Truly the worst tactical decision any xenos can make is give us a reason to stop fighting ourselves.

It's an error right up there with never engage in a land war in Asia or lesser known but more dangerous. Never play the other guys game.

I mean, it IS what we do. Think of the Greeks. The Japanese: they did nothing but kill each other for centuries but the moment a common enemy shows up they get buddy buddy real quick... then they went back to killing each other.

@@GrigoriZhukovand the “don’t touch the Americans boats”

It's like trying to fuck with the east Europe. Sure, they're constantly bickering, even fighting right now (whoops, there's the air raid siren) but give them a good enough reason and they *will* turn a foe inside out and into dust. Eventually. Probably.

Read it in Japan's voice from HLC. DON'T. TOUCH. THE BOATS.

@@lechatrelou6393YES! HLC as the US, “DOD what we got on this?” And ALL OF the general contractors rub their palms in anticipation.

​@@lechatrelou6393 mandatory fun day

I did too!

FALL BACK HERE COMES THE SUN!!!

The 56-Hit Nuclear Missile Combo Barrage! There is no kill like overkill.

Same 😂

"Here comes the sun..."

We also use our God given right to poke things with sticks, sharpened or not lol

we have some very spicy rocks

Aborigines were using spears and spear-throwers 40,000 years ago. Our hominid ancestors began using rocks as weapons well before 'modern' humans.

@@markstevenson5917 Lol, we are the most curious animals to ever evolve, no gods required.

parry this few minutes of sun on demand ya filthy casual

What's left to reverse engineer?

@@merlinathrawes746 Some scout ships might have survived mostly intact. We kinda need the tech to bring the fight to them.

Nuclear weapons don't entirely destroy everything unless it's within it's vaporization distance, which is nowhere near a kilometer even for a current MIRV warhead. Some portions of the ship, especially undersides should be intact. A 10km ship is humongous. But nobodys going near the things for two weeks without a main battle tank for obvious reasons ha

@@RiversJThis correct. Most of the damage a nuclear weapon does is from the shock wave generated by the detonation in atmosphere. Those 3 capital ships that landed were certainly wiped out. But the question now, how many MIRV warheads did each of the remaining capital ships in orbit take to their faces? That, as well as the strengh of alien materials would be a determining factor if there would be any left to reverse engineer. But those scout ships would certainly have to be captured.

@@merlinathrawes746 do note that the ones in orbit were "only" hit by powerful radiation and heated so apart from scorch marks and being irradiated they are pretty intact (though anything inside is likely dead or dying). heat sensitive stuff is likely also fried.

Eins, HIER KOMMT DIE SONNE Zwei, HIER KOMMT DIE SONNE sie ist der hellste Stern von allen, HIER KOMMT DIE SONNE

Humans: If we can nuke it, its not a god. Just a target.

@@Wastelandman7000 "if it bleeds we can kill it"

Umm... they missed the brief on humans and their gods. As in, every time a person shows up saying they are god, the other humans kill them.

From Star Trek DS9 Worf we killed our gods there were more trouble than they were worth.

​@@roberine7241Now why would we limit ourselves to only killing things that bleed? Be more diverse about your targets.

And then we went about uplifting dogs to sapience, because reasons

@@Netherdan Ironically we are already doing so in some places. Take the dogs with buttons that say words. We are already doing so.

​@@syncringe1885 It only starts to be a proper uplift if we keep breeding them to be smarter or smarter. Otherwise it only helps us communicate.

@@Elmithian Not really. Communication is how we determine half the damn time.

@@syncringe1885 Don't forget the Gorilla that used Sign language.

He was part of the squad they send to take down "primitives". The actual army is used to fighting higher classes.

Yeah just the fact they classed us as 4 instead of 3 right off the bat is enough mostly cause they only did looks and if they know about radation doesnt seem like they looked into radation scanner

It won't even be fun let alone fair

multi kilometer command ships... over half of his ship would survive... the meat onboard less so, since any radiation shielding failed the moment it fired. Without atmosphere to interact, there would not even be a serious em damage.

And even worst for the aliens for ones the American's are in agreement over politics

@@thobol10as an american, yes

​@@thobol10 worse for them, all the politicians would agree on increasing the defense budget 😂

Having friends from Down Under, I'm not sure #3 actually matters if they get mad enough... LOL

And the Canadians stopped saying sorry!

The aliens have to stupid and incompetent for most of these "Rah-rah, humanity!" stories to work, so they are. They typically ignore extremely basic things like learning anything at all about Earth before they attack, and rely completely on tactics that predate the Napoleonic Age. Gotta suspend disbelief to enjoy most amateur sci-fi.

Yea kind of a big oversight especially considering we have a vast oversupply of them pointed at eachother, the last thing you’d want is to give us something else to point our fireworks at

Said so in the story ... last time they checked Alexander was naming cities all over the middle-east

@@achimdemus-holzhaeuser1233 we had nukes before alexander lol . Just forgot our past after the previous nuke war.

@@lupaswolfshead9971 Right, I forgot about Sodom and Gomorrha

Real world story: A farmer asked the government if he could have some nuclear explosive for clearing tree stumps.

Those must have been some stubborn tree stumps lol

pretty sure a lot of people know about fogbank thanks to funny stories of its "re-discovery" on youtube. "we refined the process and removed the impurities with modern knowledge and tech. wait, what do you mean it doesn't work anymore?"

@@mrmors1344 it technically worked, however they lost an unexpected catalyst dropping the first step so the mole weight was off.

Actually..., now that you mention it.

The poor bastards

Like fighting the final boss at the beginning with nothing but your wimpy sword.

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Their entire classification system was idiotic. But yes, how much the planet can sustain should have been an important factor in their math, but they were their own planets numbers only.

@@sjmcc13 Yeah. Also, what kind of insane species reacts favorably to the proposition "kill over 99% of your population in exchange for tech?" Furthermore, such a shock to the system could easily lead to complete extinction due to collapse of every economy and infrastructural system ever, loss of any potential unique technology due to the bottleneck eliminating experts, collapse of adapted ecosystems and fallowing of farmland... And it's definitely a no-go in any democratic nation-state, because very few people would vote for a death lottery with less than 50% odds.

Overpopulated is a myth. We're just badly managed.

On the side of the rail slugs was written, "Take this"

@@Wastelandman7000 don't forget ÙwÚ written on another one

"From Earth, with Love." ⬆️⬆️➡️

@@lumberluc For Managed Democracy!

​@@Wastelandman7000 take this take this take this....take that, take that, take this *TAKE THAT, TAKE THIS*

Well the techically are disarmed its just like all the parts to make it armed are well stored

Disarm as in "Pulling the Core" or "Pulling the Fuel"?

About time that happened. We have over 20 other designs that have been waiting for approval of construction for decades.

And didn't even bother to do a proper evaluation of our military capabilities. Because we don't just have nukes. We have THOUSANDS of nukes. This is what we call hitting a death hornet's nest with a stick.

*spicy rocks

We literally hunted by throwing rocks at charging beasts for generations, some got good enough to crack the sound barrier with their rocks from slings :D

Absolute case of Did Not Do The Research on the part of those aliens. The moment throwing rocks was mentioned, the story of David and Goliath came to mind...

It's in the middle since its just the places we live that are everywhere else has room but no one cares for some reason

Indeed, it is not. I think just the US alone could feed the world, but they won't.. with proper management, we could go into the trillions.

Our problems arent overpopulation, our problems are our mismanagement of resources.

@@beingsneaky water resources are a larger problem.

​@@SLEPhotothe ISS manages so again it's willingmess

I love it when Sci fi writers get the physics right (or a close approximation to it). It's like OK, you have your warp engines and artificial gravity and what ever other bits of physics defying space magic going on. However outside of the space magic the rest of physics should still work the same as we have observed for thousands of years. Outside of the space magic, plain old Newton and Einstein still run the show. Or in this case a remarkably accurate description of a "salted" nuclear device (at least as for as I understand them). This was enjoyable enoght to not even nitpick about how much speed a vehicle would have when launched at something in orbit. As orbits can easily be beyond the range of any ICBM. A geosynchronous obit is more than twice the diameter of the Earth away. That would be way to far for a ballistic missile. One limit on the design of a ballistic missile is that they must never reach escape velocity. Should they do do they end their career as a ballistic missile and begin a new one as a very unfriendly space exploration vehicle. (This effectively limits the top speed of a reentry vehicle to a "mere" mach 25 or so. ) There is enough wiggle room with the orbits and how much they could tweak a rocket that the description of the warheads approaching orbital ships and extreme speeds can pass for real using existing missiles and what could be done in maybe a weeks time or so.

@@Snipergoat1 All fine and dandy for ICBMs bound for "earth based targets". Not so much for targets of higher orbital altitudes. The government is only telling us they "only" have ICBMs of that type of launch vehicle, but anyone with a proper mistrust of government would be better off knowing that they likely do posses launch capabilities that could hit the moon in hours or minutes. The government just isn't so inclined to tell the public they "do" have that capability. Heck, just putting a few of those MERV warheads into those "experimental" railguns to fire off into space may be feasible this day and age with advanced metallurgy and refined detonation hardware of the nukes to survive the launch. What the government keeps secret is almost always far more advanced than what they tell the public, or what the current sevicemen work with. They say "by 20 years" but I say that number of years can vary depending on the field of science and tech being looked at.

@@GrrDraxin1 well their ships were visible from earth so likely more low earth orbit. you could probably redesign a normal rocket to carry a few of these warheads

@@Snipergoat1 necessity is the mother of invention after all (or something like that) so I could imagine some engineers drinking enough coffee to kill a small elephant and designing something to deliver spicy rocks to ships in orbit. the description of the warhead was nice. makes for an epic scene compared to "nuke go boom ship gone" also you seem to be interested in hard sci fi. do you enjoy videogames?

Remember much of an ICBM is just the delivery system. Actual modern nukes are about the size of a football I think. And so can be installed on other kinds of missiles as needed.

That was the salted fusion device where a second fusion explosion is created in the byproducts of the previous detonations (and a few added ingredients). It was semi accidentally discovered by the US in the infamous Castle Bravo incident where it worked far better than expected. The minor boost had instead tripled the bomb's yield from a predicted and prepared for 5 MT to a totally unprepared for 15 MT. This is also the type of bomb that make up the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuke ever built at 50 Mega tons. With any nuclear device the main limit on it's destructive power is not the amount of reactive material carried but by how long it can react before it rips itself apart. With the energies involved there is no physical packaging that can slow that down in the slightest. The lithium salts were supposed to vaporize in such a way as to keep the detonation together for maybe another nanosecond or so. Instead this lithium plasma joined the fusion party. Thereby failing in the most awesome way possible

@@Snipergoat1 Wow. Succinct and informative. Thanks for the physics lesson.

A minor explosion, followed by an implosion, and then a violent explosion. Yeah, we accidentally found that technique and worked with it

​@lumberluc i wonder if thats how my soul became so....well, ya know....

Ol' boy didn't know about that kid called David...

I suggest it not be allowed to contact its home base....or continue existing.

there were several scout ships that were still on earth, so they could have tried to take over one of them after the nukes and maybe even before. another thing is that they blew up the front of the formation hoping to incarcerate the capital ship at the front and have a spread of less damaged ships farther from the explosion.

... we took pictures. Plus, there are a slew of Black Box projects that now have a reason to be shown

Well considering war was declared and its now known theres others out there yeah i give it 5 years at most

Also is mentioned in a different story, humans will sacrifice themselves in order to get tech to reverse engineer. ie go into irradiated leftover ships parts to find usable tech.

LONG LIVE THE KING!

Multiple independent re entry vehicles... What remained of the vessels were scrapped all over the ground. For an Empire that hadn't used nukes for millennia, they had absolutely no one to warn them.

No idea what that comes from. Probably better to go with the Futurama joke about "walking on sunshine"...

If you know anything about humans, you'll know we'll go one of two ways; 1. Xenocide 2. Liberators.

I think the simple fact that the entire fleet was lost would be scary enough for the council to mark Earth as a forbidden zone.

radiation would have made those ships untouchable anyway so might as well go with the safe option

We were too mad to bother with that BS.