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I know this isnt specifically 40K related but I think it applies to just about any "invasion" scenario, be that 40K or not. The thing that has always bothered me is in just about any Sci Fi game or film is that the Aliens seem to make the same mistake over and over; they do not use EMPs. In allot of cases an EMP attack would not be appropriate, this is when you want to keep the planets infrastructure intact (eg imperial forces wanting to reclaim a lost planet would not use EMPs). However in the majority of cases in general Sci Fi (usually against a modern or close to modern earth) the Evil aliens do not seem to be at all interested in keeping the infrastructure intact (Independence Day, Battle LA ect) . There is only one setting I have seen Aliens use EMPs prior to attack and that is in the "War of the Worlds" and they were stupid enough not to wear hazmat suits and therefore died of our diseases. Just recently I have been looking forward to "Mass Effect 3" and it baffles me why the Reapers dont bombard earth with EMPs before they attack, it gets rid of the vast majority of resistance in one fell swoop. In short I simply cant see a foreseeable reason why an off-world invading army (with no interest in maintaining infrastructure) would not use EMPs, then proceed to mop up any remaining resistance. Can anyone give me a good reason or are Aliens in almost all sci fi just stupid?

Plot armor.

EMPs aren't that effective as one would think. Military equipment is shielded against EMP, the same goes with most of the more important civilian stuff (mostly comms and such). And dropping that many EMP on the planet to actually achieve something important would take up insanely big ammount of power and resources.

Perhaps the worst aliens in any movie ever made were the hilariously crap looking (and ineffective) skinny brown things from 'Signs'. I must have been in with a cynical crowd in the cinema, but the first appearance of them (with shaky camera footage, sounds of screaming women) caused a ripple of laughter from the audience.

- Travel light years across the galaxy, defeated by solid oak door.
- Lost in corn field
- Failed to kill a child that was KO'd in its arms.
- Have a massive vulnerability to a substance that covers two thirds of the earth's surface (water), yet take no precautions about it. As well as that, you would have to guess that plain moisture in the air would be harmful, aside from the fact that most evolutionary biologists theorise that water is one of the elements necessary for life to develop. So, the aliens fail on multiple levels, by their very existence.

AtoMaki wrote:EMPs aren't that effective as one would think. Military equipment is shielded against EMP, the same goes with most of the more important civilian stuff (mostly comms and such). And dropping that many EMP on the planet to actually achieve something important would take up insanely big ammount of power and resources.

I keep hearing about that...how is it possible to shield against an EMP attack?

CthuluIsSpy wrote:

AtoMaki wrote:EMPs aren't that effective as one would think. Military equipment is shielded against EMP, the same goes with most of the more important civilian stuff (mostly comms and such). And dropping that many EMP on the planet to actually achieve something important would take up insanely big ammount of power and resources.

I keep hearing about that...how is it possible to shield against an EMP attack?

Magic and Xenos tech-heresy.

CthuluIsSpy wrote:

AtoMaki wrote:EMPs aren't that effective as one would think. Military equipment is shielded against EMP, the same goes with most of the more important civilian stuff (mostly comms and such). And dropping that many EMP on the planet to actually achieve something important would take up insanely big ammount of power and resources.

I keep hearing about that...how is it possible to shield against an EMP attack?

route the energy away from the load of the circuit, probably through the use of a fractal antenna that discharges the extra electricity, although I am not positive.

Signs is a wonderful example of just how much M. Night Shamalama sucks at his job (I know! Lets invade a planet where a substance toxic to us is an abundant resource!) and just how good Mel Gibson is at his.

The greatest alien invasion is the one from Battle L.A. There were some really tricky situations that had to be figured out in that one, like discovering that aliens capable of traveling vast distances of space and invading a planet did in fact have air support. Or that aliens can magically teleport their giant control sphere underground without anyone noticing (or that they like so many other aliens foolishly make themselves that vulnerable). My personal favorite was that to kill them you have to aim just right of the heart, the center of mass, where a trained soldier should have been aiming anyway!

I think I pissed off everyone watching that movie. I couldn't stop laughing at how absurd so many of its plot points were.

AtoMaki wrote:EMPs aren't that effective as one would think. Military equipment is shielded against EMP, the same goes with most of the more important civilian stuff (mostly comms and such). And dropping that many EMP on the planet to actually achieve something important would take up insanely big ammount of power and resources.

Actually no, while true to an extent during the Cold War military and civilian equipment/infrastructure has become increasingly more vulnerable to EMP strikes during the past 2-3 decades.

I keep hearing about that...how is it possible to shield against an EMP attack?

There are several methods... one is to build a faraday cage around the object (basically a mesh enclosure) or specific components of the object. The cage acts as a conductor for any energy it absorbs, and this energy is usually dissipated by antenna or grounding.

Another method is not to use transistors... unfortunately that requires vacuum tubes (AFAIK) which nobody uses anymore. EMP is not voodoo, its a scientific phenomenon and as such there are other scientific phenomenon to counter it.

As for why sci fi aliens never do it, there are lots of potential reasons:
1. They haven't developed weaponized EMP.
2. They are unfamiliar with the concept of EMP (plausible but not probable)
3. Alien electronics operate on principles different to our own. Their tech is EMP resistant and as such they havent developed weaponized EMP due to its uselessness or they dont utilize it because they assume our tech is similarly resistant.
etc.

There's also technological superiority. Why bother disabling our ability to fight when our ability to fight is grossly inferior to their own? So we have depleted uranium shells. They have death lazors or biological weapons that can wipe out the human race. Why bother?

Coolyo294 wrote:Plot armor.

This.

LordofHats wrote:Signs is a wonderful example of just how much M. Night Shamalama sucks at his job (I know! Lets invade a planet where a substance toxic to us is an abundant resource!) and just how good Mel Gibson is at his.

The greatest alien invasion is the one from Battle L.A. There were some really tricky situations that had to be figured out in that one, like discovering that aliens capable of traveling vast distances of space and invading a planet did in fact have air support. Or that aliens can magically teleport their giant control sphere underground without anyone noticing (or that they like so many other aliens foolishly make themselves that vulnerable). My personal favorite was that to kill them you have to aim just right of the heart, the center of mass, where a trained soldier should have been aiming anyway!

I think I pissed off everyone watching that movie. I couldn't stop laughing at how absurd so many of its plot points were.

I thought this:

"Where do you hide a command and control centre when you don't want anybody to find it?"
"Um, in space?"

but no that would make things far too difficult.

Speaking of EMP’s has anyone ever read Harry Turtledoves Worldwar books? In those the Aliens detonate Nukes in the atmosphere before landing to create an EMP effect, unfortunately they invade in the 1940’s and are disappointed when they subsequently find out the vacuum tube based radios aren’t actually affected by EMP’s.

Mind you the Aliens make so many mistakes in those books it’s hard to know where to begin. The most principle lesson to learn is never launch an attack on a planet before carrying out some decent recon work. The Aliens base their invasion plan, and thus the composition of their invading armies based on data that’s about 1000 years old. Hence they turn up expecting to take on a medieval world and end up finding an industrial one at the height of militarization.

Quite frankly they deserved to have their asses kicked.

LuciusAR wrote:Speaking of EMP’s has anyone ever read Harry Turtledoves Worldwar books? In those the Aliens detonate Nukes in the atmosphere before landing to create an EMP effect, unfortunately they invade in the 1940’s and are disappointed when they subsequently find out the vacuum tube based radios aren’t actually affected by EMP’s.

Mind you the Aliens make so many mistakes in those books it’s hard to know where to begin. The most principle lesson to learn is never launch an attack on a planet before carrying out some decent recon work. The Aliens base their invasion plan, and thus the composition of their invading armies based on data that’s about 1000 years old. Hence they turn up expecting to take on a medieval world and end up finding an industrial one at the height of militarization.

Quite frankly they deserved to have their asses kicked.

If they were expecting a mideval world why did they set off EMP? I don't know Charles The Hammer had walkie talkies.

chaos0xomega wrote:

AtoMaki wrote:EMPs aren't that effective as one would think. Military equipment is shielded against EMP, the same goes with most of the more important civilian stuff (mostly comms and such). And dropping that many EMP on the planet to actually achieve something important would take up insanely big ammount of power and resources.

Actually no, while true to an extent during the Cold War military and civilian equipment/infrastructure has become increasingly more vulnerable to EMP strikes during the past 2-3 decades.

Well, what i learnt and saw while i served in the army is that military hardware (especially the newest 4th generation stuff) prety much immune to EMP. The older stuff is resistant because it was designed to survive a nuclear war, and the newer stuff is even more resistant because of the advanced materials used.

99.9% of cases they'd just use nukes. But that would be a boring-ass tabletop game, eh?

LuciusAR wrote:Speaking of EMP’s has anyone ever read Harry Turtledoves Worldwar books? In those the Aliens detonate Nukes in the atmosphere before landing to create an EMP effect, unfortunately they invade in the 1940’s and are disappointed when they subsequently find out the vacuum tube based radios aren’t actually affected by EMP’s.

Mind you the Aliens make so many mistakes in those books it’s hard to know where to begin. The most principle lesson to learn is never launch an attack on a planet before carrying out some decent recon work. The Aliens base their invasion plan, and thus the composition of their invading armies based on data that’s about 1000 years old. Hence they turn up expecting to take on a medieval world and end up finding an industrial one at the height of militarization.

Quite frankly they deserved to have their asses kicked.

This is the stupidity rule. If you cannot find a master plan to counter the menace and defeat them beyond the odds then either invent a superweapon of your own against which they have no defence or have them make stupid mistakes they would not actually make if they were as advanced as they written up to be. Independence Day is an example of the former, Battlefield Earth an example of the latter.

Its rare to see enemies with overwhelming force that have good reason to actually miss their critical weakspot. Sauron is the one to comes to mind most. His glaring weakness was excusable because he knew his ring, and the only thing he did not know was the nature of hobbits, which was excusable as only Gandalf had confidence in their potential enough to entrust such matter to them, backed up with a large side order of destiny.
The small thermal exhaust port on the Death Star doesnt count, it should have had a filter, or even a bend.

Orlanth wrote:

LuciusAR wrote:Speaking of EMP’s has anyone ever read Harry Turtledoves Worldwar books? In those the Aliens detonate Nukes in the atmosphere before landing to create an EMP effect, unfortunately they invade in the 1940’s and are disappointed when they subsequently find out the vacuum tube based radios aren’t actually affected by EMP’s.

Mind you the Aliens make so many mistakes in those books it’s hard to know where to begin. The most principle lesson to learn is never launch an attack on a planet before carrying out some decent recon work. The Aliens base their invasion plan, and thus the composition of their invading armies based on data that’s about 1000 years old. Hence they turn up expecting to take on a medieval world and end up finding an industrial one at the height of militarization.

Quite frankly they deserved to have their asses kicked.

This is the stupidity rule. If you cannot find a master plan to counter the menace and defeat them beyond the odds then either invent a superweapon of your own against which they have no defence or have them make stupid mistakes they would not actually make if they were as advanced as they written up to be. Independence Day is an example of the former, Battlefield Earth an example of the latter.

Its rare to see enemies with overwhelming force that have good reason to actually miss their critical weakspot. Sauron is the one to comes to mind most. His glaring weakness was excusable because he knew his ring, and the only thing he did not know was the nature of hobbits, which was excusable as only Gandalf had confidence in their potential enough to entrust such matter to them, backed up with a large side order of destiny.
The small thermal exhaust port on the Death Star doesnt count, it should have had a filter, or even a bend.

Well in Sauron's defense, hadn't he been looking for it?

Frazzled wrote:

Orlanth wrote:

LuciusAR wrote:Speaking of EMP’s has anyone ever read Harry Turtledoves Worldwar books? In those the Aliens detonate Nukes in the atmosphere before landing to create an EMP effect, unfortunately they invade in the 1940’s and are disappointed when they subsequently find out the vacuum tube based radios aren’t actually affected by EMP’s.

Mind you the Aliens make so many mistakes in those books it’s hard to know where to begin. The most principle lesson to learn is never launch an attack on a planet before carrying out some decent recon work. The Aliens base their invasion plan, and thus the composition of their invading armies based on data that’s about 1000 years old. Hence they turn up expecting to take on a medieval world and end up finding an industrial one at the height of militarization.

Quite frankly they deserved to have their asses kicked.

This is the stupidity rule. If you cannot find a master plan to counter the menace and defeat them beyond the odds then either invent a superweapon of your own against which they have no defence or have them make stupid mistakes they would not actually make if they were as advanced as they written up to be. Independence Day is an example of the former, Battlefield Earth an example of the latter.

Its rare to see enemies with overwhelming force that have good reason to actually miss their critical weakspot. Sauron is the one to comes to mind most. His glaring weakness was excusable because he knew his ring, and the only thing he did not know was the nature of hobbits, which was excusable as only Gandalf had confidence in their potential enough to entrust such matter to them, backed up with a large side order of destiny.
The small thermal exhaust port on the Death Star doesnt count, it should have had a filter, or even a bend.

Well in Sauron's defense, hadn't he been looking for it?

Sauron assumed the enemy would use the ring against him, which is a reasonable assumption to make-if Aragorn or Gandalf had weilded it they'd have crushed Sauron outright. The possibility of it being destroyed didn't even occur to him. Even so it's not like Mordor was badly guarded or anything. It's not like a single vulnerable point on a death star, say.

vodo40k wrote:I thought this:

"Where do you hide a command and control centre when you don't want anybody to find it?"
"Um, in space?"

but no that would make things far too difficult.

No no no. They tried that in Independence Day but then their ships had that huge design flaw that if you crash a jet in their butt they implode.

And of course, no one in the invading alien army thought "huh, you know maybe we should change our security codes so any ships that we sent to scout out this planet don't, oh I don't know, get captured by the humans and come back and blow us up?" I mean come on. Surely advanced aliens have serial numbers and someone in security could say "Hey isn't R857621B that ship that hasn't reported in for the past six decades? Maybe we should check that out..."

At least invent a secret knock

There's an even more pressing question. Assuming you don't want the planet's infrastructure intact, why the feth would you bother to invade or use EMP's before you've bombed the planet back into the stone age?
At which point EMPs are no longer necessary.

War of the worlds. Damn, are those aliens stupid.
In the Tom Cruise one they say how they buried them there to invade later. Um, The walkers are clearly biological. So why didnt they die to the bacteria that has always beeen on the planet. Or damn diidnt they, in any version of the story, send scouts to see if they could survive on the planet? Also why didnt they invade During the Cambrian Era? When earth was exploding with life.

Protip: In an alien invasion movie, the humans have to win.

No one wants to see a movie where the aliens bombard us with Upsilon Rays (or something) from their home planet a few light years away and we all die in our beds.

Battlefield Earth (the book, not that movie crap) is the best method for an alien invasion:

load up a near indestructible aircraft with lethal gas and have it kill off the population, and then mop up.

Regards,

Bran Dawri wrote:There's an even more pressing question. Assuming you don't want the planet's infrastructure intact, why the feth would you bother to invade or use EMP's before you've bombed the planet back into the stone age?
At which point EMPs are no longer necessary.

Because the aliens usually want to keep the planet habitable, but also want to kill of the indigenous population (they dont want the atmosphere to become irradiated and all non intelligent to die from nuking every city to glass).

Frazzled wrote:

If they were expecting a mideval world why did they set off EMP? I don't know Charles The Hammer had walkie talkies.

Well spotted! I should have elaborated on that.

It’s been a while since I read them but if I remember correctly the Aliens turn up in our system and pick up Radio signals. They do a bit of investigation and discover we are far more advanced then they have been led to believe. The decision to set off nukes in the atmosphere prior to landing was a bit of improvisation on their part.

I think the justification for their misjudgment was they the Aliens themselves had been very slow to evolve and thus considered a millennium to be a very short amount of time in terms of technological development. It was inconceivable for them that we would have advanced so much. The Aliens however are old school colonialists who actually want to keep the population alive and the infrastructure intact so they can assimilate us into their little empire. Hence the invasion by land and no death rays from the sky.

He also writes in lots of other problems for the Aliens. For example their 3 planet strong empire has had no internal conflict for several thousand years, so despite massive technological superiority the Aliens have no actual experience of fighting a war, only lots of written theory from the old days. So experienced Panzer units are actually able to inflict defeats on the Alien war machines because they fight predictably. Albeit taking lots of casualties to do so.

It’s really designed in order to create a narrative where an alien invasion can turn out to be a long and drawn out conflict as opposed to the one sides affair most fictional alien invasions are.

LordofHats wrote:

No no no. They tried that in Independence Day but then their ships had that huge design flaw that if you crash a jet in their butt they implode.

Indeed, what sort of species creates a super weapon that is so unstable that if it suffers any damage at all during the firing process, it results in a chain reaction that destroys the entire ship? That’s a pretty massive design flaw.

Not to mention the awful automated security procedures aboard the mothership. Given that all the other ‘fighters’ deployed from their respective destroyers didn’t anyone think it slightly odd for a lone one to approach the mothership? Especially considering that it was one that had been reported missing for quite some time and had a foreign object welded to its side? You would think an automated alert would have gone off somewhere!

The other question is why would aliens bother invading Earth? If they want water well it's floating around the fringes of the solar system in vast quantities, and while it might be frozen heating it up is a lot easier than landing on and taking off from a gravity well like Earth.

If they want other materials... well go to any other planet in the solar system. Plenty of gold, uranium or whatever minerals you want on each of those.

sebster wrote:The other question is why would aliens bother invading Earth? If they want water well it's floating around the fringes of the solar system in vast quantities, and while it might be frozen heating it up is a lot easier than landing on and taking off from a gravity well like Earth.

If they want other materials... well go to any other planet in the solar system. Plenty of gold, uranium or whatever minerals you want on each of those.

Not to mention the trillions of tons of ore floating around in the asteroid belt. Who needs to land on a planet when you can just harvest minerals from space like the doomsday machine.

vodo40k wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:There's an even more pressing question. Assuming you don't want the planet's infrastructure intact, why the feth would you bother to invade or use EMP's before you've bombed the planet back into the stone age?
At which point EMPs are no longer necessary.

Because the aliens usually want to keep the planet habitable, but also want to kill of the indigenous population (they dont want the atmosphere to become irradiated and all non intelligent to die from nuking every city to glass).

Throw rocks instead of nukes - Lots of kinetic energy translated into heat and light, but no hard radiation. Planet might be a bit dusty and cratered afterwards, but you won't die of radiation poisoning.

Doctadeth wrote:Not to mention the trillions of tons of ore floating around in the asteroid belt. Who needs to land on a planet when you can just harvest minerals from space like the doomsday machine.

Yeah, really the only reason to come to Earth is for us, or for the wealth of organic life in general. Fortunately, though, once we head down that route it kind of solves the 'why don't the aliens just wipe us all out before landing?' question, as they'd want to harvest as many creatures as they can, and that means not killing us all with superweapons from space.