Let's Talk Alien Invasion Media

[Simon_Jester]

Well this is an interstellar ship with a roughly similar tech level to our own. Meaning I envision massive radiation shields / armor to protect against impacts while traveling at a high rate of speed. So nukes might not work very well. Also, they WOULD have some kind of weapons...so they might be able to shoot down ICBMs.

If the tech is similar to our own that means no FTL and no massive speeds. It also means that armor is going to be very thin if they want to carry enough fuel to accelerate to any velocity or decelerate in ways other than a rather harsh landing. And shooting down ICBM's is an option, but we have a lot of them.

On a related note, it also means they took ages to get to us and have likely devolved into a race with no inherent sense of balance and serious problems with bone structure and muscle mass.

Right, so they have to walk around in cyborg exoskeletons on the ground, and their 'foot soldiers' carry a 30mm chaingun and enough armor to need antitank weapons to kill... but there aren't very many of them. They have SSTO aerospace craft that can bomb us from altitudes our normal fighters and air defense cannot respond... but, again, not many and there are limits to how effectively they can bomb when flying at Mach 10 and 200 thousand feet. They have starships with missile defense that stops us from just casually nuking them... but their missile defenses have a finite capability and they can't just orbital-death-ray us into oblivion from space.

In short, they lack the instant-win buttons that a stereotypical alien invasion as imagined by OHMIGOD HARD SF overthinkers like to rely on. They're just... hard to stop.

To be a realistic threat they have to be significantly ahead of us technologically, usually with magic tech to justify an invasion. Otherwise there is no real way they could get here with enough force to pose a threat. If a force was only just more advanced than us how are they going to get the millions of soldiers they would need to Earth, we can barely leave our planets gravity with small capsules let alone an invasion force.

If they are that far advanced to get here it tends to be difficult to justify without resorting to contrived acts of plot why we don't lose and get wiped out.

Their magic technology might not be applicable to ground combat; FTL drives are good for this because you could conceivably build starships that just hyperspace-jump from their planet to ours, without needing orders of magnitude better propulsion and spacelift capability, or any super-duper alloys better than what we can imagine.

In the extreme limiting case you get Harry Turtledove's Road Not Taken, with Renaissance-era musketeers and swordsmen in starships... but that was a silly parody.

There is the alien invasion set during WW2 where the aliens thought we would barely have spears.

Although in that one the Lizards were grossly, stupidly overprepared for what they actually thought they'd face- more realistically they'd have sent nothing but machine guns, APCs, towed artillery, helicopters and recon planes to fight that war. Anything else would have been counterproductive and hard to maintain.

Although it'd be interesting picturing an alien race whose idea of 'light weapons to subdue primitives' is actually a good match for our idea of 'heavy weapons to fight a pitched battle.'

Wouldn't we just nuke their ships in orbit though? Most modern ICBM's could put a bomb on the moon easy.

Wrong.

The United States' only active service ICBM, Minuteman III cannot attain LEO. FAS gives its speed at burnout (and thus an approximation of its Delta-v, as it is always launched relatively stationary to this figure) at 24,000 kph = 6.67 km/s ∆V

9.3 - 10 km/s ∆V is required to attain LEO. (Any number of references)

Nitpick: Minuteman III can reach orbital altitude; it just can't reach orbital velocity. Getting into a stable orbit is more about lateral speed than vertical speed, which is why real orbital rockets "tip over" and start thrusting pretty much directly sideways as soon as they get above the bulk of the atmosphere.

So you could certainly use Minuteman III to lob a nuclear warhead into the path of an orbiting starship- it just wouldn't match courses with the starship, it would be fired more or less straight up to blow up at a predetermined point in space at the moment in time that the orbiting ship arrived there.

[Sea Skimmer]

Wrong.

For Minuteman III loaded with a maximum payload that is the case, no orbit. Its also simply not a very big ICBM and solid fueled with 1960s technology. Not all ICBMs are created equal, nor are you required to fully load them with kill weight. I'm not sure what Minuteman III would do with a minimal nuclear payload, which could be only a few hundred pounds, as opposed to its 2,500lb normal throw weight. All data you see for it is based on the max payload with three RVs. Presently it is only deployed with a single RV, and some have a completely different one now taken from the Peacekeeper.

For the Russian R-36M hitting the moon, or hell Mars, would be no problem with a reduced payload, that sucker is over a third heavier then the US Titan II and also a generation more advanced. Titan II could already send 500lb to escape velocity. The original R-36 itself, a technological contemporary of Titan II, had a dedicated fractional orbital bombardment variant that could put a several megaton warhead in orbit. R-36M was considerably upgraded. The US is also presently expending its Peacekeeper ICBM boosters as space launch vehicles. The performance of bigger, later missiles is much greater then that of Minuteman which is only a 38 ton missile. R-36M is over 200 tons.

If the need was simply to attack ships in orbit, almost any ICBM could be lobbed several thousand kilometers high even with its maximum payload. The apogee of the Minuteman III fired to a range of 5,500nm is already 1,136km. Of course you would face constrictions on target choice, but this is where mobile land launchers as Russia has, and all ballistic missile submarines come into play. It would just be a matter of adapting a proper fuse, and high altitude fuses were already designed in the past for RVs, in ordered to make them capable of pindown attacks.

Coorbital attacks are undesirable anyway, some kind of homing or command guidance would be required to make that work well, which would take some serious design effort in the span of months at least. With direct ascent you can use a simple timed fuse and launch a barrage with minimal modifications. The main problem would be the warheads killing each other. Also if its really such a good idea to employ nuclear weapons on a space capable enemy, at least one which is not openly genocidal.

Openlu genocidal aliens make very little sense anyway, the only good reason to invade earth would be to capture its population, and perhaps industry in a decently intact state. Earth industry might still be highly useful to a more advanced power for making parts and consumer goods, if they had advanced enough space travel to exploit that, or simply needed a forward base for yet further exploration. If someone just wanted random raw material resources, the solar system has vast amounts that involve no fighting at all and many of which are not stuck at the bottom of such a strong gravity well.

[SylasGaunt]

To be fair to Battle LA all taking out the C&C center did was remove the alien's crushing air superiority. It did nothing to get rid of the troops and other ground assets. Plus it was just one of a whole mess of them.

[Darth Tanner]

To be fair to Battle LA all taking out the C&C center did was remove the alien's crushing air superiority. It did nothing to get rid of the troops and other ground assets. Plus it was just one of a whole mess of them.

By this point of the film however the aliens had also inexplicably lost their superior firepower and durability advantages displayed in the start of the film. The soldiers realising to shoot at their chests notwithstanding

Right, so they have to walk around in cyborg exoskeletons on the ground, and their 'foot soldiers' carry a 30mm chaingun and enough armor to need antitank weapons to kill... but there aren't very many of them.

Theres going to have to be enough of them to defeat our armed forces in the field, even if their mainline infantry are comparable to battle tanks we still have battle tanks and lots of anti tank weapons to fight them with so their going to have to bring a lot of troops in their ships. Having an enemy force that can actually be engaged like you describe however is much better than the invulnerable enemy like war of the world martians, its one of the better points that Battle LA had, at least in the early scenes before they needed to nerf the aliens down for the hero to slaughter.

[Simon_Jester]

I recognize the importance of having 'enough' aliens and so on; my point is simply that you can easily create a situation where the "foot soldier" aliens we face in infantry combat are "tough but not too tough" and "numerous enough but not very numerous."

Once you create a premise that justifies the aliens being on the ground at all. Say, their people will starve and die for lack of life support if they don't carve out some literal breathing space on the ground quickly, so they pick a relatively obscure part of the world to land in, the first protagonist humans to face them in battle are special forces sent in to investigate the mysterious death of a Third World warlord at the hands of MYSTERY SKY DEVILS.

[Kinyo]

Reading this thread I was wondering why we need to fight an enemy based on our current level of tech? Instead of down-gunning the alien threat, why not up-gun humanities abilities?

It doesn't have to be a Star Wars level of ALL THE TECH!!! but it doesn't need to be Independence Day level of none of it either.

Humanity could be in the process of adjusting to the political development of a developed solar system, and have access to the technology required, when a new external threat arrives.

Movie tagline: "All the planets will be red!"

[edaw1982]

As far as a realistic plot, I've always felt that a good idea for a movie where the aliens are only slightly above us in tech level, and put everything they had into making the journey to our world because theirs was quite literally dead.

They didn't know we existed so they didn't bring RKVs or any massive kill-bot armies, but they were forced to try to invade anyways because we were being jerks and didn't let them colonize, they didn't have the fuel to go anywhere else...and invading is preferable to slowly starving to death in orbit.

So we have an alien invasion that does not *massively* outgun us, but the scale of the conflict is on par with a world war. Naturally there would be some eye candy and 'splosions, but the core of the movie could focus on a group of human soldiers behind enemy lines, or representatives from both sides trying to work out a peaceful solution despite their respective leaderships wanting to kill the evil xenos / humans. You know, something actually more interesting than a forcefield-protected martian machine vaporizing everything in sight.

The only example I can think of, aside from possibly Footfall, is the World War series, by Turtledove. The aliens have tech roughly to what we have now...or at least the mid-late 90s.
Roughly 'First Iraq War' vs 'World War Two'. But they can't nuke the planet because the colonizing fleet is a few years behind them and they need to pacify the natives who because of their overly cautious approach to new technology, and how this slow-but-steady process has worked for them in the past against other races they've conquered.

The reason they were so confident is also, they expected the humans to still be of a far lower tech level when they arrived (the probe sent showed Crusaders), so they're understandably surprised to see WWII going on.

Even throughout the books, noboody really 'wins', because even with their tech, the humans manage through means fair and foul to accquire their own nuclear arsenal, and in the end it becomes a stalemate with The Race predominantly populating warm to temperate places, like (I think) Australia and they wind up becoming a fundemental part of society because they're not leaving. Only reinforced when the Colonists arrive.

[Borgholio]

If someone just wanted random raw material resources, the solar system has vast amounts that involve no fighting at all and many of which are not stuck at the bottom of such a strong gravity well.

That's one of the biggest gripes I've ever had about alien invasion movies. Many times they come to Earth seeking something that would be far more plentiful and easier to reach out in space. Want water? Stop at the Oort cloud and harvest as many comets as you need. Want minerals? Melt down an asteroid or fifty. Want energy? Build solar arrays around the sun.

The only pretext that ever made sense was the need for a planet to colonize. The original War of the Worlds did this quite well. Mars used to be a lot like Earth but now it's dead. To ensure survival, invade and take over. They need the biosphere mostly intact so they can't use mass bombardment or nuclear weapons, hence the need for ground troops (or Martian tripods...whatever).

[Sea Skimmer]

Stealing all the water would perhaps make sense if the aliens goal was actually to steal all our sea food, and they wanted it all quickly and intended to move on quickly, so sustainability doesn't matter.

The only place stealing the water ever felt kind of right to me was Half Life 2, where it was probable that the aliens were teleporting it to another planet or Zen, and this might be vastly easier then collecting comets even if they had major space capabilities. If the main transport system is stargate style, but you have to physically build the system on the new world, then its possible to justify a lot more in terms of conquer for resources. Though you would still get all kinds of questions about why earth, and not say, alien mars equivalent. Unless they are so big they already did that many times over, and are trying to ship so much metal back to the homeworld that the freaking gravity goes up. Say did anyone ever calculate that for Coruscant?

[Xess]

Stealing all the water would perhaps make sense if the aliens goal was actually to steal all our sea food, and they wanted it all quickly and intended to move on quickly, so sustainability doesn't matter.

The only place stealing the water ever felt kind of right to me was Half Life 2, where it was probable that the aliens were teleporting it to another planet or Zen, and this might be vastly easier then collecting comets even if they had major space capabilities. If the main transport system is stargate style, but you have to physically build the system on the new world, then its possible to justify a lot more in terms of conquer for resources. Though you would still get all kinds of questions about why earth, and not say, alien mars equivalent. Unless they are so big they already did that many times over, and are trying to ship so much metal back to the homeworld that the freaking gravity goes up. Say did anyone ever calculate that for Coruscant?

Using the Burj al Khalifa as reference, with a foot print of 8000 m^2 and a mass of least 4000 metric tons, if Earth was covered entirely by them that would be a mass of 2.6x10^17 kg. Earth has a mass of 5.9x10^24 kg so even though Coruscant is much more developed the change in planetary mass and gravity is probably negligible.

[Simon_Jester]

The only example I can think of, aside from possibly Footfall, is the World War series, by Turtledove. The aliens have tech roughly to what we have now...or at least the mid-late 90s.
Roughly 'First Iraq War' vs 'World War Two'. But they can't nuke the planet because the colonizing fleet is a few years behind them and they need to pacify the natives who because of their overly cautious approach to new technology, and how this slow-but-steady process has worked for them in the past against other races they've conquered.

The reason they were so confident is also, they expected the humans to still be of a far lower tech level when they arrived (the probe sent showed Crusaders), so they're understandably surprised to see WWII going on.

The main problem with that premise was that the Lizards brought a lot of technology that was just... utterly pointless and excessive given what they expected to fight, like the equivalent of Patriot missile batteries. It would have been fun to see a civilization with ray guns that honestly expected to fight knights in shining armor... so they sent troops armed with their idea of light infantry weapons, but that is by itself a rough match for modern combat forces. Or WWII combat forces.

[White Haven]

This is bloody easy, which is why it always irritates me when movies do it so very badly. Just off the cuff, without a whole lot of thought...

-Scant Numbers. They're horrifyingly badass killing machines, but they're invading a planet with six billion people on it. Whoops.
Pros: Your aliens can be horrifyingly badass killing machines, which is fun to watch. You don't have to kneecap them with the Idiot Ball for the plucky humans to beat them.
Cons: You're going to have to kill a lot of human defenders, which might be problematical from a ratings standpoint. Credibility-straining character shields may be a problem if your viewpoint characters are front-line grunts.

-Stargate-equivalent arrival. They can't bomb any resistance into gravel, because they didn't come through space to get here. They're on the ground already, and you have to deal with them there. Bonus points if you have the 'oh dear sweet fuck, there's an active gate we have to shut down/contain or we'll never win this against reinforcements.
Pros: Dodges the orbital-fire issue entirely. May make resource-stripping actually practical, opening up a whole spread of invasion-motivations.
Cons: Very vulnerable to McGuffin Solutions. Defenders have to <action> the <thing> to close the portal and everyone lives happily ever after.

-Not Invented Here. The aliens didn't develop or build their shit, so they have what they have, but don't have the overall benefits of the tech-base that would imply.
Pros: Lets you have massive space battleships that bristle with guns -- without necessarily being able to annihilate things on the surface. Let's you have hideously effective anti-aircraft defenses, while being vulnerable to an infantry assault. Or vice versa. Lets you write an asymmetrical tech base to justify any scene you want.
Cons: Lets you get lazy. Forces additional exposition to demonstrate that this is the case, and why.

-Easy FTL. Turns out FTL just requires that you stumble on the right wormholes. No warp drives, no fusion engines or antimatter rockets. The aliens are here, but they aren't any more capable of organizing an orbital devastation than we are, which is to say 'theoretically, but not quickly and not without great difficulty.'
Pros: Relatively even fight with aliens.
Cons: Requires large-scale battles, because the only way a close-to-even force is going to threaten Earth is if there are a shitload of them. Your CGI people will be sad that they do not get to do rayguns and plasma doodads.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Stealing all the water would perhaps make sense if the aliens goal was actually to steal all our sea food, and they wanted it all quickly and intended to move on quickly, so sustainability doesn't matter.

The only place stealing the water ever felt kind of right to me was Half Life 2, where it was probable that the aliens were teleporting it to another planet or Zen, and this might be vastly easier then collecting comets even if they had major space capabilities. If the main transport system is stargate style, but you have to physically build the system on the new world, then its possible to justify a lot more in terms of conquer for resources. Though you would still get all kinds of questions about why earth, and not say, alien mars equivalent.

Well, in the case of an interdimensional empire like the Combine they may not have any real space capability at all - why spend resources to reach dead worlds when you have access to an endless number of live ones? Once interdimensional travel is developed in a setting space travel technology may become an ignored field; I've seen that postulated in some stories.

[Sky Captain]

The only example I can think of, aside from possibly Footfall

I think Footfall is one of the best alien invasion books. Also shows how destructive properly employed orbital fire support is against human military forces and infrastructure. In the end humans win only because aliens never expected humans to build a space warship to engage them in such a short time.

To have good believable alien invasion story alien side must be limited in some manner. You can't have a plausible story if a huge multi star system civilization comes here in force to take over whole solar system.

That's one of the biggest gripes I've ever had about alien invasion movies. Many times they come to Earth seeking something that would be far more plentiful and easier to reach out in space. Want water? Stop at the Oort cloud and harvest as many comets as you need. Want minerals? Melt down an asteroid or fifty. Want energy? Build solar arrays around the sun.

I'm wondering if there is an alien invasion story where aliens do just that. Come to solar system and mine easily available resources, set up huge solar collectors to generate power, build space habitats and so on while don't caring at all what happens on Earth aside from maybe some observation sattellites thrown into Earth orbit.

[Metahive]

What I ask for is this:

1.The invaders must have some means to overwhelm humanity's defense decisively, be it raw military strength or subversion
2.The invaders must use their assets intelligently and be in the know about how humanity works and what's it able to do and plan their strategy taking this into consideration (avoiding that dreadful plot device of aliens being repelled by unexpected "human ingenuity" or "the indomitable human spirit", those are lazy cop-outs IMHO)
Someone brought up Turtledove's World War series, that's exactly what I hated about it. Alien invaders fail because they didn't do their homework properly, LAME!

Can these two stipulations be satisfied and humanity still come out the victor in a believable manner?

[Purple]

I'm wondering if there is an alien invasion story where aliens do just that. Come to solar system and mine easily available resources, set up huge solar collectors to generate power, build space habitats and so on while don't caring at all what happens on Earth aside from maybe some observation sattellites thrown into Earth orbit.

What I am wondering is if there is any potential for a plot or drama in that kind of story. Unless it's some sort of retrospective where the author uses the setup as an opportunity to comment on humanity and preach.

[Simon_Jester]

What I ask for is this:

1.The invaders must have some means to overwhelm humanity's defense decisively, be it raw military strength or subversion
2.The invaders must use their assets intelligently and be in the know about how humanity works and what's it able to do and plan their strategy taking this into consideration (avoiding that dreadful plot device of aliens being repelled by unexpected "human ingenuity" or "the indomitable human spirit", those are lazy cop-outs IMHO)

I'd modify this a bit:

2a) The invaders must use their assets intelligently, show a reasonable level of awareness about how humanity works, and what it's able to do, and plan accordingly.

There's a subtle difference here, which I include because I like my aliens to be ALIEN. The working definition of 'alien' here is 'beings which think as well as you do, but differently.'

This, I think, is where the stereotypical OMG HARD SF fan falls down, because he imagines aliens whose thought processes and attitudes basically mirror his own. He's not asking "what would happen if aliens with the following technologies invaded?" He's asking "what would I do if I were the alien invader?" Granted, that's an interesting genre in its own right.

But only a sad, cramped mentality will be unable to separate the question of "what will the alien do?" from the question of "what will I do?"

So personally, I actually prefer stories in which the aliens do NOT work the way we work, and where they do NOT understand us perfectly (or even at all), and where conversely we do not understand them. And where the real struggle is not just a straight-up military conflict between good guys and bad guys, but where to understand the foreign, either so that we can overcome it, or so that we can achieve peace with it.

There is a severe poverty of the mind that comes with just... assuming that the foreign will be instantly understandable to us and will act as we would act in the same situation.

For examples of this, hm.


Look at Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. The aliens of that series don't even understand the concept that all humans are independently intelligent lifeforms at first; they assume that killing the independently mobile humans on a spaceship is no more serious a breach of protocol than disabling the camera feeds would be. When they do figure this out, they are shocked and actually withdraw and cease to attack us... because despite the massive destruction they've caused to both our armed forces and our civilian population, they never meant to hurt anyone.

Then it becomes our turn to play the implacable, unthinking, destroying beasts. We keep hammering on them harder and harder, responding to them as a purely military, implacable threat that must be annihilated. Pure conflict, THERE IS ONLY WAR type stuff. And it is not until the denouement of the novel that we get any idea of what the aliens really are, that we understand why they did what they did... but as soon as we get that understanding, the whole tone of the story changes. And we learn to accept that there COULD be peace between human and alien some day.


The reason Turtledove's Worldwar novels aren't so interesting this way is that the "aliens are inflexible" thing is presented as a one-sided thing. We understand them perfectly, allowing for language barriers. But they do not understand us, and frankly they seem incredibly slow and stupid compared to us, so that their alien 'differences' mostly just act as a way to dumb down the aliens so that humans can defeat them.


So what I'd like to see is a story where both aliens and humans are mentally weird to each other. Where neither side is just a big nasty beast with big nasty weapons. Where the aliens are stunned when we don't react the way they would to a given stimulus... and conversely we are stunned when they don't react as they expect. And the main reason all the high technology and flash and drama are there is to force humans to come to terms with the alien.

[TOSDOC]

So personally, I actually prefer stories in which the aliens do NOT work the way we work, and where they do NOT understand us perfectly (or even at all), and where conversely we do not understand them. And where the real struggle is not just a straight-up military conflict between good guys and bad guys, but where to understand the foreign, either so that we can overcome it, or so that we can achieve peace with it.

You just described Footfall there too, and IMO the real reason humanity won over the fthp--their herd mentality enabled the above description quite well, and they are one of the few alien invaders I can recall who actually admitted that they came prepared to fail and capitulate to humanity were we the stronger.

I think a story where alien invaders start plundering the rest of our solar system's resources while ignoring Earth is very interesting. There'd be precious little we could do about it at our present tech level. I wonder what public reaction would be like--how possessive are we of our own solar system after all? Does anyone know of any stories in this vein?

[Simon_Jester]

So personally, I actually prefer stories in which the aliens do NOT work the way we work, and where they do NOT understand us perfectly (or even at all), and where conversely we do not understand them. And where the real struggle is not just a straight-up military conflict between good guys and bad guys, but where to understand the foreign, either so that we can overcome it, or so that we can achieve peace with it.

You just described Footfall there too, and IMO the real reason humanity won over the fthp--their herd mentality enabled the above description quite well, and they are one of the few alien invaders I can recall who actually admitted that they came prepared to fail and capitulate to humanity were we the stronger.

To a large extent Footfall is this too, but there are some differences- we grasped the fithp pretty quickly once there was any contact with them on the ground. The fithp took longer to understand us.

Really, though, the only way in which our understanding benefited us is... well, it's not quite what I had in mind as an example though I suppose it qualified.
Spoiler

The US figured out the aliens' surrender gesture, noting that for the aliens "we surrender" translates as "we join your herd as subordinates/slaves." From this we derived an equivalent of the Red Cross symbol we could use to mark structures that were not part of our war effort, so that they would not be bombarded from orbit. The US then used this symbol as cover to build its big Orion-drive space battleship under cover of truce.

I think the idea of anyone breaking a truce really, really confused and angered the fithp, because they saw it as functionally equivalent to treason: once you've surrendered you're not just a 'prisoner of war,' you are now actually a full (if second-class) member of the society that defeated you.

Aside from that, though, it was pretty much a straight military action, and understanding the aliens psychologically played a relatively limited role in defeating them.

I think a story where alien invaders start plundering the rest of our solar system's resources while ignoring Earth is very interesting. There'd be precious little we could do about it at our present tech level. I wonder what public reaction would be like--how possessive are we of our own solar system after all? Does anyone know of any stories in this vein?

I'd like to read it too. Unfortunately the only one I can think of is rather cheesy because it was written by a cheesy author.

[StarSword]

2.The invaders must use their assets intelligently and be in the know about how humanity works and what's it able to do and plan their strategy taking this into consideration (avoiding that dreadful plot device of aliens being repelled by unexpected "human ingenuity" or "the indomitable human spirit", those are lazy cop-outs IMHO)

So personally, I actually prefer stories in which the aliens do NOT work the way we work, and where they do NOT understand us perfectly (or even at all), and where conversely we do not understand them. And where the real struggle is not just a straight-up military conflict between good guys and bad guys, but where to understand the foreign, either so that we can overcome it, or so that we can achieve peace with it.

The Star Carrier books I'm analyzing in another thread have a good example of that in book four. The human and Slan COs get to have a long enough conversation that the humans are able to work out a key facet of Slan psychology that proves key to defeating them: They're collectivist almost to the point of a hive mind. In other words they're individuals, but they're mentally all about helping their own Community, capital-C. Anything that harms the Community is considered insane.

This leads to two key plot points: Spoiler

First, they approach war like a "shoving match" (the term the author used). Slan-on-Slan fights end when one side establishes superiority over the other, and because of this they find the human willingness to defy the odds incomprehensible and frankly frightening.

Second and probably more importantly, they view lying as a terrible sin. Based on the Slan CO's conversation with Trevor Gray, the Slan reach the conclusion that the Sh'daar Masters had deliberately lied to them about the nature of both humanity (we're a Community, too, in other words) and of the universe (a little hard to explain concisely; it has to do with their biology, the way they evolved, and the fact that they were technologically uplifted by the Sh'daar rather than going technic on their own). This leads to the Slan basically telling the Sh'daar equivalent of a political officer to shut the fuck up. They quit the field and head home, and it's implied the Slan government will be reconsidering its allegiance.

[Batman]

Spoiler

Depends on a) how you define superiority, and b) what happens to the side that accepts they lost. 'We have 12 billion battleships while you have 17 rubber dinghies and a pretzel stand' is pretty decisive, but when the consequences of admitting defeat are complete extermination of you, your people, your system, and the universe-wide proliferation of reality TV you'll probably feel like getting creative with those resources.
If it's more like you losing a soccer match except a fuckton of people died and there's billions in property damage but welcome back to society and no hard feelings, yeah, not seeing the value of fighting the odds either.

[Metahive]

Ah, but see, this exactly the sort of scenario I find stupid. Aliens are so totally unimaginative that they can't make heads or tails of another species ways of thinking and get subsequently beaten because of it. This is that idiotic "only humanity is creative/humanity is special" sort of conceit that has deeply infested sci-fi. Even good sci-fi like Babylon 5, just take the epsiode "Parliament of Dreams" where all alien species have one, maybe two religions while humanity has an entire boatload of it. Or "In the Beginning" where Emperor Londo comments on how bravely and tenaciously humanity fought in the face of utter destruction and how unusual that was. Mr, Straczynski, that's basic "cornered animal" type of behaviour. It's not special!

I wish for an alien invader that's imaginative and creative enough to know how to "play" humanity. Take this variant to the Ender's Game scenario. Humanity battles a species of antlike insectoids. Humanity believes they can win the war by destroying their central "queen" complex and concentrates all of its forces into assaulting it. They successfully destroy the installation while sustaining heavy losses but then it turns out it was a ruse by the aliens who played on humanity's prejudice towards aliens of a certain "make" and baited them into a trap, destroying the "queen" complex did not provide a convenient off-button to the species and humanity just lost most of its military for nothing. That's the sort of thing I want to see, that's the sort of enemy I want humanity to triumph over. An enemy that needs to be seriously out-thought as well as out-fought.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah, but see, this exactly the sort of scenario I find stupid. Aliens are so totally unimaginative that they can't make heads or tails of another species ways of thinking and get subsequently beaten because of it.

The flip side of this is when we, not our fictional alter egos but we personally are so unimaginative that we can't imagine an alternative mindset and convincingly portray beings that don't react exactly as we do to a new stimulus.

I consider that much worse because it's a commentary on ourselves, not the fictional characters we play with. Are we so limited that we can only conceive of one way for intelligent lifeforms to behave?

What I would rather see is a convincingly alternate alien species, who thinks differently than us but in a way that is not stupid, such as thinking that "surrender" means the same thing as "pledge allegiance to the winner." And having them find out that we don't think the way they do (some of us fake a surrender, or surrender and then continue fighting later, or don't feel bound to obey a leader who DOES surrender on our behalf). And they react with a strategy that is calculated to work against us (taking hostages from a defeated group, declaring severe punishments for breaking parole).

Meanwhile we find out how they think, and try to figure out a strategy that is calculated to work against them (if they can be placed in a position where surrender will avoid a big enough disaster, not only will they actually surrender, but in all probability they will stay surrendered for all time).

This is that idiotic "only humanity is creative/humanity is special" sort of conceit that has deeply infested sci-fi. Even good sci-fi like Babylon 5, just take the epsiode "Parliament of Dreams" where all alien species have one, maybe two religions while humanity has an entire boatload of it. Or "In the Beginning" where Emperor Londo comments on how bravely and tenaciously humanity fought in the face of utter destruction and how unusual that was. Mr, Straczynski, that's basic "cornered animal" type of behaviour. It's not special!

I wish for an alien invader that's imaginative and creative enough to know how to "play" humanity. Take this variant to the Ender's Game scenario. Humanity battles a species of antlike insectoids. Humanity believes they can win the war by destroying their central "queen" complex and concentrates all of its forces into assaulting it. They successfully destroy the installation while sustaining heavy losses but then it turns out it was a ruse by the aliens who played on humanity's prejudice towards aliens of a certain "make" and baited them into a trap, destroying the "queen" complex did not provide a convenient off-button to the species and humanity just lost most of its military for nothing. That's the sort of thing I want to see, that's the sort of enemy I want humanity to triumph over.

That intrigues me too, I like the idea- but at the same time, it clashes with...

An enemy that needs to be seriously out-thought as well as out-fought.

Wait.

You do NOT want to see enemies who are beaten by a clever gambit, but you DO want to see enemies who must be outwitted? There's sort of a contradiction there. You want the enemy to be clever so that you can't beat them by simply deducing their secret weakness and hitting it, because they will have foreseen that ploy and either countered it or made it a trap. But at the same time, you want us to be clever so that it will be a story of us out-thinking the enemy.

The problem here is that the cleverness on both sides tends to cancel out and you're left with a purely military equation- i.e. whichever side has the most guns wins. If one side wins a war through true cleverness, the result is nearly always a very lopsided victory- the clever side lands an army right in the middle of the enemy's territory and ends the war in a week, or comes up with a strategem that brings the enemy field army to their knees in a matter of a month, or something of that nature.

When both sides are highly clever, the result is usually:

1) Very protracted, and
2) Very complicated.

Both those things mean that trying to portray such a war convincingly leads to a huge, overblown series of novels or movies, in which case the author usually runs into other problems trying to portray the massive conflict.

[Lord Revan]

well the thing is why should aliens who by their are not like humans, understand how humans thinks, when humans themselves have issues understanding humans from another culture.

I mean USA armed forces failed at Vietnam due to large part for their failure to understand the locals. Another example would be the Winter War, where the Soviet Union lost massive number of troops and material due badly misjudging the "national character" of the Finns.

Both these examples are within the same species (Homo Sapiens Sapiens or Modern human), so please explain to me why is it so unreasonable to assume that members of different species, hell a species that's not even from the same planet, might misjudge humans and thus leave themselves to be more easily defeat then the raw numbers suggest.

[Simon_Jester]

I agree. On the other hand, it is equally true and likely that we will misjudge them and place ourselves at a grave disadvantage.

One of the stock plots of good alien invasion fiction is that we misunderstand the aliens at first (sometimes this provokes a conflict, sometimes it's a result of them accidentally provoking a conflict), but come to understand better later, and ultimately understand them well enough to interact meaningfully with them, allowing a peaceful resolution.