Hello everybody, Mike asked about covert invasions. That made me think about ways and reasons to hide the invasion ...
* For gaming purposes, there will be a big difference between a covert invasion of a little alien species, which is going to wreck the ecosystem in a couple of decades or centuries, and little green (or grey) men who are covertly setting up a base and snatch cattle. In my earlier post, I mentioned the difference between a sentient enemy and a monster -- the player characters could try to inflitrate the Grey base, but they couldn't do that to an invasion of rabbits or kudzu. Rabbits won't try to take control of the White House or the USAF, either. * A covert invasion by sentient aliens could be just the first wave, to scout Earth's defenses and to prepare the ground for follow-up troops. But would that be properly called an invasion, or is it pre-invasion intel gathering? It wouldn't feel right to call the SOE agents who dropped into France in 1941 the first wave of the Normandy landings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive Maybe a covert force would count as an invasion if it has plans to take control of the target world without any further reinforcement, and without much breeding. * Are they planning to go overt at some time? When? Do they have to reduce the defenses of the target world by subtle means before the final strike, or are they just waiting for the right time? Perhaps the Survey Fleet dropped the invaders and went home to call the Colonizer Fleet. Now the covert invaders are sipping drinks in tropical resort until it is time to break out the guns and genetic engineering kits. * How are they hiding, anyway? Do they look like humans (or like the locals, if the target world isn't Earth)? Could they walk un_recognized_ on our streets? Or do they have to stay un_seen_? By living in remote spots, maybe? Do they have human henchmen? How did they get them? Do they have some form of mind control, or is it blackmail, or a promise of preferential status as a quisling after the invasion? Blackmail and promises are not foolproof, for mind control that depends on the TL. * Do the governments know about the invaders? Or perhaps just some agencies? Did they secretly surrender, are they secretly arming for the time the invasion goes overt, or are they already fighting a covert war? * Do the invaders want to subjugate humanity, or do they want to replace it with their own? If they want genocide, on what timescale? If they want subjugation, how many invaders will come, and what do they demand? An absurd little scenario: An Evil Overlord has a dozen henchmen, a small TL12^ starship, robots, and nanotech. He demonstrates that he can easily defeat any TL8 defense, and demands that Earth surrenders. All major governments do so. What then? The ship can carry off a couple tons of loot per trip -- at that rate, stealing the global gold reserves might take a millenium even if nothing new is mined. The Evil Overlord and the henchmen could live in luxury if they could trust their human servants, of course ... luxury by a TL8 standard, when they are used to TL12^. The only thing Earth might have to offer is sanctuary from even more powerful enemies, or things that would be outlawed on the TL12^ world. Maybe the Evil Overlord likes to have sentient slaves, and more advanced worlds won't let him. Of course that is still pretty general. Let's get down to the rules. Has anybody ever tried to calculate the Troop Strength of Earth according to the Mass Combat rules? GT had pretty generic rules in Ground Forces, which would give Earth roughly 20,000 Battalion Equivalents (BE). One BE represents one battalion of regular infantry and their supporting troops, or half a battalion of tanks. For simplicity, call it all infantry, and there would be perhaps 10,000,000 infantrymen[1] and 30,000,000 other soldiers. The infantry alone would have TS 160,000,000. To get that troop strength out of TL12^ Flying Tanks, you need 25,000 individual grav tanks[2]. At 50 tanks per battalion and 10 battalions per pure tank division, we're talking about 50 divisions. These are extremely rough calculations, I didn't go into special unit superiority, etc., but you can see that it takes a LOT of TL12^ troops to deal with a high-population world like Earth. So maybe that is a reason to step softly at first? Regards, Onno [1] Not all of them are TL8, but then I'm assuming average troops and basic gear. It is just about getting the right ballpark. [2] Again, it isn't realistic that it would be a pure tank force, but I'm aiming for the order of magnitude. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
