Re: [GZG] Invading Mars (was FTverse colinies)

I see your point about relativistic kill vehicles. It's actually
similar to the point John made:

> Personally, if I were an invading species with no moral or ethical
> objection to exterminating my competitor species en masse, a colony
> with domed cities would have a non-persistent neurotoxin dumped into
> the air processing system to forestall guerilla warfare, for those
> installations I felt I needed to take intact and not just drop a Mach
> 20 crowbar on it from orbit, cracking the shell and turning all the
> inhabitants inside out.
>
> Guerilla war only matters if your opponent has a reason to keep the
> civilian populace alive and sufficient incentive in the form of
> domestic political pressure to actually bother differentiating between
> guerillas and noncombatants.	Otherwise, it's Central Asian Muslims
> vs. Ghengis Khan, and that did NOT work out well for the Muslims.
> Personally, I don't think it will work a damn on aliens because they
> simply don't have an objection to eradicating entire populations of
> humans if it's more convenient that way.

I think that in this case there are a couple ways to resolve this.

First, you could put people into habitats throughout a solar system.
This solution doesn't help the folks at home, but it does leave plenty
of survivors to avenge the loss of earth. Individual habitats may be
fragile, but thousands of habitats spread throughout a system are hard
to completely clear away. See Bruce Sterling's _Schismatrix_ for an
example of how a society like this might work. In other words, make
Earth expendable. That works in a FT context, but doesn't help people
who are trying to fight SG or DS battles.

Second, we could simply decide that the Kra'Vak strategic objective is
NOT annihilation, but something else. Hopefully their real objective
would be something interesting and hard to fathom that would be unique
to them, rather than something like conquest or subjugation. As I said
earlier, I believe that the fact that the Kra'Vak are bothering to
stage ground invasions of colonies is a strong indicator that
annihilation is not their goal. (Of course, that only protects
humanity and the storyline against THIS threat; but if humanity fends
off the Kra'Vak they'll have some serious thinking to do about Solar
System defenses anyway.

Third, you could abandon the Tuffley Drive and replace it with
something like the Alderson drive that makes RKV's less feasible--
something I do NOT favor. Something else from the CoDominium universe
would help, too: the Langston Field absorbs energy proportional to the
cube of its intensity. An RKV is so high-energy that it might overload
a field, but the field would have a fighting chance. Not relevant to
the Tuffleyverse, but if you play in another universe or are writing
your own it's worth thinking about.

Personally I favor option 2, with some of option 1. There are already
hints that the Kra'Vak are NOT trying to annihilate humanity, Earth
should NOT be expendable unless you have a good story reason to
eliminate it, and humans are almost certainly spread over thousands or
tens of thousands of habitats on various moons and asteroid belts.

Of course, what the Kra'Vak actually want may never be clear: with
human control of the Solar System being peeled away over a period of
months or years and Earth tightly under siege, it is likely that the
Phalons would see little profit in intervening. On the other hand, the
Sa'Vasku would face a now-or-never decision: throw their considerable
power behind humanity or abandon it completely? If the Sa'Vasku and
the remnants of the human fleet (rebuilt during the Siege of Sol by
outworld colonies) are able to defeat the Kra'Vak, we may never know
what they were trying to accomplish.

-- 
Robert Mayberry

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