Alien visit rankings.

If I were doing it, I might flesh it out like this:

Class 1: Planned Friendly EBE contact
Class 2: Friendly EBE on ground without support
Class 3: friendly EBE on ground with support
Class 4: Unknown EBE contact
Class 5: Unknown EBE on the ground without support
Class 6: Known hostile EBE contact
Class 7: Known hostile EBE on the ground without support
Class 8: Unknown EBE on the ground with support
Class 9: Known hostile EBE invasion
Class 10: Unknown hostile EBE invasion

I think an unknown hostile invasion is worse than a known hostile invasion - the enemy you've already met is an enemy you've already started trying to figure out how to kill. An unknown invading would be a giant question mark.

Clearly this differentiates between "light colonial and/or scouting group" versus "full invasion." But that seems a logical distinction to me. Other possible categories could include a danger level to the EBE. They're not all going to be raging death machines shooting cyanide from their eyes, so the ones that are probably ping as higher/more dangerous class than the ones that don't. Alternately, the ones with scarier tech, and cool psychic mind-matter manipulation.

So basically whatever you need to do to make it work, but there's some examples, anyway. Other factors - biologically harmful, known disease vectors, and so forth.

Question: What the hell is an EBE? I can think of some pretty funky meanings but I'll never know what is actually meant here.

ShaunHorton said:

Extraterrestrial Biological Entity.

Click to expand...

Oh wow I was way off! Thanks!

Any reason there needs to be ten classes?

This reminds me of when I was building my magic system and I realized I was forcing myself to make entire branches of magic up just to fit into an even ten. I went with eight and it works much better.

I know that ten feels so complete, so round but maybe you don't need that many. Keep in mind too, for your reader who will be learning these classes, that the less you have the easier it is to learn what they mean.

As far as the rankings themselves...is there anything planned for air sightings or ship sightings? I think ship sightings or contact should be lower on the scale than ground sightings. But I guess it depends on the aliens.