Ender Wiggin
Junior Member
I think the first thing I want to discuss is: If you are a space faring civilization how would you invade the earth? I believe I put some basic assumptions above.
Any professionals wanna help me write military fiction?
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Are the assumptions the ones from the first post? I'd like to give an answer, but I'm not sure how your points 1 and 4 can exist together. I mean your alien elf race's military technology should be far greater than early 21st century if they can have cheap FTL travel, right?
And is the FTL travel through organic propulsion from starships or (for lack of a better term), stargates/mass relays (like from stargate sg-1 and mass effect, respectively)?
And is the earth the alien race is invading current earth or future earth (if the latter, by how much in the future)?
In any case if it was a direct invasion I'd start with a NFZ of earth, starting with the destruction or de orbit of human satellites. Then shoot down all aircraft indiscriminantly (if it's an outright, no hold back invasion) and destroy all airports and air bases and space launch centres (from orbit of course, us humans will have no means to retaliate).
Once all the surgical strikes on all military installations (both field and command and control), civilian power centres, political capitals, oil refineries, production facilities is finished the alien race can do whatever they want.
Ender Wiggin
Junior Member
Basically there's essentially no real reason that all other facets of technological advancement have to progress at the same pace as FTL advancement.
If you're a culture with no real military thread would you really need to develop tanks, jet planes and machine guns at the same rate as WWII Germany?
Propulsion from starships, I'm thinking gravity manipulated bubbles specifically where you have "Very" fast travel between systems (little gravity) but much slower travel within a planetary system (lots of gravity) but still faster than current theoretical designs like VASMIR.
Lets say between 2010 and 2025 so you can roll out the various Chinese, US, NATO, and Russian weapon systems and warships out of drydock to join the fun.
Sounds good, though I'm thinking of having them underestimate their invasions needs and thus while they can achieve regional air superiority through something akin to suborbital fights they can't be everywhere at once and its a relatively long logistics chain and alot of maintanance downtime so their own assets while availiable will be limited.
Where your strategy won't be as effective is airfields as arent just about most planes designed to be able to take off from any decent stretch of highway?
Well story wise the invasion has to be successful enough that its credible but also makes enough mistakes or misunderestimations that the war drags on for a few years giving Humans the chance to win.
Or at least turn the war into the enemy's "Spanish Ulcer"/Guadacanal bleeding them dry.
1. Invasion of Earth is seen by the enemy as a political sideshow and underestimates humans (religious extremists, they see Humans as degenerates) and don't give the General Staff enough resources/authorization to ensure a quick victory so they have to make do.
2. My understanding it takes ALOT of munitions to do what you'ld do and they'll have great difficulty with constructing their own locally or bringing enough via their supply chain to keep it up, weren't 90% of US smart munitions stockpiles exhausted with the Iraq war?
3. There needs to be a land invasion as a) its exciting from a story perspective and b) airpower alone it is proven is insufficient to win a war, boots need to be on the ground.
So the question comes how many millions of enemy soldiers would be needed (frontline and rear echelon) to conduct a credible invasion and what sort of technology slightly more advanced than ours could we give them to provide enough of a force multiplier to lower those numbers to something more reasonable.
So far I'm thinking of the following:
1) Carbon fiber kevlar, their culture and military doctrine always favoured mobility, surprise and deception having soldier lugging around 60lbs body armor is counter intuitive to this so if we assume their somewhat more advanced but still without our frame of reference I think mass produced carbon fibre munitions and equipment is feasible multiplier.
This would make their soldiers immune to... what, most small arms fire except Warsaw rounds, high calibre sniper rounds and lucky shots in the neck?
That along with all their other now light weight equipment would be a huge mobility advantage I think for foot soldiers.
2) Lets assume they have everything that is in experimental prototype stage or not fully implemented, so every squad with hardened gps equipment, secured wireless headsets down to every private, automatic communications that prevent crosstalk and confusion.
As well as very sophisticated drone craft for urban warfare and bomb detection, railguns on their tanks and some of that nifty experimental forcefield stuff the British were working on and got sorta working.
Maybe localized EMP grenades?
3) Suborbital fighter craft with long range missiles, the penultimate highground (limited numbers). Maybe they should lack dogfighting ability?
4) Naval craft, unlike the Lizards from WorldWar I think we can give the Ilnarii the transportation capacity to bring whole battlefleets over and plop them on the oceans near secured ports?
5) Hypothetical aircraft and weapons; things like the osprey that we can't quite get working? They have them in large numbers.
6) Very advanced hydrogen fuel cells, so all they need to refuel their vehicals is water.
Hmm I see... but war is usually the catalyst of technological progress.
How many/how large/how capable are these alien starships?
Similar question to the above, and also does Earth have any capable early warning system?
Well my scenario was a bit excessive anyhow
My thinking was that if your alien starships were in large enough numbers they could inflict significant or near crippling damage to the world's more significant military and civilian airfields first, before targetting high value power stations and military control stations, all from orbit where they would be practically invulnerable. So basically remove most military aircraft from the equation with maybe a few small, but insignificant civilian airplanes.Lol -- well personally I feel no half capable alien race would plan an invasion which would give us the chance to win. All I can say is that I wouldn't plant any alien boots on Earth until they've wiped out our infrastructure, aircraft/airfields, and main military installations... so maybe you could make it that the humans have a series of deep, hardened bunkers as shelters or something.
I suppose you could use Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanastan as an analogue to your desired scenario?
Ah that clears things up a bit -- but once the aliens realize their political side show is actually hurting them won't they send a much more powerful fleet to finish the job?
Hmm yes, but I was thinking less about munitions but rather "cannon fire" -- like large kinetic energy rounds fired from orbit, which along with the initial "muzzle" velocity would also have the acceleration due to gravity acting on it. Depending on the calibre of the round they can inflict varying degeres of damage, and these rounds would be in large enough numbers to sustain a bombardment.
Fair enough -- maybe target some of the more remote countries first and use that as a staging area? Maybe Australia/New Zealand or even Antartica?
What kind of weapons do the human have against their opfor? Maybe all of the world's military issue their soldiers with 50 cal or something?
(So the aliens have relatively earth like technology? Not like... how the Protoss and Covenant are so different to their respective human foes in Starcraft/Halo respectively?)
And at what stage in an invasion will they actually send soldiers on the ground? In addition to the targets I mentioned above, I'd also use aircraft to destroy human armoured vehicles and such as well, just to be safe (unless said alien race is arrogant or decides we're too weak to retaliate or something).
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Well in storytelling you can make anything happen or not happen just as long you establish the rules of the "world." For me I watched the new Battlestar Galactica but hated the pretentious storytelling. They had advanced space craft but their ground warfare technology was pretty much modern Western level. Maybe even less since they were stuck using paper. All they were doing was going by the notion it's an unknown alien culture so don't question it. The easy way to explain the disparity in technological advancement is because of religion. Maybe there's some sort of long known critical resource to FTL they possess that is long associated with a deity to which it cannot be used in certain ways like warfare. Since it would require a large amount of energy to travel faster than light, one would assume you can exploit that technology for weapons. The religious angle would explain why it hasn't.
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solarz
Brigadier
What is the goal of the aliens (Ilnarii? Nice name!) for conducting a ground invasion of Earth? Do they want to subjugate Earth for resources? Women? Puppies?
Also, 90 billion people over 100 plants is about 900 mil per planet, so only 15% of human population density. That suggest these aliens will rely on technology/skill to cover a lack of numbers. You could use the example of US in Iraq and Afghanistan for inspiration.
Do these aliens have paranormal abilities? Psionics? Magic? If they're "elves in space" (or is it "dark elves?"), maybe give them some "elven" feel to their military tactics: i.e. reliance on stealth, assassination, and terror instead of brute force/firepower.
Also, 90 billion people over 100 plants is about 900 mil per planet, so only 15% of human population density. That suggest these aliens will rely on technology/skill to cover a lack of numbers. You could use the example of US in Iraq and Afghanistan for inspiration.
Do these aliens have paranormal abilities? Psionics? Magic? If they're "elves in space" (or is it "dark elves?"), maybe give them some "elven" feel to their military tactics: i.e. reliance on stealth, assassination, and terror instead of brute force/firepower.
Ender Wiggin
Junior Member
Yeah, alien weaponry and tech is basically within Human reference.
As for ground invasion very shortly after maybe 1 weeks of bombardment.
Yeah, the CAS Role, that's where I think alot of the fighting will be around for human airforces is trying to fend them off, but there's only so many munitions.
I'm thinking they would do fine enough in places like Poland, the MidWest, north indian plains, central africa and southern China.
I think shooting a space based kinetic round into the atmosphere is a little harder than it sounds. At least if that application wasn't in built into it anyways but I'm still debating how space combat would work.
They're fighting a massive civil war "relatively" fiercer than the American Civil War (absolutely several orders of magnitude larger), just reinforcing the invasion to replace casualties and keeping it supplied would be hard.
I'm still brainstorming this.
Yes, any decent space telescope could see the fleet coming at around Pluto, not counting the intelligence and word from the rebels of such an invasion, thus they would have time to disperse.
I'm thinking more like Korea or a hypothetical invasion of China by the US in the mid-50's, clearly American firepower is superior and would win major engagements, but if troops get too far away from their firepower and they'll get whacked.
I feel how the situation will go down is despite early warning and time for preparations the initial advantages from clearing out the orbit of Earth assets and bombardment would be enough to secure the LZ's and make significant early progress, but as Earth forces regroup and reorganize, as coordination improves and the Ilnarii stretch themselves thin trying to occupy cities thats when things bog down.
Ender Wiggin
Junior Member
Religion is part of it, sheer conservatism in societal and technological progress (as anything that would benefit the common good would also make them freer, loosen monopolies etc).
But considering in BSG that their civilization got nuked to oblivion they probably would only have on board marine boarding implements and whatever they had on hand, the Cylons seemed to have some fairly advanced equipment in comparison that made 1 on 1 engagements suicide.
Thanks, its derived from the "Old" name for Drow in forgotten realms fiction "Ilythir" and now I can name the homeworld "Ilnar".
But strange, I thought I had detailed the reasoning, the Ilnarii are in a civil war, there's fighting between secessionist and government forces on just about every world, the secessionists turn to Earth for assistance promising the keys to FTL technology up to and including blueprints, scientific assistance and working engines for aid.
Earth accepts and is covertly helping the rebels, with training, equipment, intelligence and SPECOPs forces, multiple governments sign on in direct competition, it isn't UN sanctioned so each government with a stake is doing this to gain private access to FTL technology.
Eventually mistakes are made and Earth involvement is discovered, the Ilnarii home government demands not only that Earth fesses up and withdraws from the conflict, but also hand over all research materials for FTL travel and destroy ALL research done by humans.
Each and every government on Earth refuses, so the retaliatory invasion is launched with whatever they could scrap from the bottom of the barrel.
Hmm, is that so? 900 mil doesn't seem to low though. Though this could be increased. I'm already trying to think up some theoretical force multipliers that could be used.
Both kinds, High Elves and Dark Elves but the latter conquered and assimilated the former and wear the pants in the relationship.
Absolutely, I entirely wish to convey this across. I'm going to be taking a hard look at War40k Eldar and seeing what parts of it can be converted and toned down to 21st century lines.
I haven't decided if I want to give psionic ish abilities yet, I sorta want to keep it as realistic as possible but then again giving it to them could help with making the story interesting.
I think I can easily come up with a biological explaination for Dark Vision (which would make night fighting suicide for humans even with night optics).
But Levitation, Globes of Darkness, Fairie fire, and spell resistance is a little harder to justify, though globes of darkness seems like just a different chemical reaction for making smoke grenades.
You mean those places to set as landing zones? I'm not suer about southern china, maybe it'll be better for them to try the gobi desert.
Yeah I suppose it really depends on the starships... Because for what I was imagining, I thought maybe a couple dozen star destroyer sized ships coming to invade earth, optimized for ship to ship combat and orbital bombardment (actually those two capabilities can be combined, kind of like how modern AShMs can double as LACMs).
Just nitipcking here -- if the alien elf race doesn't decide to attack Earth, will that be detrimental to their civil war effort? I mean I recognize the FTL technology/rebel reasoning, but that doesn't seem enough for me to allocate significant amounts of resources into an invasion unless you know you're going to blitz them into submission within a short period of time.
Because an invasion of Earth would be opening up another front in addition to their more important civil war, and that doesn't seem very wise.
So optical sensors? I suppose the alien starships don't have cloaking or tactics to avoid detection?
What about orbital fire support? For the aliens?
Hmm is there a reason to occupy the cities -- I mean you've stated the motivations for the Ilnar or whatever, for this invasion but no definite goal yet. If it's to subjugate the human race for slavery then maybe theyl'l have to leave the cities alone, but if it's to simply wipe humanity from existance then a clean orbital bombardment should be enough.