Alien Invasion

The invasion, as it turns out, is staged.

People are really dying, but as we fight back and bolster our presence in the solar system to better deal with alien threats... we discover that upon 'defeating' their fleet with our new fleet of battlecruisers that we receive a broadcast of applause by the aliens.

Simply put, the invasion was never for real. They don't want our planet. They just wanted us to actually move beyond our own planet, and making us think we were all going to die was the best way.

Their actual tech level is MUCH higher than anything we say from them during the 'war', to the point that actual reprisal against them in anything remotely describable as the foreseeable future is basically impossible. So they are going to bugger off for the next couple thousands years, let us cool off a bit.

Still, smashing job with that war, humans! Good luck with the extrasolar colonization! Oh, and if you see a giant floating grey thing that looks sort of like a giant Y, it will eat your ship if you get too close. Just so you know.

Bye~!

The problem with invading another solar system is that it's like building a Dyson Sphere; if you're technologically advanced enough that you can, then you're technologically advanced enough that you don't need to:

As far as lebensraum goes; we have planets in our solar system which we could conceivably terraform in the not-too-distant-future, and we're nowhere near the tech-level necessary for planetary conquest.

The only resource unique to life-bearing worlds are fossil-fuels; and the idea of an oil-powered interstellar empire is as absurd as a coal-fired space-shuttle.

Slave labour? We ourselves are perhaps decades at most from robots far more efficient than even the most hard-working & eager-to-please Bangladeshi 8-year-old, never mind hyper-advanced space aliens.

Pre-emptive threat removal? What possible threat could we pose to a species so much more advanced than our own? It would be like the U.S. military feeling threatened by some uncontacted, stone-age Amazonian tribe, only more so.

The only possible reason for invading a planet in another solar-system with an indigenous population would be cultural; they feel the need to engage everyone they meet in combat, perhaps. Maybe they deliberately gimp their own forces to be more of a fair match for Earth-tech?

>Aliums find life bearing planet, rapidly dying off thanks to climate change.
>It's the only one they've ever seen but for their own.
>Littlegreensaviour.jpg
>We want your world for a garden, analyze the situation and see you cannot win without killing all life around you. Accept our generous edicts so that your kind may survive in our garden, with long, fulfilled, happy lives.
>NO MY PLANET FUCK OFF WE'RE FULL!
>You would threaten all life on your world for territory?
>FUCK YEAH MURICA DON'T TREAD ON ME GREEN SOCIALIST PINKO HIPPY FAGGOT!
>boots on the ground to control the devastation as they mercilessly and cleanly eradicate the non conformist humans.

Startide Rising

>Startide Rising
Plot summary says it's about an alien graveyard and Not!TheCovenant? Does it have something to do withg preserving earths beauty or something?

God is real, abiogensis can't be performed, and the aliens need new kinds of biota to manufacture an essential protein (a biotum which, of course, they've only found on Earth), and they need it NOW.

The book, which is very good hfy and you should read, takes place in a setting where all space is ruled by a religion/government that places a very high value on environmental sustainability. Like, I understand that there are people who get upset when they see what they see as an environmentalist strawman/soapbox; "Look at how noble and powerful and wise this beautiful environmentalist society is, shouldn't we all be like this flawless effigy with no grounding in reality?"
In the setting however, the aliens have pretty absurdly cool tech, and place very high premium on environmental diversity because they effectively 'farm' sub-sentient species to uplift as 'client' races. Species A finds a promising chimpanzee-equivalent, does a few million years worth of genetic tinkering and uplifting, uplifts Species B as their client race, and when Species B grows to full adulthood it eventually starts collecting pre-sentients and uplifting clients of its own.

Ecological catastrophe or elimination of viable pre-sentient species can get your species and your patron species exterminated by the government/outraged neighbors/enemies now with a justification for gross negligence. It's pretty much one of the worst crimes available.

Humans, being special, 'evolve' or everyone concludes, more likely were half-uplifted and then abandoned for some reason on a world in the middle of a sector set aside as a fallow world. Crop rotation, let one of your fields rest, right? So when someone notices they're there and colonizing all the fallow garden worlds adjacent to them, the first thing that happens is the government sends in a fleet or three (of super-god-tech galactic warships) to remove these "squatters" from where they don't belong.

For bonus points, have the final speech on the aliens goals be performed by a humanoid clone/android who looks exactly like Ozymandias from Watchmen.

Aliens send missiles with alien bio plague. Human immune system and medicine are helpless. Within 6 months all humans are dead. The aliens can colonize the planet.

I always felt like a Christopher Columbus type story would work well. It's just a single scout ship piloted by a narcissist who wants to be king of bumfuckistan. He uses his tech advantage and his dubiously loyal crew to build a city to his own crazy image. Maybe then a member of the ship, like a religious representative or doctor, leaves and tries to help the humans expell the captain/ get him reported to the space crown/police.

Or just do a thing with some Roadside Picnic influence.

Alien teenagers/tourists stop by on Earth so they can eat some lunch planet-side. They throw away their trash and leave.

Turns out their trash quickly assembles into an army hellbent on taking on mankind.

War of the Worlds setting could be pretty interesting.

And no I don't mean the Tom Cruise one.

>WoTW

A long time ago I was going to run a campaign based on the short lived TV series from the 90s but I never got around to getting it together.

While the concept is cute, it implies that everyone's minds are similar to a staggering degree.

Well, everyone's minds are similar to a staggering degree.

Everyone has around 2 kilos of brain in their skull.

The vast majority of people react the same way to psychoactive substances like alcohol, ketamine, cannabis, LSD, amphetamines, etc. etc. etc.

Basically, the only real difference in the minds of people is the varying amounts of various brain stuff in your skull, and your personal memories and experiences.

The rest is all the same.

> Aliens want us to save us from global warming.

> Humans respond by polluting it more.

That's downright ludicrous. Even today we could theoretically synthesize any protein we needed, it would just be a matter of time and cost. If they can travel across space, they should have the tech to trivially make what they need from raw materials. And tossing "God exists" into your SF setting is not something you should do offhandedly

Actually, that gives me an idea: The invaders aren't all that advanced really, they're a gang of criminals who murdered the ship's owner and stole the ship. Now they're looking to steal valuable resources and farm narcotic substances on our planet to ship them back to their own world so they can get rich and run the place.

A resource that might interest the alien would be diversity.

A eco-system very few species is unstable. So sources of biodiversity is an important assets. They can produce some artificially but they still need an initial artificial seed.

Sorry, i misread your post. I thought the meme-warfare probes are self-replicating, and adapt themselves to any species. I meant all species by "everyone", not just humans.

That's still possible, though, but sounds overly complicated. Just make the probe sell the target race advanced tech (energy or medical), make their technology dependent on it, collapse their economy at will.

Yeah. Even within our species, there are all kinds of people that have demonstrably different brain wiring and neurological structures. Any memetic weapon designed to target 'normal' humans would miss Autistic people and vice versa.

And thats not even getting into alien silicate space gas, and whatever distributed light-network they use to think.

I like that idea.

You could have a mission where you have to protect a university where a bunch of mankinds brightest are brainstorming, creating the theory that the technology of the ship, the behavior of the aliens, and the lack of high-end technology used by the aliens (they have future guns and shit, but make use of human artillery and missiles for bombardment) implies that they were not the creators of the ship.

Cue a globetrotting mission to activate SETI systems to broadcast some kind of MAYDAY SOS into space hopefully attracting the attention of the actual owners of the Space Ship for a big damn heroes moment as they subjugate the criminals.

How about a Stellaris-like Grand Strategy Galaxy that causes most of the trouble? It's not necessarily about gathering resources, but just making sure your sector of space is secure and all that.

Rate my idea for this Young Adult invasion:

Earth gets 'colonized' by the military branch of an aspiring Empire. They don't go full invader, but just flash their weapons and bring in tons of ships. The stories and plot hooks would be about how people deal with them and they with us.

Think about it, they might want some Space Elevator so they can use Earth as a staging ground like the Chinese are with their artificial islands, but what if they have to build it in some war-torn African country? They can't just go full Exterminatus since they need the Humans to help build it, or Complete Dictator since they don't want to run the place and be stuck on some backwater world.

How do HFY oriented people react when they just can't throw off the yoke of the Aliens, since they're more focused on their bases and doing their own thing, and getting rid of them just opens up Earth to be taken over by yet another group of aliens?

it was alright, not that different from X-COM. which is weird because you would expect a guerrilla resistance movement would act competently differently from a global funded and supported military force of ace combat specialists.

>How do HFY oriented people react when they just can't throw off the yoke of the Aliens, since they're more focused on their bases and doing their own thing, and getting rid of them just opens up Earth to be taken over by yet another group of aliens?

The same way South-Koreans react to AMERICANI PIGGU GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT MARINU!

I think that every single group on Earth (governments, mercenaries, terrorists, /k/ommandos and the like) will try to get their hands on alien weaponry and tech.

All of these groups might try to use these technologies to promote their own agenda. More conflicts erupt around the globe.

As soon as these conflicts start upsetting the aliens, they crack down HARD on everyone responsible (and probably everyone else for good measure). Eventually they get tired of constantly dealing with the plucky human resistance and invest in creating an actual human puppet government armed with their tech.

>How do HFY oriented people react

Well our superior bellicose nature allows us to catch them off guard and overwhelm their operative bases while taking almost no casualties. With our flash and awe tactics they throw down their weapons and flee as fast as they can, most are gunned down before they board their ships while the survivors are shocked to their cores at the inhumane and cruel nature of mankind.

Afterwards we reverse engineer the technology they left behind and we carry the fight to their worlds, take what we want and burn what they treasure the most before offering them peace in the form of vassalship.

In less than a hundred years mankind has established near total dominion over anything that breathes in our side of the galaxy and we're set to conquer the rest of it before five hundred years have passed.

Is what they'd say.

The concept of reverse engineering alien technology always puzzled me because it took humans 20-30 years to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics WHEN THEY HAD THE FUCKING ROSETTA STONE.

How the fuck will you reverse engineer alien technology made by aliens, not from the Earth, without any manual when reverse engineering things made on Earth by humans already takes fucking ages?
By the time the KGB had reverse engineered the basic ideas behind the American nuclear bomb, Soviet scientists had already figured out how to make one simply based on extrapolating from "The Americans have a nuclear bomb, let's grab the physics books and make our own".
Reverse engineering things to ~win~ a war is dumb as shit, because by the time your project is done, you're already dead or conquered.

Not sure whether linguisticsengineering comparison is legitimate.

Also, reverse engineering of alien tech can be greatly improved by having alien engineers to torture for info. If linguists had live ancient Egyptians they would have handled hieroglyphics way faster.

What use is torturing aliens when you probably will have major language difficulties (why would aliens bother teaching humans the engineering jargon of their language when all they need to teach humans about their language is "Fuck off" and "Get out of my way"?)?
What use is torturing aliens when torture is already proven to be absolutely shitty at extracting information throughout history?
What use is torturing aliens when you don't know shit about their biology?

Same reason Americans torture.

We are blood-lusted barbarians.

>you don't know shit about their biology?
Believe it or not, we have actual scientists at our disposal. We can get some data on their physiology from observation - do they use environment suits or not, for example. If the aliens are actually at war with the humans, and not curb-stomping them, humans can and will get samples of alien bodies, perhaps even mostly intact ones. Live aliens might be procured as well. Sure, we won't get any amazing insights into their biochemistry fast, but we will find out some basic weaknesses, or die trying. Even outside the context of choosing the torture method, this will be necessary for optimizing our ammunition, and getting our people to target their vital areas.

>we won't learn their language
War is based on communication. Learning the alien language will be a priority regardless of having any prisoners to torture. It won't be easy, but we still have scientists for that, as well as a lot of computing power. Ever heard of machine learning? Not to mention that any interest of aliens in our culture will make them communicate with SOMEONE, and give us data in the end.

>torture is not very effective
Not gonna argue. Have fun trying to bribe the alien.

So basically, you're too fucking retarded to understand that you're wasting resources trying to bridge and unbridgeable gap.

Your plan is the equivalent of a bunch of chimpansees biting an engineer who found himself in the jungle, with the plan of the chimpansees to learn how to build nuclear powerplants out of sticks, leaves and crushed ant-paste.

The only proof that a problem is unsolvable is that some guy said it is unsolvable, so we should not even try solving the problem.

Sounds like something a chimpanzee would say.

Delta Green that shit, user. That show was TOTALLY Delta Green...

Here's one for you: take the basic premise of Hitchhikers Guide, but they need to install some kind of infrastructure on the planet rather than destroy it. Also, the weapons that would let them just glad the surface would destabilize the magnetic field, negating the purpose of their coming here.

1950's tech is so 1930's.

Here's some aliens with 1550's tech.

>Delta Green

Well shit, that sounds awesome! I think I still have my notebook somewhere where I wrote down a basic elements for a campaign. Honestly I'm surprised that other people know about the show, too bad it was canned after its second season.

>And tossing "God exists" into your SF setting is not something you should do offhandedly
Yeah, that really made the Rendezvous with Rama sequels suck.
Well, that and that fact that that setting's God itself really sucks.

Worldwar series is actually really good
>aliens invade during WWII
>technological progress stopped on their planet millennia ago, conquered two other planets with the same deal, actual memorial to the one soldier who broke his foot on one of them
>ayyylmao tech level is ~90s US military, but with STL starships and absolutely no experience whatsoever, and their culture precludes them frommaking their own decisions
>Series has POV from humans and aliums, typically run into actual people, remember Goddard, Otto Skorzeny, Molotov (one of the main POV characters), and a lot of others

I really enjoyed them, but they can be pretty stupid at times, since they are Turtledove books.
But If you're looking for a fun read for some ideas, they're pretty good, since the war lasts longer than in our timeline.
There's also a sequel series set 20 years later in 60s and talks about the aftereffects of the war
and how the humans rapidly catch up to the aliums

and in a later book Humans go to the Aliens homeworld to negotiate... the Aliens are all WTF, You had guys on horses the last time we checked!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeward_Bound_(Turtledove_novel)

I don't know if anyone else remembers this show, but there's a show from the 90s by Fox called "Space: Above and Beyond." It's about a war between humans and aliens. While the show is literally "WW2 Pacific campaign in space" (it was originally pitched as a show about Marine aviators in the Pacific, but the company wanted a sci-fi show), it does have an interesting reason for the war: We went to worlds that they had claimed and ignored the warnings. It's as simple as that. Of course, there's a lot of politics and such in there, but that's the basic idea. We stuck our noses on a planet that they claimed and that was the start of the war.

So, why not something like that? We start exploring the near-by worlds with early FTL tech and set up a colony on another planet. Only thing is, it's claimed by the aliens and they view us as a great threat because of it. No need for rational reasons, just dickery. Why not?

One reason i thought aliens might want to deal with us is the possibility that perhaps they are an old race, old to the point they genuinely bred out aggression from thier race. They come under attack from a different, newer race and discover us and in return for uplifting and helping us with FTL, ships and such, we become their army and generals.

Basically a spin on the whole Khan spiel from Star Trek Into Darkness, the whole "a warriors mind" kind of thing combined with the fact that by comparison to the first old aliens we breed like rabbits

Saberhagen's "Berserker" series and Alan Dean Foster's "The Damned" trilogy.

they have more or less wrecked their own planet and need to take ours to survive as a species. however with their tech level and resources they are only just capable of mounting an invasion.
the odds are still stacked in the aliens favour but the war is winnable.

> X com rookies
>"ace"

Greg Bear's War Dogs trilogy that's still being written atm is literally this. Passably pulpy, easy read, tech is an interesting combination of modern or near-future earth and uplifted stuff. Deals with 'good', suspiciously generous aliums getting chased to our solar system by ambiguously 'evil' aliens of as-yet-indeterminate motive and humanity getting dragged into their war.

No FTL or whatever as it's still set in our solar system, but their technology does improve human life on Earth tremendously. We just have to kick their mean buddies' asses for them in return.

It's a bit pulpy but it's a fun romp.