Re: War of the Worlds in DS2

On Thursday, July 17, 2003, at 09:01 PM, B Lin wrote:
> Weaponized Anthrax is the perfect weapon to use.  Especially if you 
> know you're going to use it.	You simply hand out anti-biotics a few 
> days before spraying the whole area.	The advantage to such diseases 
> like anthrax is that we have the cure in hand.  The current difficulty

> with bio-terrorism is that often you don't know you've been hit until 
> the window for cheap and effective cures has already passed.	If you 
> are doing a planned, pre-emptive strike, then you can protect your own

> people, whether that be soldiers or civilians using prophylactic 
> measures.
This is all very well presuming you have two days notice that a bunch of

aliens in tripods are going to show up and start trashing the place. 
Most SF invasion movie aliens don't show up with banners saying 'We're 
psychotic alien killers. See you next week' :). OK, except maybe Mars 
Attacks. The original Wells story suggests they manage to achieve a high

level of surprise and disruption - he pretty much describes the 
breakdown of society almost immediately the pods pop open. If we gained 
some level of warning I'd agree with you, that would give us many more 
options. But that still doesn't get around the point that we know now 
(and didn't then) that you can seal a vehicle against intrusion by 
chemical and biological agents. If we can do it with a Challenger, you'd

have to presume they could do it with a tripod.
In the end if we're talking about playing WotW as a game, bioweapons 
don't really work other than in the abstract - martian player has to 
achieve the objective inside X rounds or lose. Maybe have a malfunction 
table which gets nastier as time passes as the martians are affected. 
The problem is that, in game terms, having a device that says 'I win, 
game over' is no real fun.

> Same for nukes - you will note that most SF writers always use the 
> caveat that aliens will land in population centers and that's why most

> governments would be reluctant to use nukes.	Personally, if I didn't 
> know better, I would land in a spot that was devoid of high 
> concentrations of natives to test out their defenses.  Unless aliens 
> have a great amount of knowledge about us, how do they know that 
> microwaves from cell phones won't scramble their sensors/cause 
> cancer/bad headaches at short ranges?
There is a line in the Wells story about how the martians had been 
observing Earth for some time before launching their invasion. If we 
'update' Well's idea to the levels of science we now understand, that 
would have to include observations throughout the EM spectrum. Short 
range emissions would obviously be missed though, so maybe something a 
mobile phone could be this centuries microbe :). They certainly seem to 
have proliferated at a similar rate... An interesting game mechanism 
would be to force Tripods to keep a certain distance from groups of 
humans or suffer damage due to such emissions. Not as far as the heat 
ray range though.

>   I would not like to drop into the center of a hornet's nest until I 
> knew more. For all they know, every human is a proto-warrior ready to 
> convert to a blood thirsty killing machine at the slightest
provocation 
> (just think of the Hollywood movies being broadcast on TV and
Satellite 
> right now...) Thus I would tend to land a "Recon in Force" unit to
test 
> the defenses, and if it looked good then land the main invasion fleet.
 
> Landing blind is a bad idea.
Actually, if you were a sensible alien you'd throw rocks down the 
gravity well at all the centres of population & CCC but I guess we're 
discarding that possibility on the grounds it wouldn't make a very fun 
game.

> If aliens land in the middle of the New Mexico desert and started 
> rampaging, I don't think there would be as much issue about dropping a

> tac nuke on them, than if they landed in downtown LA.
Is there anything to trash in the New Mexico desert? It would be a good 
place to establish a base to gather intelligence prior to the invasion 
proper. But that's more Invaders from Mars than War of the Worlds. If we

want to 'play' WotW, I think you need to keep to the spirit of it in 
that the Tripods should only be stoppable by the application of a 
significant proportion of the firepower the human player has available, 

therefore requiring the human player to try to separate them to deal 
with them and marshall his forces correctly. In the end we shouldn't get

too bound up in hypothetical discussion about what they may or may not 
do if it doesn't get us closer to a game that people will enjoy.

									
	       TTFN
									
		       Jon
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