Man launches off into space for the first time

It would definitely change the Anal Circumference Table.

>subcumming
I like your autocorrect.

The real ideal isn't the middle of the road at all, it's simply that humanity has unique strengths and weaknesses, but not strong enough to wank about and not or weak enough to make the author ennui in his pants. It's another unique, but not absurdly so, race. The problem is most efforts at getting that end up with humans as a boring baseline because that's our perspective as humans. A lot of stories that have been grouped with HFY are actually efforts at doing that though by writing from an alien perspective. So pull it off better than others, and others are garbage.

Due to the way gravity and delta-v works, most aliens that we could possible encounter would be larger then us, probably around bear size. Earth has gravity that if it were just a bit stronger, we'd never escape the gravity well. So other space faring species would have lower gravity homeworlds, and would grow larger before gravity makes it unhealthy.

For a while now I've wanted to write a story where aliens THINK they know what their special thing is, only for it to turn out to be a completely different thing. Like take Klingons right, except when they get to space they find out they are the weakest, shittiest fighters in the galaxy but they are the best at math. Their entire society is based around being good fighters but in the cosmic scene that's what they are the worst at, and their species one strength is the thing that they don't put much stock in.

That would totally fuck with their culture, after a few generations I'm sure they would start to adapt but you would have the "smart alien" species with the warrior society instincts.

I also wanted to do a thing where there is a prey species of shitty little rat men who survive by breeding like crazy and hiding, but it turns out they are superhumanly strong and nearly indestructible on any planet other than the horrible deathworld they evolved on. But they still have their shitty prey species instincts, so your unstoppable killing machines are easily startled and will jump under the nearest piece of furniture if they see anything with canine teeth.

I guess overall though I just like to think about humans finding out their niche in the universe is something weird they didn't expect. Like we are the only sentient species with vision of any kind, or we have 100,000 times more population because we are the swarm species and everyone else is hyperintelligent elf types.

So, the Ultra Series?

Except all the big guys are assholes and dont wear pants, so you have to duck and dive to avoid their swinging alien junk.

Question, are there also big girls?

No. Only big dudes.

It would be extremely painful.

>Would this change anything?

This actually isn't terribly unlikely. Earth may well be at the upper end of the scale in terms of planets with gravity low enough to escape using chemical-fueled rockets; we are "heavy worlders", basically, just a little bit more gravity and it would be impossible to enter Earth's orbit using chemical rockets.

Species from a planet with lower gravity would quite likely be taller, though also weaker and frailer.

Star Trek, where humans, while prominent, are just one member of a multi-species Federation where every species contributes greatly.

Star Wars, where species is totally irrelevant, at least in the films ("The Empire doesn't have any aliens in it!" Neither did the Rebellion until VI, unless you count Chewbacca), and everyone is human simply because most actors are human and it's cheap to keep them that way.

Oh, hey, someone hit on my first point already.

>Star Wars
"Human High Culture" was a thing, you know that right?
It was canon for a long time.

Yeah! Stop having extremes in fiction! From now on I want to see every fight end in a draw, no species has any biological/technological advantage over the other, and you better make every story completely original down to the type of cloth fabrics.

I'll ask you to kindly read what I typed again. Specifically, in the Star Wars line, words 8 thru 12 and the content of the parentheticals.

Two things.
1. It was canon, whether NuCanon keeps it is still up in the air.
starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Human_High_Culture

2. That seems like odd reasoning for a series of movies that used plenty of alien costumes for nothing but throwaway bit parts.

Would Humans be the go-to race for electronics? Would pilotable robots be much more common for us?

It was secondary canon, C-Canon. It wasn't G-Canon. Besides which, it doesn't undercut my point given, that the Star Wars movies show alien race to be generally irrelevant. Certainly at least, even if that doesn't apply to the Empire, it seems to apply to the Republic and to the Rebels.

But it really wasnt? The Rebels were shown to have a mix of humans and aliens, while the only aliens the Empire interacted with were informants and bounty hunters.

The movies seem to imply that aliens have, at the very least, been pushed either back to their homeworlds or to the fringes of society.

So its definitely more of a "Humanity Fuck You!" than anything else.

>The Rebels were shown to have a mix of humans and aliens

In Return of the Jedi, which I mentioned. In A New Hope and the Empire Strikes Back, there isn't a single alien member of the Rebellion, except Chewbacca, who is only there because of Han and is willing to leave the Rebellion when Han is. So he's no more a part of the Rebellion than Bossk is part of the Empire.

Weren't the Mon Calamari huge donors of ships and soldiers?

So, wait, ROTJ is not canon now?

...okay, fine, we'll do this the hard way.

Aside from Chewbacca, point out to me a single alien in the Rebellion in either A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back.

As a rule, you are correct.
A few exceptions could be put forward, but they don't change anything.

I like the HFY where we made friends with other species because we can cook, or that we're the only species that wasn't a douchebag to the space dragons.

Jesus fuck me Christ Veeky Forums is full of illiterate morons.

>Star Wars, where species is totally irrelevant, at least in the films ("The Empire doesn't have any aliens in it!" Neither did the Rebellion until VI, unless you count Chewbacca), and everyone is human simply because most actors are human and it's cheap to keep them that way.

Please take the time to read my original comment on the subject, in its entirety, and strive to slam some of your precious few neurons together so as to extract what I think is a very obvious meaning from it.

Give me a quick rundown on it user?

>Newton's law states: The gravitational attraction force between two point masses is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their separation distance.

Gravity doesn't pull on bigger objects "more" in the linear sense. More mass=more gravity, but it drops off over space via the inverse of a square, not a linear line. What this means is that an alien twice as big as a human needs more energy to move, proportionally, than a human would. moreso for anything three times, ect. sorry i cant into precise math

now, on an individual level your organisms wont notice much difference, but if you have to build a city-sized space station for beings the size of elephants, the engineering costs of keeping such a sprawling object together in space would be much higher than the more compact ones humans could build. not to mention every bit of metal/structure would have to be way thicker, because all of these heavy-as-fuck aliens would go straight through what we would consider "normal" flooring. There's also a matter of inertia-a ship crewed by humans would be smaller and would take way less fuel to both start and stop. there's also a matter of durability- something with larger, heavier organs (or multiple hearts that need to stay synchronized) might not be able to withstand as many g-forces as we do before passing out/dying.

in setting, this could have some really interesting implications. We could be the species of merchants/travelers because our low mass makes space travel much more economical, and hold a special place leveraging the supply lines of empires without one of our own. We could be a slave race that serves a similar purpose, and our ability to space travel/hide cheaply and easily makes for a really potent slave rebellion. Maybe we travel with children of friendly races to colonize planets, because we're the only adults small enough to make the journey and care for them.

Again two points.
You seem awfully happy to base your opinion on meta assumption when you happily brush of established canon from outside the movies.

Also you ignore my second point here >2. That seems like odd reasoning for a series of movies that used plenty of alien costumes for nothing but throwaway bit parts.

They put aliens in various roles, had them just walking around and doing nothing, for the sake of a panning shot. They could easily included them but chose not too. They later then made the conscious decision in RoTJ to include aliens in the Rebels group but NOT in the Empire.

This does not come across as a simple, its "cheaper and easier to just use humans" especially not when RoTJ is taken into account.

So based purely on what the Movies show us (regardless of anything not established with its running time) aliens either live on the fringes of society regardless of allegiance(A New Hope/TESB) OR the Empire has pushed them out of mainstream society, as they used to be part of the Republic and are now part of the Rebels (RoTJ and Prequels)

>implying God would let the universe end

>implying God doesnt have a bunch of other universes running in tandem
>implying God gives a shit about this crappy little side project

You sound like a fag and your shits all retarded

I dunno, Mass effect was kinda like that.

>im not retarded, its everyone else REEEEEEE

Sort of

You have to ignore Cerberus for it to work, otherwise its a prety big "Humanity Fu--ugh, what the fuck? Seriously? You did what? No...just no Humnaity. No."

>Would pilotable robots be much more common for us?

not as military tech, but absolutely as construction equipment. How else are we going to be able to literally work with a species several times larger than us?

Maybe formal attire mechs exist, as a way for our leaders to literally see eye-to-eye with foriegn diplomats. Could double as assassination protection, like the pope mobile or armored limos of today.

Enjoy your fujobait setting, then.

Humans end up being the warrior race in a roundabout way because our warships are so much more efficient.

Unless you kidnap Humans, I don't think you'd wind up with too many slave ones. Even if you halved or quartered the costs of space travel for people, you'd still need to get certified by !NASA and maybe even more groups before you dealt with aliens.

Interestingly, now that you mentioned all the other costs of space travel, would Humans quickly end up the more populous space species?

Then what would god's main project be?

Wonder if that means Humans tend to show up in dangerous jobs, like asteroid mining. Small enough to get into the cracks and corners of damaged machines while able to use them to get around.

Would that really matter once so many people have space access? Doesn't that make everyone the warrior race?

His magical realm

A universe full of Piss Trees.

The one wear his little human creations never ate the fruit of knowledge and instead continue to act like idiot noble savages, walking around in the nude, splitting their time between eating and fucking in equal measure.

That does sound like paradise.

>Man launches off into space for the first time
>All alien races are technologically and evolutionarily inferior

How often do these personages of great stature wear masks?

I bet it would be painful for them to land on earth.

Would it be like being underwater? Gravity and even the air just pressing down on you all the time?

>Interestingly, now that you mentioned all the other costs of space travel, would Humans quickly end up the more populous space species?

that's sort of what i'm thinking. even though you have infinite space, "livable" space is at a premium in, well, space. I figure most other empires would focus on colonizing/terraforming planets and moons because the size thing would be an issue, while we could focus on the tactical advantages of hiding space stations anywhere we could.

as for the slave aliens, i like to think of our spacefaring future as more wild west than austo-hungarian empire. Due to distance/isolation, most colonies would probably be left to fend for themselves, with failed ones going dark without comms all the time. One could have been enslaved and it wouldn't look any different than any of the donner party sob stories before it.

dude, imagine boarding parties
>aliens attempt to board human ship
>are slaughered because they cant crawl through the tiny corridors/literally fall through the floor and get stuck

>humans board alien vessel
> thousands of the tiny fuckers
> small enough to stand up straight and comfortably live in your ventilation shafts
>evolved from primates, can climb and leap
> depending on how cavernous the ship is/how much special forces training they have, could be in there for months, quietly sabotaging the ship and quietly killing crew members
>you know that they're trapped, but that just means that they'll plant an explosive and kill everyone on board as soon as they realize this
> your capital ship is now the Nostromo with vietcong. good luck.

Low gravity might not be the only reason for their size. It could just be they fit that environmental niche and got lucky enough to evolve better brains.

I liked how Year Zero did this, where it turned out Human music was orders of magnitude better than any other music aliens had ever created, so much so that when the aliens first heard the theme to a Welcome Back Kotter, like 25% of them died from orgasm

Which one was that

I can see the colonies going dark thing in "Deep Space". The numerous places around the galaxy where land might be cheap and the possibility of running your own life away from Earth and its Generalissimo.

Didn't it happen in Mass Effect? Out on the fringe, you've got corporate slavers and state sponsored kidnappers preying on places that wanted to live independently.

Give me more details on this Year Zero thing. Google won't be useful thanks to comics.

The 'Nice to Dragons' one was about !Dragons that lived on a Venus like planet. All the other races were jerks to them, where Humans thought it was cool that they looked like Dragons. They helped us with FTL drives and we hooked them up with Venus and life extending drugs.

The Cook one I think refers to an Ambassador taking some aliens to a state sponsored buffet and they open up with us when talking about food

>Year Zero
The premise is that Aliens(most of whom are pretty much post-scarcity) monitor Earth for a while, watching their sitcoms and reading their books and seeing if they had anything to contribute to galactic culture and art(because all they pretty much care about, already having reached the end of the tech tree, so to speak).

They hear human music and find that humans have evolved in such a way that makes them perfect musicians, and then the orgasm thing happens, and human music spreads throughout the galaxy, unbeknownst to humans.

The main plot arises when Humanity starts getting close to achieving FTL travel, meaning that the aliens would have to let them into the galactic club so to speak. This also means that they would have to pay humanity for all the human music they've been pirating, and because of how fucked music copyright law is, if that happened humans would end up owning 150% of all the wealth in the universe.

So the liens decide it would better to nuke humanity(before they achieve space travel) rather than pay off that huge of a debt. And a lot of alien music enthusiasts aren't happy about that.

youtube.com/watch?v=8K5Wb9lzcNc

>55629389
i haven't played mass effect, i couldn't tell you. That could totally be a thing in this setting though.

Could be a lot of reasons why someone chooses to push to the outer fringes. Some could be penal colonies like Australia or Louisiana, cheap land for homesteaders like the Oregon trail, ect.

I like the idea of some not being state sponsored, but private and frequently shitty corps who promise some settlers a turn-key setup and it turns out to be 50+year old equipment and crappy supplies. since we're tiny we can slapdash colonize worlds really quickly, even if our failure rate is really high. The rate and disorganization of this colonialism could be confusing to our big aliens because their mass means that all colonial ships/endeavours are so expensive that they have to be perfectly planned.

>Small enough to get into the cracks and corners of damaged machines while able to use them to get around

precisely! on our planet this why we have to have laws against people hiring children, their smallness in a factory made them a super popular, if unethical, employee during the industrial revolution. In this setting, we as a species would function much the same without all of the ethical considerations of child labor.

It would crush their spaceships with no survivors.

I have forgotten a bit about the Mass Effect race, but they were real jerks who had stat-sponsored slavers go out into colonies and the like.

>Alien Colonists
You know, there's probably more than a few unscrupulous alien groups that hire Humans for such colonization attempts. You can shotgun a few Humans out into space and monitor their progress. If they do well, send in your species and keep the Humans as pets

I got it in front of me. What do you want, user? Short story collection by Poul Anderson.
The one I mentioned is remarkably good and I'm reluctant to give a half-assed recap of it. Others include alien mercenaries showing up in the middle of the cold war to offer their services to the highest bidder, and a pair of aliens invited to a dinner party with some Harvard professors, whom they ask for advice on the whole First Contact thing.

I couldn't possibly tell you why, but Poul Anderson has always been an author I like a lot. Nothing I can really put my finger on, but any book I read by him just feels incredibly comfy.

Those sound pretty good. I'll give him a look. Hopefully he has some free Kindle books available

Which would push it from the middle ground into humanity fuck yeah territory.

>Ctrl+F "macross"
>0 results
come on, people

Post more pictures of Human/Zentradi interactions and tell us what makes Zentradi cities special, besides the bigness

It took you guys way too long to bring up Macross. Shame on you.

I find that it's easier to make the latter interesting when compared to the former.

>Out on the fringe, you've got corporate slavers and state sponsored kidnappers preying on places that wanted to live independently.

More like the Batarians have an innate culture of slavery. Barely tolerated pre-Shanxi because they were in the galaxy-equivalent of the boonies. Then, Humans met the Turians and the Council brought them in and gave them the Skyllian Verge to expand. Which pissed off the Batarians because it used to be their backyard to pillage and enslave.

That's got to be a huge blow to the ego.

>"We just found these 6 inch tall dude/ttes."
>"They just built an FTL ship and accidentally crashed it into one of our cruise liners."
>"They apologized."
>"For that, they are infinitely more awesome than you ever were and we are giving them those planets you never settled."

Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Alexander, were all manlets.

If we're the galactic manlet our repressed self-hatred will turn into hatred against all other species.
Humans become the galactic threat.

>what makes Zentradi cities special
Giant cows

Napoleon was above average height. Hitler was distinctly average height. We have no fucking clue how tall Khan was, but the accounts there are say he was tall and strong. Ditto with Alexander. Try again.

To be fair, Space Dragons are fucking assholes, man.

That does sound great desu.

No, it really isn't as bad. Contemplating the ways in which success might become simply impossible for us due to the nature of our selves is much more intellectually difficult than coming up with some new instance of racial wish fulfilment fantasy.

You're either autistic or a lanklet for replying like that to manlet shitposting.

Oh god we're ants

...

Once you get space travel, it doesn't really matter as much.

In fact, as established above, it works out better for you. You can handle higher gravity AND get cheaper rides.

Unless you get taken as a pet. That could be bad.

Different user here, if I recall correctly, a extremely telepathic race discovers us an laments after they discover that humans don't have an afterlife
This race evolved on a metal-poor planet and thousands if not millions of years of eugenics went into developing their psychic abilities and allows them to exist past the expiration of their body, though in a vastly different style.

It could be that humans are late to the game of space exploration, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
I really like how Draco Tavern (by Larry Niven) did it. Contact with aliens didn't fundamentally change human society, and Earth becomes another stop in the galactic network of business people and tourists.

We Fantastic Planet now

I don't think you could really do Human pets. There'd be a certain amount of intelligence you wouldn't be able to deny. Human servants on the other hoof, I can see being a possibility. Especially if they grow up being under the Aliens.

youtube.com/watch?v=yekelkLGsgI

>what makes Zentradi cities special
There aren't any; there are Zentradi communities within human settlements. They're soldiers batch-cloned and outfitted by an automated warmachine that outlived its creators, pure Zentradi culture is decanting straight into service on a ship that nobody knows how to maintain. They lost a war to pop music and kissing.

That's understandable but lame. We should make our own Giant Aliens.

Are they Insect like?
Mammalian or Avian in appearance?
What about a Reptilian/Amphibious look?

What would they think of the Miniature Humans?

>Nuke humanity to not pay piracy fees

... Why not just initiate First Contact when humans achieve FTL and go, "so, we'll give you the knowledge and tech to help you become a post-scarcity society and be welcomed into the cosmos, and in exchange all you do is rewrite a few laws to adjust to galactic standards of trade and business," and along the way just bury them rewriting the copyright laws to only pay humanity like 2.5% of the wealth in the universe.

This means not only do you get to keep your music, you now can have humans focus on enlightenment and turning them into a society focused on the arts and music.

Nice stealth quest faggot. Knock it off to /qst/.

>They later then made the conscious decision in RoTJ to include aliens in the Rebels group but NOT in the Empire.

YES.

WHICH IS WHY I SPECIFIED JUST THE FIRST TWO MOVIES. IN MY ORIGINAL POST.

THE QUESTION WAS, "WHAT MIGHT A MIDDLING GROUND LOOK LIKE?", AND I USED THE FIRST TWO STAR WARS MOVIES AS EXAMPLES. I SPECIFICALLY USED ONLY THE FIRST TWO MOVIES. I NEVER SAID THE FRANCHISE AS A WHOLE WAS AN EXAMPLE, JUST THE FIRST TWO MOVIES.

BECAUSE THEY ARE GOOD EXAMPLES. THERE ARE NO ALIENS IN THE REBELLION. THERE ARE NO ALIENS IN THE EMPIRE. A CHARACTER'S SPECIES IS SHOWN TO BE IRRELEVANT TO ALL CHARACTERS. NO ONE MENTIONS ANY PRO-ALIEN OR PRO-HUMAN BIAS.

THE CLOSEST YOU GET IS A SINGLE DETENTION BLOCK COMMANDER IN THE DEATH STAR IN REFERENCE TO CHEWBACCA AS A "THING"...AND ALSO PRINCESS LEIA CALLING HIM A "BIG WALKING CARPET".

THAT'S IT.

DIE IN A FIRE.

>Nice stealth quest faggot. Knock it off to /qst/.
Holy shit what a turd

>Would this change anything?

OF COURSCH!

Just remember, if you take your helmet off it would be extremely painful for you

The EU was always canon only for fags and now it's not canon at all.