How would a war between two races go if there were an extreme size difference between the two. i.e. 6ft vs 6 inches

How would a war between two races go if there were an extreme size difference between the two. i.e. 6ft vs 6 inches.

Assume near equal levels of magic and tech, with the tech being at or near today's level.

Vietnamese gopher tunnels vs unlimited napalm works

So basically we're to try and apply the square-cube law to any and all technology that could be relevant for the capability of a society to wage war, which is to say basically all of it, and then run a comparison down the entire list for two societies of vastly different sizes.

Yeah, whatever the author wants to happen, happens. Especially since we apparently do have pure fucking magic available here, the capacity and effects of which must also be considered for both societies.

>How would a war between two races go if there were an extreme size difference between the two?

Very quickly.

I can't tell you until you give me their sociopolitical evolution through the ages, their treatment of their own civilians and soldiers, their preferred tactics regarding heads on, guerilla and siege combat, their views on honor and what that constitutes, the reasons for said war, what kind of battlefields are they clashing over and why the fuck you think that we can estimate how an entire goddamn war is going to play out entirely based on one of these parties being taller than the other.

There was something like that in Old Man's War.

The midgets got literally stomped. The small size made them hard to beat in space but they couldn't do much on the ground.

It depends on the mechanization of the battlespace. Probably on the sea it would make no difference, for instance: there is no reason their missiles would be smaller/lesser efficient.

A good question is: what about the relative size of the armies? I mean, do they have 100 "gnomes" for each of our soldiers? In that case, if it's a defense situation, I think we might be mightly fucked. I get that a simple rifle equivalent for them would be an artillery piece, but they're just too many. Suppose they could have 4 rifles for 1 man equivalent: if they can retain the tempo of the operations...

>tiny people use their innate talent with tiny things to create nanotech plagues that wipe out entire continents of the big people
>tiny people spies are everywhere and they often go undetected so they know everything the big people are doing
>big people use chemical agents that they are resistant to thanks to their larger size to exterminate the tiny people, who are always hiding and difficult to fight head-on
>whenever the tiny people take a hit it's devastating, cities that aren't hidden well get destroyed in seconds
>but when tiny people loot big peoples' cities the resources last them longer because they consume a lot less

It's an even match

>modern tech

Smaller people would win. Small profile = hard to hit and, more importantly, harder to see. Just imagine how we would fight people who were 10x bigger than us.

Imagine 6in people armed with HE .50cal equivalent rifles, sneaking through the grass on your front lawn and exploding your achilles tendon as you try to walk to your car in the morning.

Assuming it was current earth and we introduced tiny people a whole host of animals humans find near harmless would be super predators to these tiny people.

Imagine what a cat/fox/dog would do to a village of rat sized people.

>implying they wouldn't go on cat hunts like humans go on elephant hunts

Elephants aren't carnivorous.

you're an idiot

At this tech level, the big guys would be at a disadvantage. Take all the things that make mecha impractical, and now make that your basic infrantry. Those itty-bitty tanks won't seem so itty-bitty when they're shrugging off your rifle rounds and putting holes through you all the same while being difficult to pick out with the naked eye.

The six foot people would wipe them out in the most hilarious one sided genocide. I mean even if we assume that they had an equivalent amount of people and resources by weight how would they fight? Their guns would be to small to do anything to a human, anything big enough to hurt a 6' would be equivalent to having to use one of those world war 2 artillery platforms, and we have body armor thick enough to negate it.

We brobably wouldn't use bullets to fight them but tempature weapons. Flame throwers are in effective in the real world because bullets would damage the weapon to quickly for it to be useful, while against literal six inch people it would fucking out range almost all of their conventional weapons and you wouldn't even have to hit directly to kill them. Fuck you wouldn't even need napalm.

So a conventional battle would pretty much be a slaughter, so the 6" would quickly start off with Chem or bio warfare which would be more even a battle, but still one sided.

At 6" the machinery needed to produce and move enough chemicals to make any sort of dent would be a labor of Hercule, while their small size increases the effectiveness of most chemical weapons. Bio weapons actually give them a small edge, because they would have an easier time of quarantine, but on the other hand the 6' would literally be able to use army ants. Air dropping centipedes over 6" territory would be a valid way of dealing devastating damage.

i couldn't follow that at all

Tiny people have tiny guns. Tiny guns can't hurt big people.

Big people have fire, tiny people have no way to fight fire.

Tiny people can't make enough bad air to hurt big people. Big people can use bad air to hurt tiny people.

Tiny people can make really tiny creatures to hurt big people. Big people can also make really tiny creatures, but can also use tiny creatures to hurt tiny people.

Problem with that assessment is that's not how scaling works. Reason tank armor is as effective as it is is thanks to it's thickness. Now a rifle probably wouldn't penetrate on the first hit unless it was a FMJ but it would be jarring as hell. And those tiny tanks would have a lot of difficulty with rough terrain. Plus their cannons wouldn't be any more effective than a rifle shot at best (probably more like a pistol) and if there were fired and loaded like the main guns on our tanks the fire rate would suck. And ta tank for a 6 inch person would probably be atleast rumba sized so it wouldn't be that hard to see; and it's engine would probably be something like a whacker one so it wouldn't be hard to hear either.

What about tall people? How would a race of 10ft humans fare in current warfare? What theatres would suit them the most?

Larger profiles would mean they'd get shot much more often, and restrict mobility in urban combat against smaller races. They would be able to bring larger caliber weapons onto the field, but when the enemy's rifle is still able to put you down that's not much of an advantage.

I think conventional warfare would be out of the question; as other anons have pointed out; there's no way (even with huge superiority of numbers) that an army of borrowers could best an army of men on the field of battle.

However; a guerrilla war would be much more likely, with the tiny men poisoning big folk water & food supplies, sabotaging infrastructure & assassinating key personnel, while our side of the war would be more akin to supped-up pest control; trying to find their 'nests' to exterminate & setting traps for them and so forth.

I'm image searching this file now. I was just curious about it.

Have you lugging a fucking .50 cal? Shit is heavy as fuck not to mention unwieldy as an elephant doing ballerina. Just imagine all the back issues such an army would have

I imagine mini tanks would end up looking a lot like unmanned drones.

whats the scale on that? it still looks pretty big

its about a 1m^3

Not that user, but that obviously wasn't what he meant by that post and you know it.
Comparing things to how African tribes hunt lions would have been a better comparison, but the point still stands either way.

no it doesnt. lions arent enormous killing machines in the way housecats are. a 6 inch person vs a housecat is not the same as a 6 foot person vs a lion

>6in people armed with .50BMG
The fucking recoil would throw them backwards until a sufficiently solid surface arrived to turn their spine 2-dimensional

Other funny stuff.

Tiny people would likely not be taking prisoners often.

Very hard to feed, very hard to keep. Using them as manual labour is questionable too since you have to free them and all it takes is

Forget cats. Rats.

Infiltrating cities would be both easy for them with plenty of hiding spots...and a nightmare.

Congratilations - your scouts just got eaten alive since they were carrying anti-giant weapons.

Like Macross, but in reverse.

Dude, people have hunted fucking blue whales with hand held harpoons. Your point is irrelevant.

Blue whales never shot back nor organized into armies.

See how much bigger that guy is than the door? Imagine running through a building like that. Imagine the increased cost of building things to scale, the amount of fuel their vehicles would consume

To the best of my knowledge, neither do housecats.

>that hoverhand

but were not 6 inches tall. if we were, it'd be a killing spree on both sides

If I recall right, I think something like this happened in those Lord of the Rings for Atheists books. I believe they had poisoned needles that delivered a harmful concoction that paralyzed people.

They rode mice

So it'd be the 6 inch people's Baneblade?

Imagine a tiger the size of a fucking bus attacking you. That's what an average housecat would be to them. They would have to some sort of ancient-mythology-level badasses to try hunting cats.

I think you need to dumb it down a bit more for him user.

I think what would be better would be explaining why they are at war in the first place.

Did Eurasia and Africa get its entire population replaced with Kobolds? Why are we fighting them? Where are we fighting them?