A bit of analysis: Posleen War

[Mr Bean]

It is also idiotic, seeing as we would be the European nation most likely to draft all able-bodied males as we had plenty of plans to do so in case the Soviet horde attacks. Also, all male citizens coming of age are registered and catalogued according to their usefulness in a wartime situation. It would be trivially easy to get enough men in the field, the only bottleneck would be finding arms for all of them.

Finding enough Posleen effective weapons you mean. There are storehouses on American leased bases specifically for that contingency. We are not the Russians with entire tank brigades ready to go only waiting on new conscripts but there are a large stockpile of small arms and ammo in Germany for US use from the Cold War days that could be sold to Germany since we are not invading A-Stan or Iraq in the Posleen timeline.

*Edit
And before you ask no, in a war economy when the US Government is going to ammo makers and giving them orders for ten billion .50cal rounds the ammo makes no sense to ship home economically.

[Sea Skimmer]

I don't think it was so much a .1kt explosion that killed the ships, but a .1kt explosion occuring inside the heavily armored ships. Much discussion is had during the design phase of all the things they can't do and still have the shot penetrate.

Well, such low yield nukes would waste fissile material anyway, making them higher yield is easy. If anything like a modern cannon, however big, is going to pierce the ships then a direct contact burst of a nuke will too. Plus if battleship caliber gunfire can pierce the ships, then of course so could much much smaller shaped charge weapons. Even if one won't hurt a big ship, hundreds from an artillery barrage of 155mm shaped charges sure would.

Also, the Tiger rounds sometimes kill Posleen ships in one shot and sometimes don't. You can say that about a lot of weapons, though.

Yes, but its no big deal to make much bigger nuclear shells for normal sizes of artillery projectiles. Technologically this would be easier then making 105mm nukes, 105mm just shows what a joke the whole issue really would be.

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, how many more big cats do the Germans even have to name vehicles after? If Tiger and Panther are off-limits, and they're already using Leopard and Puma and so on...

I know! They could call the new tank the Löwe! (Lion) The Nazis never actually used that. Amusingly, if I remember my Secret Prototypes of the Napkinmacht correctly, that's what one of the candidates for a successor to the Tiger II would have been anyway- it's a more appropriate name for a "Tiger III" than the name Tiger III itself would be.

Or just done it like the RDA should have done it in Avatar:

Alien Spacebattlesheps show up in LEO, brush aside the few ships the Galactics can give us, vaporize the ISS; before turning their HYPERSPACESPECTRAL MAIN DRIVES onto earth in a FIERY TORCH OF BURNINATION.

...or launch so many nuclear cluster bombs that each square mile of inhabited land gets hit by a 1 kt alien nuke.

THEN you send in the mindless ravening alien hordes. Suddenly, humanity teetering on the brink of exinction suddenly makes sense, as does the Sub-Urbs, etc....

From the point of view of a species of conquerors, that's a kind of bad plan, though. The Posleen are radiation-resistant, but they're not fucking radiodurans; they couldn't live on a planet they'd just hammered with one kiloton per square mile. An alien horde could be made that resistant, yes, but we'd have the same set of fans calling that a blatant and stupid handwave that we do (rightly) criticizing the series now.

Also, there are many things a conqueror might want to use that would be destroyed by a one kiloton per square kilometer bombardment. If that was their normal invasion practice on non-Earth planets, they'd probably have gone extinct already.

Kratman is a loathsome and insane Nazi fetishist.

[nods]

Absolutely. This is widely known and accepted, I think.

Finding enough Posleen effective weapons you mean. There are storehouses on American leased bases specifically for that contingency. We are not the Russians with entire tank brigades ready to go only waiting on new conscripts but there are a large stockpile of small arms and ammo in Germany for US use from the Cold War days that could be sold to Germany since we are not invading A-Stan or Iraq in the Posleen timeline.

*Edit
And before you ask no, in a war economy when the US Government is going to ammo makers and giving them orders for ten billion .50cal rounds the ammo makes no sense to ship home economically.

I am reminded of something Shep once told me- that the USAAF once dumped massive amounts of ammunition on the Pacific islands into the sea, because given the huge war surplus at the end of the war, it was more cost-effective to throw the stuff away than to ship it home.

I don't think it was so much a .1kt explosion that killed the ships, but a .1kt explosion occuring inside the heavily armored ships. Much discussion is had during the design phase of all the things they can't do and still have the shot penetrate.

Well, such low yield nukes would waste fissile material anyway, making them higher yield is easy. If anything like a modern cannon, however big, is going to pierce the ships then a direct contact burst of a nuke will too. Plus if battleship caliber gunfire can pierce the ships, then of course so could much much smaller shaped charge weapons. Even if one won't hurt a big ship, hundreds from an artillery barrage of 155mm shaped charges sure would.

Hmm. That might not be a foregone conclusion. Depending on how their ship armor works, it might perform drastically better against shaped charges then against solid penetrators, and actually reward you for using "big and slow" objects to punch through it. Then again, I could be totally wrong about that. Also, those ships are big, much bigger than tanks, and a shaped charge that penetrates the outer hull won't necessarily damage anything critical. Hundreds of hits would probably manage to cripple it eventually, but scoring hundreds of hits on an airborne target with powerful beam weapons to shoot back with strikes me as a bit problematic. One-hit kills are desirable.

You might note that no actual battleship gun ever took out a Posleen starship in the series- the one occasion on which the US military thinks it was done, it was actually a GalTech weapon that did the job. The SheVa gun mounts a much longer-barreled and weirder weapon, with a far higher muzzle velocity. Which is still rather silly, because...

Also, the Tiger rounds sometimes kill Posleen ships in one shot and sometimes don't. You can say that about a lot of weapons, though.

Yes, but its no big deal to make much bigger nuclear shells for normal sizes of artillery projectiles. Technologically this would be easier then making 105mm nukes, 105mm just shows what a joke the whole issue really would be.

The size of contact explosion it takes to kill Posleen ships seems to be around 5-10 kt. Matching that against known nuclear artillery shells, a "rationalized" SheVa-equivalent design might be a self-propelled, high velocity 8" gun on an anti-aircraft mount. It might still be too big to put on a normal chassis, but you could probably get it into a tank that's at least within shouting distance of what it's practical to build with modern technology (100-150 tons?) without making it a bad joke.

A 6" gun might be too small caliber to carry a big enough nuclear weapon to destroy the ship reliably without penetrating the hull- and, as you say, there's the fissile material supply to consider.

[Thanas]

Honestly, how many more big cats do the Germans even have to name vehicles after? If Tiger and Panther are off-limits, and they're already using Leopard and Puma and so on...

Löwe, Gepard, Ozelot, Luchs, Jaguar, Parder. If all fails or the designation has been already used (like Gepard, Luchs etc.) just slap a II at the end of it. Increase number as necessary, or expand it into the canine family like Wolf or Canoidae like Marder.

[Simon_Jester]

This is a heavy tank we're talking about, not a relatively agile MBT or armored car, so I think Löwe would be most thematically appropriate.

Of course, that may be my recent spate of World of Tanks playing talking.

[VarrusTheEthical]

I would like to point out that when it came to super-heavy tanks, the Nazis often named them after rodents. For example there was Maus (200 MT) and Ratte (1000 MT). So if you're having trouble with big-kitty names, you could instead start using names for small animals.

[Sea Skimmer]

As I recall, the rodent names only came about at Hitlers personal insistence. Maus started out as Mammut for example, but the Fuhrer thought that was unsoldierly or some such. Not bad thinking given how often it was going to bog down; though in its defense some people think its true purpose would have been as a mobile bunker on the Atlantic Wall. Ratte was almost certainly thought of in similar terms.

Hmm. That might not be a foregone conclusion. Depending on how their ship armor works, it might perform drastically better against shaped charges then against solid penetrators, and actually reward you for using "big and slow" objects to punch through it.

Rather unlikely, and even if it was several times more effective against shaped charges then a kinetic hit from shells you still just aren't going to need a very big shaped charge to defeat it. We have tanks rolling around today with thicker armor in LOS terms then any battleship ever had and yet you can still defeat this with weapons a four man team could move.

Then again, I could be totally wrong about that. Also, those ships are big, much bigger than tanks, and a shaped charge that penetrates the outer hull won't necessarily damage anything critical. Hundreds of hits would probably manage to cripple it eventually, but scoring hundreds of hits on an airborne target with powerful beam weapons to shoot back with strikes me as a bit problematic. One-hit kills are desirable.

Scoring hits like that is way less problematic then even designing the suspension for a land monitor that would have no realistic mobility anyway. Look at TOS-1... think about how many of those could be churned out quickly compared to just tooling up to produce massive super vehicles.

You might note that no actual battleship gun ever took out a Posleen starship in the series- the one occasion on which the US military thinks it was done, it was actually a GalTech weapon that did the job. The SheVa gun mounts a much longer-barreled and weirder weapon, with a far higher muzzle velocity. Which is still rather silly, because...

Far higher muzzle velocity creates rather serious credibility problems with regard to the Posleen ship having super armor, and yet the shell being hollow and containing a bursting charge that survives intact. Are these shells made of some magic alien material?

The size of contact explosion it takes to kill Posleen ships seems to be around 5-10 kt. Matching that against known nuclear artillery shells, a "rationalized" SheVa-equivalent design might be a self-propelled, high velocity 8" gun on an anti-aircraft mount. It might still be too big to put on a normal chassis, but you could probably get it into a tank that's at least within shouting distance of what it's practical to build with modern technology (100-150 tons?) without making it a bad joke.

You could put such a weapon on an M1 hull. Modern 155mm pieces have grown rather massive in historical terms for the caliber, kind of skews what we think of as normal for artillery chassis, but 70 tons is a really big and would accommodate a turreted 203mm weapon. After all the bare bones weight for a limited traverse SP 203mm is only 31 tons in the case of the M110, designed 50 years ago. The armor might not be much, but super tanks have so many survivability problems, especially against an enemy who is firing from the air and thus can hit the top with direct fire, that hardly matters. If you wanted major armor, then I really doubt you'd run into problems employing a limited traverse mount anyway, its not like the vehicles can't turn or deploy in groups and you only need single shots.

Course, I never read any of the books, and I fail to see why the Posleen even employing weapons no more powerful then 500lb aerial bombs from high altitude or orbit with these super ships, don't just blow up all the power plants on earth. That would cripple all major manufacturing industry, all oil refining and all serious explosives production without damaging the earth in irreparable manner like nuclear weapons might. That they not only don't do this, but can't stop earth from building massive custom vehicles pretty much proves they are completely retarded beyond the depths of hell.

Also I wouldn't be sure the subkiloton to 2kt figures you see cited for 155mm nukes are really a hard limit, its probably possible to throw in some low key fusion boosting in a 155mm package, but this was simply not desirable in such weapons so it would not be expected. The whole point was to have as low of yield as possible so they could be used close to friendly forces. While the US had a 40kt 8 inch nuke for example, we also had a project for a 100 ton 8 inch nuke giving an idea of what the military really wanted for job. The enemy buzzing around up in the air makes this problem much less serious even at the same ground distance, since you won't get nearly as much fallout.

Anyway, I think what would really happen would just be people start firing 50-100kt class warheads on rockets, and damn the results. The world survived an awful lot of open air nuclear testing, it can do it again when alien retards attack.

A 6" gun might be too small caliber to carry a big enough nuclear weapon to destroy the ship reliably without penetrating the hull- and, as you say, there's the fissile material supply to consider.

The real issue would just be producing the warhead physic packages, but that's far more doable then building and transporting super tanks in a reasonable time frame. Linear implosion nukes waste fissile, but the world has a awful massive surplus of fissile material if no requirement exists to restore stockpiles of high yield strategic weapons. Hundreds of tons of U-235 and Pu-239 exist before we even consider the MASSIVE amount of Pu-239 contained in all the unprocessed spent fuel stockpiled at nuclear reactors all over the world. Nobody is setup to reprocess really big amounts right now... but aliens invading? People will be willing to accept some nasty accidents to rush through creation of more fissile material. As far as I can tell Pu-239 extraction doesn't require any particularly specialist equipment or chemicals that could not be rapidly obtained. The hard part is having the reactor and all the enriched feedstock and all the time and money that consumes first, plus all the reprocessing waste which you can just throw in storage tanks.

[Ahriman238]

Which is freaking insulting, considering the unit in question is actually one of the formations we Germans consider elite. Likewise, another elite German unit does not have the stones to blow up a bridge later on.

But yeah, the glorious SS has no problem doing either.

That, I did not know. But it's probably no worse than the pasting and retreat of Big Red One in the main books. The unit in question had broken once earlier in the book, and when they surround a full globe force (roughly 4 million head) the Darhel leak this information to the senior battlemaster, who chooses to breakout there. 4 million charging Posleen might make me reconsider my career choices to.

Of course, in the book this force was largely composed of conscripts.

The unit that didn't blow the bridge was the SS. Or rather, the SS volunteers drawn from french survivors. The failure to do so is depicted less as an act of incompetence or moral cowardice and more as a sign of common fucking humanity.

And then a short while later the SS men shoot Posleen rafts (Posleen use rafts!?) despite human shields, Polish children kept precisely for that purpose.

Kratman is a loathsome and insane Nazi fetishist.

Even so, it would be hard enough to tell the german people that you've dissolved and arrested their 'treasonus' legislature. Now imagine doing it with 2 men in SS uniforms standing behind you.

And what do you think the average Berliner would think when he gets out of bed to see SS men patrolling the streets of the capital?

Oh well, just for fun look at this comparison of superheavy vehicles:

SheVa: 143x117 meters, height 52 meters. 7000 tons. 16" gun, 8 rounds. No secondaries.

Tiger III: 31x12 meters, height 8 meters. 1700 tons. 12" gun, fifty rounds. 4" secondaries.

Tiger IIIB: 31x12 meters, height 8 meters. 1700 tons. Posleen railgun, 440 rounds. 4"secondaries.

Maus: 10.2x3.71 meters, height 3.63 meters. 200 tons. 5" gun, 32 rounds. 3" secondaries.

Mars-pattern Baneblade: 13.5x8.4 meters. height 6.3 meters. 316 tons. Battle and Demolisher cannon, 22 and 18 rounds. laser and autocannon secondaries.

I know it's not a 40k thread, I'm just amused that even the smallest and sanest of superheavies in this series is over four times the size of a freakin' Baneblade. The gold standard of superheavies in a universe not well known for it's conservatism.

But yeah, I am not really suprised when they say in the Hedren book they are restarting production of the Tiger III with the new features (invisible paint, ground-effect drive, and Posleen style autoaim) and not the SheVa for the coming conflict.

[Simon_Jester]

As I recall, the rodent names only came about at Hitlers personal insistence. Maus started out as Mammut for example, but the Fuhrer thought that was unsoldierly or some such. Not bad thinking given how often it was going to bog down; though in its defense some people think its true purpose would have been as a mobile bunker on the Atlantic Wall. Ratte was almost certainly thought of in similar terms.

...Hitler thought "Mouse" was more soldierly than a goddamn "Mammoth tank."

No wonder the Germans lost the war.

Scoring hits like that is way less problematic then even designing the suspension for a land monitor that would have no realistic mobility anyway. Look at TOS-1... think about how many of those could be churned out quickly compared to just tooling up to produce massive super vehicles.

A distinct point.

Far higher muzzle velocity creates rather serious credibility problems with regard to the Posleen ship having super armor, and yet the shell being hollow and containing a bursting charge that survives intact. Are these shells made of some magic alien material?

I honestly do not know, though I wouldn't be surprised since by the time we see SheVas taking the field, we also see MBTs with 'upgraded' armor that makes use of materials that are at the very least 'futuristic' if not actually alien magic.

The size of contact explosion it takes to kill Posleen ships seems to be around 5-10 kt. Matching that against known nuclear artillery shells, a "rationalized" SheVa-equivalent design might be a self-propelled, high velocity 8" gun on an anti-aircraft mount. It might still be too big to put on a normal chassis, but you could probably get it into a tank that's at least within shouting distance of what it's practical to build with modern technology (100-150 tons?) without making it a bad joke.

You could put such a weapon on an M1 hull. Modern 155mm pieces have grown rather massive in historical terms for the caliber, kind of skews what we think of as normal for artillery chassis, but 70 tons is a really big and would accommodate a turreted 203mm weapon. After all the bare bones weight for a limited traverse SP 203mm is only 31 tons in the case of the M110, designed 50 years ago.

Major armor is not critically important, but you do want high muzzle velocity and the ability to fire at high angles, so it's gonna be bigger and heftier than an M110.

Again, for all I know it might not fit on a 70-ton platform, my point is that I cannot imagine it getting too large to build the damn thing at all. We could, if need be, build a 100-ton tank. It would work, it would not be a farcical monster like the SheVa. And it would do the job.

Course, I never read any of the books, and I fail to see why the Posleen even employing weapons no more powerful then 500lb aerial bombs from high altitude or orbit with these super ships, don't just blow up all the power plants on earth. That would cripple all major manufacturing industry, all oil refining and all serious explosives production without damaging the earth in irreparable manner like nuclear weapons might. That they not only don't do this, but can't stop earth from building massive custom vehicles pretty much proves they are completely retarded beyond the depths of hell.

Yes, they are. They also like to capture other people's industrial infrastructure, and they aren't used to having to fight an opponent with serious military-industrial capabilities that makes destroying their production facilities necessary.

Also I wouldn't be sure the subkiloton to 2kt figures you see cited for 155mm nukes are really a hard limit, its probably possible to throw in some low key fusion boosting in a 155mm package, but this was simply not desirable in such weapons so it would not be expected. The whole point was to have as low of yield as possible so they could be used close to friendly forces. While the US had a 40kt 8 inch nuke for example, we also had a project for a 100 ton 8 inch nuke giving an idea of what the military really wanted for job. The enemy buzzing around up in the air makes this problem much less serious even at the same ground distance, since you won't get nearly as much fallout.

I know, I know. My point is that I know you could put a Big Enough Bomb in an 8" shell. You might be able to do it in a 6" shell, I wouldn't know, but in the worst possible case you could put a very long-barreled 8" AA gun on a chassis of 100 tons or so, have it fire nuclear shells, and it would do the SheVa's job perfectly well, while being so incredibly much better and cheaper.

Anything beyond that is just icing on the cake.

[Ahriman238]

Far higher muzzle velocity creates rather serious credibility problems with regard to the Posleen ship having super armor, and yet the shell being hollow and containing a bursting charge that survives intact. Are these shells made of some magic alien material?

Yes, and no. The 'shells' are dart-shaped, and almost completly solid, Depleted Uranium. The exception being the 0.5% or so taken up by the antimatter charge and the field generator that keeps the antimatter from touching any of the regular matter until the proper time. The SheVa version weighs roughly 1 ton, after losing the propellant and sabot. The Tiger version is still an antimatter DU round, but is somewhat smaller with an additional mechanism that lets them set various yields.

So, the material is not alien tech at all, while the explosive material and 'detonator' is. The shells are not hollow and have no need for a bursting charge.

[Ahriman238]

Learning a fair bit more about the Galactics, but one thing I meant to get to is human AI. Because the AIDs are programmed to snoop for the Darhel, creating a human AI must have been a priority at some point. All the Tigers had an AI.

In the post-war world, There is a special program, most often in a PDA, that imitates an AI without being a true AI. It's called a Buckley. Pvt "Lefty" Buckley was part of MAD MIKE'S unit on Diess, and had the misfortune to, in a single day get caught in a fuel-air explosion, buried alive, blow his hand off, get shot in the torso, caught in a nuclear blast (though he wasn't nearly as close as Mike) strong enough to rip a C-Dec in two. And then had half a C-Dec fall on him. He transfered out of the ACS in a hurry, and died in Hell's Faire, when a Posleen superior decided it was clever to use an HVM to take out a target behing cover 20 feet away.

But the Tctpch recorded his personality, as they apparently do with anyone they find interesting, and the Tctpch were secret backers to the human AI program, so Buckley or a composite personality containing Buckley, became the standard program. The problem is, the Buckleys are increibly depressive and pessimistic, even more so then the original, flesh-and-blood version. In fact, each and every Buckley eventually turns suicidal and destroys itself. The problem can be mitigated by turning down the AI emulation, which gives the program a longer life and takes care of most of the personality issues. The problem is that the lower the emulation level is, the less intelligent and independant the program is, ie the less like an AI and more like any other program.

There are personality patches, but they are notoriously glitchy and inevitably make the program crash even faster. Somehow this strikes me as a much more realistic intrepation of a human built AI.

[MKSheppard]

From the point of view of a species of conquerors, that's a kind of bad plan, though. The Posleen are radiation-resistant, but they're not fucking radiodurans; they couldn't live on a planet they'd just hammered with one kiloton per square mile. An alien horde could be made that resistant, yes, but we'd have the same set of fans calling that a blatant and stupid handwave that we do (rightly) criticizing the series now.

Also, there are many things a conqueror might want to use that would be destroyed by a one kiloton per square kilometer bombardment. If that was their normal invasion practice on non-Earth planets, they'd probably have gone extinct already.

The concept works however, for explaining a lot of the initial timeline and such in the Posleenverse War -- its a lot harder to defend against the Posleen if they are nuking any large military concentrations that appear from orbit with ultra-clean nukes, as well as hitting large industrial concentrations from orbit -- e.g. Nuking Detroit to destroy a significant portion of our tank production capacity -- you still have a lot of other industry left over for post-world conquest if that's what you're after.

I mean, once they swept aside the initial opposition, they had total control over orbital space, and they...decide to land globes immediately, with no fucking recon or anything at all?

[Simon_Jester]

It always worked before.

Remember, the Posleen aren't used to people who put up enough of a fight for anything more advanced to be necessary.

Also, frankly, their population demographics are so fucked up that getting most of their foot soldiers killed off every time they invade a planet is probably just as well- otherwise they'll overpopulate the place too quickly, fight the predictable nuclear war they have on a regular basis, and just have to haul ass for the next planet that much sooner.


In-story, the justification is that the Posleen are basically cavemen operating technology that is very, very automated. The automation doesn't tell them they need to blow up certain targets from orbit, it just flies the ship. And they aren't smart enough to identify those targets themselves, so their orbital bombardment is very haphazard and ineffective at wrecking serious stuff.

Think of them as being like 40k Ork warbosses who view space travel as a convenient way to get down to the ground and mix it up with the enemy up close and personal, and you won't be too far wrong.

[MKSheppard]

Simon, I don't give a shit about in-universe Ringo explanations for why things are the way they are. That gets us insane stuff like starships shaped like a naked woman.

This is a way Ringo could have kept his entire plot (Earth overrun, humanity living on the edge), without requiring humanity to be dumber than a box of rocks.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon, I don't give a shit about in-universe Ringo explanations for why things are the way they are. That gets us insane stuff like starships shaped like a naked woman.

This is a way Ringo could have kept his entire plot (Earth overrun, humanity living on the edge), without requiring humanity to be dumber than a box of rocks.

Eh, reflex. I just ramble about stuff like that sometimes; I don't expect it to stop you from coming up with things that make more sense.


Totally unrelated to anything Ringo came up with, just looking at it as an alien invasion novel, I don't know if I'd actually like the "bombed flat" version because it's too hard for me to see a balance struck between "we've been bombed so hard we can't conceivably survive and they kill us all easily" and "we haven't been bombed hard enough to create the desired level of tension."

The closest I can come up with is Footfall. Which itself requires the aliens to exhibit some dumb as a box of rocks behavior, to not notice someone building an Orion-drive battleship under their noses.

[Darth Hoth]

I freely admit I don't know a lot about the Green Party in Germany, I somehow doubt they wield anything like the power or influence they do in the book, and I'm just about positive that they aren't actually batshit insane enough to want to destroy the human race to preserve the enviroment. If I'm wrong on either of these points, feel free to correct me.

The way I got it was, that bit was mostly a faux-pious excuse for selling out humanity in return for their own safety. Also, it was apparently limited to the Darhel conspiracy in the top tiers of party. The lower ranks (and perhaps even most of the leaders) would not have known about it.

As for the politics in the Bundestag . . . in Ringo's alternate-history world I would take less offence at the Greens being the major left-wing faction, and more that the euro-conservative (meaning by US standards leftist-centrist) opposition was for some incomprehensible reason dominated by open neo-Nazis.

Setting the condition that they all be in same unit, segregated from the rest of the military was also incredibly stupid. If there is a single SS man in a group of a thousand men, he is largely harmless. Putting all the SS men in one place, with orders to organize themselves is asking for trouble.

Plot contrivance. In the afterword Kratman basically said the rejuv SS was an "Awesome, let's do it!" idea he and Ringo came up with and ran with, making up the rest of the story to (somewhat) justify the premises.

It helps it a little that that demand was (if I recall correctly, at least) made by a rather naïve woman politician who had no idea at all about how militaries work in real life.

Kratman is, from what I know:
-Less bad when he's paired with Ringo. Ringo is a Republican, not a Nazi, so he acts as a moderating influence on Kratman.
-Getting worse over time. Publishing more novels makes him more confident in his Naziism; Watch on the Rhine was his first.

I would not think Kratman is an actual Nazi - then he would hardly heap tons of praise over the Israeli military and consistently depict their Arab enemies and everyone who agrees with them as subhuman trash. He is some odd species of right-wing militaristic extremist who makes Old-Style Shep (back when he earned his title) look pacifistic, though. I believe he self-described in one of his novels as (in paraphrase) centre-right on domestic issues and Attila the Hun on foreign policy. Though he was probably joking; a little, at least.

Watch on the Rhine was actually his second novel; before that he had written A State of Disobedience, which is atrociously bad. (Easily his worst, I would say, but then he has published a couple of new books since I stopped reading him, so he might have clocked it.) The general pattern you have observed of getting worse over time, though, I would agree with. The second book of his Terra Nova series was a thousand-page bloated monstrosity. It was also the one having the sadistic baroness of Amnesty Interplanetary torturing her prisoners in their dungeons. (The human sacrifices the progessives carry out to their dark gods do not show up until the third one.)

[Ahriman238]

From the point of view of a species of conquerors, that's a kind of bad plan, though. The Posleen are radiation-resistant, but they're not fucking radiodurans; they couldn't live on a planet they'd just hammered with one kiloton per square mile. An alien horde could be made that resistant, yes, but we'd have the same set of fans calling that a blatant and stupid handwave that we do (rightly) criticizing the series now.

Also, there are many things a conqueror might want to use that would be destroyed by a one kiloton per square kilometer bombardment. If that was their normal invasion practice on non-Earth planets, they'd probably have gone extinct already.

The concept works however, for explaining a lot of the initial timeline and such in the Posleenverse War -- its a lot harder to defend against the Posleen if they are nuking any large military concentrations that appear from orbit with ultra-clean nukes, as well as hitting large industrial concentrations from orbit -- e.g. Nuking Detroit to destroy a significant portion of our tank production capacity -- you still have a lot of other industry left over for post-world conquest if that's what you're after.

I mean, once they swept aside the initial opposition, they had total control over orbital space, and they...decide to land globes immediately, with no fucking recon or anything at all?

You mean sort of like this?

Light kinetic energy weapons dropped towards the planet below as probable threat locations were spotted or a God King simply wanted to make a pretty explosion. Dozens of the small, smart entry vehicles dropped through the atmosphere striking cities and military bases across Earth. Four of them for some reason struck the Great Pyramids in Cairo and another half dozen were targeted on deserted areas in the Central American jungle. The detonations—equivalent to a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon—were tiny, white pinpricks on the surface of the planet.

That's the scouting force, after sweeping aside most of the meager space forces and blasting away most satellites, nuking 'dozens' of cities and military bases. And the Pyramids. And the jungle?

The point is, at least limited nuking from orbit was always going to happen, but they didn't want to damage their prize too much, and were eager for honorable ground combat that the Net would reward them for. By way of recon they did a single, multi-hour orbit of the earth, looking for good landing sites and other signs of resistance.

HA! It took until honor of the Clan, but we finally have an FTL speed! It took an Indowy freighter 1 month to make a journey of 60 light years! Ok, that's an average of 2ly/day, but the way their FTL works, a large portion of that time would be spent moving through systems on sublight. The effect over long distance travel is the same, I'm just noting that shorter trips probably go faster. Well, with those speeds They're never going to be competitive with Wars or 40K, or even Trek. Assuming for the moment the layover effect doesn't get worse (which it absolutely should) we're talking 1400 years to cross the Milky Way.

In the same book, so far a Fleet ship makes a roughly 200 ly journey in 5 months. Albeit Iron Mike is displeased at the snail-like pace for what should be one of the fastest ships in the galaxy.

Well, we know the Galactics have only really explored and settled our arm of the galaxy. Where previously the Galactics had lost 70+ worlds to the Posleen, now there are Galactics living on ~280 worlds with 'some Posleen presence.' Indowy freighters are even carrying weapons and human gunners. How the times change.

Oh, and the Darhel have several satellites orbiting earth with overpowered laser weapons for frying Posleen concentrations. Lasers seem an odd choice for the job, I'll admit, but it's clear they also sometimes use them against human targets. The satellites also have a wide-area stun weapon for crowd control. This last feature is not generally known, so far they have never had to use it.

[Simon_Jester]

Kratman is, from what I know:
-Less bad when he's paired with Ringo. Ringo is a Republican, not a Nazi, so he acts as a moderating influence on Kratman.
-Getting worse over time. Publishing more novels makes him more confident in his Naziism; Watch on the Rhine was his first.

I would not think Kratman is an actual Nazi - then he would hardly heap tons of praise over the Israeli military and consistently depict their Arab enemies and everyone who agrees with them as subhuman trash. He is some odd species of right-wing militaristic extremist who makes Old-Style Shep (back when he earned his title) look pacifistic, though. I believe he self-described in one of his novels as (in paraphrase) centre-right on domestic issues and Attila the Hun on foreign policy. Though he was probably joking; a little, at least.

Hoth, you must remember that the Nazi Party incorporated a range of ideologies. The fact that Kratman isn't anti-semitic (or if he is, he directs it against the Arabs) doesn't prove much. If you look at politics in a European context, Arabs and Turks and the like are practically the new Jews- they're the infiltrating racial threat, now with a side order of Overwhelmingly Numerous Foreign Hordes thrown in for good measure.

I don't actually think Kratman gets his political opinions straight from Mein Kampf. But if he were alive in 1930s... well, anywhere, he'd make an avid Nazi, because he fits right in. What he is today is the real Nazi, the person who honestly believes in racial/cultural/ethnic destiny of his people and how foreigners and communists and whatever are sabotaging it and so on, reimagined for the 21st century. Which means less fetishization of race and eugenics, because that's fallen out of favor... but also more fetishization of the memetic history of his people as he defines them.

And this allows us to look at the idea and see how, at heart, this kind of ideology is bankrupt and foolish and contemptible rather than being scary and impressive. It's incapable of understanding its opponents, it's incapable of perceiving history or projecting the future except through a lens of farcical lies.

That's the scouting force, after sweeping aside most of the meager space forces and blasting away most satellites, nuking 'dozens' of cities and military bases. And the Pyramids. And the jungle?

The jungles in question sound like the sites of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations... which also built pyramids. Posleen God-Kings build pyramids for themselves in pacified territory- see Barwhon as portrayed in A Hymn Before Battle. Some Posleen ship commander probably spotted those pyramids from orbit, thought they were the dwelling-places of powerful human equivalents of God-Kings (arguably true in a symbolic sense, given what they were built for), and ordered the ship's guns to blow them up.

It doesn't reflect on overall targeting priorities.

Oh, and the Darhel have several satellites orbiting earth with overpowered laser weapons for frying Posleen concentrations. Lasers seem an odd choice for the job, I'll admit, but it's clear they also sometimes use them against human targets. The satellites also have a wide-area stun weapon for crowd control. This last feature is not generally known, so far they have never had to use it.

Lasers have some big advantages. One is that unlike high-velocity kinetics (say, a scaled up HVM), you can dial their yield back to any desired intensity. And unlike relatively 'low' velocity kinetics (say, Project Thor) their aiming isn't so limited by questions of orbital mechanics.

So you can fire as much or as little laser as a target as you want. You can stop firing at will rather than going "oh crap rounds are on the way" when you start missing or it turns out to be blown out of proportion. And you aren't restricted to big humongous impacts that raise dust clouds and cause nuclear-equivalent collateral damage.

All in all I can see why lasers might be preferred to kinetics if you need to provide 'close air support' from orbit.

[Connor MacLeod]

These reviews sound interesting. Could I trouble you, good friend, for a link?

There were actually two separate parts for Thanatos' attempt at A Desert called Peace Part 1 and Part 2

Be warned I dont think it was ever finished, and its full of spammy BS. be prepared to skip over tons of examples of TOM KRATMAN SPACE MARINE spammy bs. The second thread was a bit better than the first, I think.

There was also an amusing argument with one of Kratmans' supporters (or kratman himself its hard to say sometimes) in that thread.

There's also Opecoiler's Review f A desert called Peace also known as (IIRC) where Texas manages to secede from and topple a lame caricature of the US government in a contrived manner. Also pretty spammy as I recall, but this one at least is complete.

[MKSheppard]

You mean sort of like this?

Light kinetic energy weapons dropped towards the planet below as probable threat locations were spotted or a God King simply wanted to make a pretty explosion. Dozens of the small, smart entry vehicles dropped through the atmosphere striking cities and military bases across Earth. Four of them for some reason struck the Great Pyramids in Cairo and another half dozen were targeted on deserted areas in the Central American jungle. The detonations—equivalent to a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon—were tiny, white pinpricks on the surface of the planet.

So we have only 'dozens' of 'light' KEWs being dropped on probable threat locations, each equivalent to a 10 kt device; with about a dozen being wasted on the Great Pyramids and Maya/Inca Temples...

...and we have the entire fucking world to conquer.

Great fucking strategic planning there. It's up there with Turtledove's Race deciding to conquer Earth on the basis of a single photograph by a survey probe of a Crusader with a sword in his hand.

What's more, despite Turtledove explictly saying that the Race plans so far ahead and takes the slow route so many fucking times -- the Race doesn't even fucking bother to have the survey probe automatically calculate how many cycles it takes for the target planet to do one orbit around it's star; and then stay for ten of those orbits to catalog any possible anomalous weather/baselines....

....leading to our Alien invaders being shocked, fucking shocked that it gets cold on Earth.

Mmmrm. Nazis something something, cold, no winter clothes something something.....

The point is, at least limited nuking from orbit was always going to happen, but they didn't want to damage their prize too much,

This makes no sense. Consider the following points:

What possible use is human industrial capacity to the invaders? It would be the equivalent of 2000ies USA invading 1860ies India for 'industrial capacity', since you would only be able to get low grade stuff (by your standards) manufactured in your conquest's factories, defeating the point of the invasion in the first place.

Posleen are shown to basically be able to drink down liquid sarin, and then piss it, with no ill effects basically if we believe Ringo's schtick. So a bunch of radio-nuclides in their food and surroundings won't harm them.

By way of recon they did a single, multi-hour orbit of the earth, looking for good landing sites and other signs of resistance.

Again, why didn't they stay up there for at least a day to do a real thorough recon run?

[Simon_Jester]

As to the recon, there isn't an in-story answer you'd feel obliged to respect.

All I know is that if you write a really smart alien invasion story where the aliens have starships and we don't and the aliens systematically nuke every military concentration and factory on the planet, it's going to be boring as shit. Even compared to the mindless "fighting the Ravening Hordes" level that something like a Ringo novel can be entertaining on, it's gonna be boring, because it all comes down to "and then they blew up and died."

Virtually all alien invasion novels have to work out a way to explain why the aliens don't just nuke the blue pink/brown people from orbit. It's a weakness of the Ringo setting, but it's not a unique one.

This makes no sense. Consider the following points:

What possible use is human industrial capacity to the invaders? It would be the equivalent of 2000ies USA invading 1860ies India for 'industrial capacity', since you would only be able to get low grade stuff (by your standards) manufactured in your conquest's factories, defeating the point of the invasion in the first place.

A distinct point.

Posleen are shown to basically be able to drink down liquid sarin, and then piss it, with no ill effects basically if we believe Ringo's schtick. So a bunch of radio-nuclides in their food and surroundings won't harm them.

You're mixing chemical and radiation resistance. Even Ringo never pitched the Posleen as being that fallout-tolerant.

[MKSheppard]

All I know is that if you write a really smart alien invasion story where the aliens have starships and we don't and the aliens systematically nuke every military concentration and factory on the planet, it's going to be boring as shit. Even compared to the mindless "fighting the Ravening Hordes" level that something like a Ringo novel can be entertaining on, it's gonna be boring, because it all comes down to "and then they blew up and died."

Virtually all alien invasion novels have to work out a way to explain why the aliens don't just nuke the blue pink/brown people from orbit. It's a weakness of the Ringo setting, but it's not a unique one.

He could have spent a little more time on developing the initial invasion than he apparently did.

You can still trash humanity's capacity put up a good resistance without resorting to my over the top "BURN THEM WITH ANTIMATTER TORCH" or "A NUKE ON EACH SQUARE MILE!" plan -- dropping only a few dozen KEWs, and about a third or so of that limited number on Mayan Temples/The Great Pyramid does not make for a good pre-invasion bombardment.

For example, you could drop your KEWs on each major oil refinery complex you find around the world, meaning that humanity quickly runs out of gas for it's mechanized vehicles, thereby making it more of a "fair fight" in your eyes, q.v. how dare those 'oomies bring a tank to a posleen fight!

[Ahriman238]

Just a quickie, the Darhel have a limited number of real-time FTL comms. The "altars of communication" are apparently relics of the Aldenata, and the Tchpth have never said one way or another if they understand the things well enough to make more.

Because of the number destroyed in various schemes over the years, there are ironclad rules about only using them in the event of a genuine emergency, one that effects the Darhel as a whole rather than a single group or corporation. One was moved to earth during the Posleen War, or rather the moon, to allow the Ghin to keep track of the situation there.


Also, no one ever sees or personally speaks to the mysterious leader of the Bane Sidhe. They seak to him through a physical comm device, a sword in a stone, which also serves as his avatar in all electronic communications. Deep.

I'd find it hilarious if, after all this time, the leader of the Bane Sidhe was a minor Darhel flunky looking to hop up the ladder quicker with an entrapment scheme. Or a recorded human personality (like the Buckleys) from the last contact.


...

I may have a been a little bit hasty in saying that at least count Dracula doesn't ride to the rescue in this series, since Papa O'Neal recounts the story of his real encounter with an actual-factual vampire. I wish I were kidding.

[Simon_Jester]

Although given the amount of weird shit and human enhancement techniques thrown around in the series, the idea that the mysterious pre-1990s contact between humans and Galactics might include a few people getting enhanced and modified in ways that inspire vampire legends isn't the craziest thing in the books... that's probably saying more about the books than the idea.

[Sea Skimmer]

Major armor is not critically important, but you do want high muzzle velocity and the ability to fire at high angles, so it's gonna be bigger and heftier than an M110.

M110 already has a rather high angle of fire. The best possible muzzle velocity is around 750m/s, with ammunition designed several decades ago, which is already within 70m/s of the velocity of the 88mm Flak 18. So its not exactly a slow moving shell anyway. Requiring a higher velocity would really be dependent on needing to engage the enemy ships moving at 300-400mph or more, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Again, for all I know it might not fit on a 70-ton platform, my point is that I cannot imagine it getting too large to build the damn thing at all. We could, if need be, build a 100-ton tank. It would work, it would not be a farcical monster like the SheVa. And it would do the job.

Yes, and in all reality we could likely turn the M1 or several other NATO tanks into a 100 ton vehicles with another road wheel, maybe even cut existing ones in half to do so quickly. The options are endless.

Yes, they are. They also like to capture other people's industrial infrastructure, and they aren't used to having to fight an opponent with serious military-industrial capabilities that makes destroying their production facilities necessary.

That's kind of staggeringly dumb to the point of how could they ever be an advanced civilization, which is a reason why I don't bother with books like this thank god.