First Contact with the Kanga

Somtaaw wrote:A thought on bombing the Kanga's back to the stone age (and then satellites to watch over that colony) concept has been tried with one of Weber's co-authors for other series.

Ringo and his pos-verse, the Posleen (Or Pos'oslenar something or another like that) were confined to a single planet by their mysterious god/creators as a crime, and then had to "invent" a totally different hyperspace method than their god/creators knew about to escape.

I don't see how that could work if you kept them, say, at a pre-steam level.

A species that has spent literally thousands of years, thinking "The only good alien, is a dead one", it'd be like trying to change one of the movie Predators, that taking trophies and hunting sentients is wrong.... it just isn't going to happen

Well, if all else fails, you could capture and raise some eggs/babies/whatever they have - even if the culture is completely unsalvageable, the species could be saved.

(Unless they've genetically re-designed themselves to be pure killers, but I don't think the Kangas did that, from Ludmilla's description. I think they're only ideologically hostile to other species, not "all rage all the time".)

Good old thread re hab and thank you. I was suprised "the powers that be" just up and let Milla walk. Never under estimate the evilness of even good governments.

Yep ... somebody will pull up Milla's escape pod. That is a given. Yep ... our radio frequency signals have already left Earth. Opps. How great will be all of our world's co operation?

I for one see the new tech creating all sorts of problems with the "haves" and the "have nots". I do not see that much co operation between our nations with this new stuff at first.

So, friction here on Earth to start with. Maybe a few small wars. Then finally some effort to build a battle fleet of our own. It is human nature to do so. Then what will happen?

Dunno. I think the next books will do a great job of describing what happens when unexpected tech is released into the world. Both good and bad. Perhaps two separate story lines at once?

I love this Forum. HB of CJ (old coot)

The USN knows where they had a fleet when the last fight went down, but Milla's fighter, let alone her pod, splashed down "over the horizon". So the USN has about as good a guess as they did when we initially started looking for the Titanic. Slightly better because they didn't have any GPS in those days, but still just as large an area to cover. By the time they found it, odds are good the Kanga's would have arrived, either the first wave or the secondary war fleet.

Also, the fighter almost definitely has some form of RADAR absorbing, or deflecting paint, recall that nobody had any idea they were coming until the missiles started flying. And I believe SONAR works on exactly the same principals as RADAR does, so it would take extremely high detailed mapping of the bottom to find the fighter. Further reinforces the "not worth it" when they already have the Kanga fighter+tech, and know two Kanga fleets are coming soon™

Nobody except Richard has a good clue where the pod went down, and while we have no evidence he didn't hand that location over, we also have no evidence he did. He also didn't witness the actual touchdown of the fighter and pod, the pod floated, but the fighter is heavy and immediately went under. Perhaps heavy/massive enough it didn't get moved by currents too much, but the pod may have moved considerably after going under.

Milla may want to give her co-pilot a proper military burial, and maybe salvage more advanced tech, like the flightsuit, energy gun, more ammo cubes (she's only got what she had leftover, and she did burn upwards of 3 cubes just showing it off, and then dealing with the chassis... think she only had 5 or 6 to begin with). Milla knows how the tech was programmed, so she could rig up an interface, and make the connection between Richard and the co-pilots gun so he can fire it. And both having suits could be useful later, if the government tried to chase them down.

cralkhi wrote:I wonder if they might not be able to change things if they met the first Kanga scout with utterly overwhelming force and clearly superior technology? That Troll is end-of-the-war Kanga technology, and it seems like that war led to a lot of tech advancement.

Maybe they'd be able to "scare" them (or at least some of them) out of their mindset, so they wouldn't have to wipe out the species.

Although it really wouldn't be that hard to avoid wiping out the species and still make them 'not a threat'... just drop a colony on an undeveloped planet with only low-tech equipment and put sensors in orbit that would tell you if they ever developed technology that could get them into space.

(I don't know why they didn't do that with the Rigelians in the Starfire verse...)

Actually, they did. In Crusade, all the references are to genocide, but at the beginning of Shiva Option Sommers thinks

Nothing in history had prepared the human race—even that minority capable of learning from history—for the horror that had begun when a survey mission had stumbled onto the Arachnids. Nothing… not even the Rigelians, who’d been like a ghastly caricature—or, perhaps, surrealist painting—of the worst religious and ideological fanatics of Old Terra’s past. (And presumably still were, on the few planets where they now existed, closely watched by orbital stations under standing orders to obliterate anything more advanced than a steam engine or a black powder muzzleloader.) The Bugs were something else altogether. And after three and a half years of war, no one was any closer to fathoming what that something else was than they’d been in 2360.

So apparently it wasn't quite genocide, though it might have been destroying their culture.

Since it appears a sequel is in the works, I'd like to see the new first contact. I don't think the war would be terribly interesting, since humans should have an overwhelming tech advantage, but the interactions might be. One of the best parts of the Starfire books was the human-alien interactions, and we've seen little of that from Weber since. In AT the Kanga are treated just as one-dimensional as the Bugs or Gbaba, and it'd be nice to have something else. The Dahak books touched on that a little by making the Acchultani something other than faceless monsters, and I'd like to see that again.

Somtaaw wrote:The USN knows where they had a fleet when the last fight went down, but Milla's fighter, let alone her pod, splashed down "over the horizon". So the USN has about as good a guess as they did when we initially started looking for the Titanic. Slightly better because they didn't have any GPS in those days, but still just as large an area to cover. By the time they found it, odds are good the Kanga's would have arrived, either the first wave or the secondary war fleet.

The problem is Milla's fighter isn't down there--it self-destructed. All that's down there is the capsule.

Also, the fighter almost definitely has some form of RADAR absorbing, or deflecting paint, recall that nobody had any idea they were coming until the missiles started flying. And I believe SONAR works on exactly the same principals as RADAR does, so it would take extremely high detailed mapping of the bottom to find the fighter. Further reinforces the "not worth it" when they already have the Kanga fighter+tech, and know two Kanga fleets are coming soon™

There's no reason for a space fighter to be stealthed against sonar and it was shot up--any stealthing would be damaged anyway. If it was down there we could find it.

Milla may want to give her co-pilot a proper military burial, and maybe salvage more advanced tech, like the flightsuit, energy gun, more ammo cubes (she's only got what she had leftover, and she did burn upwards of 3 cubes just showing it off, and then dealing with the chassis... think she only had 5 or 6 to begin with). Milla knows how the tech was programmed, so she could rig up an interface, and make the connection between Richard and the co-pilots gun so he can fire it. And both having suits could be useful later, if the government tried to chase them down.

Once again, you're forgetting how things work. Milla can't program the gun for Richard. Once they're programmed that's it, there's no reprogramming. Probably the only things worth having are the flight suit and ammunition.

I do not think they would be useful anyway--the guns are too powerful, firing one is dramatic enough that they just blew their cover.

taylorandrian wrote:As a result of this faster technological development, the Kangas detect humanity sooner in the new timeline than they did in the original timeline.

Maybe, maybe not. If they do, humanity would be better prepared, and it was already well-prepared in the original timeline.

But one thing we've found out is that we're now making less noise in the EM spectrum than we did a quarter century ago, because we've shifted from high-power broadcasts to low-power point-to-point, or even transmissions inside a medium (like fibre optics). We're less detectable now than we used to be and this trend will continue for some time.

It'll reverse again once we start making enough impact in the Solar System as a whole, in particular once we start englobing the Sun with energy collectors to power our system economy and instead start putting out far more infrared waste emissions. But that's many centuries from now. I get the impression that such a massively-colonised and industrialised system would be able to outproduce the Kangas easily.

Then again, given we should know which direction the Kangas come from, it would be relatively easy to keep emissions there dark for a very long time (maybe thousands of years), until it becomes impossible due to the number of objects occluding the Sun.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Then again, given we should know which direction the Kangas come from, it would be relatively easy to keep emissions there dark for a very long time (maybe thousands of years), until it becomes impossible due to the number of objects occluding the Sun.

Disagree--we aren't trying to hide from the Kanga homeworld, but rather from Kanga scouts. It's not just one vector that needs to be shielded.

However, the fighter has the FTL drive, Earth will develop it. The pre-contact Kangas aren't going to stand a chance against a ship dropping a RKEW.