Re: War of the Worlds in DS2

On Thursday, July 17, 2003, at 08:37 PM, Eric Foley wrote:
> His original tripods that could be stymied by what we now consider 
> laughably
> sluggish ironclad rivercraft and stopped in token numbers wouldn't
fare 
> too
> well against modern guided missiles.	The 1938 broadcast that upped
the 
> ante
> to massive B-17 airstrikes also would've had troubles with guided 
> weapons,
> to say nothing of the obvious nuclear trump card.  Even the 1953
movie's
> hoverships, which could ignore nuclear devices outright, fall short in

> their
> implementation of Wells' vision, against modern biowarfare.  After
all, 
> an
> alien invader that can't even put up with the common cold isn't going
to
> have much fun at all against weaponized anthrax.
Er.. You'd have to find a microbe that they were vulnerable to but we 
weren't. YOu couldn't just throw any old WMD at them. I doubt the 
inhabitants of whatever city was involved would be very happy with you 
using weaponised anthrax against the Martians. You could probably find 
one, but you'd have to capture a few martians to test them on first...

As to the whole 'killed by microbes' thing, you have to remember Wells 
was writing long before we ventured beyond the atmosphere. When he was 
writing, ironclads were about the most powerful fighting machines on the

face of the earth. They had a much more fearsome reputation than an F-16

does today, no matter how many mavericks you load onto it. I find it 
very hard to believe that any advanced race who could travel from one 
planet to another en masse would be stupid enough to allow their own 
environment systems to mix with the local atmosphere. At least until the

planet had been appropriately terraformed anyway.

It's quite possible to come up with an alien technology which would be 
invulnerable to just about anything. It's also possible to invent one 
that looked that way, but in fact had a weakness. It all just requires 
the right amount of PSB.

						TTFN
							Jon

--
"... For it is the folly of men that they forget.."