Goblin Storm Rising

Buckethead Buckethead

What would happen if we were faced with an alien menace immune to bullets?  Or at least, largely immune to bullets?  How would the tactics of our beloved armed forces have to change?

Today, the Amazon fairy brought the lastest of Charles Stross' Laundry books, The Fuller Memorandum.  For those who haven't, the previous two installments - Atrocity Archives and the Jennifer Morgue - are great fun, a hash-up of the great spy novels and Lovecraftian horror.  And the protagonist is a UNIX guru.

It occurred to me that another fun match up would be Tom Clancy and Lovecraftian Horror.  There was a movie that came out a couple years back, involved dragons going up against modern technology - duels between Apache gunships and dragons; M1A2 tanks and dragons, parked cars and buildings against dragons.  (The dragons won.)  The movie overall sucked all ass, but some of the imagery was cool.

Most fictional accounts (and all factual ones, so far as I am aware) involving mythical creatures tend to deal with the typical quest architecture - single hero or small group of heroes against said mythical creatures.  Usually, using the same weapons as our medieval forebears, rather than the best modern science and engineering have to offer.  Personally, if I was going up against a troll, I'd rather have a Barrett .50 than a rusty longsword.

So, what if a mystical veil appears (or re-appears...) - a gate between our world, and other places where there are dragons, goblins, dwarves, and whatnot.  And what if they all have magical weaponry and armor.  And they invade in force - huge numbers, hundreds of divisions?  What then?

Let's lay out the ground rules - magic is, on the whole, subtle.  No fireballs.  But it can be used to enhance the properties of otherwise normal physical objects.  So, the magical steel breastplate is significantly more bulletproof than the garden-variety conquistador relic.  Say, more bulletproof than the best body armor issued to our own soldiers.  This armor will deflect anything shy of a .50 bullet, giving the ugly nasty a bruise but not otherwise hindering his attempts to gut you with his magic sword - which, similarly, is magicked up to preternatural sharpness.  The magic sword is equivalent to the sf descriptions of a monomolecular blade - cuts through just about anything, given time.  Magic bows and arrows are super accurate, have longer range, etc.

So, a fully geared up goblin warrior is armored over most of his body, but certainly the head and torso.  Regular small-arms fire is functionally useless - only a shot to the face or multiple wounds to the extremities will stop him.  At range, he's got a bow and a quiver of arrows.  These are at least as accurate as the English longbow, but with a tendency to result in head shots.  And, once they get close, they've got super-sharp can openers that will cut right through any body armor.  They've got no artillery to speak of.  They depend on mass assaults in the medieval style to close and gut their opponents who are typically other goblins, armed similarly.  (The Scots, locked in eternal combat with their mortal enemies, the Scots.)

So, invading on a broad front through the middle of the US, they find almost no resistance at first -  no army there.  But we get our collective asses in gear, call up the guard, bring troops back from Kerplackistan, and engage.

Our typical tactics involve dispersed formations and small caliber weapons.  The only way an M16 armed US soldier is going to kill a goblin is with a head shot.  Artillery will work on them - but only more or less direct hits, as their armor will protect them from shrapnel well into what we'd normally consider the 100% kill zone.

Would we be able to kill enough - put enough hits on target before they close and chop us to gibbets?  I don't think so.  What tactical changes would we have to make to deal with this threat?

I invite your suggestions in the comments.

Posted by Buckethead Buckethead on   |   § 9

§ 9 Comments

2

Near as I can tell, the fatal weakness of Goblins AND their magic would be iron. Picture if you will squads of troops armed M-16s chambered for the 6.8SPC cartridge shooting high-carbon steel sabot rounds, or flights of A-10 Warthogs laying down fire into goblin ranks using the same technology. Judicious use of napalm and thermite to line them up, Warthogs to finish the job.

GaijinAK GaijinAK

3

This armor will deflect anything shy of a .50 bullet, giving the ugly nasty a bruise but not otherwise hindering his attempts to gut you with his magic sword ...

Errr... not so sure of that, I am. Even if it's deflected, a fifty-cal round delivers a hell of a lot of energy on impact, and you don't need to penetrate armor to damage the body inside the armor. Consider that when one armored knight was fighting another, both tended to use, not edged weapons, but blunt-force weapons like maces, warhammers, flails, and morning stars.

Don't forget that steel can shatter under heavy blows. Is your hypothetical magic-steel shatterproof?

So, the magical steel breastplate is significantly more bulletproof than the garden-variety conquistador relic.

I also think you may give medieval armor more credit than it deserves. Even the best plate armor could be penetrated by a ball from a blackpowder musket. Your hypothetical magic armor may be more resistant than plate armor, but OTOH modern bullets thrown by modern firearms have a lot more penetrating power than a musket ball.

We would also need to consider the consequences of goblins attempting sword-and-arrow attacks on a platoon of camouflaged soldiers who have had time to prepare defensive positions with (among other things) Claymores and caltrops.

wolfwalker wolfwalker

5

@wolfwalker - I know where the word proof in bullet proof comes from - they'd proof the armor by firing bullets at it. Until that started resulting in holes too regularly.

What I was imagining was some powerful magic that would make the armor significantly stronger than our best ceramic/aramid fiber armor.

Good point on the crushing hitting damage - and also on claymores. Prepared defenses would be hard on the poor buggers. Although in the sketchy scenario I imagined - the Goblins probably would have captured significant territory before the army got in gear, and we'd actually be retaking ground they hold, so less occasion to use those sorts of things.

But if they were on the offensive, against regular army troops - it wouldn't stop at claymores. I can imagine all sorts of dirty tricks.

Buckethead Buckethead

6

We don't have any lightsabers laying about do we?

The Maximum Leader The Maximum Leader

8

If we look at the infantry missile weapons of the renaissance, the effective range of an authentic longbow is on the order of 50 meters. Perhaps a magic bow's range is double that.

Concerned soldiers in the modern US Army are complaining that its M4 carbine is less effective than it should be at 500 meters. That is, at long ranges, shot from a short barrel, the glorified .22 leaves a tiny hole. At closer ranges, or from a longer barrel, it shatters bone.

Modern soldiers, equipped with red dot sights, should be crippling goblin arms and legs at will, from 400 meters down to 100 or so — arms and legs the goblins really, really need to wield muscle-powered weapons — at which point the remaining magical archers might make the mistake of trading shots rather than charging and engaging in close combat, where they presumably would have a clear advantage.

So, could an army of goblins with magical arms and armor overwhelm a modern light infantry platoon armed only with small arms? Sure, with sufficient numbers.

Could an army of goblins with magical arms and armor overwhelm a modern mechanized infantry platoon with APCs or Hummers with mounted machine guns? No. The goblins would get picked apart and never manage to engage.

And we haven't even looked at using real artillery yet. For the goblins with win, they need useful magic, not just better medieval weaponry.

Isegoria Isegoria

9

Having now gotten halfway through the Stross trilogy (thanks, B!), I'm tempted to say you guys are overthinking this.

To beat the Goblins, all you need is a HOG, a palmtop, and a laissez faire attitude toward your own demise.

Patton Patton

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