I think that any off-Earth race might develop an unarmed combat system for the same reasons they developed on Earth. On the other hand, they may all get along.

Another thing to consider is the shape of the being. Sure, they could be vaguely insectoid with 2 arms 2 legs, and 2 that serve as either or both, but they could just as easily be bird-like with no hands, or huge blimp-like creatures with no limbs at all.

They may have other natural abilities that make punching combinations pointless. Bio-electric shock? Chemical spray? Plus with 6 arms, they may not punch at all, preferring to grapple. I could see using 2 arms for additional stability on the ground in a way that would be the little green man equivalent of Tai Sing (Monkey Boxing). With 6 arms flailing about, there would be a lot of chances to lose their footing unless they were built very low with very strong legs.

It's kind of a fun idea to think about. I have a character in a story that is part of an insectoid race where each 'job' was decided through selective breeding. She had two legs and 4 arms and emitted a chemical from her wrists that could cloud the vision of the target. Her specific role was a guard. Harvesters had 4 legs and could secrete a very sticky goo to trap prey and carry it back to the hive/ship. Two members of the same race, but two totally unique methods of fighting.

And welcome to the board.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

You'd have to consider the conditions they were fighting in to. A race that lived in zero g would develop fighting systems based around totally different principles to one living on the surface of the planet, even for humans. How to generate power in a punch when theres no gravity to hold you against the floor? What would a zero g guared look like? And are there some principles that apply to fighting most or all creatures, or does each race have to be dealt with in a unique way? I'm a martial arts fan myself, so I could easily get carried away with this.......

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

I've been thinking about that in the dojo recently I was planning to write a short story about aliens and humans studying a martial art alongside each other (because of interest in the other race's culture, mainly)

A lot of our martial arts techniques are based on intrinsic knowledge of leverage and muscle-bone connections in the human body.
Leverage itself, now, is universal - but what if the alien combatant had an exoskeleton, or no bones at all like a squid?
It's not unlikely that aliens would have developed martial arts, but their techniques would probably not immediately work against ours, nor ours against theirs.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

I think a lot of aikido and similar would still work against an exoskeleton (in gravity). They still have joints and limits to how far they can move them. Something like jujustu may be less effective depending on the pain receptors and, really, how do you choke out a slug-thing that breathes through it's skin?

Something like Ch'in Na would be all but useless on an an alien physiology. At least until a lot of study was done to adapt it.

A striking style might be effective against a squishy, but the key would be to learn just where the right squishy bits to hit are.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

I'd imagine Aikido could work but it would have to be adapted. Alien joints might have far lower limits than ours, or work at odd angles. Or there might just be a lot more of them, with greater reach! You would have to find the right leverage angles and balance points all over again.

And I'd not try fixing an alien on the ground with an ikkyo fix just to have it backstab me with its scorpion tail...

It would be a lot of fun trying to figure out how to adapt it, though.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

Okay, true story time. I had to figure out something like this in real life, in real time, once.

No, really. The story is on another thread here, but the highlights are that I was at the zoo, in a torrential rainstorm, and found myself alone in an area with an emu that seemed to have taken a disturbingly special interest in me.

He was standing in front of the exit gate, so there was no way to get by him. I tried to get him to move and he turned and started walking towards me. I backed off to give him room, and he kept after me. The whole time I'm backing up, I'm looking at those feet with the three big toenails, each about the size of my thumb. My line of thought went something like this:

I wonder if I'm fast enough to block if it kicks me.
I wonder if I'm strong enough to actually make a difference if I do block.
Turds! It hasn't got knees! How am I gonna stifle a kick if there's no freaking knees?

I ended up walking sideways in crossover stances (to get my liver clear) with my elbow over my kidney. I figured if it kicked, I'd have to rush it and get in close to take away its range. I'd sort of decided that they would find me bled to death next to the body of an emu with it's neck tied in a knot.

About this time I was moving at the pace of a fast walk, backwards, up a hill paved with bricks pressed into the ground (so, uneven), and not looking. How could it end badly?

I reached the gate and made it out unscathed, only to find a keeper coming out of a building near by. I called him over and told him what had just happened. He told me that that particular bird sometimes formed a focus on a certain person and would just follow them around. It was perfectly harmless.

Still. Looking back it was sort of fun mental exercise. At the time, not so much.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

My experiance of aikido is minimal (6 months of twice a week training, although i plan to go back), but the impression I got was that a good atemi was needed to make most of the techniques effective. So i'd have to argue that even adapted aikido would need to be paired with knowledge of vulnerable organs / nerve clusters to strike at. At least in the early stages of learning about an opponent striking arts might be easier to adapt, as the mechanics of a punch or kick remain the same regardless of where its aimed at. I think that the ability to control an opponents centre of balance could be particularly devasting though, especially in high gravity environments, and grapplers have a better sense of where a objects centre of mass lies, regardless of its shape. Against a creature completely covered in natural armour you'd need a distraction other than a strike- eg for something with strong hearing a loud kiai might be dveastating all on its own at close quarters.
Edit: Following from Togs story about the ostrich I've found that when playing with with my friends huge german shepard there are positions he can be lured into where he'll lose his balance even though he has twice the legs and a centre of mass two feet below mine. A loud clap or shout a couple of feet above his head also seems to startle him badly, and I imagine much closer than that would be pretty painfull since he can here my friend coming in the cellar from about two hundred meters away.

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

Agreed.

I admit I'm a noob myself (5th kyu) but I have more of a problem with Aikido being primarily passive and fixing instead of effectively hurting. When faced with an alien, I wouldn't try to get it to the ground, I'd want to try rendering it unfit for combat.

I think it would still be a very good defensive technique if the defendant were experienced (I can't say that after 9 months I'm good enough to fight off even a serious human attacker). But it definitely lacks in the area of what to do once you have fended off the initial attack, given that all fixing techniques won't even work on most animals.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

In true aikido, there are no strikes. There are some older variations, such as aikijutsu and aiki-budo that had strikes, and the Korean art of Yu-sool (aka Hapkido) that blends aikido with taekwon do, but the original premise of aikido as laid out by Morehei Ueshiba was harmony above all. When anger is offered, you counter with love. This "love" generally involved being led around in a little circle and falling over, but the ultimate goal was for the attacker to accept that his anger was less strong than the love which kept overcoming it.

That and getting up sucks.

When I say Aikido, I mean the Founder's version of it.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Works good on dogs Left hand to the right side of the neck, right hand grabs the left front leg, twist to the left, and drop. Granted were were only playing, but it was a big lab, and I got to practice a lot.

I should also mention that my aikido training was sort of odd. It was taught as one of the 4 different styles that made up what I was learning at the time. Each style was taught pure, but they were all mixed in together, and few if any used the correct terms. What I know about traditional aikido is from a book called Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere which I highly recommend to anyone interested in learning about the motions.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

So do I. There is also a French school that teaches attacks, but it's not the one I am training.

The point I was making is that through this philosophy, it might be effective in getting a nonhuman attacker to the ground, but not at all effective in containing him as all containment techniques are designed for human physiology.
I haven't tried with a dog. I'd be afraid of hurting them... their shoulders and joints work so differently. Even kids can't train all of the techniques because they might hurt themselves a lto more than adults.

Personally, I wouldn't bet my money on the alien accepting that my love was stronger than his stamina. I'd be looking for the nerve centre.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

I'll have to try that Tog, he's got wise to most of the tricks I can play on him! I think that some of the principles of blending with an attackers motion, controling centre of balance, leverage, distraction etc would be found in most creatures methods of fighting, and could well find analouges even in very alien entities conflicts, since they're based on pretty fundamental physics and logic. The specifics of how those principles were applied could get pretty wierd though.
Jokergirl I think aikido's something you have to put many years into before you see any return, and I think that return comes when you know how to use the principles behind it without worrying about specific techniques at which point it's dynamite, but thats an opinion with little real knowledge behind it. For simple self defense and a lot of street smart ideas that can keep you out of trouble in the first place my reccomended reading would be Dead or Alive by Geoff Thopmson.
Changing tack back towards the OP: I'd like to see a zero g dojo, I think that would be a very interesting experiment, and if humanity expands its presence in space at all there could well be results that save a life someday.

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

Ender's Game had interesting Zero G fighting. I'd have liked to read more about that training. Sadly, they mostly figured it out for themselves after normal selfdefense classes.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

Yeah, the guy that taught that hybrid form said that he was only going to include the 60% of aikido that he deemed useful, for everything else, there's hitting.

The containing has always been my issue with grappling styles. Eventually you have to let them go.

As for the Dog, it actually doesn't put any stress on the joint. You are basically pulling the leg back down toward the ground, nit bending it against itself. That's just to keep it from stepping to the left to adjust to it's new center of balance. That dog an I played for quite a while. I managed to dump him about 8 times in all, and he never gave the slightest indication that it was hurting him. If he did, I'd have stopped.

And yeah, against a hostile ET, aikido would be to get it down. The fire axe in the hall would be to keep it there.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

I grapple with my dog for play sometimes. I found that it is possible to set up a rear naked choke on a dog, but she really reacts badly to feeling an arm go around her neck, even in play. You might also think it's possible to do a two leg takedown on a dog by shooting through sideways and grabbing the front and rear legs on the far side, but she is very adept at avoiding that move.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis

Intelligent animals on Earth come in all shapes and sizes. My advice to you would be to pick one then decide how and why your pick might have a need for increased intelligence or use of tools as a edge on survival and evolution.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.