Post by RedDwarfIV on Jun 18, 2015 17:08:54 GMT -6
A while ago I was thinking about the Battleship movie and how crap it was, and I was thinking "If I wrote a movie about Battleships and it had to feature aliens, how would I write it?" And in my head, I construct a story.
The aliens are not here to invade. They are not here to blow all our crap up. They are here because, like the US Naval task force in the movie, they are in a war game. They didn't expect to come across an alien species, let alone an alien civilisation, and they've never met aliens before. Coupled with the assumption that their Fleet Headquarters would do some research on wherever they are getting sent, they decide that it must be part of the war game. They need to pick a fight with this civilisation, which is obviously a construct made by Fleet HQ to spice up their War Games. Discovering that the civilisation has a computer network, they look around it until they find as basic a fleet warfare simulator as they can find, so it will be easy to understand.
The 'fleet warfare simulator' that they find is a well-loved children's game known as Battleships, which apparently dates back to what the civilisation calls "World War Two", so it must give a good idea of how this war-game enemy fights.
After long enough for the aliens to have made some plans, things start happening on Earth. A German Ensdorf minesweeper, a British Astute submarine, a Russian Kirov cruiser, a US Iowa battleship and the Chinese carrier Liaoning all over the course of several days, find themselves getting orders to fully crew up (or at least get operational), and get underway (the strange orders coming from alien EWAR assets), at which point they will find their navigational instruments all leading them to the same place. Possibly this will be exacerbated by strange weather effects, like heavy fog.
At this point, the aliens (having already landed) surface near the impromptu fleet. They send a message to each of the human ships, essentially relaying the rules of the Battleships game, before using their spacecrafts' transforming abilities to form their own minesweeper, submarine, cruiser, battleship and aircraft carrier. Having done this, they say "start in one hour" and sail off into the fog, the space-submarine submerging.
As the confused humans try to get past their language barriers and communicate without radio, and figure out what their chain of command should be (or if there should even be one), the aliens slink off to their starting positions on the grid they've drawn for themselves and is as shown in the 'manual' they sent the humans earlier.
When the game finally begins, the human ships start seeing strange objects come flying through the air, and splashing into the ocean. Figuring that they are being fired at, they begin to scatter, but one of the weapons hits one of their ships, spreading a red substance across part of the ship. To the aliens, this is a 'training round', intended to jam up machinery and hold crew in place until the end of the excercise. To iron ships and human crews... it is horribly corrosive, killing many crew members and damaging the ship until they can find a way to get most of the substance off (or dilute it with water). Now knowing that they are under attack, the humans band together, and they aren't interested in following the rules.
In the aliens battle control centre, the hits and misses are being automatically registered and put up on a display. In the Battleships game, ships don't move, but in real life, they can. The injured vessel moves out of the area that the aliens are firing at, preventing it being hit again and surprising the aliens when they don't get another hit by shooting all around the hit position.
Liaoning launches whichever of its helicopters are best suited for a visual search of the sea, and possibly also its Changhe Z-18s to hunt for the alien 'submarine' spacecraft. When some of the helicopters get back with positions for several of the alien craft, Liaoning launches its J-15s while the Iowa and Kirov begin firing cannons and launching missiles (respectively) towards the alien positions. The Astute and Ensdorf head towards the aliens, so that the Astute can get a torpedo lock and so the Ensdorf can start laying its sixty mines in the aliens' area while using the fog to avoid being seen. By this point, the rest of the fleet is heading out of the area that the aliens think the humans should be in. Inevitably, the cannon shells and missiles begin to get hits, dealing heavy damage to several of the alien vessels. It finally dawns on the aliens that this is not a wargame, because the humans are not using training rounds.
It then becomes a rush for the aliens to try and reopen communication with the humans and make clear that it was a mistake before they get wiped out.
The aliens are not here to invade. They are not here to blow all our crap up. They are here because, like the US Naval task force in the movie, they are in a war game. They didn't expect to come across an alien species, let alone an alien civilisation, and they've never met aliens before. Coupled with the assumption that their Fleet Headquarters would do some research on wherever they are getting sent, they decide that it must be part of the war game. They need to pick a fight with this civilisation, which is obviously a construct made by Fleet HQ to spice up their War Games. Discovering that the civilisation has a computer network, they look around it until they find as basic a fleet warfare simulator as they can find, so it will be easy to understand.
The 'fleet warfare simulator' that they find is a well-loved children's game known as Battleships, which apparently dates back to what the civilisation calls "World War Two", so it must give a good idea of how this war-game enemy fights.
After long enough for the aliens to have made some plans, things start happening on Earth. A German Ensdorf minesweeper, a British Astute submarine, a Russian Kirov cruiser, a US Iowa battleship and the Chinese carrier Liaoning all over the course of several days, find themselves getting orders to fully crew up (or at least get operational), and get underway (the strange orders coming from alien EWAR assets), at which point they will find their navigational instruments all leading them to the same place. Possibly this will be exacerbated by strange weather effects, like heavy fog.
At this point, the aliens (having already landed) surface near the impromptu fleet. They send a message to each of the human ships, essentially relaying the rules of the Battleships game, before using their spacecrafts' transforming abilities to form their own minesweeper, submarine, cruiser, battleship and aircraft carrier. Having done this, they say "start in one hour" and sail off into the fog, the space-submarine submerging.
As the confused humans try to get past their language barriers and communicate without radio, and figure out what their chain of command should be (or if there should even be one), the aliens slink off to their starting positions on the grid they've drawn for themselves and is as shown in the 'manual' they sent the humans earlier.
When the game finally begins, the human ships start seeing strange objects come flying through the air, and splashing into the ocean. Figuring that they are being fired at, they begin to scatter, but one of the weapons hits one of their ships, spreading a red substance across part of the ship. To the aliens, this is a 'training round', intended to jam up machinery and hold crew in place until the end of the excercise. To iron ships and human crews... it is horribly corrosive, killing many crew members and damaging the ship until they can find a way to get most of the substance off (or dilute it with water). Now knowing that they are under attack, the humans band together, and they aren't interested in following the rules.
In the aliens battle control centre, the hits and misses are being automatically registered and put up on a display. In the Battleships game, ships don't move, but in real life, they can. The injured vessel moves out of the area that the aliens are firing at, preventing it being hit again and surprising the aliens when they don't get another hit by shooting all around the hit position.
Liaoning launches whichever of its helicopters are best suited for a visual search of the sea, and possibly also its Changhe Z-18s to hunt for the alien 'submarine' spacecraft. When some of the helicopters get back with positions for several of the alien craft, Liaoning launches its J-15s while the Iowa and Kirov begin firing cannons and launching missiles (respectively) towards the alien positions. The Astute and Ensdorf head towards the aliens, so that the Astute can get a torpedo lock and so the Ensdorf can start laying its sixty mines in the aliens' area while using the fog to avoid being seen. By this point, the rest of the fleet is heading out of the area that the aliens think the humans should be in. Inevitably, the cannon shells and missiles begin to get hits, dealing heavy damage to several of the alien vessels. It finally dawns on the aliens that this is not a wargame, because the humans are not using training rounds.
It then becomes a rush for the aliens to try and reopen communication with the humans and make clear that it was a mistake before they get wiped out.