The man knows his stuff, ladies and gentlemen!

Said point-defense weapons undoubtedly shipped in as any existing point defenses would have been taken out to prevent resistance to the takeover.

Exactly.

Look at panel 4, that Point Defense Gun has stabilizer legs splayed out, that's a 'mobile installation' if I ever saw one. I was designed to move in to position quickly and fire off a few shots before being packed up to ship to another location.

Sadly, their design was for a war where it took longer to pinpoint a PTG location than it does in the time of this story, as they are all reduced to smoking debris before they can relocate to their second firing location, as shown in panel 5.

In this case, the units are not so much mobile in the sense of evasive, as much as easily set up and remotely operated as they would not be expected to last very long to counter fire.

Ah, that would explain the lack of visible wheels/treads on the PDGs, as well as their small size relative to the gun barrel: they are, in essence, disposable 'drove' emplacements.

When dealing with an orbiting attacker, who would have taken out the local satellite network and deployed their own as part of the 'air superiority phase' of the attack, the PDG's would be located and targeted before their second shot, and even if they were om dreads, like mobile artillery, they most likely could not move far enough fast enough to avoid the total destruction zone of a mere Orbital Fired Kinetic Rod (AKA the 'Thor's hammer' or 'finger of God' weapon. Previous page, panel five).

Waste of lives.

You just described every war, in every location and every time.

A question about equines, why do they not have fingers?
how do they button their shirts, type on computers, and eat with utensils?

They do it all offscreen.

The magic of friendship

I really like this sequence in that it is a very un-Hollywood depiction of space combat. Spaceships flying in at hypersonic velocities while spaced out so far from one another that they are just specks. Orbital bombardments of enemy targets where the enemy can't even see who is killing them. No huge, dramatic ground assaults with intense gunfire reminiscent of World War II.

Agreed.

Also, I just thought about it, would it not be great to see an alien invasion movie made like this even if it shows just how screwed we would be if one came?

That would be very refreshing. No ominous spacecraft hovering over national landmarks, virtually no warning that anything was coming, no time to even react to anything. Just sudden inexplicable devastation on a global scale from on high, then the fleet descends upon the ruins.

It doesn't even have to be much devastation come to think of it.
First the satellites are eliminated with nothing even in sight. Next the big telescopes, followed by military bases and fleets taken out with pin-point accuracy.
Finally the power and communiation grids. That or they hack our systems from a secretly landed craft to shut them down.

And finally the landing ships with each soldier in a power armor that you would need an anti-tank weapon to take out. Which are in short supply by then. Or simply wait untill we are decimated enough because of our supply system comes to a stop.
It would depend on why the aliens came in the first place.

True, all it would take to wipe out the majority of our civilization is some well-placed EMPs to knock out our aging electrical grids.

Orbital bombardment is much easier to say than done.

First, a ship in orbit is a supremely predictable target, one that can be sighted in with pinpoint accuracy even using eighteenth century tools and knowledge -- and even if they waste fuel on constant maneuvers, one can predict them enough for an active seeker missile to reach them.

Two, the defenders on the surface have an actual time and dV advantage over orbital attacker; they can not only pick the least-energy or least-time intercept trajectory for any given (stable) orbit, they can pick essentially any starting point on the surface with only small penalty. At the same time, the attackers need to either waste massive amounts of energy in orbital plane changes at suboptimal points or suffer at least half-orbit delay for any attack.

Three, the atmosphere is a great shield: where defenders' missiles are at their slowest going up and therefore experiencing minimal thermal loads, the attackers need to build their projectiles extremely tough or they would burn up during reentry. This can be countered by either slowing the missile down -- therefore loosing it's main advantage, the kinetic energy -- or making the warhead much bigger and heavier -- and therefore exponentially more costly to transport.

All true up to a point.

Missles are nice, but for space combat railguns will do the trick. Big ones for planetary bombardment and small ones to shred any missle we can send up. Their range in space is unlimited and the accuracy a question of how good the sensor systems and targeting computers are. Depending on that, they could be in the orbit of Mars or even that of Pluto and hit earth. You don't need to be in earth orbit to bombard earth from space.

As for the athmosphere, you can calculate how much or your 'bullet' melts during entry and still have the impact you want by changing it's size. Yes, you need to change the size of the railgun as well. Something you do before even building it. You should know before if you want small impacts, destryoing a building or go for massive destruction before your attack anyway.

This is technology we have or soon will have. Someone with FTL capability will probably have even better stuff. So yes, we can't even defend against technology we have if someone puts it up there.

The only question is, what the goal is.
Aliens could shred our satellites without even being seen. Same goes for the big telescopes. If they do some recon, they can hit military bases and launch sites next. The closer to earth they get, the more accurate they'll get. I 'd guess, single military ships will be the last to go.
Of course, they could also just grab a few hundred asteroids and send them down, also long before we can do anything about them.

Railguns are definitely the way to go.

Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a great example of this, as the Lunar Rebellion uses the Cargo Railguns to launch the cargo containers, not into their planned 'flight paths' where the container's retro-rockets would safely bring the container to the designated collection point in the ocean, but into aggressive entry paths to strike at full speed. After they run out of cargo containers, they just bolt iron bars around Lunar boulders so the railguns can 'grab' and 'throw' them.

Rail guns are a bit over-hyped. They can only practically pump out so much velocity and the launcher has to deal with recoil. In the Albedo setting, they are limited to short range point defense weapons, spraying out a lot of small fairly fast projectiles. A launcher big enough to heave heavy bombardment objects (modest size missiles at very high velocities, or heavier objects at more moderate speeds) would need to have the ship built around it to deal with energies needed. In the scenario, ship's base velocity plus missile motor velocity is more than enough to provide plenty of terminal energy. Guided intercept weapons need very high impulse maneuvering more than base velocity to be useful.

Well railguns are a bit interesting, I have made a few table top or in my case truck bed railguns. People assume that you need a large projectile moving fast. While moving a large projectile at a high velocity will generate a decent amount of recoil, thats not where railguns shine. If you propel a 1/4inch projectile at hypervelocities (14x speed of sound or more) that will be more than enough to cause significant damage to anything however, when you are speaking PD Gauss coils are better at launching a stream of projectiles at medium velocities than railguns, For something trans atmospheric I would use neither I would instead use a delivery vehicle that can change velocities as needed ( course change) to continually and gradually build up velocities form about say behind the neighboring planet. once in range of a moon's orbit or so, deploy kinetic ablative Multiple Indipendant Reentry Vehicles for target destruction. Or conversely use a ship mounted attack and launch a large ablative mass from a 'dive path'.

You forget some details:

1) While ships 'in orbit' follow predictable paths, they are still up 'rather high,' and it takes time for ground-based attacks to reach them, during which time the ground-fired attack can be detected and countered.

2) This 'timing advantage' only applies if the attacker chooses to 'park' in orbit for the attack. A well-planned planetary assault will not waste time entering orbit until after the planet has been pacified, much like this page of the comic is showing: The main fleet is still out beyond lunar orbit and decelerating for orbit, while the landing craft, launched earlier, when the fleet was at a higher velocity, storm the planet by taking not predictable, stable orbital paths, but atmospheric entry paths that are as aggressive as the ships can handle. The defender's on the far side of the planet from the initial strikes have the advantage of half a day to seek shelter, but anything left on the surface to try and strike back will just be more targets for the continued 'creeping bombardment' of the orbital assault.

3) Weapons designed to strike ground targets from outside the atmosphere do not need warheads, their mass times the kinetic energy they have from being 'dropped from orbit' is more than enough energy to cause a impact explosion rivaling that of Nuclear weaponry.

No orbital bombardment here. The critical targets were taken out by hypervelocity impactors that had a few AU to run up velocity. Moreover, the impactors would not be in a single wave, but staggered out to provide coverage over the whole approach period. The only orbital action would be dealing with remaining short-range point defense or previously hidden weapons. But mostly it would be high ground tactical fire support with beam weapons. Finally, any ships would have intense terminal defense weapons against missile attack in general, especially effective against relatively low velocity ground launched units.

Why would any alien invasion, with the wherewithal to go interstellar, bother with fighting it out? First, why come here at all, and then how to best secure what it was that they came for? My scary alien invasion scenario would be to remake the biosphere into something more to their likeing, so they unleash nanites that eat EVERYTHING, then the fat nanites then become the sequestered raw material for terriforming the planet to their requirement. Most of the various Earth versus the aliens scenarios are little more than power fantasy showcases of how we plucky Earthers can thwart the evile alien invaders. Any more realistic situation would have the invaders take us over or wipe us out without having to fire a single shot in the normal sense.

Seems you really dislike the run-of-the-mill sci-fi stuff, taking into account how you depict technology in your works, especially here in Albedo.

Well, there is a sub-set of SF which is purely technical show-off, which has, thankfully, largely gone away nowadays ("tell me, Dr Gadget, how does that contraption work?") as well as some really creative "what if" stuff, but the bulk does tend to focus on something other than a well-considered technic infrastructure. I'd like to think I worked up a reasonable setting as well as good story.

*chuckles*
I agree completely with you and would go even a step further.
Why go through the trouble of terraforming, when you can build huge space habitats? Chances are you can build them before you get FTL capability. Something like Babylon 5 could be on the lower size scale for example (and yes, I remember that your VLCC's are just as long as B5).

Planets are bigger, more durable, can be more or less self-regulating, and have raw materials built in. Habitats are maintenance-intensive and have a high failure risk over time. I'd regard them as only semi-permanent, certainly no a truly permanent/final living solution. B5 is a lot bigger.

Really? I thought the VLCC's were 5 miles long, the same as B5. Oh well, time to dig Albedo out and read again.

Oh jeez no. More like 400 meters or so. If at any time I said otherwise, it would be a mistake, like the double-ended version. If it came from the later games series, I'd have to regard most of that as non-canon. They basically had a game notion and simply used the Albedo scenario as set dressing.

Noted

BTW, now you're talking about the RPG games, how much stuff about those games are canon in the Albedo universe? Or are an alternative universe with no relation with the canon story?

Paul Kidd's original and supplements are pretty much on, as he did it with my cooperation. The later stuff I didn't get involved with (partly in that I simply didn't, being a slovenly slacker) and they went off and did their own thing without much regard for the source material. I'd consider it almost a generic SF furry scenario. Again, I didn't give it the attention it could have used, but at the same time, it seemed that they had their own game setting in mind and increasingly it became "Albedo" in name only.

Then, I have to assume anything from the Refractions fanzine, except all the stuff written by you, especially anything related with the Creators written by other authors, aren't canon, right?

I'd have to take a look, in case someone guessed right, but likely not.

So war with the Chtorr, or Command and Conquer:Tiberium? Those are both scenarios that boil down to that - the Chtorr ecology, and the titual green rocks are basically that.

Although, with a bit of work, you could get a version of the classic alien invasion that basically boiled down to a big clanking replicator version of what you described - a small STL or rubbish FTL scenario where a seedship arrives, cranks out an army and then uses that force to coerce a technically inferior local population and tech base to do basically that. Doesn't require drexeler tech, and allows for use of in situ industrial resources - bootstrapping an existing base to your tech level is probably less of a bother than reconstituting one, particularly if you don't care about collateral. Also, there's scenerios where the ecology itself is a prize of some kind - makes something useful to them they can't get elsewhere (for a reasonable amount of work, anyway).

Fire in the sky . . .

Always loved the technical descriptions throughout the comic. Keep 'em coming, Steve!

Good stuff!

A Serious game of Hide and Seek