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Originally Posted by Sumeragi
They're silicon-based. Most likely what applies to earth would so easily apply to them.
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No, they're carbon based. This is a plot point actually.
Bio weapons are still hard to say either way though as it's unclear how exactly beta breeding and biology functions. They seemed to consume flesh and recycle organic matter into new units which implies some level of normal metabloic activty and breeding, but there also stuff about them being "fueled" by the reactor in a Hive and such which implies biology totally unlike anything on earth. Either way DNA research and such was in it's infancy during the 70s and the focus ought to have been rightly placed on improving industry and weapon systems to fight them, not pipe dreams of a super plague. Research should have continued, but it's entirely possible the alien biology simply didn't have a good vector for attack or even that they haven't fully deciphered the BETA genome.
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Originally Posted by Silvance
If the BETA are not advancing on the surface, then they dig underground as they invade, and there's no way to tell where they will strike.
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Only because the local humans are brain dead and have apparently never heard of a microphone, seismograph, ground penetrating radar, gravity sensors, cosmic rays, or electricity. There is nothing "stealthy" about a tunneling operation that is boring out something big enough to move thousands of creepy crawlies some of them a dozen meters tall in a finite amount of time. Some of these systems would need to deployed in place and would work best as a trip wire, but many could also be easily mounted on a vehicle. In our world there isn't a huge demand for detecting tunnels and indeed allot of the work has only been spurred recently by smuggling tunnels under the US border and a few other highly controlled zones (Israel border for instance).
Obviously though the Muv-Luv would have a pretty damn compelling reason to fund the shit out of these projects, and it's rather hard to buy that they can apparently build an anti-gravity doom fortress, but a method of detecting a hole in the ground evades them. There is really no reason beyond abject stupidity that after thirty years they can't reliably detect large tunneling operations near controlled Terran well in advance of any attack.
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Nuclear mines? Depends whether the country in question will want to use such things on their homeland, and follow the example of Russia and China. They can try to lure the small horde there. I highly doubt it'd stop the entire BETA horde since like everyone said, their numbers are just overwhelming unless there's just a few thousands of them or so... The mines will easily kill the BETA, but all of them? VERY unlikely. The mines will be all used up in no time.
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There's also no real reason they need to be "mines" in the "buried" sense. They'd only be mines in the sense of a weapon left in the path of the enemy unattended, but they could easily just be standard bombs with a time or remote fuse. Go look up "lay down delivery" Hell I'll save the effort and just quote the wiki stub:
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Laydown delivery is a mode of deploying a free-fall nuclear weapon in which the bomb's fall is slowed by parachute so that it actually lands on the ground before detonating. Laydown delivery requires that the weapon's case be reinforced so that it can survive the impact, and generally involves a time-delay fuze to trigger detonation. Laydown mode can be used to increase the effect of the weapon's blast on built-up targets such as submarine pens, or to transmit a shock wave through the ground to attack deeply buried targets. It has the additional advantage of allowing the carrier aircraft to fly very low – in order to avoid enemy defences – and still get away without being destroyed in the detonation. This is particularly important where high-yield nuclear weapons such as the B41 nuclear bomb and B53 nuclear bomb are concerned.
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A ground skimming aircraft could rather easily be deployed just ahead of a swarm and deploy the "mines" in it's path.
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Nuking the hives is not very effective since the laser class are at the top of the monument, shooting at anything within range. Even if a bomb is dropped and reaches the bottom of the shaft, will it take out everything including the extra branches that stretches really far and deep?
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This is an island:
This is an island after a ten megaton explosion
It's completely within our ability to build a bomb five times that size within the weight and and size constraints of say... a TSF inside a drop pod. You'll forgive me if I think a hive is going to just shrug that off.