The invasion is going well- not perfectly, as humanity isn't willing to go into slavery without a fight- but the odds remain firmly in the invaders' favor.
After all, to any star-spanning race, humans are just natives. No space fleets, no lasers, no antigravity, nothing. They might as well fight with bows and arrows.
And then the aliens find out that humanity does have one ally- the ponies.
The silly, fluffy, obsessed-with-friendship, and above all pacifist ponies.
The aliens are laughing.
The aliens haven't faced the ponies in combat yet.
A random snippet unrelated to anything else, written to get it out of my head so I could move on to other stuff.
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Chapters (1)
Expeditionary Horse?
OK, this needs to be a series of short stories.
Ah, bad luck, they got the competent ponies. It's a two-sided problem, the kinetics would have wrecked the shields, as they're designed to do, but they were also attracting lightning discharges. The lasers were evidently sufficiently insulated, but were never going to penetrate those barriers. Very difficult. As you say, heavy artillery would have done the trick, specifically shells, not missiles.
Frankly, at this point I'd pull my forces and start throwing KEWs from out of orbit until the battleground settled down again, but then I'm not much a fan of this kind of wasteful nonsense anyway.
I would be lacking as a writer if I did not link The Road Not Taken by Turtledove here.
Not what I expeted when I read the short description, but it turn out very well either way.
I think you are right, about the logistics being the main problem, in case of an invasion. You have just to watch back to the second world war, when Germany invaded Russia. Way to long suplie lines at the end + all the trouble with partisans should have made clear from the beginning, that it can only end in a disaster.
Using humans as slaves? The aliens must be pretty dumb if they think meatsacks are gonna be good at productivity.
Like seriously, if they have the technological capabilities to cross interstellar distances, then automation on their side must be at least decent enough for them to not rely on organics.
It's not one hundred percent certainly, but likelihood should be pretty close.
This story's prose is good, but looking from realistic point of view the alien's motivations are pretty hard to believe. Slavery is really inefficient.
You know you're in for something good when the first few words introduce you to someone whose title is literally "Cat Herder."
The Mwew: We're not the Kzinti, honest!
Okay, to be fair, they do seem more disciplined than Niven's cat-men.
derpicdn.net/img/2013/9/22/432550/medium.jpg
Yeah, that was a speech worth setting the scene for. Magnificent stuff. Equestria is a pastel-colored deathworld, after all, and equine civilization does manage to hold on even when the protagonists are otherwise occupied. Thank you for a wonderful little read.
Is it bad I love the story already?
Especially if the Changelings would rush to help them...
Great story!
I enjoyed reading it.
Also, lots of interesting background in the Author's Notes, which makes it clear you really thought things through.
For those that liked this, check out Knight Breeze's Humanity Within trilogy, starting with What I've Become. By the end, we've got a combined strike force of ponies and humans boarding alien ships. Pretty cool.
10241755
Thanks for the tip, I will certainly look into it, when I have a bit more time.
Clearly your protagonists never read This Page. If they had, they would have chosen different tactics or even a different target planet. Humans make lousy slaves. A famous WWII-Era Japanese flag officer once noted that The USA makes for an extremely expensive invasion target.
AN excellent story.
Anything that is an exception to the rule isn't silly to you understand it. Something is causing that exception to the star's gravity pulls the planets into orbits around it
stop. think about that again. a STAR revolves around the planet because someone on that world wants it to. do you really want to go up against a civilization that can treat its local celestial objects like pinballs? getting your invasion fleet smacked by a moon or star is kind of a dumb way to die.
On the bright side, they could have been singing.
Luckily they left them some dignity.
I love stories where a person or people are seen as weak by their enemies but surprisingly turned out to be otherwise. This tale is a great example, and if this was simply a casual effort on your part, I should probably start reading the rest of your work.
10241800 At least you won't have deal with the shame of it. Of course someone or multiple someones will write it off as pilot error
Ah yes, the eternal battle of logistics and practicality vs. Rule of Cool. Any civilization capable of mass interstellar travel has no need for fleshy slaves, and space is so huge that there could be hundreds of advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy, yet because of the vast distance, they would not even know that we developed radio technology. But we want entertaining space stories, so we suspend our disbelief for the sake of our amusement.
That said, I have a special fondness for authors, like yourself, who can write an entertaining space story, while at the same time using the acceptable breaks from reality to educate the reader. Sci-fi writers, as a rule, have no concept of scale, and you are the delightful exception. Thanks for the fun story.
Equestria seems to like the "hammer them until they become our friends" trope. And I'm not objecting.
10241736
"Equestria is a pastel-colored deathworld." Blunt and accurate.
What people seem to forget is that underneath the comedy, the ponies are basically semi-godlike super beings.
Rarity has hauled around literal tons while Twilight has taken an anvil to the skull and just shrugged it off. The Wonderbolts can fly a mach speeds in what amounts to spandex without shredding their wings and Rainbow Dash alone can create city destroying natural disasters if she has a bit of time, while some of the earth ponies have enough force behind their movements to turn people into paste with an accidental touch.
And then of course, there's Luna, who can move the moon around at what has to be several hundred thousands of miles an hour (if not millions) to just swat an invasion fleet that comes into her space, or completely flood the Earth in a matter of seconds using the moons gravity if in a ground war (and that's not even getting into what she could do to the magnetic poles or atmosphere with the moon).
10241804 The musical number was got out of the way before the attack went in. Sensibly.
10241816 Every once in a while I have moments when my compulsion to write, which is usually a chore and frequently painful, becomes an effortless flow. This is one of those times (once I got the invaders established- that was a chore).
10241707
You know, this could almost be a future set in your Farmer Bruener storyline (if these cats were dimensional invaders rather than galactic).
10241823 True, no need for slaves- and if they needed slaves, snatch-and-run raids would be cheaper and more effective than trying to nail down an entire planet at one go.
But human history shows that one hell of a lot of wars are less about "I need" and more about "I wanna".
10241865
I can concede on the fact that ponies are far more superior to humans physically ( Big Mac regularly hauls large volumes of apples) but.......
- Where are you getting that RD can create city leveling natural disasters?
- Wonderbolts can't fly at mach speeds, only RD again ( and that's using Sonic Rainboom)
- Luna's moon moving is honestly non-combat applicable, considering the fact we only see her move its orbit and even if she can do all the aforementioned stuff you've listed above, this claim is built on the assumption that she can somehow move our own moon ( considering the aliens are invading our world), which is honestly kinda stretching it.
Even if the ponies do superior physical stats, infantry battles honestly doesn't really matter when the enemies can just simply bombard you from orbit.
A spacefaring species that regards organic slaves are worth using.
A spacefaring species that regards manually controlling the orbits of you system as a sign of weakness.
A spacefaring species that regards a reluctance to kill as pacifism.
This is a story about blithering idiots being blithering idiots.
It isn’t a ‘bad’ story in the sense that there aren’t any significant problem with it. It just feels so shallow and banal as to have been a waste of time.
10241957 I plead two defenses: first, the need to give a frame for the badass speech at the end; and second, there are too many examples of human conquerors (successful or otherwise) being EXACTLY THIS STUPID.
If they can do that then they've broken physics as we know it and may as well be using magic (Discord levels or higher) for all we'll be able to do anything to stop them.
Reminds me of a book series I read once. First book was written in the 80's and was about humanity creating a invasion fleet to attack another world. It made a big deal about the troops having to be kids trained up to combat readiness from age 12 and deploying at age 18 and the logistics train being literally launched a year after the initial invasion force with all the extra supplies they would need to fight a ground war. Every piece of equipment and troop needed to be accounted for. Because how precious they were as they couldnt be replaced. Written with the Cold War and Vietnam in mind as well so the weapons and tactics were less sci-fi and based on those weapons and gear. This reminded me of that a bit.
10241899
Well, we've seen Rainbow Dash casually break the sound barrier even without a sonic rainboom:
And we know there are other ponies who can match her, such as Lightning Dust, and unless she is so far above the other Wonderbolts it's not even funny, it stands to reason they would be around her level as well.
Incidentally, if we assume Equestria's atmospheric conditions are roughly the same as ours, Rainbow Dash just went from zero to 343 meters per second in under said second. Let that gut punch to physics sink in for a moment.
I... Uh, I liked this. Made me grin.
Nice one!
~Skeeter The Lurker
Im waiting to see if a certain Master Gunnery Seargant Major Hearthwarming Rose ever manages to make it to the field.
Welcome to Equestria. Its like Australia, but deadlier.
Thats why ponies make freinds quickly. They have to. The naive dont live long enough to take time.
10242291
That scene feels like an outlier, considering when she competes against Lighting as shown here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5HtQZtcbgA
Or flying with the other Wonderbolts as shown here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Q2G8Gh0-M
Timestamp at 2:45.
She doesn't even remotely approach what she has shown in your video.
Or maybe RD holds back purposely? Who knows?
Her speed is pretty inconsistent throughout the series's entirety and I'm inclined to believe that it's whatever the plot demands it at this point.
10241707
Not to forget Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It’s one of the earliest examples I know of using a redirected asteroid as a KEW.
10241707
I'm reminded more of his Worldwar series, beginning with In The Balance.
10241823
This, in a nutshell, is one of the key differences between an author of sci-fi and an author of science fiction.
someone who thinks about the logistics of interstellar war thank you
the short version is all dependent on ftl
no ftl no interstellar war is possible it's just not
"slow" ftl c to 5c it's "possible" but massively unlikely to be worth it with multi-year deployments to reach an engagement its more reasonable to think of it as a colonization effort with guns.
"fast" ftl ~300c now you can have an interstellar war. you should not for lots of other reasons but finally travel is not one of them.
Magic, it gets the job done.
10242465 Niven and Pournelle had wonderful senses of grand scale. When you make Ringworld, an artificial world with a habitable surface of approx. 3 million times the earth, whose defense is to make the sun it is orbiting into a giant solar-pumped laser...
10242510
Actually, if you're going the genocide route, you don't need FLT. One large rock with some ability to adjust it's course and moving at 99% the speed of light and you're good.
10242390
Yeah, if I was that cat-person in, say, the Star Trek universe and heard about the Pony planet which has a sun going around it my immediate thought would be "Oh Great Garfield in heaven. They've got a Q on that planet, don't they? Or an Organian. Or maybe a Douwd."
10242574
i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/022/506/manofculture.jpg
Good stuff, but MLP's cartoon basis kinda ruined the story from the start. Even if you ignore the most OP aspects of MLP (ie. moving the sun and moon), the logistical advantage of being able to instantly convert 1/3rd of your population into aerial cargo and troop transports alone would rewrite all terrestrial military strategy and tactics. Hell theres even an episode about this: In Hurricane Fluttershy, the pegasi create an artificial tornado to transport water. Thats a nice tank, is it waterfall proof?
10242574
Could be worse.
Could be Leutenant Berkley.
10242554 Only if your interests in the world in question are strictly limited to mining the asteroid belt remaining after impact.
10241957 My favorite example of real-life idiotic underestimation of the enemy:
"Why do you duck, gentlemen? Why, those rebels couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-"
--- last words of Maj. Gen. John Sedgewick, USA, May 9, 1864
10242554
it would work I would not call i war however
10242611 War is whatever makes the enemy stop shooting back.
So many Vulcans in this thread. By which I mean, so many people who think that logic would decide whether a species would go to war. Or go interstellar raiding.
10242614
so peace is war