Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

With Earth at least, we have one of the greater concentrations of things like metal and water located in a single area of our solar system. While there may be more of those things overall in various bodies, it's more spread out. So if the invaders were lazy or simply found it more practical to extract resources from one location, then Earth would be a good target.

I'm sorry, but that's absurd. Enceladus has ten times the water of Earth, and its lower gravity and position farther out in the solar system make it a far better target for would-be interstellar looters. Heck, if they called us up and asked nicely, I'm sure some kind of deal could be made.

Besides, anyone who imagines that they could transport planetary volumes of water around in spaceships not only needs their brain checked, but to be sent to the reeducation camps. It's almost comically inefficient. Water can be used for a lot of things: refueling, creating oxygen, supplying agriculture, but none of those require draining oceans. Terraforming, maybe, but then why take it from Earth?

Going back to Half-Life 2, the environmental storytelling in the game suggests that the Combine have indeed been draining Earth's oceans, but there's no hint that they're doing it via ships. Rather, they seem to be leveraging their portal technology. I doubt it's an intentional copy of that idea, but The Marvels also has the main villain use a portal to transfer air and water between planets. (It seems to be ripping off Spaceballs instead.)

Such works make little to no effort to ground their technology in realism, so there's little point in criticizing them (on that basis).

Speaking only for myself, if I were in charge of an evil galactic empire and one of my subordinates suggested invading an occupied planet to steal its water, I'd shoot them in the head (or whatever appendage contains their brain).

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 10:20:32 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Why negotiate when you have superior firepower?

Edited by Kaiseror on Feb 26th 2024 at 9:19:43 AM

For the same reason you don't drive a Formula-1 car at 200 mph on residential streets.

"Hey, we built this massive military apparatus. Why not use it in the most inefficient and self-defeating way possible?"

"You have wonderful ideas, Blorglxk'xk, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

By that rationale, the US should have invaded Canada a long time ago.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 10:23:51 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

? We're both talking about alien invasion, right?

Even draining the ocean with portals is absurd, I was curious the other day about how long it would take for a drain to drain the ocean after a gag in a show.

Your looking at needing millions of trillions of years to drain the ocean with a fire hydrant and no replenishment.

And while that is only one connection, well assuming you used millions of portals from the series...

Your still looking at billions if not trillions of years.

The amount of water in the ocean is insane to any practical scale.

Also I would assume so, the US could easily overpower canada and just take whatever they wanted from them... just like aliens could earth.

But negotiations work out better for both parties.

Edited by Imca on Feb 27th 2024 at 12:32:52 AM

You're suggesting that, because an alien empire has a powerful military, they shouldn't bother negotiating with inferior civilizations. This defies any sort of logic or rationality.

Anyway, we've already stipulated that invasion isn't quite such a stupid idea if you have overwhelming technological superiority. Invading for water, however, is.

If the Hypertraxions from Flpp'xxkk IV want to steal Enceladus' water, there's fuck all we could do about it today, so it would be more a matter of politeness than anything.

I guess it depends on the diameter of the portal(s). Chalk this one up to Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 10:34:36 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Not if you the interstellar empire intend to bring them into your fold. I don’t necessarily mean as slaves. Additional acquisitions, expanded borders, greater control of the balance of power, you need not be a cartoon supervillain in why you attacked a homeworld to begin with.

Under certain circumstances attacking a home world can work in favor of the homeworld’s population in the long run if their original government was say a rival hegemon in terms of stellar conflict. It would take time and effort to integrate that as the newest part of the empire but the return dividends could be much greater.

Any space war that isn’t about expansionism is unlikely to involve much in the way of warfare. It’ll either be ship to ship war with the losing side seeing their planet reduced to glass in the case of a genocidal war (at best, it might not even involve that) or basically blockades and piracy for economic. Ideological war would be almost anything from simple Side A goes to Side B to kick B’s ass and then go home to excessively complex spirals of hatred and violence.

But to rule out attacking a homeworld entirely? That’s folly. Interstellar empires should they ever be a thing are quite unlikely to be a “Mars for the Martians” policy where you can capture all the colonies you want but you can never so much as think about moving against a rival power’s homeworld. It’s unrealistic when put against the backdrop of history of actual wars. Plenty of homelands and capitals have been invaded over the course of civilization, what makes a single planet any different when scaled up to interstellar to galactic size?

Or your go the Stellaris path and see all those exploitable pops for your empire.

Inter arma enim silent leges

I didn't say that attacking a homeworld would never be rational. I said conquering, with the added stipulation that this would be done via orbital invasion. After all, the Combine conquer Earth, but they don't do it from orbit. They do it via portal spam. If you have a Type 2-3 galactic empire and you want to snatch up Earth, nothing we have is going to stop you.

Most of the "serious" scenarios we've been discussing involve relative technological and logistical parity. In that scenario, homeworld invasion for the purpose of conquest and occupation is hilariously stupid.

If you want water (for some reason), go mine some asteroids or moons. If you want to rule the natives, start with infiltration and coercion. If you want a biosphere but don't care about preserving the native life, lob some big rocks.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 11:29:06 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I have a hard time visualizing why you would even want to subjugate another species for labor.

Like surely if your capable of going interstellar you can make some damn robots.

And the robots you dont have to go though the motions of well... subjugating them and dealing with the assimilation and disent.

Send some self-replicating robots and have them Grey Goo the target planet into a paradise for your species. Then send your colony ships along behind them. (IIRC this is the premise of Macross.)

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

At this point, one may wonder why an alien species doesn't just simply make a visit to Earth, take what they need at the moment and then leave before the locals notice their presence or the theft until after the fact.

Much more cost-efficient and rewarding than wasting ships and/or manpower on a global invasion.

"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."

You mean Aliens Steal Cattle? That would depend on their ability to arrive and depart unnoticed, and in turn on Stealth in Space, which is impossible. So, no. Maybe 100 years ago, before radars, telescopes, and satellites were watching the sky 24/7/365.

A civilization capable of doing that today would be so advanced that our chance of meaningfully fighting them would be 0.0000 repeating. The idea is compatible with the Alien Zoo hypothesis, in which we're surrounded by high-tech aliens who are deliberately concealing themselves from us because we are not ready.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 12:02:25 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I'd want to conquer other species not just for work, but you can pretty much make a case of Scary Dogmatic Aliens conquering worlds either because they are religious zealots who want more worshipers, or need labor because they forbid the use of robots or AI, or they see themselves most of the pop as being oppressed and pose themselves as liberators or they want to keep a potentially harmful species in check but are against genocide.

Granted, plenty of wars in our history have been fought for stupid reasons and ego, so I wouldn't put any alien intelligence from being above doing the same.

Inter arma enim silent leges

Even stipulating the potential for Scary Dogmatic Aliens who just want to conquer everyone, surely they'd be good enough at it not to commit the basic errors found in every story about an Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion. If they did, they wouldn't remain conquerors for very long.

The Combine comes to mind again, and as I've pointed out, we never see their ships hovering overhead, threatening to nuke cities. They are smart enough not to make that kind of mistake.

Yes, that's a potential way to do the job. It's risky, since the natives could figure out how to defeat — or worse, reverse-engineer — the disease, but it doesn't cost you millions of troops. The Ender's Game series postulates exactly this method in the "descolada".

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 12:17:46 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I remember hearing that a good way for alien invaders to wipe out humanity would simply be to covertly release some kind of superplague onto the planet and come back later. It has historical precedence since most of the colonization of the Americas didn't happen till after most of the indigenous population had either directly or indirectly died from European diseases.

This reminds me of that one alien species in the "Stargate" tv-series who had the M.O of "Pretend to be friendly, offer an (Cure-All) medicine to the people on the planet which in reality is actually (permanent medically-induced sterilization) and then wait until the species dies out naturally now when no new generations are born, conquer planet at their own leisure. Rinse and repeat".

To be fair, it was an efficient way to conquer a planet.

"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."

Yeah, that would do the trick quite nicely.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Ah yes the Aschen, only beaten through time travel. They sterilized most of the population, they left a few to help sell the idea to any future societies they'd meet that they were benevolent and helpful.

"Oh it's so terrible about that plague, thankfully we stepped in when we did to help! We've even given them jobs to help give them purpose after losing everything else."

We have, at least a couple of times.

I think you can try and conquer a planet without nuking it into the stone age. Also, i would argue few wars are truly existential. It's really, really uncommon to actually completely wipe out a people because this is incredibly, incredibly hard. There's no way you could entirely wipe out a species and still be left a useful planet. And i'd argue that even if you want to do that, you'd still want to send a fleet to make sure your initial bombardment didn't miss anything.

I would argue that in an even somewhat realistic setting, this is practically guaranteed to happen. An apes and angels scenario is far more likely than potentially dozens of races going through dozens of major (and potentially millions of minor) events and still somehow end up with a level of development a few decades apart.

But also, people are sometimes bad at judging their opponent's strengths. The nazis started several wars of choice against opponents they had no way of beating. Russia is currently entering the third year of a ten-day war. the USA invaded Afghanistan with the idea of regime change, and the taliban was back in power before the last helicopter took off.

Interstellar invasion will be rare, sure, and frequently stupid perhaps too, but there is no way in seven hells it won't happen.

To be honest the Aschen were incredibly dumb with their actual goal. They conquer planet to set up as agricultural worlds, even though they had the ability to turn Jupiter into another star. Finding, befriending, secretly sterilizing and then taking over alien worlds is an absurd plan to produce some food.

Everything that makes one a Scary Dogmatic Alien is also what makes them terrible invaders. It's one of those ideologies that's just suicidal. And so they're practically guaranteed to try and invade someone else, and fail.

Edited by devak on Feb 26th 2024 at 7:30:03 PM

Why have civilization at all when you can just bash people over the head with clubs?

UFO After Blank series pulls an unusual take on this: the Grey Goo is Organic Technology that replicates in the upper atmosphere until it reaches critical mass, then precipitates out and kills everything on the ground, then dissolves into the soil. Most of the life that survived is heavily mutated and as it turns out later, the aliens aren't trying to colonize Earth at all, nor do they need resources or anything. They just needed us out of the way so that they can get to work.

Because let's face it, a single-planet civilization along the lines of Earth simply doesn't merit the deployment of a fleet actually meant to sterilize rather than subjugate.

If you've got some tribal guerrillas making a stink in the boonies, are you really going to Colony Drop them? It'd be a waste of ordinance.

I personally imagine the Combine as reserving their actual muscle for worlds that might actually develop into a headache down the line, at which point no quarter is given. They're basically the archetypal hunter of a Dark Forest scenario - except instead of a crossbow, they bring a minigun.

I would also wanna add that modern warfare is horrendously expensive, horrendously destructive, and a horrendously inefficient way to settle disputes. If you can negotiate a settlement, it's a vastly superior way to go.

It's why basically every major rich nation is busy fighting each other in the UN rather than in a major peer-to-peer conflict.

Also the Combine can teleport between universes, but not in universe. The portal storms and aftermath of Half-Life let them put some weight in but after that they basically put in a token effort to keep Earth under control. Were they to send their ships they'd have to cross the boundary of space in realtime to reach Earth anyways. Even their smaller portals couldn't fit anything large enough for a full on invasion.

The Lambda Team developing point to point teleportation however changed that, if the Combine had their hands on effective teleportation like that then they'd easily steamroll anything because now they could travel instantaneously.

devak:

Yes, this is also something I've said in the past, although it does seem as if a lot of would-be sci-fi writers step around the issue by postulating intra-species warfare, a la The Expanse. Of course, such scenarios often involve near technological parity, making said warfare prohibitively wasteful and therefore suicidally stupid.

It's impossible to prove a negative. My opinion is that interstellar warfare will be impractical to the point of impossibility unless someone invents FTL. Anyone who attempts it will run into the sheer economic impracticality before their fleets get anywhere near a potential target.

My hypothesis is that no species can attain interstellar travel while remaining stupid enough to believe that such invasions can work.

However, it doesn't mean that nobody will ever attempt to seize another planet. If they do, however, they'll use much more sensible tech, like nanobots, diseases, KKVs, robot armies, etc.

Yeah, and thus it's unlikely that they would survive to develop the capability in the first place. As above, this is "proving a negative", but I believe that no such civilizations could exist in reality. In sci-fi, I suppose it's possible, but as with everything else you need to pick the Hand Wave or One Big Lie that your setting uses to justify its plot.

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Echoing Silence: Yes, that's true, and it's hypothesized that one reason the Combine target Earth specifically is because they want to get their hands on that portal technology. Anyway, portals are space magic, so it's a case of the setting justifying the plot, as I mentioned above.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 1:58:21 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"