"The End of the Space Age"

[Ideologue]

By the way, Tyr, I liked that painting.  Something to do with Larry Niven?

You've never read Footfall!

It's one of the greatest alien invasion novels ever written, go to your library at once!

I don't read books that don't have pictures in them.  It's inefficient.

Anyway, I really doubt any book that features ground combat can possibly be one of the "greatest alien invasion novels ever written," since aliens would never need to deign to resort to infantry tactics.  It would be like instead of dropping the bomb, just landing the Enola Gay on Uchibori Street, running up to the palace, and challenging Hirohito to a swordfight instead.

[Razgovory]

Ah, so you are becoming Marty type lawyer.

[Ideologue]

Ah, so you are becoming Marty type lawyer.

[Razgovory]

It's not a bad book.  The aliens do throw big rocks at the earth, but seriously hampered by the fact they are all very, very stupid.

[Eddie Teach]

Anyway, I really doubt any book that features ground combat can possibly be one of the "greatest alien invasion novels ever written," since aliens would never need to deign to resort to infantry tactics.

I dunno. Presumably they want to take the planet in fairly stable condition and any civilization with interstellar travel can probably also dig several miles underground.

[Razgovory]

Anyway, I really doubt any book that features ground combat can possibly be one of the "greatest alien invasion novels ever written," since aliens would never need to deign to resort to infantry tactics.

I dunno. Presumably they want to take the planet in fairly stable condition and any civilization with interstellar travel can probably also dig several miles underground.

Any civilization that took decades to get to Earth could probably a wait a few more decades while the atmosphere returns to normal.  Hell wiping everything out has the benefit of making it easier to grow your own  crops on the new planet.

[Ideologue]

Anyway, I really doubt any book that features ground combat can possibly be one of the "greatest alien invasion novels ever written," since aliens would never need to deign to resort to infantry tactics.

I dunno. Presumably they want to take the planet in fairly stable condition and any civilization with interstellar travel can probably also dig several miles underground.

I've always reckoned the easiest method, with the least collateral damage, would be to use biological warfare on an alien species.  Now there are obvious practical reasons to avoid biological warfare between populations of humans, but none of them apply to a war between two different species.  Dusting the planet with airborne ebolAIDS isn't going to bother the Phantom of Krankor.

[Razgovory]

It would require some knowledge of Human anatomy to do that.  Which means they would need to capture humans.

[Eddie Teach]

Or looking stuff up on wikipedia. 

[crazy canuck]

It would require some knowledge of Human anatomy to do that.  Which means they would need to capture humans.

An almost impossible task for aliens who have developed the ability to travel to other habitable planets.

[Eddie Teach]

What if the aliens are the size of mice? 

[Razgovory]

It would require some knowledge of Human anatomy to do that.  Which means they would need to capture humans.

An almost impossible task for aliens who have developed the ability to travel to other habitable planets.

Yeah, but you have to go down and get them.  Which means people might shoot at you.

[crazy canuck]

It would require some knowledge of Human anatomy to do that.  Which means they would need to capture humans.

An almost impossible task for aliens who have developed the ability to travel to other habitable planets.

Yeah, but you have to go down and get them.  Which means people might shoot at you.

Yeah, if they land in Detroit.  But presumably the aliens are smarter than that.  I hear wheatfields are good places for picking up humans with the added benefit of leaving a work of art.

[Ideologue]

It would require some knowledge of Human anatomy to do that.  Which means they would need to capture humans.

You come in peace, claim you can make humans immortal with somatic gene therapy (it doesn't matter if you can, although you likely need to have genetic engineering capabilities plausible enough to withstand scrutiny), have the information given to you with enthusiasm, then you build several viruses with 99.9% fatality rates and a semi-lengthy incubation times for maximum contagion, and finally you disperse it on crops, in water supply, or simply by dusting major population centers.

In ten years, humanity is reduced to a few Texan survivalists and Japanese nerds who lack any significant capacity to make war.  You put them in zoos.  Perhaps force them to breed.

[Eddie Teach]

99.9% fatality rate leaves 6 million people, presumably some of them will have access to US/Russian/PRC/Euro armories. The alien invasion force is likely to be much smaller than that, though having superior firepower. So there's still potential for some good ground battles.