why alienoids won't exterminate us puny earthlings maybe the Space Pope tells them killing civilians is a no-no and you will go to Space Hell if you do.

[dworkin]

I never actually read the book, only summaries of it. Were the aliens a particularly evil bunch who wanted to eat our babies or would surrendering be a good option?

Spoiler

As I recall they just wanted somewhere to live. Their main problem was they were herd creatures. Once they had got the local 'alpha' to surrender they assumed the entire group had and would stay so. Anyone who then resisted was deemed to be part of an 'insane herd'. Being space-farers they had very harsh rules for what to do to the 'insane'

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Basically, surrendering to the Fithp would actually have been a viable option if it weren't for the inevitable problems that guerillas would draw.

And of course the whole "conquered by aliens" thing.

[MKSheppard]

I read Footfall for the first time a year or two ago. I think they used 5"/54 cal single mounts; not 16"/50 turrets. Not sure; though, so if someone can pull a copy out to confirm, that'd be nice.

As for Hard vs Soft SF -- I personally like my stories medium hard -- basically I can live with FTL, magitech drives of some sort that can cross solar systems on a time scale of week(s); allowing the stories to move at a decent clip, while still emphasizing the fact that space is huge.

But I can also live with soft-as-McDonald's-Ice-Cream-Cone SF when it's done well, like Mike Resnick's STARSHIP:x series; mainly because Wilson Cole is amusingly fun to read.

[Gil Hamilton]

I never actually read the book, only summaries of it. Were the aliens a particularly evil bunch who wanted to eat our babies or would surrendering be a good option?

Spoiler

To expand on what dworkin said, they have an entirely different concept of "surrender". They EXPECT conflict when two different herds meet and battle with the other tribe until until it is clear which tribe is the stronger one, at which point, the herd surrenders and becomes part of the stronger herd. There is no bad blood involved; the stronger herd doesn't typically abuse the weaker one significantly and the weaker one doesn't continue resist at all. As dworkin says, they consider an individual who continues to fight after their tribe has surrendered to be insane and they don't expect it and they also have no notion of a "conditional surrender" (that last point is a major plot point in the book).

So surrender is a good option if you can't defeat the F'thip, assuming that you actually surrender and stop fighting when you do. Humans are bad at this; they are insane by F'thip standards. In the book, the F'thip take the surrender of an individual by the individual rolling on his back and a F'thip putting his foot on the persons chest. At this point, the F'thip consider the person to be beaten and part of the tribe. What happens is that humans didn't get the message. The F'thip attack Kansas and will overrun a town and any human that was captured was thrown on the ground, given the foot, and then let go. This makes sense to a F'thip, but humans would wander away bemused, find more weapons, and keep fighting, usually leading to the F'thip unceremoniously blowing them away because they were extremely mentally ill. Or burning down the town with everyone in it because guerillas living there and they don't differentiate between geurillas hiding in a town and the town itself; it is all one tribe and if someone surrendered for that tribe, continued fighting means the tribe is insane and has to be put down.

This difference in psychology leads to the F'thip downfall, because they give humans a symbol they can place on top of buildings to indicate that the building is peaceful and has accepted surrender, with the understanding if they ever find anyone using the "Happy Snout" as a cover for continued fighting, they will bomb EVERYTHING using that symbol. The F'thip don't really lie or bother with skullduggery, but human do. In the book, they use the symbol to construct a spaceship capable of attacking the F'thip's mothership and end up defeating it.

The F'thip werent stupid by any means, but they have an entirely different psychology.

[MKSheppard]

The big problem with failure modes in a lot of fiction is that they're usually unintelligently thought through. Failures in real life generally start out as somthing minor; rather than engines deciding to spontaneously explode or whatnot for no reason at all.

EDIT: A very good example is the failure of the O2 tank on Apollo 13. It was not due to some gross manufacturing defect; but because of a clutch of minor issues that all came together in an unholy cascade failure.

[Stark]

It also supposes infinitely resolving sensors that can pick out a teeny tiny insignificantly invisibly small dot of heat (ie a ship at 500,000 kms or whatever) reliably.

[MKSheppard]

That's the temperature of the interior, but not necessarily that of the exterior. Consider baking. Pre heat your oven, then touch the outside. You probably won't be burned. Thanks to insulation, the exterior temperature is much less than the interior temperature.

Congratulations, you just cooked your crew alive by not providing a heat dissipation system.

The Apollo LEM and CSM used sublimator cooling in which water glycol was passed over radiator heat plates to transfer heat to the mixture, which then sublimated into space as vapor.

This was acceptable for a short-ranged mission of 14~ days -- not so for a long duration mission.

You might be able to 'run silent' by having heat sink tanks full of H2O which you can then pump waste heat into, and these tanks would be located on the 'dark side' of your spacecraft -- the side that's shielded from long range IR detection by the rest of the spacecraft's mass being between it and the enemy IR sensor in a "head on" flight mode.

But eventually, the heat capacity of your heat sinks will be reached, and you'll need to dump that heat, whether via venting the water or deploying radiators.

[Simon_Jester]

It also supposes infinitely resolving sensors that can pick out a teeny tiny insignificantly invisibly small dot of heat (ie a ship at 500,000 kms or whatever) reliably.

That's the easy part; astronomical telescopes do it all the time. It's not so much angular resolution that matters as intensity.

The real key is lowering the outer temperature of the ship to something low enough to be invisible on passive IR, which is quite tricky, since you're going to be generating appreciable waste heat and you have to get it out somehow. That's not a problem in an oven because you don't care if the inside of an oven gets hot enough to boil living tissue; that's what they're for.

With your spaceship you can't get away with that.

[jollyreaper]

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

My argument wasn't so much from the hard SF angle but the "please don't stretch the premise any more than you have to" angle. If we handwave magitech then you could conceivably have an invasion by aliens less advanced than us. Nazi lizards use stargates to open portals directly on our world and come pouring through. But the general assumption when someone says "realistic alien invasion" is usually thinking of invasion from space. Now you have your choice of whether or not to include FTL. Most hard SF types would say realistic FTL would be even more demanding than STL travel. But if we handwaved FTL not being all that complicated, maybe 50 years in our future, there you could have an invasion fleet. But anyone really wanting to make a nod to hard SF will have it be an STL invasion fleet which still has the implication of being very advanced in comparison to us.

I would also tend to think that aliens would be engaging in a war of choice here. Is Earth a good target for invasion? Can a scout ship come first? If there's no sign of technical civilization there now and it takes a thousand years to get there, what could crop up? Would they bring weapons just in case? What kind of weapons?

[jollyreaper]

Frankly i don't see why "stupidity" is automatically assumed to be a bad thing. It depends entirely on how you write the topic. Humans being humans (EG irrational) is stupidity, but it is not neccesarily unrealistic or boring/dull/stupid. People do make mistakes, get arrogant, or fuck up. But the manner in which you WRITE this does affect things - it is quite possible to make stupidity seem like an utter contrivance. People are not machines and sci fi should not be written as if we have godlike superhuman "THIS IS THE MOST PRACTICAL WAY TO GO ABOUT THINGS" deciding everything.

Frankly the issue is always one of "plausibility" and "contrivance" in writing, and the to which it occurs (a little is not a problem, but alot can ruin it. And this applies to the technical as well as the story and character aspects.)

There's plausible mistakes that are tragic and then there's just WTF mistakes that kill the suspension of disbelief. A leader knowing he has been betrayed by one of his men and killing the wrong one, that's a tragic mistake. Getting the signals mussed up and being in the wrong spot to intercept the invasion fleet and finding out over the subspace radio that your planet is burning, that's a tragic mistake. Hitler trying to invade Russia, an awful mistake but one that you can completely understand in context. Same with the Japanese picking a fight with the US, something that they couldn't possibly win. But you can see how they in their arrogance believed it was possible.

WTF mistakes break you out of the story and make you doubt the intelligence of the author, like superheroes forgetting to use clearly established powers to resolve problems, characters getting tossed idiot balls that push them to the point of being out of character for mistakes to happen, etc.

Strictly speaking, anyone who starts a war they ended up losing obviously made a mistake because most people don't start wars they know they can't win. They must have figured they could win it and figured wrong. So if an alien race invades the Earth and loses, they obviously miscalculated. The question is how did they make that mistake? A really good dumb example is Signs. Aliens invade a planet where what is to them burning acid lays over two thirds of the surface and falls from the sky and they're invading naked. That's worse than Hitler only packing summer uniforms for invading Russia.

[MKSheppard]

Just like how my oven never turns on again after it preheats!

Because human beings are just as robust as heating elements.

Nevermind that the oven has the surrounding air in your apartment to radiate heat to; while the spacecraft is operating in a near perfect vacuum -- one of the reasons why heat is such an issue with spacecraft design is that space is a near perfect insulator -- it's just damnably hard to get RID of heat.

Why am I generating heat? It's not like I'm constantly firing my lasers.

50 man crew? That's 5 kilowatts of heat that has to be dissipated; unless they're corpses. The computer(s) needs to run; that's probably a few kilowatts there. There's the guidance and navigation gyros. Another couple of kilowatts. If we're using radar to perform collision avoidance; we have to deal with heat generated by our T/R elements.

If you are using magnetic fields to deflect cosmic rays and other radiation, that's a lot of heat dissipation there.

Then of course, there's your power source that's providing energy to run the whole ship.

[hongi]

Destructionator XIII, why do you think projected spaceship concepts have huge radiator fins? Just because the artists think they look cool?