Modern Earth vs Tripods (1898 War of the Worlds book)

[U.P. Cinnabar]

We don't have Tsar Bombas or railguns either. And unless the shielded aliens are blisteringly incompetent in a way none of the films have made them, we're not getting either of them because the infastructure to build and install such weapons would be among their primary targets.

We could start producing some Tsar Bombas, and railguns do exist in prototypes, so it's not like they're completely out of our depth or anything.

And, how would the martians actually know the exact locations of railgun/high capacity nuclear weaponry plants? I doubt most civilians know that, weren't the martians just following a rough map?

The Martians could monitor radio-frequency transmissions from Earth.

[Archinist]

...are you actually referencing *fanfiction*?

Also, just how quick do you think cars go? Tripods are, what, 30-50 ft tall. They've got long enough legs that their basic gait would be pretty quick in open country.

The average family car can usually go above 150 kph, and there a plenty of people who drive over 300kph over in Germany, a perfectly safe country, so that must mean that it is relatively safe to drive at that speed. As for fanfiction, it is only the mechanics of it, and it sounds quite sound.

The Martians could monitor radio-frequency transmissions from Earth.

Is there any proof of them doing this? And I don't think the military will just broadcast it out for everyone to see, nor will the martians instantly know how to understand English.

[NecronLord]

The 2005 tripods should be relatively easy, once we figure out how to kill them, since there are plenty of suicide bombers who would gladly defend lay down their own life for the survival of humanity.

A lesson in informed attributes.

The martians are smart. The book and the films hammer this home repeatedly. They're not just intelligent, they're a higher order of intelligence entirely to humans. The book hammers this home again and again, their intelligence is to ours as ours is to lower order animals. Unlike a lot of sci-fi franchises, because the book is well written (the adaptations less so) and consistent, there is never any grounds for reasonable doubt that this is true, there's nothing in the books or movies to significantly contradict it, or to suggest this is hyperbole or a limitation of the in-universe writer's perspective.

In all three versions they are said to have studied humans extensively, and their equipment is wholly adequate to culling humans and domesticating them as a food source.

Now, how do we apply this? We look at real life; breaking in wild cattle is a dangerous job, people get hurt doing it. Sometimes the animal will be able to gore someone where they don't expect it. But nonetheless most cattle in the world now live entirely as domesticated creatures. Because we learn faster and more capably than they do - we transmit information in a way they do not. We domesticated a small number (originally as little as 80!) of cattle, and then exterminated wild cattle. You cannot go and see an aurochs, they are nowhere to be had. We hunted them to extinction and replaced them with our custom-bred, comparatively retarded but very meaty and delicious species.

Yes, grenades worked once in the 2005 film; the cattle gored the cowboy, that one time - its comrades will investigate, and then they will apply their intelligence - and the least of them is smarter than the smartest human, remember they are to us as we are to cows. Even the smartest aurochs was of grossly inferior intelligence to any human farmer. They will certainly not allow humans to systematically exploit a weakness.

The martains are of a higher order intelligence. We have as much hope of defeating them (without the aid of providence in the form of their justified virology oversight) as aurochs did of defeating homo sapiens.

Tl;dr: They'll install a grate over that hole.

Also, I'm moving this thread to sci-fi. War of the Worlds is not supernatural-Fantasy.

[Iroscato]

...are you actually referencing *fanfiction*?

I couldn't even muster the energy to reply to it

[U.P. Cinnabar]

...are you actually referencing *fanfiction*?

I couldn't even muster the energy to reply to it

And, not very good fanfic at that. An hour of my time I wished I could take back.

Archinist, we're capable of receiving radio signals from space; it's called radio astronomy. The Martians are more advanced in many ways, and would logically have that capability. Radio telescopes are comparatively simple to build.

Every radio-frequency signal(including television and Internet)transmitted on Earth is transmitted into space at the speed of light, and could be picked up by Martian radio telescopes in 3.2 minutes with relatively little distortion(more so, as Mars has a thinner atmosphere).

[Simon_Jester]

Archinist, are you assuming that cars can travel everywhere at the fastest speed cars can travel anywhere, on roads that are specially designed for cars to go very very fast on?
____________________________________________
Another big difference between today and the 1890s that hasn't been discussed is communications and transportation.

In 1898, telephones existed but were very rare; at most there were sparse phone networks connecting major cities. The main means of communication was the telegraph. To send a message on a telegraph, you had to tap it out using Morse code, so each letter of the message would take a second or two. At that rate, just sending the equivalent of a 160-character text message would take, say, 3-5 minutes. Sending a long, complicated message would take hours.

And unless the person you wanted to talk to was right there in the telegraph office to receive the message, someone would have to write the message down on a piece of paper and walk to them in order to deliver it. Getting a reply would take hours at best.

If people misunderstand what you tell them in your telegram (and a typical telegram would be "tweet" length, not "essay" length), they're going to make a mistaken decision, and you probably won't have a chance to correct their misinformed ideas for a day or more.

As a result, news took a day or so to cross the country, and government decision-making cycles were measured in days at best. Any agents trying to carry out a government plan have to take the train (which runs on a fixed schedule) or ride a horse (top speed on the close order of ten miles an hour).

Plus, once the Martians started going on the rampage, they were able to totally cripple the British government quickly by blowing up railroad lines and telegraphs. Cut the lines in one place, and suddenly no one can travel or communicate along that path faster than the speed of a horse.

..

Contrast that to today, where cars can drive quickly on any road, helicopters can fly anywhere, where radios and landlines and cell phones are all over the place.

If the same set of Martian tripods landed in the same places in Britain today, the government in London would be informed of the situation within minutes. Teams of soldiers and other officials would be on the scene within minutes or hours at the most, literally flying in.

Attempts to communicate with the Martians would likewise begin almost immediately. And as soon as ONE Martian landing site started attacking the people around it, the word would go out by radio. The other Martian landing sites would be treated as hostile and targeted by artillery and airstrikes. It is very possible that the first landing site would suffer the same fate.

And virtually all of this has nothing to do with military firepower. It's simply because helicopters and radios are much better tools for movement and communication than steam locomotives and telegraphs.

So we don't even need to fixate on how amazing our weapons are and flex our muscles. It is entirely possible that the 1898 British could have defeated the Martian invasion armed with exactly the same technology they 'historically' had, if we armed them with only one extra thing:

Smartphones.

[NecronLord]

Of course, it's entirely likely that the martains would build a more suitable culling system for the domestication if the Earth had smartphones.

Look at our tripod equivalent today - note I searched for 'modern working cowboy.'

He doesn't have our tippy-top super-whizz-bang munitions, but the cows still aren't winning. The tripods in each case, infections aside, are perfectly adequate for the foe they're designed to fight. Why bring expensive and complex gear they'd not need?

[Simon_Jester]

Assuming we accept your core premise that the Martians have unlimited intellectual and technical prowess and will automatically devise a system of attack that overrides our defense, no matter how sophisticated that defense may be, you are correct.

On the other hand, I would argue that this constitutes a no-limits fallacy, and one not fully supported when we make a reading of War of the Worlds in the context of its era, and in the context of the social issues that Wells intended to address.

Remember that Martians were portrayed as fundamentally smarter than humans in 1900. This was an era when it was believed that Europeans were fundamentally smarter and more capable than, say, native Tasmanians- and that this was why the Europeans had been able to exterminate the Tasmanian natives, wiping them out and taking over their land.

It was taken as a given that some races of humans were just plain better than others, that there was a smooth continuum between real intelligent peoples on the one hand, and the brutal apes on the other. In this context it is unsurprising that any species with higher technology than 1900-era humans will be portrayed as categorically smarter and mentally better than 1900-era humans.

Wells intended to use War of the Worlds as a tool to force his fellow Britons to look at this seriously. To imagine what it would be like, to be the native race being herded toward extermination by an outside context problem that can kill and destroy at will. To show the "they're smarter than us so they're winning" equation from the side that does not have the Maxim gun.

Today, we have assimilated that lesson fairly well. We now understand that while 19th century Europeans had a technological advantage over the people they targeted for imperialism, this did not make them objectively superior beings. It did not reflect genetic superiority or more advanced brains. It did not mean that the humans of other lands were somehow a bunch of half-gorillas. It was simply "we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not."

So knowing this, we have to seriously stop and rethink the premise of the novel, knowing that Wells crafted that premise specifically to call it into question.

the question is, are the Martians really our superiors in the sense that humans are fundamentally superior to (wild or domestic) cattle?

Or are we confusing technological advancement for intellectual stature, just as 19th century Britons would have?

[NecronLord]

That is accurate from a Doylian analysis but wholly and utterly irrelevant in the Watsonian context implicit in vs scenarios. The text says it, nothing contradicts it, therefore it is fact and their intellect is supreme.

Yes, the message is that they are colonialists and the gap is not so wide.

The message of Star Trek is that scientific analysis and dedication will usually carry the day and the message of Star Wars is that good always triumphs - thus Trek beats the Galactic Empire.

That's not how it works.

[streetad]

The Martians are demonstrated in the book to be highly intelligent, learning quickly from their mistakes. Eg after losing a couple of tripods to concealed artillery, they retreat and rearm themselves with a more suitable weapon, and methodically bombarding any possible cover with poison gas when they resume their advance.

They MAY have something up their sleeve that modern Earth can't deal with, but it's impossible to infer this from the books. They deploy exactly the correct level of technology to effortlessly cripple Victorian Britain and no more. We don't know if they even have radio, as the tripods communicate between themselves using some kind of siren/bullhorn thing.

Is it not likely that, as an intelligent species that learns from their mistakes, the Martians might simply surrender once they realise they have bitten off considerably more than they can chew? If Cortes had landed in Mexico to find basically an analogue of Napoleonic France, say, I would imagine he would certainly be more diplomatic than IRL. The Martians do have some unusual technology that they might be able to bargain with such as their heat ray, easy manufacturing tech and big-ass space gun.

[Archinist]

The Martians are demonstrated in the book to be highly intelligent, learning quickly from their mistakes. Eg after losing a couple of tripods to concealed artillery, they retreat and rearm themselves with a more suitable weapon, and methodically bombarding any possible cover with poison gas when they resume their advance.

They MAY have something up their sleeve that modern Earth can't deal with, but it's impossible to infer this from the books. They deploy exactly the correct level of technology to effortlessly cripple Victorian Britain and no more. We don't know if they even have radio, as the tripods communicate between themselves using some kind of siren/bullhorn thing.

Is it not likely that, as an intelligent species that learns from their mistakes, the Martians might simply surrender once they realise they have bitten off considerably more than they can chew? If Cortes had landed in Mexico to find basically an analogue of Napoleonic France, say, I would imagine he would certainly be more diplomatic than IRL. The Martians do have some unusual technology that they might be able to bargain with such as their heat ray, easy manufacturing tech and big-ass space gun.

What easy manufacturing tech do they have? They once constructed some aluminum bars with forklifts, but that is about it. As for their ray guns, would those really be useful in modern warfare? The average tank wouldn't be tall enough to fire accurately at a target with the heat ray.

The space gun might just be a rocket launching, and it could possibly be worse than a standard chemically-fuelled powered rocket. Also, would modern earth really trust them enough to trade with them and let them go? There is also the possibility that they might get destroyed so quickly that they don't get the chance to communicate at all.

[NecronLord]

Is it not likely that, as an intelligent species that learns from their mistakes, the Martians might simply surrender once they realise they have bitten off considerably more than they can chew? If Cortes had landed in Mexico to find basically an analogue of Napoleonic France, say, I would imagine he would certainly be more diplomatic than IRL. The Martians do have some unusual technology that they might be able to bargain with such as their heat ray, easy manufacturing tech and big-ass space gun.

I'd imagine that the indignity of surrender to what're basically animals might prevent them considering it for quite some time.

In the specific scenario of 'book tripods are deluded by Q into thinking they're dealing with 1890s Earth' yeah, they'd have to wind their necks in (heh), at least until the home base sends something a bit more helpful. I was talking more generally of their motives.

[Bernkastel]

What about a modern-day Earth vs the Martians from the 50's movie? Since we've established the '98 lot would be resoundingly roflstomped, let's amp things up a bit...

Good idea. This scenario can only work if you either increase the combat potential of the tripod force or decrease that of the earth forces.

On a vaguely related note, I really should see if my local library has a copy of War of the Worlds. It's been quite a while since I read it.

[Borgholio]

On a vaguely related note, I really should see if my local library has a copy of War of the Worlds. It's been quite a while since I read it.

Me too. I always enjoyed reading it. I guess I'll have to settle for watching the '53 movie version again though. Oh boo hoo.

[Iroscato]

Guys, there are such things as PDF's out there for a reason...

[Simon_Jester]

https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/warw.html

There you go. War of the Worlds, readable online.

That is accurate from a Doylian analysis but wholly and utterly irrelevant in the Watsonian context implicit in vs scenarios. The text says it, nothing contradicts it, therefore it is fact and their intellect is supreme.

Even in the context of the text, we have to accept that claims about Martian intelligence is being made by a man who was badly traumatized by their actions, who spent days or weeks on the run and in hiding from them, who never communicated with a Martian, and who lives in a world where scientists and historians never got the chance to actually study living Martians, interact with them to gauge their intelligence, or otherwise accurately measure what their minds are capable of.

He has no way of knowing how smart the Martians really were. If we speak in terms of IQ, is the average Martian a being of IQ 100? 120? 160? Some massive, godlike, unmeasurable value? All those possibilities are equally consistent with the observed facts, since nothing the Martians do is outside of what we can imagine normal people with advanced tools and weapons doing. Presumably there were some Martians who are pretty smart cookies by human standards, because the Martian strategy for attacking Britain is actually quite clever. But we can't go from there to concluding "Martians must be supermen because a scared refugee who barely survived their attack thinks they are."

Sure, they have better technology- but they explicitly come from an older planet and are an older civilization. Perhaps their superior technology is simply a product of their greater age, not of being mental supermen who have infinite reserves of increasingly powerful technology they can pull out of their hats to win no matter what is done to fight them.

Now, the 1950s and 2000s portrayals of the Martians, even with merely human intelligence, would probably be able to win against everything humans do. Because they have immunity to the largest weapons humanity has ever created. With only a few minor precautions they can turn that near-invulnerable defense into truly invulnerable defense.

But the 1898 Martians (or, arguably, the 1938 Martians from the radio drama) were not categorically immune, they could be killed with weapons we know how to create. To somehow say "they'd just pull even better weapons and defenses out of their bag to deal with our improved weapons and defenses" is to make an unwarranted assumption about their capabilities.

Yes, the message is that they are colonialists and the gap is not so wide.

The message of Star Trek is that scientific analysis and dedication will usually carry the day and the message of Star Wars is that good always triumphs - thus Trek beats the Galactic Empire.

That's not how it works.

This isn't about the book's message.

The point is that just because an 1898-era Englishman thinks that the technologically advanced aliens must be mentally superior to him, just as he is to a gorilla (or a cow)... That doesn't mean said Englishman is in fact correct.

We today know to question the accuracy of claims of the form "X has better tools than Y, therefore X is a superior life form that can effortlessly outwit Y at will." The narrator of The War of the Worlds did not.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Guys, there are such things as PDF's out there for a reason...

One of them is not "you can hold them in your hand and not have to turn anything on to do so."

[Bernkastel]

https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/warw.html

There you go. War of the Worlds, readable online.

I now love you utterly. If you ever want me to kill someone for you in your glorious name, just ask.

Seriously, thank you.

[Simon_Jester]

...All you has to do is google, man. Google

[title in quotation marks] read online

And you will nearly always find online versions of any SF&F novel of any real note.

[NecronLord]

Simon, if you want to know how the in-universe author of War of the Worlds knows about the details of the martians' brainpower, I direct you to your own link, Book 2, Chapter 2, "What We Saw from the Ruined House."

In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the hands. Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some facility.

The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles.

[...]

And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place certain further details which, although they were not all evident to us at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.

[...]The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a single round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours except that, according to Philips, blue and violet were as black to them.

When the writer suggests that there may be a form of telepathic communication between the aliens, he goes out of his way to establish himself as a skeptic.

Before the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there may remember, I had written with some little vehemence against the telepathic theory.

HG Wells had written a negative review of a book on "telepathic" pseudoscience where he condemned such pseudoscience, in reality.

And further to Book 2 Chapter Ten The Epilogue

I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little I am able to contribute to the discussion of the many debatable questions which are still unsettled. In one respect I shall certainly provoke criticism. My particular province is speculative philosophy. My knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to a book or two, but it seems to me that Carver's suggestions as to the reason of the rapid death of the Martians is so probable as to be regarded almost as a proven conclusion. I have assumed that in the body of my narrative.

At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found. That they did not bury any of their dead, and the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by no means a proven conclusion.

Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians used with such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further investigations upon the latter. Spectrum analysis of the black powder points unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possible that it combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once with deadly effect upon some constituent in the blood. But such unproven speculations will scarcely be of interest to the general reader, to whom this story is addressed. None of the brown scum that drifted down the Thames after the destruction of Shepperton was examined at the time, and now none is forthcoming.

The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far as the prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have already given. But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and almost complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History Museum, and the countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that the interest of their physiology and structure is purely scientific.

[...]

It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson, and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer settlement.

The writer has not just staggered out of the war, but has clearly consumed a body of scientific material published on the martians after the invasion. Professor Howes was in fact a real person who HG Wells knew in reality. It is clear that our fictive author is writing at a point not only some time past the invasion, but in a period when the aliens have been dissected, examined and mounted on public display in the British Museum! It is clear that the author is familiar with the state of the scientific debate on the matter of the martians, he is not simply raving out of his own personal experiences as you allege.

It can be established beyond reasonable doubt that the book's rendition of the aliens have a brain-case approaching four feet around nor does the author mention that there is any scientific dispute (when he mentions other scientific debates such as that of the nature of the Black Smoke and spectroscopy performed on it) about the evidence for them having grossly superior intellect. He even talks about the composition of the food-beast-men that the martians brought with them, in a context that makes it obvious they too have been examined.

There's ample evidence to suggest the author knows exactly (as much as any well educated and scientifically involved man of his time) what's known or concluded about them. Any suggestion that the book can be reinterpreted against the evidence of someone who shows no sign of insanity or reduced competence and is clearly in communication with the scientific authorities of his world enough to describe various experiments in the text, is simply sophistry.

I think you may be confusing Wells' extremely literate and scientifically connected viewpoint character with Ray Farrier, Spielberg's mostly uneducated every-man teamster, who has no special knowledge of his aliens. Wells' character has extensive access to dissections at least.

Sure, they have better technology- but they explicitly come from an older planet and are an older civilization. Perhaps their superior technology is simply a product of their greater age, not of being mental supermen who have infinite reserves of increasingly powerful technology they can pull out of their hats to win no matter what is done to fight them.

Now, the 1950s and 2000s portrayals of the Martians, even with merely human intelligence, would probably be able to win against everything humans do. Because they have immunity to the largest weapons humanity has ever created. With only a few minor precautions they can turn that near-invulnerable defense into truly invulnerable defense.

Good thing I'm talking about the 2005 rendition then. Can you find anywhere where I said the 1890s aliens would - with the resources they invade with in the OP - defeat the Earth - don't bother looking, no such place exists. I was responding specifically to the notion about suicide bombers, to make a point to nail down to Archinist the fact that these are sapient - in the case of the 1890s ones at the very least clearly transhumanly intelligent - beings which will adapt their tactics and processes.

Of course, I'm treating the 2005 film as an adaptation, and I specifically disclaimed that there's grounds to think the 2005 ones aren't so intelligent as the 1890s ones, not least because their brain case is smaller as a proportion of their body and smaller overall; but the point remains largely the same, they are a sapient, tool using species capable of mastering (in the 2005 example) some kind of interplanetary teleportation and advanced computation. They're not going to sit there and take it up the ass (almost literally) from suicide bombers in their food cages when they can use the simple expedient of killing their prisoners before they feed on them, or mounting the cages on one side and visually examining each feeding victim before consumption for bombs or any of the no doubt dozens of engineering solutions a reasonable person could come up with.

[NecronLord]

As a note, I specifically exclude the War of the Worlds 1953 from any discussion of intelligence from this point because apparently there's an TV series in the same continuity that sounds aggressively stupid in which the aliens also sound... not exactly bright.

[NecronLord]

...All you has to do is google, man. Google

[title in quotation marks] read online

And you will nearly always find online versions of any SF&F novel of any real note.

I am sure you meant to speak only of public domain books such as War of the Worlds. Remember DR2 bans incitement of criminal activity including file-sharing and sharing of links to websites sharing illegal content.

[Simon_Jester]

Indeed, it would be at best imprudent to follow the Google search to the sort of website that ignores copyright on novels, even if that happens to be possible.

[Titan Uranus]

Actually, I'll go further than Simon, the original book's Martians are either arrogant in the extreme and no more intelligent than the average human, or they are as thick as a brick shithouse.

Now why do I say this?
Firstly, we know that they had a flying machine of some sort (I'm not sure where you got the idea that it was an airship from, it is specifically implied to be heavier than air), yet instead of waiting, constructing it and reconnoitering the area and the forces arrayed against them they assembled their fighting machines first and attacked blindly.
This implies either extreme arrogance (just like the beginning of essentially all of the wars of the British Empire since Napoleon's time) or irredeemable stupidity.

Secondly, the first Martian machine wrecked was destroyed by an artillery battery firing over open sights in the middle of a field, there is no excuse for the Martians not focusing on the cannon as their first target (at least if they were at all familiar with their targets), but they failed to fire until cannons brought one of their number down.
Now, they did rearm themselves and make certain to silence the cannons they found from then on, but this says nothing for their intelligence, since a prepubescent child would have done the same thing. And if the British Army had had the chance, they would have begun placing artillery crews in ambush, and the Martians whose arrogance or stupidity prevents them from performing reconnaissance of any type would have taken heavy casualties.

The fourth major encounter of the book is between the tripods and the Thunderchild, I will look again in a moment, but I believe that the Thunderchild destroyed one tripod and her death wrecked another. The Martians have already been exposed to cannonfire at this point, and yet they fail to destroy the obviously cannon-armed ship sitting near them, which is stated to not be maneuvering at the beginning of the encounter. In fact, the Martians fail to fire upon the vessel even when she is shooting at them and moving straight towards them at flank speed, in fact they take no action until one of their number is destroyed by the ship which was waiting in plain view and moved directly towards them in a suicidal charge to protect the civilians evacuating.
That's actually probably beyond mere arrogance and more in the realm of deep stupidity.

One wonders how the Martians would have dealt with an actual Royal Navy battleline, as opposed to a single obsolete ironclad ram.
Probably pretty poorly, though the British would have a difficult time hitting the tripods.

And their plan for attacking Britian amounted to "stumble towards the nearest population center" until one bright spark hits upon the idea of securing the ports to prevent refugees from escaping, far too late to do anything, but oh well.

In short the actions of the Martians the the War Of The Worlds book are completely consistent with an arrogant civilization that has not known real war for a very long time, or with those of recent lobotomy victims.
They are in no way consistent with the idea that the Martians are somehow superintelligent or even of superior intelligence to humans.

[Simon_Jester]

Actually, I'll go further than Simon, the original book's Martians are either arrogant in the extreme and no more intelligent than the average human, or they are as thick as a brick shithouse.

Now why do I say this?
Firstly, we know that they had a flying machine of some sort (I'm not sure where you got the idea that it was an airship from, it is specifically implied to be heavier than air), yet instead of waiting, constructing it and reconnoitering the area and the forces arrayed against them they assembled their fighting machines first and attacked blindly.

This implies either extreme arrogance (just like the beginning of essentially all of the wars of the British Empire since Napoleon's time) or irredeemable stupidity.

Alternatively, they had adequate intelligence of the broad outlines of their enemies' capabilities. Remember that while the Martians are (in your plan) sitting around trying to get information on flying machines, they are trapped in giant pits and vulnerable to anything the British choose to do to them.

Plus, of course, the possibility that the Martians can't build flying machines without gathering resources they didn't bring with them. They're limited to the machinery they can send via interplanetary spacecraft, and they may not have had the launch capability to send a prefab flying machine to go with the prefab tripods. That would help to explain why we do not see a flying machine for several days after the Martian rampage begins. It's not just that they don't use a flying machine they already had with them. It's that there is no evidence they even had one with them at all, until several days of their industrial operations in secure territory.

Secondly, the first Martian machine wrecked was destroyed by an artillery battery firing over open sights in the middle of a field, there is no excuse for the Martians not focusing on the cannon as their first target (at least if they were at all familiar with their targets), but they failed to fire until cannons brought one of their number down.

All previous British weapons had been utterly useless against them, including Maxim guns which LOOK a great deal like cannon- a big cylinder on a wheeled carriage.

For that matter, someone who knew a lot about the artillery of this era would have expected the field guns to fail, because the standard artillery shell of the era was manually fuzed airburst shrapnel, which would have detonated and bounced fragments harmlessly off the lightly armored tripods. Only naval guns of this period had shells likely to harm a tripod except on an extremely lucky hit.

Now, they did rearm themselves and make certain to silence the cannons they found from then on, but this says nothing for their intelligence, since a prepubescent child would have done the same thing. And if the British Army had had the chance, they would have begun placing artillery crews in ambush, and the Martians whose arrogance or stupidity prevents them from performing reconnaissance of any type would have taken heavy casualties.

The Martians move as fast as locomotives (much faster than any army unit the British have), and the height advantage of a tripod means they can see for miles around them in all directions. Their prefabricated walkers are functional as reconnaissance vehicles. And they quite simply do not have the numbers to have dedicated scouts separate from their effective fighting units, at least not at first. Remember that this whole invasion involves a very limited number of Martians and machines. Britain isn't being attacked by an army, it's being attacked by at most a few hundred armored vehicles. Probably more like a few dozen.

The fourth major encounter of the book is between the tripods and the Thunderchild, I will look again in a moment, but I believe that the Thunderchild destroyed one tripod and her death wrecked another. The Martians have already been exposed to cannonfire at this point, and yet they fail to destroy the obviously cannon-armed ship sitting near them, which is stated to not be maneuvering at the beginning of the encounter. In fact, the Martians fail to fire upon the vessel even when she is shooting at them and moving straight towards them at flank speed, in fact they take no action until one of their number is destroyed by the ship which was waiting in plain view and moved directly towards them in a suicidal charge to protect the civilians evacuating.

On the contrary, Thunder Child did not fire on the Martians at all until she reached point blank range, and the narrator explicitly says that if she had fired a single cannon at them, the Martians would have sunk her with heat rays.

One wonders how the Martians would have dealt with an actual Royal Navy battleline, as opposed to a single obsolete ironclad ram.
Probably pretty poorly, though the British would have a difficult time hitting the tripods.

Some analysis of this on another forum is of interest here:

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/t ... lds.21213/

And their plan for attacking Britian amounted to "stumble towards the nearest population center" until one bright spark hits upon the idea of securing the ports to prevent refugees from escaping, far too late to do anything, but oh well.

On the contrary, the Martians methodically cut railroad and telegraph lines, hamstringing the Salisbury Government's efforts to mount a defense, and the narrator explicitly remarks that this is what they are doing.

And why would they even care about refugees escaping? The tens of millions of Englishmen in the territory they've attacked are far more than they can possibly control or 'herd,' even given that they view humans as a form of cattle. They are already slaughtering huge numbers of humans with their chemical weapons, simply to be rid of them, and to ensure that they have a secure base of operations that is not occupied by 'wild' humans with potentially dangerous weapons. If half the population of England flees across the Channel, so much the better. The Martians have no reason to desire tens of millions of Englishmen running around underfoot, especially when at least some of those Englishmen are soldiers armed with dynamite and potentially with artillery!

The mission of these Martians cannot possibly be "kill all the humans" or "enslave all the Englishmen." It can only be "secure a beachhead for the next wave of our invasion force while building up more fighting machiners."

Moreover, sending forces to the ports means risking a fight against the only type of human fighting machine built to anything like the same scale and with capabilities comparable to those of the Martians- battleships and armored cruisers. It is a largely pointless risk, as the Martian attack off the Blackwater reveals.