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01-19-2022, 07:13 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
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01-19-2022, 08:43 AM | #22 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
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01-19-2022, 10:33 AM | #23 | |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
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Actually, apologies for coughing Babylon 5 up again, but I seem to recall that that was a meme in there as well - the Minbari, whilst possessing a high degree of technological superiority which made winning the space war just an matter of time for them, struggled a lot more on the ground due to ideological issues - specifically, they were used to warfare being the preserve of a warrior caste, who could be eliminated and then the non-combatant castes could be more or less safely ignored. The ability of humans to simply "fight some more forever" was hard for them to comprehend. Also, I suspect, until you deploy battlesuit infantry, technology makes a lot less difference in man-on-man combat. |
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01-19-2022, 10:51 AM | #24 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
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Make the carnivore aliens really terrifying, individually, but (as with many predators) reflexively territorial. That would make it difficult for them to organize for any endeavor that requires anything larger than an extended clan and its longtime allies or subordinates -- say, a few tens of thousands, even when things are desperate. Scary up front, and never less than deadly at company-level infantry or marine engagements, with heavily armed vehicles with advanced weapons because they point them at each other, all the time. On the other side, the slightly-backward, peace-loving, highly-social, harmless-looking primates of Terra, who have studied war so thoroughly and so deeply, they call it a martial art.
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. Last edited by tshiggins; 01-19-2022 at 11:07 AM. |
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01-19-2022, 11:42 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
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01-19-2022, 12:09 PM | #26 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
Slowly.
More seriously, unless there's One Weird Trick to get into space without a massive expenditure of resources (which, to be fair, in a Star Trek inspired setting may well be the case), only being able to function in terms of tens of thousands is a serious problem for getting into space (while NASA only had around 30,000 "total personel" when they landed a man on the moon, they had around 200,000 "contract employees" - source). You could have discussions about how humans somehow made it into space while still such a young species - but my own inclination would be the One Weird Trick option, with humans just discovering it rather late in their development ("Wait, wait, wait. You're saying you first sent people to your moon by... putting them on top of a freaking chemical rocket? How have you people not blown yourselves up already?").
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01-19-2022, 12:12 PM | #27 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
Yeah, that's a problem.
Hmm. Maybe borrow ideas from C.J. Cherryh's species, the Kif, in the Chanur novels? They were a race of dedicated carnivores who had very rigid hierarchies based on perceived strength. If a warlord emerged capable of building a coalition strong enough, then other oligarchs either knelt or died. Essentially, the strong master/willing slave structure was underpinned by biological imperatives in the Kif brain. Once the hierarchy was established, though, any particular Kif society remained peaceful and prosperous for its duration. However, should the archon start to weaken, it would set off a brutal power-struggle. This could offer opportunities for external aggression, and sometimes one warlord would absorb an entire other "nation," decapitate its ruling class (often literally) and assimilate the subordinates. So, under someone perceived as a, "strong leader," peace and prosperity could last decades. Moreover, the Kif were intelligent enough to recognize the benefits of stability, so while power-struggles were brutally violent, they ended quickly. When one side clearly gained the upper hand, the surdinates of the others turned on their own leaders, slaughtered them mercilessly (mercy was not something any member of the Kif race could even recognize...), and then knelt.
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. Last edited by tshiggins; 01-19-2022 at 12:19 PM. |
01-19-2022, 01:31 PM | #28 | |
Join Date: Dec 2020
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
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That would be some weird trick, because everybody knew it was impossible we just didnīt try and ruined the academic career of the few who said itīs possible. Getting a aggressive predator race into space which is also used to live together in family bands at most, is tricky. In one novel of AsimovsīRobot City? there was a dominant race in their home system were 3 other intelligent races, which were conquered an subjugated by the top race. The ship the characters met is staffed with a lot of the other races and only 1! member of the top race. |
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01-19-2022, 01:43 PM | #29 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
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Also, because it looks like I forgot to include it in my previous post: "I don't want to kill you, and you don't want to be dead." Seems like that would sum up humanity's attitude in such a setting - they aren't looking for allies to protect themselves, they're looking for allies so they don't have to go xenocide a few civilizations.
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01-19-2022, 11:03 PM | #30 |
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: The former Chochenyo territory
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Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st
As the new kid on the interstellar scene, we don't know anything. Our labor (and possibly our resources) could be purchased with knowledge in a way that can't be done with established species who have already picked up a corpus of knowledge about the galactic neighborhood. So we end up as contractors paid in intel, seeking reliable alien allies who will trade for useful knowledge.
I believe there's a SF story out there in which most intelligent life evolves on low-gravity methane iceballs, just because there are many more of those than large rocky planets. Consequently most aliens are comparatively fragile, and humans are like the Lava Men, which makes us very desirable as roughnecks in hazardous areas, able to survive thousands of milli-Gs and cavorting in molten ice.
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