Alien Invasions

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

This doesn't really make their objectives clear to me. Are we showing any signs of ever becoming a threat? And if that is their concern, why absorb us instead of just dropping an asteroid on us to send us back to the stone age? The nature and imperatives of the aliens are the very essence of this setting and they are not really addressed.

Garden worlds could be relatively rare within the alien empire's territory, which would make being nice to the natives instead of glassing the planet the preferred method.

[AlexanderHowl]

It could also be a philosophical position. The aliens may have an ethical code that requires them to allow submission before acting to annihilate a potential enemy who does not submit. As for dropping rocks, dropping Eros 433 anywhere on the Earth would pretty much end the human species, so the exact target does not matter.

[Michele]

You, the local government, outwardly accept alien domination. Alien occupation troops and overseers land. You secretly set up a minor resistance group, which you then seemingly proceed to defeat on your own, as a token of submission to the aliens. The resistance movement, unfortunately, before being defeated manages to gather alien biological material, and if possible a few live aliens.
You also organize a number of secret bio labs, which eventually come up with a suitable bioweapon. It won't be easy, giving the different biochemistry, so the labs will have to start from the basics and study. It might take years. But eventually you infect one or more of the aliens who you know will soon be going on leave, at least aboard their fleet and hopefully all the way to their planet.
I know, at TL10 it will be hard to infect them, but it seems the best option.

If they are (or mainly use) robots, the same, but, as mentioned in another post, by means of computer viruses à la Independence Day. The unrealistic part there was the immediate availability of the necessary tech. The IT labs will have essentially to use the captured stuff the reverse-engineer the necessary developments.

If they are organic and also use robots, then use the two solutions above, together.

[Donny Brook]

Well, their motivation could be a lot of things, but until it is settled, this exercise is kind of directionless.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

And are you assuming stone age people are not a threat?

Indeed, I am inclined to consider stone age people an insignificant threat to a TL10 extra-solar culture.

[Black Leviathan]

I think movies like Independence Day have poisoned us with the unrealistic idea that we're going to fight against a species advanced enough for FTL travel. You're very right that a TL 10 species will utterly dominate us in warfare. However they won't necessarily be as successful at an occupation. Especially if they were knocking us down and moving on to the next conquest. TV shows Colony or Falling Skies might be a better template for how we fight an alien invasion.

[ericthered]

Moving asteroids is hard, for the record. 433 Eros weighs 24 thousand times as much as the aforementioned main battle fleet. Moving it is going to be a pain. And then you need to station someone in space to make sure the humans don't move the asteroid out of the way. And that's going to be a long boring watch. Its probably cheaper to use conventional nukes.


Economically, its probably best to extract tribute from earth rather than destroying its civilization. Everywhere seems to have its own unique resources, and a planet with a different biology than yours seems like it would have that hold as true as any.



So I think the aliens are going to grandstand, do some damage, make some very unequal trading arrangements (up to and including tribute), impose some minor political changes and then move on, leaving outposts in space or on a small area they "lease" from us.



The game I'd run afterwards would be about humans trying to make earth richer, holding together the fragile government, and navigating the alien empire.

[RyanW]

I ran a brief campaign of an alien invasion. The aliens were from a "peace-loving" empire. They loved peace so much, they exterminated anyone who didn't quickly accept it after the initial shock-and-awe strike.

The campaign took place in the 1930s, and the aliens learned it took a lot more than they expected to shock and/or awe a world that had recently survived the Great War. Basically, every species they had encountered was either non-warlike, took to war with a certain level of ceremony, or continuously knocked itself back to the stone age. They found the idea of being pragmatic and industrial about war just... alien.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Well, their motivation could be a lot of things, but until it is settled, this exercise is kind of directionless.




Indeed, I am inclined to consider stone age people an insignificant threat to a TL10 extra-solar culture.

Stone Age people can still conduct assassinations and massacres, often more effectively then technological people and they do not have wealth or infrastracture to hold hostage. They do not have to give battle unless they want to unlike an organized culture.

They are not capable of pushing the aliens off the planet. That does not make them no threat at all. They can in fact make themselves very much a nuisance.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Stone Age people can still conduct assassinations and massacres, often more effectively then technological people and they do not have wealth or infrastracture to hold hostage. They do not have to give battle unless they want to unlike an organized culture.

Among other impediments, how will they travel through interstellar space to get to their targets?

[AlexanderHowl]

Let us outline a few points then to flesh out the exercise-

1. The aliens do not want the Earth or the resources of the Solar System, they just want humanity to submit to their authority because humans have a small chance of becoming a future threat to their polity. Until they gained full citizenship, humans would be a protect species with limited rights.

2. The aliens are uninterested in occupying the Earth. While they are interested in creating a survey station with a 'small' squadron of 12 million metric tons in the Sol System to defend their new territory, they would be willing to let humans govern themselves as long as humans follow the laws of the Empire concerning the privileges of Imperial citizens and the protections according protected species.

3. The aliens are really worried about human overpopulation on the Earth and would be willing to invest massive (compared to the Earth) resources to remove the majority of the human population from the Earth. After submission, they would help humanity build tens thousands of space habitats (under Imperial ownership, of course) in order to remove 4/5 of the population from the Earth. They are also worried about climate change, so they would want to uplift the Earth to TL9 as quickly as possible in order to replace the existing energy infrastructure (under Imperial ownership, of course).

4. The aliens are wealthy. With the resources of millions of star systems, they value gold and platinum at 1/30 the value that humans place on them, and will ruthlessly use that advantage to purchase as much of the Earth as possible until the Earth prices equal Imperial prices. They are also capable of producing perfect gemstones at $1/carat, meaning that they are also willing to flood the market in that way.

5. The aliens are advanced and are willing to flood the Earth with cheap TL9 technology. With the technology difference involved, the aliens will be capable of flooding human markets with their primitive TL9 products after submission in order to replace human corporations with alien corporations. They are willing to do so at cost in order to make humans dependent on the aliens.