Travis Watkins wrote:
A few thoughts:
A large mass(they don't sound like they walk in a long line) shooting
shotguns at a designated target are going to kill a lot of their own.
Unless they are wearing armor(something that they probably cannot make
themselves the way you describe them), one round from your average
pistol or hunting rifle can kill them with a decent hit. Unless
someone is supplying them with equipment, ammo, and other supplies,
they don't have any sort of support structure and should generally be
using natural or improvised weapons.
They tend to form ranks around individual God-kings. They function very
much like Napoleonic units, with each thoroughly under the command of
one officer. A good way to decrease their functionality is to kill the
leaders. Then they only function as an uncoordinated mass. Dangerous but
without any control.
How do they keep themselves fed? Particularly while traveling?
They can eat ANYTHING. The boma blades (big mono molecular machetes) are
as much for cutting up "thresh" (thresh being anything that isn't a
Posleen) as for fighting. Everything killed is cut into manageable
chunks, then eaten or passed back into a group larder. A Posleen horde
resembles a swarm of locusts.
Even if one of them finds a gun they can use, how long can they use it
before they run out of ammo?
They are smart enough to use their weapons, this includes reloading.
They're "functioning" idiots, think Forest Gump.
If they eat each other, then killing one should take half a dozen
others out of the fight as they eat their dead comrade(and possibly
fight over the remains, possibly using up what few rounds they had).
See above, food is butchered VERY quickly. There's no "feeding frenzy"
around downed food. Everything is handled very economically.
Quite frankly 1/400 with enough brains to realize that they need to
make equipment to be more effective means that they are only really
useful as shock-troops, and will quickly die out without a large
support structure that they cannot provide for themselves.
The Aldenata left them with lots of idiot proof machines. They don't
actually fly their ships through space, they tell the computers roughly
where they want to go and it gets them there. They tell the fabricators
what they need and it makes it. All they have to do is keep it filled
with raw materials.
Even if the food and supplies are available in shipping containers of
some sort, 1 thinker out of 400 animals is not enough to keep them fed
and equipped even with pheromones for 6-12 specific behaviors that
would be carried out without flaw.(and since they are mad, not
engineered as soldiers, those behaviors would not include 'collect one
weapon, your kit, and a meal, then form up')
Nope, totally wrong. They aren't animals, they just aren't very smart.
An army of Forest Gumps lead by a few Lt Dans. The Lts. range in
smarts/skill as well, they're just lots smarter then the Normals. Some
Normals are smarter as well, just not enough to be God-kings.
What if you have a mock-up of a commander that then shoots at the real
commander. Why would they not then mob their commander(even 50% of
them)? Pheromones don't really provide IFF when they are already
immersed with 'shoot my target' pheromones.
Most of the better weapons are at least semi-computer controlled. The
Posleen aims it, the PC figures out how to hit what it's being aimed at.
Unless the mockup could hack into their battle-net it would last seconds
after exposing itself. The control over the Normals might not be
pheromones, or not entirely, but I can't recall exactly what it is.
The Zendretti at least had technicians that 'know the secrets of
levers 3 and 7' and they still had only a small percentage of their
self-repairing ships powered by a regenerating power source still
working after a few hundred years.(and they were basically humans with
a warrior culture, not the unthinking killing machines you describe)
God-kings that retire from the way of battle (that's it loosely) become
caretakers, wise-men, etc. and many devote themselves to learning. The
regular God-kings have a rough understanding of their tools, and if it
breaks dump it into one end of the fabricator and a new one comes out
the other.
I can see the warrior kings having good equipment(mostly found), but
their minions should be easy to mow down with conventional rounds as
they swarm in to attack at melee range, often distracted by stopping
to eat their own dead.
They bring their own toys to the party, not found stuff. Human waves
worked for the Soviets in WWII, they were able to over-run fixed
positions they just took heavy causalities doing so, and they only
attacked in waves of thousands or tens of thousands. Now think of waves
com posed of hundreds of thousands or even millions. With another wave a
minute or so behind. They mostly don't care about causalities. The
younger, more gung-ho, stupider God-kings are leading the charges with
their normals. They mostly get killed. Considering their birth rate and
rate of maturity (a few months from egg to adult), and the fact that
those adults are fully trained and ready to be handed a weapon and given
to a God-king to fill out the ranks. (Compared to the 18ish years for a
human to mature and a few months of training to produce a soldier.) They
can afford the losses. Plus those dead become rations for the rest of
the horde and their equipment become raw materials for the fabricators.
I'd suggest reading the book. I believe that you can read the first few
for free as e-books from Baen.
( http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/11-UntotheBreachCD/) This has the
first 7.
Mike S.
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