LibriumArcana.Games

I've talked to a few of you on Skype about this, but a conversation with Frigid prompted me to type out my notes so far. Instead of PM'ing just him regarding this, I figured I'd type all this out here. Frigid, I am still very interested in your responses to this in particular, but the rest of you are are quite welcome to jump in.

The scenario so far:
- a relatively small alien force locates one of the Voyager probes back to Earth, with intentions of exploit Earth's resources, and taking a certain number of humans as menial slave labor.
- Alien forces include a cruiser with four shuttles, and approximately 1500 able bodied troops - 500 of which are the ground troops.
- the aliens arrive at Earth, destroy all communication & GPS satellites in orbit, and strike the major leadership centers of each nation.
- finally, the alien invaders broadcast a message to Earth, telling humans to basically pack up and get ready to be meek, mild-mannered servants for all surviving generations, a process will start shortly.

In response, military leaders convene, and decide to create a global military response force, drafting SEALS, Spetznas, and other special forces as the backbone of such a force, supplemented by supply and fire support as a combined effort of all nations.

I want this to then go to a more or less XCOM-ish setup (except without being restricted to just small teams on a mission, and with resources of all major nations of Earth at their disposal), because the aliens actually don't have a large number of troops at the outset - only a cruiser, and several shuttles capable of transorbital speeds. The cruiser sets down on Luna (Earth's moon) to study strange artifacts by another alien civilization, and to create a home base from which to clone and build troops.

My apologies for odd issues with capitalization and spelling, as I'm posting this from my phone while waiting for a meeting to start at work. If you need more information than this, I will gladly add it - but basically, I'm looking for steps for proper response by Earth at each step, and how they would eventually overwhelm the alien invaders. I'm completely okay with using Earth here in metaphor for what happened when America got involved in WW2.

My thanks in advance - please let me know if you need more information, or if I can clarify a particular point.

First thing that comes to mind is that this seems like a 'do everything with a bayonet but sit on it' issue- assuming they can command orbit, they can generally fuck our day all different sort of ways- total destruction of our orbital capabilities (already done in the scenario), and the ability to try to swat down anything that comes chugging up the gravity well.

Are they expecting a follow-on force and by what timetable?

Do they have any particular need to come to Earth? Labor for their base or somesuch?

If they're patrolling orbit to make sure that we don't try anything funny, how many craft can they maintain on a continuous basis and how much orbital acreage can they cover, so to speak?

So basically they can stare down the pipe and anything that they see that they don't like they can drop a rock on (or a Thor javelin or whatev) but they can't sustain anything on the ground. However, with our satellite grid down they can pretty much pinprick wherever they want and get away before response can get mustered.

Josh wrote:First thing that comes to mind is that this seems like a 'do everything with a bayonet but sit on it' issue- assuming they can command orbit, they can generally fuck our day all different sort of ways- total destruction of our orbital capabilities (already done in the scenario), and the ability to try to swat down anything that comes chugging up the gravity well.

Basically, yes. This is meant to be a way to decentralize political and economic power for later United Federation of Planets-ish shenanigans when all is said and done, and from talking to people, this is probably the only plausible way to set that up for later, given current world politics.

Josh wrote:Are they expecting a follow-on force and by what timetable?

No - all additional troops will be built or cloned from their fabricated base on Luna. It will take about 12 months for their base to reach production capacity, at which time they'd be able to crank out 2000 fighting troops a month.

Josh wrote:Do they have any particular need to come to Earth? Labor for their base or somesuch?

Not really - humans would be intended for shipboard and factory menial labor mainly, given that too many resources would have to be spent making humans capable of surviving on the surface of Luna. There are a few artifacts on Earth that the invaders would like to dig up, and humans would be likely drafted for such tasks.

Josh wrote:If they're patrolling orbit to make sure that we don't try anything funny, how many craft can they maintain on a continuous basis and how much orbital acreage can they cover, so to speak?

This is part of the reason for their alpha strike, meant to be a decapitating strike to damage the humans' morale and ability to fight in return. They can only really field a few shuttles for Earth operations after the cruiser lands on Mars and becomes the base, which happens shortly after the alpha strike. The shuttles are armed and armored transports, with better straight-line acceleration than what Earth-based fighters are capable of (considering that the shuttles are capable of escape velocity from Earth's gravity, about Mach 6), but they can still be shot down by Earth-based fighters and craft, even if they are more resilient than current Earth stuff.

Josh wrote:So basically they can stare down the pipe and anything that they see that they don't like they can drop a rock on (or a Thor javelin or whatev) but they can't sustain anything on the ground. However, with our satellite grid down they can pretty much pinprick wherever they want and get away before response can get mustered.

Basically yes, but after the cruiser lands and becomes the base on Luna, most of their heavy strike capacity will be reduced to what their shuttles are capable of.

I am unclear as to why a species with the ability to mass produce people would at all be interested in capturing another species as slaves. Could they not just genetically engineer docile and obedient servants and then produce them the way they produce soldiers?

I've said this before but I'll put it down in writing.

Why are they not simply hitting us with meteor bombs and then making the announcement?

Why is their base on Mars and not on the Moon? The logistics are simpler and the Moon is close enough to shoot places on Earth.

Updates, courtesy of Frigid:

- alien base of operations moved to Luna, from Mars.

An alternate scenario suggested by Frigid & CynCat is something akin to what happened in the show Alien Nation - where alien refugees, out of fuel, food, and/or water, send a broadcast to Earth asking for refuge. The fun part then would be not only the brief political fight of who gets to house these poor refugees (which certainly won't be District 9-ish), but what these poor refugees might have been running from.

Lys wrote:I am unclear as to why a species with the ability to mass produce people would at all be interested in capturing another species as slaves. Could they not just genetically engineer docile and obedient servants and then produce them the way they produce soldiers?

Pretty much, which is another plothole in the whole "invaders" scenario. It's honestly for that reason that I'm considering more the alien refugee idea as a catalyst for the sort of outcome I'd like to have further down the line.

As far as why Mars and not Luna, defense against retaliation. With our tech we can send a nuke to the moon pretty easily, but not Mars. Plus Mars is closer to the asteroid belt, so easy access to ammo.

This is the problem with trying to make video game scenarios 'realistic'.

You're going to have to manufacture a reason why they need to come to Earth and why it's pressing. There's no reason why they couldn't have set up out of sight and cranked out all the forces they needed, built up infrastructure, and if we noticed them then they drop a lot of rocks on us to keep us from coming at them. For that matter, you'll have to justify why their response is hostile when they're facing a reasonably developed planet that so massively outnumbers them.

So if you have alien artifacts on Luna, perhaps there are hidden artifacts on Earth. Or if you wanted to justify abduction scenarios, maybe there's a Rosetta stone for activating the artifacts encoded into portions of human DNA. So they need to cast a broad net to get as much human DNA sampled as possible.

Yeah, there are still blanks in the alien invasion scenario - why they're trying to invade at all (when with their tech level they'd have no real reason to, except to be assholes), especially considering the lowered number of forces that would allow them to be possibly be defeated by our poor humans.

The more I'm thinking about it, the refugee idea is appealing more to me so far, if only because so far it's easier to fill in the blanks to make the basics work.

On the other hand, while the alien artifacts idea does appeal to me for an invasion scenario, I don't think it would work to have any on Earth, as we likely would have found one or two by now. Having human DNA be a key to said artifacts is interesting, and one I think I'll use if I go with the invasion scenario, just because it allows me some OG Aliens Shenanigans.

I will tinker more with the invasion idea while I'm at work today, and see what I come up with to fill in the blanks satisfactorily.

My thanks to all of you for your questions and assistance so far.

Footfall had a pretty well thought out alien invasion scenario. The Fithp haven't developed any of their own technology, so they could fuck up their home plane with biological weapons but have no way of fixing it. They are also ill-prepared to start a space-based civilization. They could have easily claimed most of the Solar System and left humanity alone, but their means to do so are maginal, so it's very much Plan B. So they are, in a way, refugees as well as invaders. Additionally the Fithp are biologically driven to establish dominance over others of their kind, and have a surrender instinct to make that urge not devolve into never-ending warfare. Humans, by virtue of being intelligent, ping as a competing herd (or several of them). This adds a psychological aspect to it, they can't just leave us alone knowing that we're right there, they have to establish dominance.

Which brings me to a point: The aliens being assholes is a perfectly viable reason to explain an otherwise irrational alien invasion. In the case of the Fithp, Niven and Pournelle hedged their bets by having the Fithp invasion be rational even without the psychological aspect (homeworld is dying, all their technology is stolen so they aren't good at independent development, etc). However I think it's plenty enough reason on its own. I mean, the European powers historically held a lot of colonies that simply could not be justified economically or strategically. They just had them as a point of national pride, and because fuck if we're going to let those other guys claim that territory when we can do so instead.

It's reasonable then, for there to be imperialist aliens who conquer and subjugate other sapient species they encounter because their national pride rather than for any actual rational or strategic reason. They could also be religions fanatics who insist very much that we convert to their religion, and what's more that we must submit to their rule as part of that conversion. These aren't rational reasons, but they are reasons that we can see aliens having for wanting to invade a bunch of people who can barely manage to keep a single habitat in orbit.

There's also the utterly paranoid bastards from Apocalypse Troll, who wipe out other intelligent species because they're simply terrified of the idea that they might, maybe, possibly become a threat to them. This went very well for them most of the time, because the species they targeted hadn't even developed space flight. Then they encounter humans and we were just advanced enough to actually present a threat. Like a self-fulfilling prophesy we respond to them trying to wipe us out by going on a warpath. Though ironically xenocide isn't one of our wargoals so much as just reducing these assholes back to their homeworld so that they stop trying to kill us. Whereas they definitely will exterminate every last human if they can. This does, however, mean that they're not interested in invading anyone's planets. They'll happily establish space superiority and just wipe out the natives from orbit.

Interesting points, Lys - religious, or even criminal underworld extremism are both plausible scenarios, as is even the baser "competing species" imperative. Any of those are plausible to have higher technology than we humans, but not necessarily know how to use it well, or even effectively - however, I certainly don't want to fall into the "evil invaders hold the idiot ball lulz" type of thing.

Making a costly mistake that comes back to savagely bite them in the ass as far as humanity goes, I can see. Losing because they repeatedly made bad decisions is possible (I mean, it happened in Earth's own history), but in a story, it tends to devolve the villains into punching bags doing evil things for their own sake.

As much as I think it would be hilariously awful to have a sort of villain that raises puppies just so he can angrily kick them across his throne room when thwarted, it makes it much more difficult as a reader to see things from his perspective. I've always thought that a good antagonist is just as important as a good protagonist, so for this sort of thing, the details bother me.

With all that said, invading due to biological/psychological imperative is tragic in a way, as you can't really hate them, but on the other hand, you do want to make sure that they're properly and securely fenced in so they behave themselves. And hey - it's a bit sycophantic, but if humanity beats them, then by that same token of psychology, humanity might get a client species on accident. If that's the case, humanity could let it sit there... or, could use it to create the beginning of something United Federation of Planets-ish.

rhoenix wrote:With all that said, invading due to biological/psychological imperative is tragic in a way, as you can't really hate them, but on the other hand, you do want to make sure that they're properly and securely fenced in so they behave themselves. And hey - it's a bit sycophantic, but if humanity beats them, then by that same token of psychology, humanity might get a client species on accident. If that's the case, humanity could let it sit there... or, could use it to create the beginning of something United Federation of Planets-ish.

That's exactly what happened in Footfall. At the end they surrendered completely, giving in to that side of their psychology and acknowledging humanity as the superior herd. So we basically got a client race with somewhat superior technology out of the bargain. You really should read it, it's a very good first contact / alien invasion story, and you might find it helpful in fleshing out your own ideas.

There's also Dread Empire Falls which has the aliens build an empire for ideological reasons. They subscribe and promulgate a belief system called The Praxis which purports to have keys to building the perfect society. The Praxis includes the duty to bring all intelligent races into the perfection of the Praxis.

That the Praxis concentrates all the society's wealth and power into the hands of a small elite is entirely appropriate. Just ask the Legion of Diligence.

Nice - thank you both, I'll add both Footfall and Dread Empire Falls to my next list of stuff to get.