While I would certainly sign up for your plan to drop a few bombs on the ships I’m not sure they, cruise-missiles or anti-ship missiles would be that much more effective than air-to-air missiles, they certainly have (much!) larger warheads but they’re still not designed to take on something of that size.
In the scenario depicted they expected only a window of opportunity of a few minutes, when you’re fighting for the survival of the human race a little (or a lot of) collateral damage is acceptable. But there are nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles, we’ll split the difference and use those.
Personally I’d like to see an alien invasion movie where although humanity is overmatched technology wise its still able to put up a damn good fight. For example, apart from the shields, in ID4 the alien fighters weren’t much more advanced than human fighters, in fact with their line-of-sight green-laser thingies they were at a distinct disadvantage, modern fighters with beyond-visual-range missiles could pick them off without the aliens even seeing the human aircraft…that’s assuming you could lure them out for a fight in the first place.
I recall reading that there was a planned sequel for ID4 depicting a ground-invasion, that could have been potentially interesting.
Let’s see; “Stranger in a Strange Land;” “The Majipoor Chronicles;” “The Worlds of Null-A;” “The Dispossessed;” “Slan;” “Earth Abides;” just to name a few.
I guess it depends on one’s estimation of collateral damage. My thinking is (contrary to what Truthers assert) big structures collapse when stressed enough, and even though the hovering battleships were “15 miles in diameter” they have to be both mostly hollow (like any building) and filled with lots of energetic substances (fuel, lubricants, weaponry) that make good secondary explosions. In theory it requires a lot of effort to keep that much mass hovering and it’s plausible that it wouldn’t take TOO much damage to upset that equilibrium.
By contrast, employing nukes on these things hovering over every major city on earth is likely to make most of earth – the best parts – unlivable for humans for a long, long time. Hardly worth wining if you nuke everything.
Of course, any weapon that destroys those things is going to have huge collateral damage, just from 15 mile ships (or the fragments thereof) falling to the ground.
True, but if the aliens had any sense their ships would be built with compartmentalisation and multiple-redundancy like human aircraft-carriers so that damage to one part wouldn’t render the rest inoperable.
I think that basically I wouldn’t be willing to take the chance that the human counterattack would fail, I’d let history judge me…
As for rendering the areas where the nukes were used unihabitable for a long time people moved back into Nagasaki and Hiroshima pretty much as soon as the ground cooled off, it certainly wouldn’t be an action to take lightly but I don’t think the long term effects, local or global, would be that terrible, it would be fairly limited, depending on course on how many ships would have to be targeted…if I recall correctly there were about fifteen. Not fun for the area immediately surrounding the targets but not that tragic either given the alternative.
Exactly. This is what I mean by clumsy filmmaking, although I’m sure there is a better term for it. The president is a hero, so the story is contrived to allow him to do something heroic at that point. It’s distracting when I can see the cogs of the screenwriter’s mind grinding together. I don’t go looking for these things, but I’m far more likely to notice when I’m watching something I’m not enjoying.
Can’t comment on the other suggestions people have made as I haven’t read them, but I think that one could actually work as a film.
Nuclear fallout wouldn’t be a major problem if tactical nukes were used. However, IIRC, I saw an estimate that the energy released by a 15 mile wide space-ship falling a mile would itself be a multi-megaton explosion.
The Stars My Destination* would definitely work, in competant hands. I’ve filmed the openinh over and over in my head, and it’s a killer, compelling opening.
You should read the ones on my list; every one of them is a well-deserved classic. I think most of them would translate well to film, except maybe “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which I would really like someone to try even if it didn’t translate because it’s such an amazing story.
I first read it when it was titled Tiger! Tiger!, it was recommended to me by my English teacher when I was about 13. It’s now available in the UK under it’s original title, and that’s what I have on my shelf.
