Modern Earth vs Tripods (1898 War of the Worlds book)

[NecronLord]

Firstly, we know that they had a flying machine of some sort (I'm not sure where you got the idea that it was an airship from, it is specifically implied to be heavier than air), yet instead of waiting, constructing it and reconnoitering the area and the forces arrayed against them they assembled their fighting machines first and attacked blindly.

Me? I've not stated it's an airship.

Are you suggesting that because the capsule containing the parts for the aircraft came down .

Secondly, the first Martian machine wrecked was destroyed by an artillery battery firing over open sights in the middle of a field,

No?

In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther bank, and in another moment it had raised itself to its full height again, close to the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six yards above the hood.

I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the other four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to dodge, the fourth shell.

I was writing more, but really Simon's hit every other point of value.

[Titan Uranus]

I will have to reread the book then, because I certainly do not remember them cutting telegraph lines, and I definitely remember the Thunderchild firing multiple volleys (one sinks a civilian vessel in the background, as I recall.)

It is possible that the Martians were unable to build flying machines without further materials, though it that case I would suggest that an intelligent enemy would have prefabricated smaller ones.
There was nothing preventing the Martians from establishing a perimeter and working from there, actually that is what the cylinder did on the first day.

Your point about shrapnel is one I hadn't actually considered, I wonder if the guns were meant to be firing solid shot? I'm not sure if pre-WW1 explosive shot would have been useful against armor. In any case, the British would never have used shrapnel unless that was literally all that they had. It also occurs to me that the British after the Boer War added a whole lot of indirect fire heavy artillery to their army, almost as much as the Germans, though I have no idea how long that took, I don't think they'd mady significant headway by 1900.

I don't think that the tripods ever engaged the British Army at long range either, nothing beyond easy field gun range in any case. In favt I think I remember a reference to melee combat, though that might just be the the musical.

Even if you accept that the Martians fighting machines can be used for recon (I'm not sure I do, with them being one-man vehicles and all), they are never used in that way.

My memory of the Thunderchild encounter differs from yours, but even if she did not fire until she reached point blank range, the Martians still ignored a cannon-armed warship trying to ram them.
I'll read the analysis later.

They do not need to be within naval gunfire range of the ports to control them, and controlling the ports allows them to prevent reinforments from arriving, and to control the enemy's movements.
If the Martians had merely desired securing a beachead they would have never landed in Britain.

[Titan Uranus]

*snip*

I stand corrected, it appears that I must reread War of the Worlds.
What a chore .

Someone else said it was an airship, for some reason I thought it was you.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd suggest the telegraph lines would be rapidly cut intentionally or not, simply by the walkers walking around. They'd have to work hard to deliberately avoid them.

Your point about shrapnel is one I hadn't actually considered, I wonder if the guns were meant to be firing solid shot? I'm not sure if pre-WW1 explosive shot would have been useful against armor.

It'd be useful against armor that was made of cast iron or such and would shatter under a high explosive hit. No modern field gun in the world would have an AP round or solid shot in that era. The muzzle velocities are far too low for it to be useful against any form of armor that did exist at the time. British 15pdr was only 480m/s weapon. We make mortars with that velocity now. Some 6in sized siege guns (people still thought/engineered in those terms even with what we would now call field weapon calibers) would have solid shot, mainly as a way to batter fortifications as it was still very difficult to engineer a penetrating round with an explosive payload. I don't think the British had any modern siege guns at the time though, nothing designed past the 1880s smokeless powder/HE invention. They just converted existing weapons.

In any case, the British would never have used shrapnel unless that was literally all that they had. It also occurs to me that the British after the Boer War added a whole lot of indirect fire heavy artillery to their army, almost as much as the Germans, though I have no idea how long that took, I don't think they'd mady significant headway by 1900.

Well, the British actually had a superior setup at the divisional level to the Germans by 1914, as they had that long range 5in gun, but they only had oh like six divisions worth of the weapons. None of this was implemented until well after 1900, the British actually ended up buying several hundred field guns from the Germans to make up for their own inferior guns in the Boer War.

However they were not the same pattern as used by the German Army, the German army had actually adapted a non quick firing gun in 1896 that was rendered obsolete the very next year by the French 1897 piece. Being Imperial Germans (who had rejected the French style recoil system, IIRC it was first tested by a German) they then produced SIX THOUSAND of these guns, before rebuilding every single one into a quick firing gun for something like 1 billion gold marks. Which was the price of like 10 battleships. Imperial Germany was run by morons.

If the Martians had merely desired securing a beachead they would have never landed in Britain.

Why not? It makes perfect sense as a beachhead to invade the rest of the world. It would be very difficult to move all the European armies to the UK, while the tripods seem to be tall enough that they could easily cross the straights of Dover to invade the mainland when desired.

[Iroscato]

Must admit this thread's put me in the mood to reread WotW as well

[Simon_Jester]

It is possible that the Martians were unable to build flying machines without further materials, though it that case I would suggest that an intelligent enemy would have prefabricated smaller ones.

Even in The War of the Worlds' version of the solar system, Earth has a denser atmosphere than Mars, possibly with different chemistry. The Martians had no way to test their flying machines in Earth's atmosphere prior to landing. It's entirely possible that they did send along flying machines that turned out not to work. Or that they didn't want to risk wasting tons and tons of cargo capacity in their very limited number of interplanetary capsules on flying machines that might not work.

There was nothing preventing the Martians from establishing a perimeter and working from there, actually that is what the cylinder did on the first day.

One, there's no way to guarantee that the resources needed to create the flying machine will be right there at the site of the cylinder's impact. Two, the only "perimeter" that can be established around a cylinder is the zone heat ray projectors can hit from the crater that cylinder forms- the Martians simply do not have enough fighting machines to hold a perimeter in a normal sense of the word. And, three, if the British do have any effective indirect fire artillery (which the Martians cannot rule out), it is EXTREMELY dangerous to remain camped inside a 'perimeter' that is in fact a single isolated point, while the enemy wheels up to shell that one isolated point.

So instead of wasting time on machines that may require fine tuning to work, they use machines they are confident will work, and then act to secure a REAL perimeter by destroying all enemies that can threaten their core territory.

Your point about shrapnel is one I hadn't actually considered, I wonder if the guns were meant to be firing solid shot? I'm not sure if pre-WW1 explosive shot would have been useful against armor. In any case, the British would never have used shrapnel unless that was literally all that they had. It also occurs to me that the British after the Boer War added a whole lot of indirect fire heavy artillery to their army, almost as much as the Germans, though I have no idea how long that took, I don't think they'd mady significant headway by 1900.

Shrapnel WAS virtually all that field artillery had in that era, because shrapnel shells are very effective at butchering blocks of soldiers in the open.

And blocks of soldiers in the open were the intended target of field artillery; if the enemy dug in behind trenches and fortified structures, you blasted them out with siege guns or with specialist ammunition for the existing field guns.

Moreover, 1898 was before the Boer War, so the lessons the British learned from that war would not apply to their military practice in the book.

I don't think that the tripods ever engaged the British Army at long range either, nothing beyond easy field gun range in any case. In favt I think I remember a reference to melee combat, though that might just be the the musical.

No references to melee combat in the books. The tripods have no reason to bother engaging from long range; at long range they present nearly impossible targets for the field guns of the day, but will have greater than average trouble targeting a concealed gun battery. Remember that these tripods can move at speeds comparable to modern armored vehicles; they are not slow or clumsy.

With melee combat I have no idea what on Earth you are talking about.

Even if you accept that the Martians fighting machines can be used for recon (I'm not sure I do, with them being one-man vehicles and all), they are never used in that way.

Exactly how would you distinguish between individual Martians on reconnaissance and individual Martians carrying out other missions? And why would reconnaissance be a job that individuals can't carry out themselves?

My memory of the Thunderchild encounter differs from yours, but even if she did not fire until she reached point blank range, the Martians still ignored a cannon-armed warship trying to ram them.
I'll read the analysis later.

This can readily be explained in a number of ways.

They do not need to be within naval gunfire range of the ports to control them, and controlling the ports allows them to prevent reinforments from arriving, and to control the enemy's movements.

Because the Martians' heat-rays cannot reliably sink ships at very long range, heavy naval guns shelling the approaches to a port make it hazardous for the tripods to approach. To get close enough to control that territory rather than simply harass the occupants, they need to be within a few miles of the port- which puts them in naval artillery range.

If the Martians had merely desired securing a beachead they would have never landed in Britain.

Exactly how do you imagine that? They have to secure territory somewhere on the planet that is large enough to permit further reinforcements to be landed. They could have chosen some isolated point in the middle of nowhere, but bluntly it just plain makes more sense to secure a beachhead that cannot be conveniently attacked or infiltrated (due to being an island) AND which also happens to be the site of the planet's strongest native nation.

[Micro-Balrog]

The problem with the concept of killing tripods with indirect artillery fire in 1898 is that indirect fire artillery requires communication with an observer that can correct the fire of the artillery in terms where the rounds are actually falling and what effect they're having on the target. This is even more necessary when the target is something that can move.

In 1898 as we historically know it, voice radio has not yet entered mass use, and was definitely not available for military ground forces. The first real-world maritime radio telegraph broadcast was sent in 1900, and experimental portable radios (that could be carried by a team of mules) were coming into military use in 1906. Even as late as 1916, a military commander would be effectively blind to the actions of his men once they crossed into No Man's Land. Possibly military orders could be relayed by runner or heliograph or something of the sort but clearly this is not a reliable form of artillery fire direction.

Beyond this, even as late as the 1990s artillery required truly enormous expenditure of shells to destroy things like armored vehicles which would be maneuvering and so forth. Typically the numbers of shells required are stated in dozens or even hundreds of artillery shells per acre.

I believe that the combat scene with the Thunderchild is intended to be portrayed as a set of feats of incredible unusual heroism and good luck for the humans.

P.S. It's worth also noting that the field artillery of the day had a very limited range - 3000-5000 yards is listed as the effective firing range of the largest British field guns of the era. We don't know how tall Martian Tripods were, but it's entirely feasible that they had a horizon distance which could allow them to spot the field guns at a great distance and shoot at them with their Heat Ray. (I assume, perhaps unfairly, that the Heat Ray can shoot as far as the Martian can see).

[Titan Uranus]

So I read the analysis you linked Simon, and I concede that I had forgotten much of the book. I have revised my estimation of the Martians upward considerably. Though I still think they were arrogant, and I'm not convinced by the analysis's reasoning behind the Martian's reasoning for moving three walkers towards the Thunderchild.

Even in The War of the Worlds' version of the solar system, Earth has a denser atmosphere than Mars, possibly with different chemistry. The Martians had no way to test their flying machines in Earth's atmosphere prior to landing. It's entirely possible that they did send along flying machines that turned out not to work. Or that they didn't want to risk wasting tons and tons of cargo capacity in their very limited number of interplanetary capsules on flying machines that might not work.

An airship would have worked just fine, and unless we are assuming that they do not have spectroscopy, I'm pretty sure that they know what the Earth's atmosphere is like, I don't remember any breathing apparatus being mentioned by the Narrator. We've designed plenty of flying machines for Mars, Venus, etc. without testing them first. Though it is possible that Martian flight is extremely underdeveloped due to the thin atmosphere.

One, there's no way to guarantee that the resources needed to create the flying machine will be right there at the site of the cylinder's impact. Two, the only "perimeter" that can be established around a cylinder is the zone heat ray projectors can hit from the crater that cylinder forms- the Martians simply do not have enough fighting machines to hold a perimeter in a normal sense of the word. And, three, if the British do have any effective indirect fire artillery (which the Martians cannot rule out), it is EXTREMELY dangerous to remain camped inside a 'perimeter' that is in fact a single isolated point, while the enemy wheels up to shell that one isolated point.

One, if the Martians did require earthly resources for their flying machines, then it would be reasonable to put off constructing them. However, I would still argue that it would have been better to forgo five of the 100 fighting machines for some decent recon capabilities.
Two, I'm sorry, I have not explained myself correctly. I do not mean that the perimeter must be small and static, it would be flexible, you would build fighting machines and then expand the perimeter, which would be miles across, while making opportunistic attacks and raids outside of it, which themselves could be miles long, then once the flying machines are built you can use them to scout for the main advance. Imagine the perimeter being like a beating heart or a pair of lungs, with lances or tentacles shooting out every now and again (probably continuously if the Martians are as tireless as the Narrator thinks they are. Actually, better yet, imagine a spinning top, the machines constantly (or often) moving around the perimeter while groups broke off in arcs or thrusts and then curved back to return to the main body.
Although, given how little resistance the Martians encountered there would be very few commanders who could hold to that plan. Not doing so doesn't make the Martians stupid, but it does mean that they are not super-intelligent. I still think they were a bit arrogant, but not hugely so, I think it was just enough for the British colonialism allegory that Wells was going for.
Three, yes that would be extremely dangerous, and I can see how you would assume that I was suggesting a static perimeter.

So instead of wasting time on machines that may require fine tuning to work, they use machines they are confident will work, and then act to secure a REAL perimeter by destroying all enemies that can threaten their core territory.

I still am of the opinion that is an excessive gamble without recon capabilities. The fighting machines are single-creature vehicles, and dividing the attention of your soldiers is a bad idea.

Shrapnel WAS virtually all that field artillery had in that era, because shrapnel shells are very effective at butchering blocks of soldiers in the open.

And blocks of soldiers in the open were the intended target of field artillery; if the enemy dug in behind trenches and fortified structures, you blasted them out with siege guns or with specialist ammunition for the existing field guns.

I am aware that Shrapnel was the main type of shell at the time, I had assumed that they would have solid/HE shot sitting in armories somewhere even though they were not part of the standard combat load, the same way the US had WP rounds for the M60s' main guns lying around even though they were not part of the standard load out. However, Sea Skimmer knows a heal of a lot more than me, and the quotation from the book clearly states that it was a shell which destroyed the machine. The machines must have had truly thin armor, which I suppose makes some sense, but they seem designed to stop bullets, and how on Earth would they know how much human small arms can penetrate?

Moreover, 1898 was before the Boer War, so the lessons the British learned from that war would not apply to their military practice in the book.

I had thought that the Boer War had begun in 1898, and though that if the artillery were produced in Britain they might have some of the Guns lying around, as I do not know much about the Boer War and did not know how quickly the British learned. I concede that point.

The tripods have no reason to bother engaging from long range; at long range they present nearly impossible targets for the field guns of the day, but will have greater than average trouble targeting a concealed gun battery. Remember that these tripods can move at speeds comparable to modern armored vehicles; they are not slow or clumsy.
With melee combat I have no idea what on Earth you are talking about.

I wasn't implying that the Martians needed to engage anything at long range, though they should have engaged the Thunderchild at long range, it's just that when accessing their capabilities range matters. If they can stand atop a mountain and shoot ship-sized targets accurately for 100 miles then the intelligent thing to do is different from what is intelligent if they must close to one mile or their heat rays will dissipate in the atmosphere.
In the musical (Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds), the Artilleryman tells the Narrator when they first meet that the Fighting Machines got so close that they used their legs to crush men and to bash them to the ground or against trees. Though the artillery was already gone at that point.

Exactly how would you distinguish between individual Martians on reconnaissance and individual Martians carrying out other missions? And why would reconnaissance be a job that individuals can't carry out themselves?

A fair point, but they are not as fit for the purpose as a flying machine would be.
If an individual is preforming reconnaissance on his own then his attention is divided between recon, defense, navigation, and relaying information.

This can readily be explained in a number of ways.

I'm not satisfied with the explanation that they allowed the Thunderchild to close to ramming distance because they were under orders to only engage the Channel Fleet, it seems insane that they would be ordered to not defend themselves, they should have fired once the intent of the Thunderchild was clear. Although given that the heat rays are invisible it is possible that they did fire, but failed to melt the forward armor of the Thunderchild, and only destroyed her once they could aim at more vulnerable areas.
I'm still not sure what they were doing there, if they are attempting to bring the Channel fleet to battle, well; the further out they get, the deeper the water becomes, the tripods get slower (and probably clumsier as well), and their range shortens. Given that the rammed tripod couldn't get out of the way of the Thunderchild, they definitely were not as agile as they were on land. Going out into the water takes away so many advantages, that you would have to be extremely arrogant to do so, unless there is something I am missing. Fighting machines only seem like they are 100ft tall or so, and the English Channel is shallow, but the shallowest crossing is still 145 ft deep according to the wiki, I'll find a

Because the Martians' heat-rays cannot reliably sink ships at very long range, heavy naval guns shelling the approaches to a port make it hazardous for the tripods to approach. To get close enough to control that territory rather than simply harass the occupants, they need to be within a few miles of the port- which puts them in naval artillery range.

All you need to do is get close enough to wreck the docks, and especially their machinery, and possibly destroy any attempt to land reinforcements, that does not require you to be at the docks or destroy shipping of any kind. Placing the docks under your guns in sufficient for control, in fact a single machine can probably run between multiple docks and control them all.

Exactly how do you imagine that? They have to secure territory somewhere on the planet that is large enough to permit further reinforcements to be landed. They could have chosen some isolated point in the middle of nowhere, but bluntly it just plain makes more sense to secure a beachhead that cannot be conveniently attacked or infiltrated (due to being an island) AND which also happens to be the site of the planet's strongest native nation.

I'm not denying that an island beachhead is appealing. However, an island beachhead only makes since if you are expecting reinforcements and you need to secure a base area. For those purposes, Japan would be a better choice. But the best choice would be the Yukon where they would not be noticed for months, no significant military force exists, and the environment has to be closer to that of Mars than wet, temperate England.
There the Martians can build up as much force as they want, while testing their gear, and learning that microbes exist, all unmolested aside from the occasional mountain man.
Now, Britain does make sense if they need native industry, in which case it possesses the second highest density of industry per capita (though I expect it wouldn't look very good by comparison to the US from orbit) and is reasonably defensible. However, you still have the issue of the Martians not having the ability to cross the water (at least initially) while the humans can, and mainland Europe would probably look like the second most industrialized place in the world overall from Mars, so landing in Britain opens up your landing force as a target. That issue could be mitigated by sufficient intelligence (in the military sense), but I don't know. It seems like all they should know is that Earth is green and fertile and that her people have electric lights, but then they have vehicles just armored enough to resist human small arms, but not enough to resist cannon. If they are going in completely blind then landing in Britain seems like arrogance and hubris, but if they know the vague capabilities of the British army then it seems far more reasonable to wreck one of your main opponents.

Well, the British actually had a superior setup at the divisional level to the Germans by 1914, as they had that long range 5in gun, but they only had oh like six divisions worth of the weapons. None of this was implemented until well after 1900, the British actually ended up buying several hundred field guns from the Germans to make up for their own inferior guns in the Boer War.

I was under the impression that the Germans had more heavy guns (I think defined as larger than the gaggle of field guns clustered around 3 inch caliber) per man than the British at the start of WW1, were most of them delegated to the corps level?

Why not? It makes perfect sense as a beachhead to invade the rest of the world. It would be very difficult to move all the European armies to the UK, while the tripods seem to be tall enough that they could easily cross the straights of Dover to invade the mainland when desired.

There are two references in the book to the tripods being 100 ft high, one from a terrified artilleryman and the other from a London paper after the army is defeated in the field, both seem unlikely to be accurate. I'll see if I can't find a better way to quantify it.

[Simon_Jester]

So I read the analysis you linked Simon, and I concede that I had forgotten much of the book. I have revised my estimation of the Martians upward considerably. Though I still think they were arrogant...

They clearly were. The point is that while they were arrogant, they pursued a competent and effective strategy which indicates they had a fairly well thought out plan of action.

...and I'm not convinced by the analysis's reasoning behind the Martian's reasoning for moving three walkers towards the Thunderchild.

Why not? The only other explanation is that they were trying to slaughter shipping- but they do not fire on the shipping with their heat rays from long range, or for that matter at all. There is no mention in the chapter of any civilian vessel being sunk or damaged by Martian fire, or gassed by the black smoke.

Even in The War of the Worlds' version of the solar system, Earth has a denser atmosphere than Mars, possibly with different chemistry. The Martians had no way to test their flying machines in Earth's atmosphere prior to landing. It's entirely possible that they did send along flying machines that turned out not to work. Or that they didn't want to risk wasting tons and tons of cargo capacity in their very limited number of interplanetary capsules on flying machines that might not work.

An airship would have worked just fine...

But an airship moves slowly through the air (about as fast as a tripod can walk). And it would have a huge vulnerable gas-bag and would be very easily shot down by even the crudest of artillery. Moreover, Earth has highly energetic weather, probably more energetic than Mars, and an airship would be vulnerable to destruction in storms, which the Martians would know are possible without having any experience in how to deal with them.

If the Martians weren't being arrogant about unknown environmental hazards on Earth, and weren't blind to the possibility of the British having the ability to fight back meaningfully... They would not seriously consider bringing a lighter-than-air airship to use on Earth. Not when such an airship would have a great deal of bulk that could be committed to fighting machines or to sending more Martians in the cylinders.

and unless we are assuming that they do not have spectroscopy, I'm pretty sure that they know what the Earth's atmosphere is like, I don't remember any breathing apparatus being mentioned by the Narrator...

Even if the Martians had breathing apparatus as a precaution (I would bring some with me), they may have discarded it when they realized that Earth's atmosphere contained no chemical toxins. They were of course blind to the possibility of biological infection, since there is no such thing in their biology.

We've designed plenty of flying machines for Mars, Venus, etc. without testing them first. Though it is possible that Martian flight is extremely underdeveloped due to the thin atmosphere.

It is extremely likely that Martian flight is underdeveloped. Also, we have computer modeling; there is no evidence that Wells gave the 1898 Martians computers, any more than he gave them the wheel.

One, there's no way to guarantee that the resources needed to create the flying machine will be right there at the site of the cylinder's impact. Two, the only "perimeter" that can be established around a cylinder is the zone heat ray projectors can hit from the crater that cylinder forms- the Martians simply do not have enough fighting machines to hold a perimeter in a normal sense of the word. And, three, if the British do have any effective indirect fire artillery (which the Martians cannot rule out), it is EXTREMELY dangerous to remain camped inside a 'perimeter' that is in fact a single isolated point, while the enemy wheels up to shell that one isolated point.

One, if the Martians did require earthly resources for their flying machines, then it would be reasonable to put off constructing them. However, I would still argue that it would have been better to forgo five of the 100 fighting machines for some decent recon capabilities.

Their reconnaissance was totally adequate to their needs, Uranus.

Their enemies' reconnaissance was literally horse cavalry. Whereas their reconnaissance could be performed by armored fighting vehicles too powerful for the enemy to even threaten except from fixed defenses, moving at the same speeds we would use for land-based reconnaissance in real life, and able to see the surrounding terrain for several miles in all directions because of their great height.

Exactly how do you think the Martians were in any way threatened or inconvenienced by their 'deficient' recon capabilities?

Bear in mind that by all evidence, they had some degree of space-based reconnaissance to know the lay of the surrounding terrain (either probes or satellites or just really big ground-based telescopes). We can infer this because the Martians specifically chose to invade Britain. For one, this suggests they knew Britain was a highly industrialized target they'd want to disable and defeat quickly. For another, it suggests their maps of Earth were precise enough that they could confidently launch cylinders at Britain without being worried that if they "missed" the capsules would fall into the ocean.

Two, I'm sorry, I have not explained myself correctly. I do not mean that the perimeter must be small and static, it would be flexible, you would build fighting machines and then expand the perimeter, which would be miles across, while making opportunistic attacks and raids outside of it, which themselves could be miles long, then once the flying machines are built you can use them to scout for the main advance. Imagine the perimeter being like a beating heart or a pair of lungs, with lances or tentacles shooting out every now and again (probably continuously if the Martians are as tireless as the Narrator thinks they are. Actually, better yet, imagine a spinning top, the machines constantly (or often) moving around the perimeter while groups broke off in arcs or thrusts and then curved back to return to the main body.

Why would this be preferable to, or for that matter different from, what the Martians actually did? They deployed their fighting machines, they drove away the native population for miles around the area they initially landed in, and then they started operations to construct flying machines that, among other things, appear to have performed reconnaissance.

Although, given how little resistance the Martians encountered there would be very few commanders who could hold to that plan. Not doing so doesn't make the Martians stupid, but it does mean that they are not super-intelligent. I still think they were a bit arrogant, but not hugely so, I think it was just enough for the British colonialism allegory that Wells was going for.

Exactly how is what they actually did a flawed or unwise plan? "Being cautious" is not the same as "being smart." Indeed, you would expect a super-intelligent person to know precisely what degree of caution is actually warranted by a situation, and to make reasonable allowances for that, but then to NOT waste time and resources guarding against dangers that are unlikely to materialize.

So instead of wasting time on machines that may require fine tuning to work, they use machines they are confident will work, and then act to secure a REAL perimeter by destroying all enemies that can threaten their core territory.

I still am of the opinion that is an excessive gamble without recon capabilities. The fighting machines are single-creature vehicles, and dividing the attention of your soldiers is a bad idea.

Reconnaissance is routinely performed by single individuals flying airplanes, or driving vehicles, or riding a horse, or walking around on foot. That is not at all unusual, and in the history of warfare scouts have operated alone many, many times.

It would be even easier to operate alone in a scout vehicle, if the scout is virtually immune to enemy action, can easily outrun or outfight almost any combination of forces the enemy possesses, and can see the enemy coming for miles. All of which are generally true of a Martian tripod fighting late 19th century militaries.

For that matter, for all we know there is such a thing as a two-seater fighting machine. How would the narrator know? Why rule that possibility out?

I am aware that Shrapnel was the main type of shell at the time, I had assumed that they would have solid/HE shot sitting in armories somewhere even though they were not part of the standard combat load, the same way the US had WP rounds for the M60s' main guns lying around even though they were not part of the standard load out. However, Sea Skimmer knows a heal of a lot more than me, and the quotation from the book clearly states that it was a shell which destroyed the machine. The machines must have had truly thin armor, which I suppose makes some sense, but they seem designed to stop bullets, and how on Earth would they know how much human small arms can penetrate?

They could make reasonable estimates or projections, at least, if they know roughly how large humans are physically and what size weapons humans can carry, and given that they know roughly the level of technology Victorian civilization would have.

That said, the only time we see a shrapnel shell take down a Martian tripod, the shell bursts "clean in the face" of the tripod:

The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and glittering metal.

"Hit!" shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.

I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I could have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate device of metal whirling to destruction.

Either the shell happened to burst almost the instant before impact, in which case every single bit of shrapnel hits the Martian at maximum possible speed, maximizing the likelihood of at least some of the shrapnel penetrating or at least inflicting spallation damage on the inside...

OR the shell hit and exploded on impact (as opposed to just bouncing off blowing up later, or not detonating at all, which one would expect).

Then the hood of the tripod was blown off, very possibly by some kind of internal secondary explosion triggered by the initial damage.

Either way, this is a hit much more forceful than the Martians would normally expect from 19th century field guns, and a fighting machine armored to stop rifle bullets and lower-velocity shrapnel bullets might easily fall to such a hit.

I wasn't implying that the Martians needed to engage anything at long range, though they should have engaged the Thunderchild at long range, it's just that when accessing their capabilities range matters. If they can stand atop a mountain and shoot ship-sized targets accurately for 100 miles then the intelligent thing to do is different from what is intelligent if they must close to one mile or their heat rays will dissipate in the atmosphere.

True. That said, there are no mountains near London that would be high enough for them to use the heat ray for such great distances anyway.

A fair point, but they are not as fit for the purpose as a flying machine would be.

They are perfectly adequate for the purpose. At what point in the novel do the Martians ever actually suffer any noticeable inconvenience as a result of their having 'unfit' reconnaissance assets?

If an individual is preforming reconnaissance on his own then his attention is divided between recon, defense, navigation, and relaying information.

That happens all the time in real life anyway, and always has, so while it may not be ideal it is hardly a crippling problem. The Martians are short on manpower; exactly how many people are they supposed to commit to redundant missions?

I'm not satisfied with the explanation that they allowed the Thunderchild to close to ramming distance because they were under orders to only engage the Channel Fleet, it seems insane that they would be ordered to not defend themselves, they should have fired once the intent of the Thunderchild was clear.

Since Thunder Child did not fire on them, they may well not have realized they needed to defend themselves from it until got close enough that they could clearly see its guns and recognize it was trying to close to point-blank range.

The only other large self-propelled objects the Martians would have seen close up so far would be civilian trains and steamships, and none of those shot at it. They would probably be aware by now that the British had crewed fighting ships armed with heavy guns, but visually distinguishing ships from one another is not always easy, especially to an alien from another planet that has no oceans.

Although given that the heat rays are invisible it is possible that they did fire, but failed to melt the forward armor of the Thunderchild, and only destroyed her once they could aim at more vulnerable areas.

This is an interesting suggestion on your part.

I'm still not sure what they were doing there, if they are attempting to bring the Channel fleet to battle, well; the further out they get, the deeper the water becomes, the tripods get slower (and probably clumsier as well), and their range shortens.

Yes- but it is well within the capabilities of the 1898-era Channel Fleet to stay entirely out of range of Martians on shore. And indeed to shoot at Martians from ranges at which the Martians cannot even damage the hulls of the British ships, because the hulls of those ships are below the horizon. This is discussed in the thread I linked to, by the way.

So the Martians cannot realistically engage the Channel Fleet without the fleet's permission... unless they at least try to wade out into the sea. This may not be a great idea, but it at least merits being tried. And there is no other obvious explanation for what the Martians are even doing wading into the ocean. If as you say it puts them at risk and removes their advantages, why would they bother doing it, if there is no specific mission that demands that they do so?

Because the Martians' heat-rays cannot reliably sink ships at very long range, heavy naval guns shelling the approaches to a port make it hazardous for the tripods to approach. To get close enough to control that territory rather than simply harass the occupants, they need to be within a few miles of the port- which puts them in naval artillery range.

All you need to do is get close enough to wreck the docks, and especially their machinery, and possibly destroy any attempt to land reinforcements, that does not require you to be at the docks or destroy shipping of any kind. Placing the docks under your guns in sufficient for control, in fact a single machine can probably run between multiple docks and control them all.

The Channel Fleet's guns have a maximum range of ten thousand yards or more. A Martian standing close enough to a port facility that it can reliably use heat rays to sink ships in the port, or otherwise prevent the port from being used, is very likely to be within effective range of British battleship guns.

I'm not denying that an island beachhead is appealing. However, an island beachhead only makes since if you are expecting reinforcements and you need to secure a base area. For those purposes, Japan would be a better choice. But the best choice would be the Yukon where they would not be noticed for months, no significant military force exists, and the environment has to be closer to that of Mars than wet, temperate England.
There the Martians can build up as much force as they want, while testing their gear, and learning that microbes exist, all unmolested aside from the occasional mountain man.

If the Martians are only trying to secure a beachhead, this is true. On the other hand, if the Martians have multiple goals, it is not so simple.

1) Have a defensible beachhead.
2) Have a tolerable climate that supports Martian life such as the Red Weed.
3) Have a native population of animal life (including humans) that can reliably be used for food. This tends to exclude certain remote territories like the Yukon.
4) Have whatever material resources the Martians need for industry. Since they can't know in advance where the minerals ARE by direct observation, this suggests that they target an already-industrialized area of the planet.

The Yukon fails (3) and (4) and possibly (2).

The continental United States fails (1), and given that its territory is widely dispersed it might also fail (4) in that the resources the Martians need might not be right there beside their landing site.

Japan passes all tests adequately, but did not have been a good choice for (4). Moreover, Japan did not industrialize until the last few decades immediately prior to Martian invasion, so the Martians might not have been sure it had adequate industry and resources. For all we know, the Martians flipped a coin, and decided to attack Britain rather than Japan.

However, you still have the issue of the Martians not having the ability to cross the water (at least initially) while the humans can...

The Martians have no experience with sea travel. They may overestimate the effectiveness of broad water as a barrier to movement. They certainly won't view water as easing movement, the way someone experienced with the history of sea power on Earth would. Moreover, the Martians clearly have effective flying machines or the ability to make them- they just don't have them immediately. And in the immediate short term it simply does not matter whether the Martians can cross water barriers. They don't need to, because they're too busy securing the area on land immediately around the landing zone.

and mainland Europe would probably look like the second most industrialized place in the world overall from Mars, so landing in Britain opens up your landing force as a target.

The Martians may well be confident that they can build up and secure a defensible perimeter faster than the combined militaries of Europe can build up a force to retake the British Isles. From what we see in the novel, I have no reason to doubt their judgment in this matter.

It seems like all they should know is that Earth is green and fertile and that her people have electric lights, but then they have vehicles just armored enough to resist human small arms, but not enough to resist cannon. If they are going in completely blind then landing in Britain seems like arrogance and hubris, but if they know the vague capabilities of the British army then it seems far more reasonable to wreck one of your main opponents.

[/quote]Exactly.

[Titan Uranus]

They clearly were. The point is that while they were arrogant, they pursued a competent and effective strategy which indicates they had a fairly well thought out plan of action.

I agree that they were arrogant, my initial idea of them being either extremely arrogant or actually stupid was based on my clearly deficient memory of the book. I think that we agree on them being arrogant but competent.

Why not? The only other explanation is that they were trying to slaughter shipping- but they do not fire on the shipping with their heat rays from long range, or for that matter at all. There is no mention in the chapter of any civilian vessel being sunk or damaged by Martian fire, or gassed by the black smoke.

I explained why further down, but I'll respond up here. I don't know what they were intending to do in the channel, I just have problems with the explanation that they were there to engage the channel fleet.
Perhaps they were there to observe the ships with an eye toward duplicating them, modifying them into designs useful to the martians, or assessing their capabilities, using three tripods to get a view from multiple angles and so that they were close enough to get a good view of the ships (as well as for protection). That's actually a decent reason for not firing on the Thunderchild until she got close.
"Yeah command, they're just comin' right at us, we're getting some really good video here."
"Uhh, command, the water machine ain't stopping... requesting permission to fire"
*Tripods fire, but fail to melt the armor in time*
*enraged screams, then crazed screams, then static*

Yes- but it is well within the capabilities of the 1898-era Channel Fleet to stay entirely out of range of Martians on shore. And indeed to shoot at Martians from ranges at which the Martians cannot even damage the hulls of the British ships, because the hulls of those ships are below the horizon. This is discussed in the thread I linked to, by the way.

So the Martians cannot realistically engage the Channel Fleet without the fleet's permission... unless they at least try to wade out into the sea. This may not be a great idea, but it at least merits being tried. And there is no other obvious explanation for what the Martians are even doing wading into the ocean. If as you say it puts them at risk and removes their advantages, why would they bother doing it, if there is no specific mission that demands that they do so?

I'm not sure that the Channel Fleet can actually do that, the walkers are presumably 100 ft tall, from the book (though that could be inaccurate considering the sources). The heat ray is mounted below the cockpit, so let's say that the ray is 80 ft high, that gives an 11 mile view distance. If they can find a 100 ft high hill to stand upon, then the view distance is 16.4 miles, the range of the Canopus-class battleship's main guns (the newest BB class at the time, as far as I can tell) is listed as 10,000 yards (5.6 miles) by the wiki. So if they were out there to engage the Channel Fleet then their effective range must be less than line of sight and less than ~5.6 miles. It's possible of course that the maximum range was much longer than the effective range, but I doubt it was twice as long.
Since wading out to engage the fleet implies a shorter range than the fleet, I think it is more likely (if we assume a shorter range) that they Tripods were there to observe the ships as they left the Thames. That way they could get an idea of whether or not they could close with the Channel Fleet despite the tripod's slower speed in water. What do you think?

But an airship moves slowly through the air (about as fast as a tripod can walk). And it would have a huge vulnerable gas-bag and would be very easily shot down by even the crudest of artillery. Moreover, Earth has highly energetic weather, probably more energetic than Mars, and an airship would be vulnerable to destruction in storms, which the Martians would know are possible without having any experience in how to deal with them.

If you have telescopes that can provide significant intelligence, then you probably have good enough optics that you can park the airship which really doesn't need to be that big) at 20000ft, or however high or low you want, 1800's artillery cannot reach very high even if they have mounts which can aim that high. But that again gets into the question of how much they actually knew about the Earth. As far as I can figure, they know that the Earthlings have electricity, but not radio.
In the WotW universe, I'm fairly sure that Mars used to be a green planet, though I suppose that would be very difficult for the Narrator to actually know. Also, it's habitable by creatures that can inhabit Earth, so presumably the atmosphere can't be too much different unless it has a hell of a lot of oxygen, enough that I am almost certain that they would't develop heat rays into their most viable weapon. Though perhaps they would, and just deal with the resulting conflagration, that seems counterproductive on a dying planet but it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility, especially if they were not used by collective agreement, like tactical nukes.
In any case, I bet the Martian atmosphere has storms in the WotW universe.

If the Martians weren't being arrogant about unknown environmental hazards on Earth, and weren't blind to the possibility of the British having the ability to fight back meaningfully... They would not seriously consider bringing a lighter-than-air airship to use on Earth. Not when such an airship would have a great deal of bulk that could be committed to fighting machines or to sending more Martians in the cylinders.

Why? I know that I said airship, and that gives the image of a gigantic contraption, but all that is really needed is a vehicle the size of a hot air balloon with an engine of some type, which given their ignorance of the wheel would presumably have to be a jet or rocket engine, probably jet. Though it's possible that they do have the wheel, and only their fighting machines lack it, the flying machine was incomplete and if anything was going to be declared a state secret after the war it would be that, so the Narrator might not have gotten a chance to examine it.
Wait a second, the cylinder unscrewed, right? That means lathes, and lathes mean wheels, unless they used some other means to create the lid. How on earth do you create a cylinder as a technical society without creating wheels?

Even if the Martians had breathing apparatus as a precaution (I would bring some with me), they may have discarded it when they realized that Earth's atmosphere contained no chemical toxins. They were of course blind to the possibility of biological infection, since there is no such thing in their biology.

Yeah, but it would have been discovered in the Cylinders after the war. It is unthinkable that they wouldn't bring any, unless they had way more knowledge about Earth than we had assumed. The point is that either the Narrator was incomplete in his information (odd, since it would fit with the narrative both he and Wells were selling "if only they's kept their breathing apparatus on we would have been doomed", I wouldn't agree with that assessment but it seems like something he would say) or the Martians had way more knowledge about Earth/were way more reckless than I would assume.

Their reconnaissance was totally adequate to their needs, Uranus.

Their enemies' reconnaissance was literally horse cavalry. Whereas their reconnaissance could be performed by armored fighting vehicles too powerful for the enemy to even threaten except from fixed defenses, moving at the same speeds we would use for land-based reconnaissance in real life, and able to see the surrounding terrain for several miles in all directions because of their great height.

Yes, but they had no reason to think that until after they started engaging the British Army, they could not have possibly known that the British did not have tank-equivalents until they engaged them, not to mention that an airship would have allowed the Martians to see over obstacles while allowing their commander to get a good look at all of their forces and better coordinate them. I have no real idea how well forested South East England was in 1898 or how hilly it is, but I bet there are enough obstacles to make it difficult to command dozens of machines over miles of terrain.

Exactly how do you think the Martians were in any way threatened or inconvenienced by their 'deficient' recon capabilities?

In the actual event, not at all, but since their only information is from presumably Mars-based telescopes and all they would tell you is that the Earth is somewhere between electricity and the radio in technological advancement, and you are dropping into an industrialized area with unknown numbers of unknown hostiles wielding unknown weapons, I would sure as fuck want to look around before going into a decisive action.

Bear in mind that by all evidence, they had some degree of space-based reconnaissance to know the lay of the surrounding terrain (either probes or satellites or just really big ground-based telescopes). We can infer this because the Martians specifically chose to invade Britain. For one, this suggests they knew Britain was a highly industrialized target they'd want to disable and defeat quickly. For another, it suggests their maps of Earth were precise enough that they could confidently launch cylinders at Britain without being worried that if they "missed" the capsules would fall into the ocean.

Surely their information must come from Mars-based telescopes (I bet Olympus Mons has a hell of a good view)? Is it even physically possible to shoot a satellite out of a gun and have it achieve orbit around another world without rockets to change trajectory? And if you have rockets, why on earth would you use a gun for interplanetary expeditions?

Why would this be preferable to, or for that matter different from, what the Martians actually did? They deployed their fighting machines, they drove away the native population for miles around the area they initially landed in, and then they started operations to construct flying machines that, among other things, appear to have performed reconnaissance.

It isn't, only that the Martians did not wait for their flying machines to be ready before launching a serious offensive. As it was they had no way of knowing what the British had beyond their immediate area, they could have been fighting militia or police for all they knew. Again, I'm not arguing that attacking makes them stupid, just arrogant in a completely understandable way.

Exactly how is what they actually did a flawed or unwise plan? "Being cautious" is not the same as "being smart." Indeed, you would expect a super-intelligent person to know precisely what degree of caution is actually warranted by a situation, and to make reasonable allowances for that, but then to NOT waste time and resources guarding against dangers that are unlikely to materialize.

Sure, but I was assuming that all they know is that humans are industrialized, have electricity, and do not have radio. That is not enough to make predictions when 1918 Britain would have given them a really hard time.

Reconnaissance is routinely performed by single individuals flying airplanes, or driving vehicles, or riding a horse, or walking around on foot. That is not at all unusual, and in the history of warfare scouts have operated alone many, many times.

Yes, but the optimal configuration for a fighting vehicle and the optimal configuration for a scouting vehicle are not the same.

It would be even easier to operate alone in a scout vehicle, if the scout is virtually immune to enemy action, can easily outrun or outfight almost any combination of forces the enemy possesses, and can see the enemy coming for miles. All of which are generally true of a Martian tripod fighting a late 19th century military.

But the Martians do not know that until they engage the army, and are certain that they are actually engaging the army.

For that matter, for all we know there is such a thing as a two-seater fighting machine. How would the narrator know? Why rule that possibility out?

They would know after the war, but yes, it is entirely possible that he would not tell his audience.

They could make reasonable estimates or projections, at least, if they know roughly how large humans are physically and what size weapons humans can carry, and given that they know roughly the level of technology Victorian civilization would have.

But how would they know how large humans are, you can't tell that from Mars, or even orbit, right?
That said, the only time we see a shrapnel shell take down a Martian tripod, the shell bursts "clean in the face" of the tripod:

Either way, this is a hit much more forceful than the Martians would normally expect from 19th century field guns, and a fighting machine armored to stop rifle bullets and lower-velocity shrapnel bullets might easily fall to such a hit.

Yes, but they wouldn't know how powerful Victorian cannon were. How can you possibly tell the muzzle velocity of a cannon from Mars or orbit? A cannon of the same type, optimized for HE (which probably would have happened had there been a major European war in the 1890's) might well have had no difficulty penetrating. If engine technology were a little better during that hypothetical war, you might well have wound up with AT rifles, which might have penetrated just fine.

They are perfectly adequate for the purpose. At what point in the novel do the Martians ever actually suffer any noticeable inconvenience as a result of their having 'unfit' reconnaissance assets?

See above, they don't, but they had no way of knowing that going in.

If an individual is preforming reconnaissance on his own then his attention is divided between recon, defense, navigation, and relaying information.

That happens all the time in real life anyway, and always has, so while it may not be ideal it is hardly a crippling problem. The Martians are short on manpower; exactly how many people are they supposed to commit to redundant missions?

Since Thunder Child did not fire on them, they may well not have realized they needed to defend themselves from it until got close enough that they could clearly see its guns and recognize it was trying to close to point-blank range.
The only other large self-propelled objects the Martians would have seen close up so far would be civilian trains and steamships, and none of those shot at it. They would probably be aware by now that the British had crewed fighting ships armed with heavy guns, but visually distinguishing ships from one another is not always easy, especially to an alien from another planet that has no oceans.

The relatively light armament of the Thunderchild would make identification harder, though depending on what the front looked like, that might not speak too well of their optics.

The Channel Fleet's guns have a maximum range of ten thousand yards or more. A Martian standing close enough to a port facility that it can reliably use heat rays to sink ships in the port, or otherwise prevent the port from being used, is very likely to be within effective range of British battleship guns.

The horizon is 11 miles away at 80 feet, so that's only true if the heat ray is limited by Earth's atmosphere. If so, I would need to check the depth of the British coastline, but that would give us a lower limit for their heat ray's range.

If the Martians are only trying to secure a beachhead, this is true. On the other hand, if the Martians have multiple goals, it is not so simple.

1) Have a defensible beachhead.
2) Have a tolerable climate that supports Martian life such as the Red Weed.
3) Have a native population of animal life (including humans) that can reliably be used for food. This tends to exclude certain remote territories like the Yukon.
4) Have whatever material resources the Martians need for industry. Since they can't know in advance where the minerals ARE by direct observation, this suggests that they target an already-industrialized area of the planet.

The Yukon fails (3) and (4) and possibly (2).

The continental United States fails (1), and given that its territory is widely dispersed it might also fail (4) in that the resources the Martians need might not be right there beside their landing site.

I hadn't considered foodstuffs, but it seems like hunting would be fairly easy with a laser from 80ft up, I suppose it depends on their calorie needs. Though really, there are plenty of remote places where they would be undisturbed for months.
But I don't see why they can't build up in the Yukon/Upper Canada/insert remote area reasonably close to industry and start their blitzkrieg a few months later when their follow-on forces land in the NW US or the Rhineland. However, the possibility does exist that they needed something industrial immediately, like fuel. They would presumably know that there is fossil fuel usage. If they did need fuel, then hitting Britain first makes good sense, though I'm not sure how they planned to extract/synthesize/whatever enough of it with their initial landing force.

Japan passes all tests adequately, but did not have been a good choice for (4). Moreover, Japan did not industrialize until the last few decades immediately prior to Martian invasion, so the Martians might not have been sure it had adequate industry and resources. For all we know, the Martians flipped a coin, and decided to attack Britain rather than Japan.

Yes, if they needed human industry then Britain makes perfect sense.

The Martians have no experience with sea travel. They may overestimate the effectiveness of broad water as a barrier to movement. They certainly won't view water as easing movement, the way someone experienced with the history of sea power on Earth would. Moreover, the Martians clearly have effective flying machines or the ability to make them- they just don't have them immediately. And in the immediate short term it simply does not matter whether the Martians can cross water barriers. They don't need to, because they're too busy securing the area on land immediately around the landing zone.

The Martians have canals, and presumably at one point liquid seas, like our Mars. Unless they don't have canal boats for some reason, I think they would see water as an aid to movement.
It didn't matter in the book, because the humans were so clearly outmatched and divided. For all they knew, Europe was a united empire with a 1918 army that would have swarmed across the channel by the millions as soon as the Martians landed.

The Martians may well be confident that they can build up and secure a defensible perimeter faster than the combined militaries of Europe can build up a force to retake the British Isles. From what we see in the novel, I have no reason to doubt their judgment in this matter.

But I can't think of any reason why they should know that from the beginning.

It seems like all they should know is that Earth is green and fertile and that her people have electric lights, but then they have vehicles just armored enough to resist human small arms, but not enough to resist cannon. If they are going in completely blind then landing in Britain seems like arrogance and hubris, but if they know the vague capabilities of the British army then it seems far more reasonable to wreck one of your main opponents.

Exactly.

I'm glad you agree, but I can't think of any means by which they would do that.

[Simon_Jester]

I explained why further down, but I'll respond up here. I don't know what they were intending to do in the channel, I just have problems with the explanation that they were there to engage the channel fleet.
Perhaps they were there to observe the ships with an eye toward duplicating them, modifying them into designs useful to the martians, or assessing their capabilities, using three tripods to get a view from multiple angles and so that they were close enough to get a good view of the ships (as well as for protection). That's actually a decent reason for not firing on the Thunderchild until she got close.
"Yeah command, they're just comin' right at us, we're getting some really good video here."
"Uhh, command, the water machine ain't stopping... requesting permission to fire"
*Tripods fire, but fail to melt the armor in time*
*enraged screams, then crazed screams, then static*

Okay, that actually makes a fair amount of sense.

I'm not sure that the Channel Fleet can actually do that, the walkers are presumably 100 ft tall, from the book (though that could be inaccurate considering the sources). The heat ray is mounted below the cockpit, so let's say that the ray is 80 ft high, that gives an 11 mile view distance.

This depends heavily on the height of the tripods. If they are less than 100 feet tall, their range decreases significantly. Since we don't get a precise measurement, only information from newspaper articles that are themselves inaccurate even in-story, it's hard to say.

If they can find a 100 ft high hill to stand upon, then the view distance is 16.4 miles, the range of the Canopus-class battleship's main guns (the newest BB class at the time, as far as I can tell) is listed as 10,000 yards (5.6 miles) by the wiki. So if they were out there to engage the Channel Fleet then their effective range must be less than line of sight and less than ~5.6 miles. It's possible of course that the maximum range was much longer than the effective range, but I doubt it was twice as long.

Given the lay of the coastline in the area in question, it is very possible that the Martians can't find hills that high to stand on. Not if the shoreline doesn't permit it, or if the hills of that height are all too far from the sea for it to be beneficial.

Also, the atmosphere may cause attenuation of the heat ray at ranges considerably less than five to ten miles. In real life the US Navy is having considerable trouble implementing laser weaponry, precisely because when laser weapons are fired through sea air, the high humidity and spray tends to attenuate the beam. Since all evidence suggests that the heat ray is a laser-like weapon, it may be stopped by the moist air, or they may be scattered to the point where they are unlikely to cut through the armored side of a warship in a reasonable amount of time.

Yet another possibility is that the Martians sent out three tripods to assess the depth of the water, which they could not realistically know, in order to figure out whether or not engaging the fleet would be practical. Which ties into you saying...

Since wading out to engage the fleet implies a shorter range than the fleet, I think it is more likely (if we assume a shorter range) that they Tripods were there to observe the ships as they left the Thames. That way they could get an idea of whether or not they could close with the Channel Fleet despite the tripod's slower speed in water. What do you think?

This is credible. I think we are in or near agreement.

I still think it believable that the Martians who waded out into the Channel were moving to engage the Channel Fleet or at least seek a practical firing position from which to do so. However, it is also plausible that they were simply observing the shipping itself and were therefore caught by surprise when one of the ships suddenly attacked them with deadly force.

The key point is that the author's supposition that they were there to slaughter the civilian shipping is not believable. If they were able to do so, they would have already started by firing heat-rays from long range... unless of course the heat-ray is much shorter-ranged than we have been led to believe, even shorter than I believe.

But an airship moves slowly through the air (about as fast as a tripod can walk). And it would have a huge vulnerable gas-bag and would be very easily shot down by even the crudest of artillery. Moreover, Earth has highly energetic weather, probably more energetic than Mars, and an airship would be vulnerable to destruction in storms, which the Martians would know are possible without having any experience in how to deal with them.

If you have telescopes that can provide significant intelligence, then you probably have good enough optics that you can park the airship which really doesn't need to be that big) at 20000ft, or however high or low you want, 1800's artillery cannot reach very high even if they have mounts which can aim that high. But that again gets into the question of how much they actually knew about the Earth. As far as I can figure, they know that the Earthlings have electricity, but not radio.

I'm sure the Martians could have designed a high altitude lighter-than-air craft that would be able to function on Earth.

The point is that while they could do so, the benefits of them sending such ships along in their cylinders are doubtful. We have indications that each cylinder is only large enough to contain five fighting machines. If so, then sending along even one airship might significantly decrease their overall fighting machine force. And it is unlikely that the aerial reconnaissance thus provided, for the few days before they get their first flying machine ready, would make a significant difference.

This is important. Within mere days of their landing, Martian flying machines are already in the air. There is no evidence that they could have done much better than this by any reasonable means. There is no evidence that they could have somehow benefited greatly from bringing flying machines of a different type, or having them ready significantly before they did.

As far as I am concerned, this entire notion of Martians somehow having "weak" reconnaissance and having erred in not bringing more or different flying machines is a random brainbug that makes very little sense.

In the WotW universe, I'm fairly sure that Mars used to be a green planet, though I suppose that would be very difficult for the Narrator to actually know. Also, it's habitable by creatures that can inhabit Earth, so presumably the atmosphere can't be too much different unless it has a hell of a lot of oxygen, enough that I am almost certain that they would't develop heat rays into their most viable weapon. Though perhaps they would, and just deal with the resulting conflagration, that seems counterproductive on a dying planet but it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility, especially if they were not used by collective agreement, like tactical nukes.

In any case, I bet the Martian atmosphere has storms in the WotW universe.

Since Mars is canonically much colder and dryer, and receives less energy from the Sun, while it no doubt has storms, it is likely that these storms are less energetic than on Earth. On Earth, some of the main drivers of storm dynamics are:

1) Massive bodies of warm seawater (this is the main reason for hurricanes, for instance)
2) The difference in albedo between seawater and land causing difference in temperature.
3) Moisture in the air interacting with other variations of temperature and pressure.
4) Oceans acting as large, mostly flat areas where storm systems can build up energy without losing much of it to friction with terrain features.

None of this is in play on Mars.

On a cold desert planet, storms would still happen, and dust storms could be quite dangerous. But they would tend to be rarer and weaker than on Earth, all else being equal.

Moreover, my POINT here is that Martian scientists would know Earth has clouds (which you literally cannot miss if you're looking at the Earth) and probably storms. But they would not know much about the real atmospheric conditions, and would not have experience dealing with Earthly storms that are rich in rain and hail and lightning (they might well know about lightning since lightning creates radio signature).

So they may well just plain not know if it would be safe to operate flying machines on Earth without going there and trying it for themselves.

If the Martians weren't being arrogant about unknown environmental hazards on Earth, and weren't blind to the possibility of the British having the ability to fight back meaningfully... They would not seriously consider bringing a lighter-than-air airship to use on Earth. Not when such an airship would have a great deal of bulk that could be committed to fighting machines or to sending more Martians in the cylinders.

Why? I know that I said airship, and that gives the image of a gigantic contraption, but all that is really needed is a vehicle the size of a hot air balloon with an engine of some type, which given their ignorance of the wheel would presumably have to be a jet or rocket engine, probably jet.

The practical minimum size for a rigid airship capable of acting as a useful observation craft is still significant. They might be able to build an extremely tiny tethered balloon or something and fit it into a corner of one of their cylinders, but this would again be of very, very doubtful and limited value.

In fact, as far as I can determine this hypothetical Martian blimp/airship/whatever is still a solution in search of a problem.

Though it's possible that they do have the wheel, and only their fighting machines lack it, the flying machine was incomplete and if anything was going to be declared a state secret after the war it would be that, so the Narrator might not have gotten a chance to examine it.
Wait a second, the cylinder unscrewed, right? That means lathes, and lathes mean wheels, unless they used some other means to create the lid. How on earth do you create a cylinder as a technical society without creating wheels?

We are told in detail that the Martian technology on Earth makes little use of "fixed pivots" as well as wheels. The question of how they create a cylindrical spacecraft without wheels is uncertain- but we DO know they have a variety of means of creating fixed sliding joints that duplicate many of the functions of wheels. I wouldn't get too hung up on it.

Yeah, but it would have been discovered in the Cylinders after the war. It is unthinkable that they wouldn't bring any, unless they had way more knowledge about Earth than we had assumed. The point is that either the Narrator was incomplete in his information (odd, since it would fit with the narrative both he and Wells were selling "if only they's kept their breathing apparatus on we would have been doomed", I wouldn't agree with that assessment but it seems like something he would say) or the Martians had way more knowledge about Earth/were way more reckless than I would assume.

That's a fair point, and it suggests that the Martians did in fact know that Earth's atmosphere would be breathable to them.

That said, my original point wasn't that the Martians couldn't be sure our atmosphere was breathable. It's that they couldn't be sure there wasn't some quirk of our atmosphere that would impair their ability to operate flying machines.
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Their reconnaissance was totally adequate to their needs, Uranus.

Their enemies' reconnaissance was literally horse cavalry. Whereas their reconnaissance could be performed by armored fighting vehicles too powerful for the enemy to even threaten except from fixed defenses, moving at the same speeds we would use for land-based reconnaissance in real life, and able to see the surrounding terrain for several miles in all directions because of their great height.

Yes, but they had no reason to think that until after they started engaging the British Army, they could not have possibly known that the British did not have tank-equivalents until they engaged them, not to mention that an airship would have allowed the Martians to see over obstacles while allowing their commander to get a good look at all of their forces and better coordinate them. I have no real idea how well forested South East England was in 1898 or how hilly it is, but I bet there are enough obstacles to make it difficult to command dozens of machines over miles of terrain.

Not very forested or hilly at all, really. The English countryside was dominated by farms and low-lying second growth forest, with little or no 'untamed wilderness.'

It's uncertain if the Martians had radios (we know they used a sound-based system to communicate, and there's no obvious reason why they should bother with one if they have radios, but there may be a reason that is NOT obvious to us). But again, the Martians seemed to have no difficulty coordinating their forces well enough to meet their needs in the novel.

The Martians could reasonably have been worried that the British would have some kind of primitive tanks or antitank guns of their own, yes- but if they had such military hardware it is also very much possible that they would have at least primitive fighter aircraft capable of shooting down a blimp. The problem cuts both ways; if a Martian tripod is inadequate to defeat the British on the ground, a small blimp isn't going to do a lot of good in fighting them in the air.

Exactly how do you think the Martians were in any way threatened or inconvenienced by their 'deficient' recon capabilities?

In the actual event, not at all, but since their only information is from presumably Mars-based telescopes and all they would tell you is that the Earth is somewhere between electricity and the radio in technological advancement, and you are dropping into an industrialized area with unknown numbers of unknown hostiles wielding unknown weapons, I would sure as fuck want to look around before going into a decisive action.

They're committed to decisive action as soon as they land- it's not like they can leave if anything goes wrong. Their options are either to conquer, or to surrender. And if the locals turn out to be too tough to conquer, then Mars can't colonize Earth, and it matters very little whether the lead wave of the Martian expedition lives or dies. Because either way, the expedition cannot go home, and Martian civilization is doomed unless the Venus colonization project works out.

So anything that reduces the likelihood of successful conquest (like, say, sacrificing 10 or 20% of their overall tripod force in exchange for a few blimps that may not even be safe to use in the local atmosphere)... That is a bad idea.

Surely their information must come from Mars-based telescopes (I bet Olympus Mons has a hell of a good view)? Is it even physically possible to shoot a satellite out of a gun and have it achieve orbit around another world without rockets to change trajectory? And if you have rockets, why on earth would you use a gun for interplanetary expeditions?

If the Martian atmosphere is low enough in density, and if they can get the muzzle high enough into the atmosphere, a gun might well be more efficient. There's a reason people are suggesting mass drivers for payload launch in real life (especially as a way to launch from the Moon and Mars).

They might well be able to build small rockets to decelerate a spacecraft, but find a gun preferable for launching large payloads.

For that matter, if the capsules are purely ballistic then the whole trip is arguably suicide, because they have no ability to make mid-course corrections. Firing a gun accurately enough to hit a specific target on Earth is theoretically possible, but even the tiniest error could result in the cylinder crashing into the ocean or missing the planet altogether. It makes much more sense to imagine that they have rockets with enough delta-V to at least ensure that the Martian cylinders land in the right place, in which case braking an observation satellite into a stable Earth orbit is also viable.

Why would this be preferable to, or for that matter different from, what the Martians actually did? They deployed their fighting machines, they drove away the native population for miles around the area they initially landed in, and then they started operations to construct flying machines that, among other things, appear to have performed reconnaissance.

It isn't, only that the Martians did not wait for their flying machines to be ready before launching a serious offensive. As it was they had no way of knowing what the British had beyond their immediate area, they could have been fighting militia or police for all they knew. Again, I'm not arguing that attacking makes them stupid, just arrogant in a completely understandable way.

To secure an area of the size you envision (tens of miles across) would have required a "serious offensive." Moreover, as noted, this is a do-or-die operation for the Martians. They cannot go home, their only choices are surrender or conquest. They can't actually do anything different if the British turn out to have much stronger army units in reserve ready to attack them after a few days. Their only hope is to spread out across Britain as widely as possible, cause as much disruption and mass panic and turn the population into refugees, so that mounting an organized counterattack is impossible.

Staying bottled up in a small beachhead for a few days while waiting for reconnaissance reports does NOT make it less likely that the British government will be able to organize a successful counterattack. If anything it makes it more likely.

Exactly how is what they actually did a flawed or unwise plan? "Being cautious" is not the same as "being smart." Indeed, you would expect a super-intelligent person to know precisely what degree of caution is actually warranted by a situation, and to make reasonable allowances for that, but then to NOT waste time and resources guarding against dangers that are unlikely to materialize.

Sure, but I was assuming that all they know is that humans are industrialized, have electricity, and do not have radio. That is not enough to make predictions when 1918 Britain would have given them a really hard time.

1918 Britain would have been more dangerous to the Martians not so much because of their better technology, but because of their higher level of military mobilization. Even with limited information, the Martians may well have been able to deduce that Britain was NOT a heavily mobilized society with large armies 'ready to go' on short notice.

Indeed, that would actually have been a good reason to target Britain in the first place. All the continental European powers of this time had conscript armies, most of them equipped with larger and more modern arsenals of artillery. They would have been able to dispatch more troops more quickly and efficiently to react to Martian attack. Britain had much weaker land defenses, precisely because it was used to relying on its navy to protect it from invasion.

Reconnaissance is routinely performed by single individuals flying airplanes, or driving vehicles, or riding a horse, or walking around on foot. That is not at all unusual, and in the history of warfare scouts have operated alone many, many times.

Yes, but the optimal configuration for a fighting vehicle and the optimal configuration for a scouting vehicle are not the same.

So what? When you are limited to ten cylinders each containing five vehicles, and you have an island with a population of tens of millions and a land area of tens of thousands of square miles to conquer, it does not matter. If you can send fifty effective combat machines, and those machines are at least adequate reconnaissance vehicles, then you do not waste time fooling around and creating reconnaissance vehicles that cannot perform as well in a fight. You send in the fifty machines, because it is hard enough conquering an island of tens of millions with so few vehicles WITHOUT screwing around and wasting space, resources, and energy.

They could make reasonable estimates or projections, at least, if they know roughly how large humans are physically and what size weapons humans can carry, and given that they know roughly the level of technology Victorian civilization would have.

But how would they know how large humans are, you can't tell that from Mars, or even orbit, right?

With very good telescopes they can see our buildings, or potentially even our wagons and other vehicles, and get a pretty good idea of how large we are. Their ideas might turn out to be wrong, but it wouldn't be very likely.

Yes, but they wouldn't know how powerful Victorian cannon were. How can you possibly tell the muzzle velocity of a cannon from Mars or orbit? A cannon of the same type, optimized for HE (which probably would have happened had there been a major European war in the 1890's) might well have had no difficulty penetrating. If engine technology were a little better during that hypothetical war, you might well have wound up with AT rifles, which might have penetrated just fine.

That's a plausible risk, but armoring the machines well enough to be immune to direct hits from 3" exploding shells, or .50 caliber rifles may have been impractical given the constraints of being able to launch them through interplanetary space.

If it turned out that the natives were actually capable of defeating a force of fifty tripods that moved quickly to dismantle their communications and transport networks, too bad. If they can do that, then the whole invasion is very likely to be pointless, and they're screwed and doomed anyway.

So they do the best they could with the considerable resources at their disposal, construct a good plan to make the best of what they have, and then go, launching their attack as quickly as possible before humans grow any more advanced and capable of repelling the invasion. Delay does not benefit them here, since as you keep pointing out it would not have taken much more technological development or social change to make humans capable of defeating Martian armies.

The relatively light armament of the Thunderchild would make identification harder, though depending on what the front looked like, that might not speak too well of their optics.

They may also have had optics trouble caused by dealing with wave action buffeting their tripods, as well as sea spray. Those are environmental conditions they would have no experience with.

But I don't see why they can't build up in the Yukon/Upper Canada/insert remote area reasonably close to industry and start their blitzkrieg a few months later when their follow-on forces land in the NW US or the Rhineland. However, the possibility does exist that they needed something industrial immediately, like fuel. They would presumably know that there is fossil fuel usage. If they did need fuel, then hitting Britain first makes good sense, though I'm not sure how they planned to extract/synthesize/whatever enough of it with their initial landing force.

None of the areas you name are particularly close to large industrial centers. The American northwest was not a large industrial center in the 1890s, and what industry there was had been built too recently to have played a role in long range Martian planning. The Rhineland is the heart of Europe's industrial areas, so why are you even mentioning it?

It seems far more likely that the Martians were planning to make use of immediately available resources; it may well have been that they brought industrial machinery for those purposes in their cylinders. We know the Martians had machines of types other than the pure 'fighting machines,' including the "crab-like handling machine," and we never do find a full, exhaustive list of the types of equipment they have available to them.

The Martians have canals, and presumably at one point liquid seas, like our Mars. Unless they don't have canal boats for some reason, I think they would see water as an aid to movement.

Even if they have experience using artificial canals for boats, that's not the same as being able to comprehend the tremendous advantages of flexibility and mobility that sea power confers.

Also, Martian canals would have been used for moving water for consumption and irrigation, not for transportation (unless of course they like having people boat in their drinking water). In the recent history of their civilization, and thus in the history that informs the mindset of their planners, a gigantic body of water would not seem like an obvious path for enemy forces to move along. It would seem like a barrier.

We know this because this psychology influenced (for example) historical planners of wars in France and Germany, who had far greater knowledge of sailing, ships, and sea power than any Martian, even a Martian who had observed earth extensively.

It didn't matter in the book, because the humans were so clearly outmatched and divided. For all they knew, Europe was a united empire with a 1918 army that would have swarmed across the channel by the millions as soon as the Martians landed.

If that were so then they were doomed anyway and nothing they could do would help. Invading with ten or a hundred times as much force would then have been necessary- but an invasion in such huge force would in turn have taken decades longer to prepare, during which time Martian climate would have gotten worse and human power to resist would have increased, causing a further vicious cycle and making Martian victory nearly impossible.

Striking quickly with a strong but limited force may well have been their best strategy... but in that case all their choices about how to equip that force would be driven by the need to maximize its chances of success against a vastly more numerous force.