A scavanger world/fantasy/sci fi setting

[Jayngfet]

So, as promised, my other setting idea.

In the year 2016 or so a group of aliens attacked. After several years earth and the aliens simultaniously launched a killing blow. Biological warfare on both sides. Each launched a series of viruses, bacteria, and various mutigens lethal only to the other group. So many people died on both sides they couldn't continue the war. Spaceships crashed, Cities were turned to ghost towns, billions died on both sides. All that damage, combined with various bombings kicking up dirt in the atmosphere and knocking out lots of important buildings where survivors were. The internet and phones went down, the power was cut off world wide. The surviving humans and aliens either killed each other or learned to work together, depending on the area's.

This post apocalyptic world was littered with technology that could not be reproduced in the worlds state, guns, medicine, vehicles.

Fast forward a couple hundred years, maybe three hundred, the mutaints can be grouped into recognisable nonhuman races, with lots of mutations most lable as magic, or a gift from whatever god they worship, or just seen as another mutation.

There isn't much to the world, roving packs of orcs and trolls and goblins. A steampunk kingdom or two living in the ruins of old cities. Some mutaint animals, roaming or flying or digging for prey or plants. Maybe a primitive city, covered in huge mutaint trees, rope bridges suspended between them.

[Thiel]

Like I said earlier in the other thread, there's no way humans could fight an invasion force to a standstill. At least not by 2016

[Jayngfet]

It started in that year, that's not how long it took. I'm not sure how long it would take, but the economy and everything wouldn't be all that great by. It would mean they'd be desperate enough to do this and have everything bad enough to make a post apocolyptic world less proposterous.

[Thiel]

It wouldn't last more than a year. Chances are we'd surrender immediately, since the aliens are capable of making "Rocks fall, everyone dies" a literal truth.

[warty goblin]

Indeed, this is how I'd imagine anything with complete space superiority would run an invasion of a single, isolated planet like earth.

1) Orbit.

2) Drop something heavy on some major yet non-vital urban center in each continent.

3) Point out that they have plenty more where than came from.

4) Graceously accept surrender offers.

5) Use humans as more or less unmolested slave labor to produce whatever the aliens want planetside, then ship it to orbit.

6) Use your deathgrip on planetary governments to slowly remove things like personal access to the internet, telephones and libraries. You want the population to be stupid and fragmented. An intelligent population doesn't get you anything, you have already proven yourselves at least as smart, and certainly technologically superior to humans, so pretty much everything they make should be route recreation of your designs. You don't want people capable of doing genetic work on your species, or any other for that matter.

7) Regulate the hell out of population levels by informing governments that if they go over certain levels, you will take drastic steps involving large pieces of rock to lower them again.

8) If the aliens are biologically capable of inhabiting earth, slowly force humans to emmegrate from some continent or other until it is pretty much depopulated. Australia is a good choice for this. Also begin to lower the acceptible population levels for each and every country.

9) Land and colonize Australia.

10) Continue to do this across pieces of the planet that you want, using geography to keep humans away from your settlements.

11) Doing this slowly (like over hundreds and hundreds of years) you will be able to concentrate the overwhelming majority of the shrinking human population someplace you really don't care about. Ideally by this point humans have a more or less iron age society building space age stuff by aping your blueprints, and you and more or less thought of as the most vengeful gods the world has ever seen.

12) Bomb this place, hit it with your nastiest bioweapons, and generally render everything within it dead.

13) Wait for the dust to settle.

14) ???

15) Enjoy your new planet.

Done like this there is literally no chance for a counter attack, since humans will never actually see anything to attack. Also technically driving humanity extinct is unneccessary, if you can't inhabit the planet, keeping them at iron age levels of sophistication while churning out your produce is plenty good enough. I'd consider it foolhardy to try to coinhabit the planet with humans in close proximity, since that gives them the opportunity to discover you are not gods, and also the chance to propagate violence against you.


Even if you don't go this route, I would point out that after 300 years, there's not going to be a lot in the weapons and medicine department that is still usable. Most medicine can't just be left lying around, and also can't be prescribed willy-nilly. There's a reason we send doctors to med school after all. Same with weapons, they'd either fail for lack of maintenence, or be worn out, have their ammunition exhausted or people just plain forget how to use 'em.

[Jayngfet]

Maybe it's a colonization attempt. That would mean they wouldn't have many weapons and the vast distances between planets mean backup could take a while, if it comes at all.

Earth could be the only planet habitable to them, and they didn't check for sentient life, only planet size, gravity, atmosphere composition, soil composition, ocean composition, moon size and distance, and distance from the sun.

After all, would you expect to go to some planet and find life that's not only more than single celled, but is sentient and armed?

[Piedmon_Sama]

I don't really think it matters (we beat aliens all the time in fiction, you don't have to bend backwards to appease people who don't like a standard storyline), but if you insist on "plausibility" why not have the aliens not be soldiers? In fact, maybe the alien fleet is a slapped-together band of refugees on the run from an even bigger, meaner menace? They're in desperate need of a new world to inhabit (hence why they'd prefer to avoid annihilating earth), they have basic weapons and facilities (which may seem impressive to us humans, but are considered antiquated by the aliens' own standards) and a decided lack of military discipline (they're all civilians with maybe a small number of military running the ships).

[Jayngfet]

And of course they'd have such a small number of things like bombs and missiles that those would be saved for major operations.


I'm wondering how the aliens will look. I'm thinking wither this mass of many sectioned legs, or a humanoid look, with obvious differences(impossible or improbable skin tones, wierd eyes, missing a finger, hair would be a bunch of thick strands that can move like tentacles.

[SurlySeraph]

Like I said earlier in the other thread, there's no way humans could fight an invasion force to a standstill. At least not by 2016

Depends on the invasion force, doesn't it? If we massively outnumber them, if their military technology hasn't kept pace with their transportation technology, if we find a way to evade the "Drop rocks from orbit" danger (like traveling nomadically and avoiding cities), or if the aliens drop rocks infrequently enough that they aren't a real big danger [given that they have to travel at least to the asteroid belt and back every time, find a rock big enough to do significant damage but small enough to move, and not run out of fuel doing this, this is a significant possibility], if we have enough space capability to put up some resistance [say, jury-rigged shuttles for kamikaze runs] or if one of countless other possibilities is true, we could fight them to a standstill. Just because the invasion force YOU would want couldn't be fought to a standstill doesn't mean no invasion force could be fought to a standstill.

Anyway, back on topic. The idea works decently. Would the alien race still exist, and would they be playable? Do the mutants include both human-descended and alien-descended species? How dense is the population? How habitable are most areas? Is everyone immune to the old biowarfare diseases now? Are there any alien vessels left on-planet or in orbit?

[Jayngfet]

Yes to the alien descendants, they'd let me get away with some of the crazier things.

The population altogether? I'm throwing a radom number in here but say 3 billion including aliens and the wierder mutations.

Most of the planet is habitable, but a bit harsh, deserts are where they used to be before we started turning them into farms in places like california, maybe bigger than before. There may be dead areas, thanks to radiation and chemical leaks from a crashed ship, the remains of bombs dropped and such.

Everyone's immune to most of the original stuff, but there's still enough to cause mutations in a good deal of babies.


Aside from the alien suriviors landing on the planet, I'd imagine there's be ships where everyone died, ghost ships in orbit.

[Threeshades]

Like I said earlier in the other thread, there's no way humans could fight an invasion force to a standstill. At least not by 2016

How is that even important? There is no alien-invasion fiction that does not completely ignore this (unless the invading aliens are actually winning, which is a rare scenario)

Also just because a race is capable of long range space travel doesn't mean they have such superior military technology and tactics that it would be impossible. Earth packs enough firepower to blow itself to hell and back several times. Also there is the home advantage. Viet Cong anyone?

[Dervag]

Maybe it's a colonization attempt. That would mean they wouldn't have many weapons and the vast distances between planets mean backup could take a while, if it comes at all.Plausible, but the "dropping rocks" system isn't that hard to set up.


Earth could be the only planet habitable to them, and they didn't check for sentient life, only planet size, gravity, atmosphere composition, soil composition, ocean composition, moon size and distance, and distance from the sun.

After all, would you expect to go to some planet and find life that's not only more than single celled, but is sentient and armed?Why didn't they send a space probe in first to go take pictures of the target planet?

If you have even a vague idea of what to look for, evidence of human activity on Earth has been visible from orbit for centuries, because we've been chopping down forests. This ignores the possibility of using "spy camera" technology, which would make things like the pyramids extremely obvious evidence of a technological civilization.

It's at least plausible that they sent the probe hundreds of years ago and took it for granted that we'd still be in the Iron Age (the premise of Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series). But it's hard to believe that they could examine our planet in enough detail to be sure they could live here without finding evidence of an intelligent species living here.
__________


I don't really think it matters (we beat aliens all the time in fiction, you don't have to bend backwards to appease people who don't like a standard storyline), but if you insist on "plausibility" why not have the aliens not be soldiers? In fact, maybe the alien fleet is a slapped-together band of refugees on the run from an even bigger, meaner menace? They're in desperate need of a new world to inhabit (hence why they'd prefer to avoid annihilating earth), they have basic weapons and facilities (which may seem impressive to us humans, but are considered antiquated by the aliens' own standards) and a decided lack of military discipline (they're all civilians with maybe a small number of military running the ships).That works great. Though in that case they're more likely to try and make a deal than to conquer us. As in "We will trade the secret of flying cars for Madagascar."

[Gavin Sage]

Plausible, but the "dropping rocks" system isn't that hard to set up.

Unless this is an annihilation campaign on the part of the aliens the usefulness of rocks is rather identical to that of nuclear arms. Because much bigger and the climate damage starts to set in.

And humanity has enough nukes to barbecue the surface area of Earth several times over. Presumably any invasion fleet will take up less area then that. And yes the tech already exist to hit small objects in space, satellite killers already are a reality.

So unless the aliens have sufficiently advanced tech as to make rock dropping unnecessary to begin (like defenses that can shrug off any human armament period) with or are looking for a pyrrhic victory, humanity winning is not impossible.

[Jayngfet]

Where are they getting these rocks? It takes a whole lot of effort for us to just get a thousands of miles away look at something in the asteroid belt and throwing the moon at us is right out.


And I'd imagine that the probes to gather data were sent out a long time ago before they attempted to colonise. Scientists studying our solar system when we were still in a pretty crap technological state. Then comes the time when refugees/pioneers come in and are surprised to find a bunch of well armed humans not amused by the fleet parked in orbit.

[warty goblin]

Rocks are really easy to get. The moon comes to mind as a readily available source that is conveniently enough already in orbit. Just start carving off couple ton pieces of moon and firing them at population centers. The prep would take a while, but there's no way a species capable of traveling between stars would lack the industrial capacity to do this.

Consider what would happen if over the course of twenty-four hours every city on the planet with more than 500,000 or so people was bombed into a gutted ruin. Even if the firepower to resist remains, the organization to use it does not, and the manufacturing to replace it is gone as well. There would be some significant environmental damage of course, probably a bit of global cooling, but given the general trend towards increased warmth, it probably won't start an ice age.

The only way that I see humans being able to survive is if the aliens are completely incompetent, a trait which is probably not a hallmark of things capable of engineering interstellar travel.

[Jayngfet]

The thing about that is people don't have to worry about the negative effects of rendering the moon a wasteland, you can nuke anything there into oblivion and no one will care.

[Thiel]

Depends on the invasion force, doesn't it?
No


If we massively outnumber them,
Numbers means nothing if we can't reach the aliens.


if their military technology hasn't kept pace with their transportation technology
Anything capable of generating enough energy to power an interstellar starship will do nicely as a weapon.


if we find a way to evade the "Drop rocks from orbit" danger (like traveling nomadically and avoiding cities)
If the entire human population started to live like nomads we'd die of starvation within a year or two.


or if the aliens drop rocks infrequently enough that they aren't a real big danger [given that they have to travel at least to the asteroid belt and back every time, find a rock big enough to do significant damage but small enough to move, and not run out of fuel doing this, this is a significant possibility]
Set up a base on the moon and build a giant railgun.


if we have enough space capability to put up some resistance [say, jury-rigged shuttles for kamikaze runs]
Launching something into space is a huge operation that depends on a limited number of facilities spread across the globe. Bombing them is a simple task. And even if we did manage to launch every single piece of spaceworthy junk we posses it wouldn't matter only a tiny fraction of it has the power to actually reach anything higher than


or if one of countless other possibilities is true, we could fight them to a standstill. Just because the invasion force YOU would want couldn't be fought to a standstill doesn't mean no invasion force could be fought to a standstill.





How is that even important? There is no alien-invasion fiction that does not completely ignore this (unless the invading aliens are actually winning, which is a rare scenario)
Jayngfet made this thread because he wanted imput and this is mine.


Also just because a race is capable of long range space travel doesn't mean they have such superior military technology and tactics that it would be impossible. Earth packs enough firepower to blow itself to hell and back several times. Also there is the home advantage. Viet Cong anyone?
But since none of it can reach them it's a moot point.


Unless this is an annihilation campaign on the part of the aliens the usefulness of rocks is rather identical to that of nuclear arms. Because much bigger and the climate damage starts to set in.
Falling rocks doesn't cause radioactive fallout. And if you do it right you won't even get much atmospheric dust.



And humanity has enough nukes to barbecue the surface area of Earth several times over. Presumably any invasion fleet will take up less area then that. And yes the tech already exist to hit small objects in space, satellite killers already are a reality.
Why wouldn't they? Unless they only have one ship there's no reason why they shouldn't spread out. And even then it's still a moot point since they'll be hanging around a a significantly higher altitude. So unless you have a Saturn V stashed away somewhere we simply can't reach them.

[Jayngfet]

Of course nothing says we can't also build giant railguns and attempt to blow them out of the sky, with some sort of powerful bullet(or several types, hollow point, explosive, and so on).

I like the idea of huge guns dotting the area, they could be used as a defensive weapon against hostile tribes and animals. And they'd also have a pretty good scope, which would also be useful.

[Jorkens]

Out of interest, how dependent is the whole setup on the alien invasion backstory? I mean, there are dozens of ways of setting up a post apocalyptic mutant earth without incurring the wrath of the plausibility police...

[warty goblin]

The thing about that is people don't have to worry about the negative effects of rendering the moon a wasteland, you can nuke anything there into oblivion and no one will care.

There are a few fundamental problems with this.
1) Getting nukes to the moon is very hard (read expensive) with foreseeable/existing technology.
2) Rocks are cheaper than nukes
3) Shooting down nukes in space isn't going to be very hard to do. One can use, for example, rocks.
4) There are a lot more rocks on the moon than their is accessible fissile material on earth.
5) Also, one can conduct all of one's mining operations on the dark side of the moon, which makes targeting a snarly problem since people on earth can't actually see it.

The fundamental problem facing earth in your sort of scenario is that as long as your opponent isn't fussed about massive civilian casualties (which rather by construction an invading alien species isn't), they can strike with complete impunity. Furthermore the odds of any interstellar society not having some form of missile defense is fairly faint, and our methods of getting things into space can hardly be described as stealthy.

[Meltemi]

Variation: Why are they invading? Resources are abundant in space, and generally easier to extract. Artificial habitats for leibensraum can be constructed - those ships are already artificial habitats, just with engines included. Also, the Rocks Fall scenario already brought up - why are the aliens not making use of orbital kills or threatening to blast humanity back to the Stone Age from orbit? Space is the ultimate high ground.

A partial solution could be that it could be that it isn't an intentional invasion, but merely perceived as one from the human perspective.

Alien perspective: There was a phlebotinum breakdown/negative space wedgie that disrupted the fleet's FTL travel and comm capabilities, and chances of long-term survivability in general. Fortunately, one ship's astronavigator has located a world in a nearby nondescript system, that they can reach barely in time and also survive on long enough to repair a ship to call back home. With the severe damage, the ships do not have the time to take the luxury of simply entering a parking orbit and ferrying up/down, but fortunately, all of the ships are designed to survive the stresses of FTL travel, which means they can at least drop out of "hyperspace" right over the atmosphere and simply crash-land. If they can successfully call home, it won't matter what condition the ships are in, and they wouldn't be able to completely rebuild the ships due to the complexity of the engines even if they left them intact in orbit. If we can't call home, at least we'll have someplace to survive until someone comes looking for us. Just as there's no time to worry about a stable orbit or detailed FTL calculations to make sure all of our ships even survive the translation out of hyperspace, there's obviously no time for a detailed survey of the planet. It doesn't matter; we're certain to die if we stay out here, and the planet couldn't be that dangerous. Leaving aside left- or right-handed DNA or whether we can eat the local food, we have hunting rifles and a small military escort to take care of non-intelligent life, and it's not like we've found any other sapient life forms, right?

Human perspective: Alien dropships appeared out of nowhere and staged massive landings across the entire planet. Their appearance was heralded by massive energy bursts that has completely fried every suborbital satellite and installation between Earth and the Van Allen Belts, as well as disrupting all unshielded electronics on the surface. Thousands, if not millions, have already died just from alien ships landing in major coastal cities, or worse, barely missing land and setting off planet-crossing tsunamis. Communication with them has proven completely impossible, but it is clear that this can only be a prelude to invasion. Decisive action is the only way, but we've confirmed that conventional arms are completely unusable against the ships themselves.

Alien perspective: Crap. We landed in the middle of a few billion creatures that look like defanged kralnaks, but unlike the latest fad in children's pets, they're throwing around nukes. Even worse, with the forced translation from hyperspace and crash-landing, our ships are in no condition to survive their biggest bombs. We need to secure our landing site, but we're a survey and support fleet, not a military force. All we have is...ah, our xeno-biology labs. Well, they did attack us first, after all, and they are so irresponsible that they're throwing around nukes...we can give them something to keep them busy and secure our landing point long enough to call in people to get us the hell out of here.

Human perspective: Mysterious disease with a massive mortality rate? At least we can crack their hulls with our biggest nukes. We'll launch a massive global assault, try and take at least one or two of them intact. If they made this thing, they're going to have something to cure it. Right?

Alien perspective: It seems our disease was a bit more successful than we thought it would be, especially since we only had a couple samples to learn from. A pity they're attacking us and have managed to drive us away from several of our own ships. Wait, we designed this retrovirus from one of our own baselines that we already had, since we didn't have time to build a new thing from scratch, and we already knew that if they could survive on this rock, they had to have a physiology a little bit like our own to breathe the atmosphere. But doesn't that mean that...crap. It mutated back, and Strain B only infects us.

Then things get worse. Basically, it looks like an invasion, and fulfills everything on the TC's list from the back story: alien attack, killing blows, bioweaponry inimical to each faction (Strain A/B), crashed ships, and planetary cataclysms caused by massive mega- to giga-tonne UFOs falling out of the sky. It avoids the Rocks Fall because the aliens aren't actually in space to make the rocks fall anymore. Even leaving aside the question of whether alien military tactics/tech would be on par with humanity or ridiculously advanced, if they're not actually a military force beyond, say, some sort of minor escort (hence a survey fleet rather than single ship), they wouldn't have the force to simply dictate terms, and the whole manner of arrival and reception on both sides makes a peaceful resolution a bit...tricky. Just hypothesizing out the wazoo, but couldn't it work with a bit of tinkering? It's all backstory, regardless, and you're setting the primary story centuries in the future, so a little bit of irregularity even with your baseline might be obscurable with the fog of time.

[Jayngfet]

Out of interest, how dependent is the whole setup on the alien invasion backstory? I mean, there are dozens of ways of setting up a post apocalyptic mutant earth without incurring the wrath of the plausibility police...

This was more or less my first idea, if you have an alternative I'd love to use it if it makes more sense.


And warty goblin, while we're on this, how does a series of humongus railguns sound? They'd all be in military instilations rather than cities, all around the world. One in the rocky mountains, on in the carribean, one in the himilayas, one in the Sahara...




Wait, I remember something about using existing technology to absorb sunlight with a satalite, and converting it into an intense concentrated beam of light, if we convert that from a way of getting solar power and use it as space based weaponry it could be used to fire at the moon and orbiting ships.

[Jayngfet]

Variation: Why are they invading? Resources are abundant in space, and generally easier to extract. Artificial habitats for leibensraum can be constructed - those ships are already artificial habitats, just with engines included. Also, the Rocks Fall scenario already brought up - why are the aliens not making use of orbital kills or threatening to blast humanity back to the Stone Age from orbit? Space is the ultimate high ground.

A partial solution could be that it could be that it isn't an intentional invasion, but merely perceived as one from the human perspective.

Alien perspective: There was a phlebotinum breakdown/negative space wedgie that disrupted the fleet's FTL travel and comm capabilities, and chances of long-term survivability in general. Fortunately, one ship's astronavigator has located a world in a nearby nondescript system, that they can reach barely in time and also survive on long enough to repair a ship to call back home. With the severe damage, the ships do not have the time to take the luxury of simply entering a parking orbit and ferrying up/down, but fortunately, all of the ships are designed to survive the stresses of FTL travel, which means they can at least drop out of "hyperspace" right over the atmosphere and simply crash-land. If they can successfully call home, it won't matter what condition the ships are in, and they wouldn't be able to completely rebuild the ships due to the complexity of the engines even if they left them intact in orbit. If we can't call home, at least we'll have someplace to survive until someone comes looking for us. Just as there's no time to worry about a stable orbit or detailed FTL calculations to make sure all of our ships even survive the translation out of hyperspace, there's obviously no time for a detailed survey of the planet. It doesn't matter; we're certain to die if we stay out here, and the planet couldn't be that dangerous. Leaving aside left- or right-handed DNA or whether we can eat the local food, we have hunting rifles and a small military escort to take care of non-intelligent life, and it's not like we've found any other sapient life forms, right?

Human perspective: Alien dropships appeared out of nowhere and staged massive landings across the entire planet. Their appearance was heralded by massive energy bursts that has completely fried every suborbital satellite and installation between Earth and the Van Allen Belts, as well as disrupting all unshielded electronics on the surface. Thousands, if not millions, have already died just from alien ships landing in major coastal cities, or worse, barely missing land and setting off planet-crossing tsunamis. Communication with them has proven completely impossible, but it is clear that this can only be a prelude to invasion. Decisive action is the only way, but we've confirmed that conventional arms are completely unusable against the ships themselves.

Alien perspective: Crap. We landed in the middle of a few billion creatures that look like defanged kralnaks, but unlike the latest fad in children's pets, they're throwing around nukes. Even worse, with the forced translation from hyperspace and crash-landing, our ships are in no condition to survive their biggest bombs. We need to secure our landing site, but we're a survey and support fleet, not a military force. All we have is...ah, our xeno-biology labs. Well, they did attack us first, after all, and they are so irresponsible that they're throwing around nukes...we can give them something to keep them busy and secure our landing point long enough to call in people to get us the hell out of here.

Human perspective: Mysterious disease with a massive mortality rate? At least we can crack their hulls with our biggest nukes. We'll launch a massive global assault, try and take at least one or two of them intact. If they made this thing, they're going to have something to cure it. Right?

Alien perspective: It seems our disease was a bit more successful than we thought it would be, especially since we only had a couple samples to learn from. A pity they're attacking us and have managed to drive us away from several of our own ships. Wait, we designed this retrovirus from one of our own baselines that we already had, since we didn't have time to build a new thing from scratch, and we already knew that if they could survive on this rock, they had to have a physiology a little bit like our own to breathe the atmosphere. But doesn't that mean that...crap. It mutated back, and Strain B only infects us.

Then things get worse. Basically, it looks like an invasion, and fulfills everything on the TC's list from the back story: alien attack, killing blows, bioweaponry inimical to each faction (Strain A/B), crashed ships, and planetary cataclysms caused by massive mega- to giga-tonne UFOs falling out of the sky. It avoids the Rocks Fall because the aliens aren't actually in space to make the rocks fall anymore. Even leaving aside the question of whether alien military tactics/tech would be on par with humanity or ridiculously advanced, if they're not actually a military force beyond, say, some sort of minor escort (hence a survey fleet rather than single ship), they wouldn't have the force to simply dictate, and communication, Universal Translators aside, might actually be effectively impossible.

This is actually close to one of the concepts previously suggested, refugees or settlers using old data on a survivable planet in an attempt to land and live there. I was thinking there'd be a gap in communications, if nothing else language wise. By the time anything's sorted out half the population of both groups is dead and all forms of quick communication are down.

[warty goblin]

Humongous planetside railguns are absolutely not the way to go, for the same reason that obscenely large artillery units now are not the way to go. They are just way too easy to hit from space. Any orbital power gathering system may as well have 'shoot me now' written on it in Martian as well.

That said, Meltemi is definately on to something there which actually makes sense.

[Jayngfet]

Yeah, I think that's the way to go.

Now then, what should these aliens look like? I'm thinking either humanoid or insect like.

[Meltemi]

Wait, I remember something about using existing technology to absorb sunlight with a satalite, and converting it into an intense concentrated beam of light, if we convert that from a way of getting solar power and use it as space based weaponry it could be used to fire at the moon and orbiting ships.

This sounds fairly close to the Kzinti Lesson or Jon's Law (a sufficiently interesting drive packs its own weight in "blam," basically), actually, since this is close to an actual theorized method of power collection that could conceivably be implemented if it didn't violate several treaties on space militarization (solar power sats plus a wide-area microwave transmitter beam - narrow the area and you increase the power delivered per unit area, basically tightening the focus into a weapon). Your biggest problems are going to be aiming this thing to actually hit its target, ranging the target without losing laser coherence enroute (at which point it would fizzle, basically), and keeping the blasted thing alive against alien attacks long enough to shoot.

Plus, while they brought up the moon as the nearest source of rocks, it's not the only one by any measure, and probably not even the most practical one except from a time-to-arrival view. Leaving aside the plethora of Near-Earth Objects that could easily be redirected with a simple bump and acceleration, I recall two stories where this was used - one by humanity by simply mounting an Orion Engine on an asteroid from the local belt and accelerating it for a couple months to near-relativistic speeds, and another by aliens trying to wipe out humanity by throwing an entire moon (Iapetus, I believe) at the Earth. They're a lot further away, and we probably won't have an effective way to project any sort of military power beyond the Earth-Moon system in the next seven years. Simply projecting past GEO is only conceptual, and the Moon is pretty much the limit of practicality.

EDIT: Ah, we've already moved past it. Ignore, then. ^_^

[Jorkens]

This was more or less my first idea, if you have an alternative I'd love to use it if it makes more sense.

Off the top of my head, and without working through the details:
* like someone upthread suggested, make the aliens a single rogue unit trying to make a fast getaway from something. When their fuel starts running out they crash land on Earth, as the nearest habitable planet. Humans being a bit panicky at that point (for whatever reason), they shoot first and ask questions later. Vastly outnumbered but packed with biotech the aliens manage to unleash a mutagenic plague, but it's too late to stop them getting walloped (or is it?) edit: should have read Metelmi's post first! :smallredface:
* make the war into humans versus rebel martian / lunar colonists a couple of hundred years into the future. The rebels dropped the plague on the earth, but not before their stuff was so badly damaged that it turned out not to be sustainable any more
* make the war humans versus humans - maybe the biological agents were meant to be a 'doomsday device' that would never get used, as in Dr Strangelove, maybe there were plans to contain them once the enemy have capitulated but they turned out to be less effective than was anticipated
* have the biological agents be released by a terror group or religous cult, possibly with the deliberate intention of creating a world conforming to their hyper-darwinist ideas and elevating humanity to its next stage
* some non human based event - maybe the whole thing just evolved of its own accord, maybe there was some vast climatic / geophysical change (there's a JG Ballard story where epic solar flares blow away the ionosphere and things get Very Strange Very Fast, although JGB isn't noted for his scientific rigour) which set up the whole scenario.

Some of these could also set you up for 'creatures evolved from gerbils' or whatever as well...

[Zeful]

Just to wiegh in on this as it's very close to an idea I have. The easiest way to make humans survive and Alien invasion is to make the Aliens dumber. The best way to do that is lower the number of Aliens. One or two aliens will be notably dumber than a thousand.

Make the invaders outcasts of their society. They recieved/stole a ship. They want to make humans a slave race to fight against those that wronged them etc. This allows you to create peace quickly between us and the invaders.

[Jayngfet]

How about they're outcasts who wanted to find the non sentient life and mutate it into a soldier race against those that wronged them

[Zeful]

How about they're outcasts who wanted to find the non sentient life and mutate it into a soldier race against those that wronged themYou know this is sounding more like my idea now...

Of course it's not like you have cameras in my house so you can always be one step ahead of me?
"Do we really need to watch him shower?"

[Jayngfet]

You know this is sounding more like my idea now...

Of course it's not like you have cameras in my house so you can always be one step ahead of me?
"Do we really need to watch him shower?"

Yes, yes we do.

[Zeful]

But the mutation this is kind of what I did, but my aliens simply increased the number of nueral bonds in the visual processing reigons of abducted children, as well as fidling with their genome with nanites. They were geniuses in the medical field on their homeworld, but tended to make people "better" by manipulating them, which is why they stole their ship (a glorified science vessel later upgraded as a carrier/battleship deal) and escaped.

[Dervag]

Variation: Why are they invading? Resources are abundant in space, and generally easier to extract. Artificial habitats for leibensraum can be constructed - those ships are already artificial habitats, just with engines included.Building space habitats is very expensive per person you build habitat space for. It's a lot more expensive in time and effort than using a planet. If there's a large colonist population, it's likely that much of it is civilians in cryo, too... which limits the available workforce to construct space habitats.


Alien perspective: There was a phlebotinum breakdown/negative space wedgie that disrupted the fleet's FTL travel and comm capabilities, and chances of long-term survivability in general. Fortunately, one ship's astronavigator has located a world in a nearby nondescript system, that they can reach barely in time and also survive on long enough to repair a ship to call back home. With the severe damage, the ships do not have the time to take the luxury of simply entering a parking orbit and ferrying up/down, but fortunately, all of the ships are designed to survive the stresses of FTL travel, which means they can at least drop out of "hyperspace" right over the atmosphere and simply crash-land...

[tragedy ensues]This one works REALLY well. It's brilliant. I love it.

[Jayngfet]

So then, since no one seems to care about the aliens apperance how about a rough breakdown.

Dwarves and elves have taken the rockies and some of the great planes and turned them into two steampunk kingdomes with defferent styles. Dwarves have steampunk tanks and make their own guns and have huge mines. Elves have airships and trains and such.

Orcs are beastlike creatures. They roam around in packs like wolves around the americas, often lead by more intelligent humanoids as trained forces. Half Orcs are slightly less intelligent than a human but faster and have better reflexes.

Illithids run the area from nothern south america to florida.

Speaking of the sea, creatures have mutated into huge monsters, giant squids can rip a large boat in two and serphents can rip apart ships, many headed hydras can attack from all sides.

Europe has been decimated, turning into a wasteland where the trees have all been petrified into statues of themselves and only some smaller animals live, there's the occasional basalisk, which is rife with so many viruses it's not affected by and dangerous bacteria that it's small reptilian body is dangerous to anything too close. The state of the buildings varies, northernmost cities are Just large piles of stone while some southern ones are in remarkable condition.

Africa is mostly unnafected, but the occasional giant humanoid or animal will pop up, except egypt, the north of which is nearly as bad as asia and the south of which has a series of crazy things, many armed humans, people with heads resembling animals and whatnot.

Asia has mostly animals in the way of mutations, nine headed birds, aquatic monkies.

[Thiel]

If yo'rwe going to play the mutation card, you should try and limit yourself to things that, while beyond science as we know it, we can imagine. So, no basilisks.

[Jayngfet]

I'm not using the huge, serpentine thing that can kill you with it's look. I'm using the foot long older mythological version that kills anything that gets too close.

[Jayngfet]

Lets try currency then, I'm thinking that there'd be a simple form of currency, coins made from copper, bronze, iron, then steel. One bronze is ten copper, ten bronze to an iron, ten iron to a steel. It means the various tribes and small kingdoms can trade more easily. With some more advanced places only accepting coins with a symbol engraved on one side.