Err, on second thought, this should probably actually be in MPSIMS.
So, let’s say an army, which could easily decimate a 1898-era army arrives on modern earth and attacks a modern-day military. This mysterious army is composed of mostly long-range siege units which use a mixture of chemical weapons and a superheated “ray” of heat…
This ray of heat is extremely destructive, and can turn a wooden mansion into torched charcoal in seconds. When they fought the 1898’s army, they lost 4 men out of 60 men total. Each “man” is actually an armoured unit which is about 30 meters tall, and can fire it’s ray up to 1 kilometer away, any further and it becomes significantly less powerful.
I was meaning to just outright say the Martian Tripods from the original H.G. Wells novel, but wanted to be more subtle and creative. I was wondering how well the tripods would fare against modern earth.
Unless you want to equip your invaders with some sort of shielding its going to be a very lopsided fight.
I wouldn’t even start to guess how many Stinger missiles we have in our inventory. I’d also be willing to bet that even the 50cal Barrett rifles in civilian hands would do real damage against joints and other soft points of the walkers.
If 1 km is the range of their heat ray, they might have a bit of a problem with attacking aircraft, even if they have aircraft of their own.
The Martians of Wells’ work weren’t invulnerable, even to conventional forces of the time—at least two Tripods are killed with shellfire, in two different engagements (with a third temporarily disabled), and another killed via ramming. And there’s been over a hundred years of improvements in weaponry—and, perhaps more importantly, communications and sensors—since then.
Honestly, I actually kind of wonder if the 1953 Martians did better than they should have, given the human state of the art, especially since the Martians tended to keep to fixed, predictable paths “like scythes.” Emplacing mines—especially atomic ones—in their paths to detonate within the Martians’ shield bubble might have been a viable tactic.
Or, especially since the shields didn’t appear to be airtight, even to a casual observer, using chemical or biological agents against them might have been effective. And of course, in fact, the latter was.
Steam ram Thunder Child mangled one of those bastards back in 1898. I think modern tanks and attack aircraft would go through the book version Martians like a hot knife through butter. Operation Desert Storm level walkover, except for the walking part. I mean the Martians will be walking but we’ll walk over them despite not walking.
Wells’ Martians were actually a pretty close match for what would become WWII technology. And we are now further beyond WWII than WWII was beyond Wells.
snfaulkner, we’re talking about real-world tech here. Don’t go bringing in fictional superheroes like Teddy.
I came in here to say that, much of the initial effectiveness of the Martian invaders was basically ‘shock and awe’ and the human defence only really fell apart when the ‘black smoke’ was used against them, flash-forward a couple of decades and First World War era gas-masks could quite possible have helped mitigate even that tactic.
I read War of the Worlds fairly recently and I was surprised at how modern in feel and how readable it is even today, it really is a classic book for a reason.
And on a side-note I kind of raise an eyebrow when people say that it was really about colonialism as if that is some kind of revelation, it makes me suspect they’ve never actually read the book because HG Wells outright states that in the introduction.
I think we are selling the 1898 Martians a little short.
The military of today would still probably win but these Martians would change their tactics somewhat especially after they lost some ships.
One of the things in the original book and the 1953 movie, is that the Martians were quite bold in that their ships just stood there and let the humans give their best shot at them and then they just continued to move destroying everything in its path. This involves panic and a lot of the book is describing the panic caused by these "unstoppable " Martians.
You presume that our putative Martians are mentally flexible. You can be quite brilliant, and still have an inability to rapidly or readily adapt. Social structures, mental flexibility, logistics chain… Many things could straight-jacket your martians.
I suppose the Martians would have another 120 years of weapons development under their belts and still suffer few casualties. They might have even figured out what microbes are.
