March 2001.

A "friendly" alien race makes First Contact, secretly, with the governments of Earth. They are called the Darhel, and for nearly two hundred years they have pressed by a race called the Posleen.

Now, the situation has changed. The main Posleen advance has been disrupted by the arrival of Shinogi and his U-men, fresh from the OA universe. After a brief confusion ("this isn't the wormhole to Damascus") Shinogi decides they traveled through time and/or to a parallel reality. Now he is making his way to Earth, raiding the GalFed planets in his path, sometimes enslaving the local population long enough to produce specific needed spoils. He will arrive within 3 years, looking to conquer mankind and lead them to the glorious future he has seen. He could get there faster using Federation ships, but doesn't like traveling unarmed, or resent the waiting. A (reduced) Posleen force will be just 18 months behind him.

The good news for Earth is that until they can begin recruiting humans from this time period, there are very few U-men, only 144,000, and they don't have access to anything like their normal infrastructure, something Shinogi means to change. The bad news is that the U-men are very, very smart, with a passing familiarity with Earth history (they may not know if the Cold War is over by this point, but they can point to China on a map) and a considerable wellspring of knowledge on military tactics, particularly as relates to civil insurrection and guerrilla warfare. To say the least, fighting them is going to be very different from fighting the Posleen.


The U-men are a fanatical cult of super-sophonts. If you don't know OA and haven't been keeping up with my thread on it (shame!) That means they're humans whose muscles, bones, and assorted squishy bits have been replaced with carbon-boron nanotube duplicates. They are (at least) 10,000 x stronger than any human. They do not need to eat,drink, or breathe. They laugh at bullets and conventional explosives, or really anything that isn't antimatter or at least nuclear. They can swiftly regenerate from any injury not immediately fatal. They can see IR-UV, and have exceptional night vision. Their hearing isn't quite up to the standards of the best of the animal kingdom, but it's not far behind and very, very good at determining precisely which direction and distance a sound came from. Their sense of smell is on par with a dog's.

Their intellects are also enhanced, albeit to a far lesser extent than their physical abilities. They think very quickly, and their reflexes are probably at least twice as fast as a trained unenhanced person. They have boosted learning and coping, creativity, flawless memory, and no fear.

Their weaknesses are few. They require a reliable power source or they freeze up. They are 'weak against' nukes, antimatter, Rods from God, and very intense levels of cosmic radiation. But so is everyone else. They also overheat relatively easily compared to baselines. They have cooling systems far in advance of what nature gave us, but also a lot more waste heat to deal with.

Their leader, Shinogi, is a transapient. He looks like a walking squid, but he is thousands of times quicker, more precise, and generally smarter than well, anyone in this universe I suppose. He's even more capable within his specialties, management and propaganda. He knows how to produce technology thousands of years more advanced then ours, and in some ways superior to the Galactics, but is frustrated by his lack of materials and manpower. He floats gently through life in his personal utility fog, a vast cloud of nanites under his mental control, and anyone within his immediate reach can be disarmed, restrained or killed in an instant by his wishing it so.


For simplicity's sake (OA has as many and as inconsistent weapons as 40K) and because it's something they'd do, we'll say the U-men "commandeered" 5 globes worth of Posleen ships, weapons and general tech. They can be very practical when they need to, and I'm sure they'd be delighted by the tenar's autotarget capabilities (if less so of how it makes the rider a target) and the sheer destructiveness of HVMs.

We'll also say that since Shinogi wants to build a techbase that would allow for vast-scale nanofabs that would allow him to build the technology he's familiar with, he'll want to capture as much of Earth's infrastructure intact as reasonably practical. That and a firm expectation of victory will stop him from dropping rocks.

So, how different will the Galtech conference go if they're arming up to meet U-men instead of Posleen? Who will win, Iron Mike or Shinogi? Will the winner be ready for when the Posleen show up a bit late? In the land of the batshit-insane techno-wank, who is king?

It depends very much on the space forces as five globes could be dealt with by enough human anti-globe weaponry with both ship and space based weapons being sufficient to stop five globes is within the realm of possibility.

Otherwise the U-Men sit in orbit and tell the humans surrender or we will rock you (literally) with a Kinetic Entry Vehicles, either you will surrender now or we wait for the Posleen to soften you up for us for about nine months while we party in deep space. After the time has passed we will come back and fight you then. Naturally we will simply be rocking any Posleen controlled areas as they destroy all industry they run across to build their own.

It sounds very much like the U-men can walk through Posleen hordes at will killing them at their leisure with none of their weaponry the Posleen can muster except shear numbers to dogpile one and hack it to bits. Except they won't be fighting them, they orbit the planet, destroying all the Posleen ships then stage small battles to get Polseen to muster then drops KEV's on the assembly areas and do it over again until they stop gathering at which point they can start a hunting system with Tenar to sweep and clear the planet.

Or if they are feeling like REAL dicks they can kick enough shit into the atmosphere to cause global cooling fucking both the humans and the Posleen while leaving themselves even better off due to the heat issues. What's a hundred years to a nigh-inuverable superman after all.

They're smart enough and dickish enough, and Shinogi's been known to plan decades in advance. But I already said no rocks.

We're assuming, for the sake of this scenario, that Shinogi is feeling rather off his game. His patron is gone, the Net is gone, the Wormholes are gone. The entire universe as he knows it is gone, and he's in a new place where humans are primitives squatting in the mud and aliens he's never heard of are trying to kill him.

Shinogi wants to capture as much of Earth's infrastructure as he can, as intact as is reasonably practical, as quickly as possible. He also needs to kickstart the Cult of the Unknown Archailect on a new world, as he's done dozens of times before, to provide cannon fodder and new recruits to expand the U-men, and he can't trust that to the alien minds of the Indowy or the Posleen, and is too smart to start with the Darhel (though that would probably take care of their lintatai problem.)

He wants to arm up quickly to meet a suddenly hostile galaxy and needs Earth, specifically, to pull it off. His end goal here (extrapolating somewhat from things he's done in the past, his ultimate goals in the series are unknown) is a sort of theocratic space empire, ruled by himself, humanity, the aliens, in that order. Personal ascension to Greatest Archailect, and construction of all the wonders he's grown used to back home.

If you give him ships he will have rock like things that are not rocks but fulfill the same position in that he has a big threat over the humans and it makes good tactical sense to force the humans to surrender or fight the Posleen then him and he's a hundred times smarter than the smartest Posleen and with enough of a fleet and fast transport abilities and lets face it, hordes of super soldiers who put the super in super soldier... with the Posleen on the ground and disrupting the humans he can conqueror with ease even if he's not dropping rocks on ships but instead hitting them with beam weaponry from orbit.

You forgot how many weapons the landers and C-Decs have. Even without KEV's he has the options of Plasma launchers and big giant lasers which lets him set up orbiting Ion cannons which are rock free and give him as much or as little destruction as he wants. If he has ships he can choice to land or not, to wait or not. With ships and the resources of those ships intelligently lead he can stomp Earth's armies at his pleasure because gearing up to fight him is radically different from fight Posleen, and if they lose to him at least they are not eaten. I predict surrender if he can make the right negotiations with the rich countries. After all landing troops to do a snatch and grab on the top Chinese Party officials is pretty easy when they must nuke their own cities to slow you down/ So even if he opts for war it's going to be an orbital insertion snatch and grab.

Point is Shinogi is not going doing any field fighting against anything but Polseen.

Well. I was hoping for ACS vs U-men vs Posleen. Which is why I set up the U-men to just rplace the scouting wave. But I suppose you do make sense. Even if Shinogi wouldn't nuke cities from orbit, he'd probably take out a few major military bases, and use the threat of rocks, R-bombs or similar.

I'm pretty sure an HVM or the more powerful lasers should be able to to take down a U-man. I suspect the grav-gun would, if not one-shot, at least be able to cause signficant injury.

What are the possibilities of Shinogi just makes itself GAIA 2.0? Becoming a fully sentient planet would definitely help against any aggressiveness by the humans and Posleen invaders. How long would the conversion take?

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ASVS('97)/SDN('03)

"Peppercorn Tomatoes slathered in broken guacamole sauce. Put it in the microwave and press puree. 5 seconds in the dumpster and it is ready to be cooked in the freezer at -350 degrees for twenty minutes. Apply pressure in various hamster spots and scream like a psychotic banshee." My reply when asked what was on my mind.

By the sacred crotch of Arkvoodle!

Well, It took GAIA herself 50+ years. Shinogi has the advantage of better knowing what he's doing and what the end result would look like. On the other hand, the starting resources and technology available to him are a lot less than what GAIA had for her ascension.

But can he integrate himself into the planet and build enough defenses to deal with the posleen before taking his time with the humans while continuing his conversion?

I mean, he could choose the best place to begin merging with Earth, while beginning to build planetary defenses with the help of the U-men. Shinogi could just tell the human governments that he is there to help humanity and if they believe him then he can begin the conversion, build enough planetary defenses. Posleen then shows up, gets pasted before getting the chance to land (or use blue goo to reduce then to resources he could use) and he can continue his planetary conversion at his own pace.

By the time humanity figures out that something is terribly wrong, Shinogi becomes GAIA 2.0 and gets to make the rules with impunity. Then the moon is converted, then other planets in order to ascend even further..... With enough time, he could build his own Black Angel and conquer the rest of GalFed.

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ASVS('97)/SDN('03)

"Peppercorn Tomatoes slathered in broken guacamole sauce. Put it in the microwave and press puree. 5 seconds in the dumpster and it is ready to be cooked in the freezer at -350 degrees for twenty minutes. Apply pressure in various hamster spots and scream like a psychotic banshee." My reply when asked what was on my mind.

By the sacred crotch of Arkvoodle!