Alien Ninja Fembot Pirates vs the Jedi SAS Chuck Norris startroopers: RUMBLE

Really BIG Robots

We're looking here at your huge Pacific Rim jobs, Optimus Prime, Harvesters from Terminator: Salvation, those sorts of machine. Quantity, as they say, has a quality all of its own: but there are those say that being big isn't a good thing when you're thinking about targets.

Ordinary Human Troops (Cannon-fodder)

We're looking here at unwilling teenage conscripts, out-of-shape weekend warriors, Starfleet security personnel and others whose uniforms probably don't fit properly and whose weaponry will range from unimpressive to shoddy. That said, they do at least have weapons of some sort - and they may in some cases, by means of good organisation, be powerful as a group even if they are underwhelming individually (pike regiments, perhaps).

War Robots

These are robots specifically designed for combat. A lot of variety again, here, as there are all the Star Wars droid armies to think of, Hammer-Stein and the ABC Warriors, ED-209 from RoboCop, Matrix Sentinels, Skynet's Flying-HKs and many more fictional examples. There are also real-world war robots to consider, many of them airborne (the well-known Predator, Reaper, Warrior etc) and some groundbased (MAARS, the one-eyed robot trouser snake etc).

Starship Troopers Mobile Infantry

We speak here of Heinlein's originals from the book, not the comparatively feebly equipped movie version. These chaps wear the original powered armour, sturdy stuff on the same general level as that found on today's tanks (at any rate, Heinlein specified that MI cap troopers could take on and beat tanks easily). And this armour isn't like the exoskeletons from Aliens and the Matrix trilogy, it's a complete gas-tight hard suit - and nimble, not plodding. You can run and jump in it, and if you jump hard its boot jets cut in and you can leap right over buildings. And MI weaponry is powerful stuff, too: it's not discussed in a lot of detail but it's clear that fire-and-forget tactical nuclear missiles are squad-level kit and that every cap trooper is a one-man apocalypse with his suit's Y-rack lobbing mortar bombs about him as he bounces through the fray. MI "flamers" are perhaps something a bit sexier than ordinary napalm-squirters, too, as it seems that a heavy flamer can produce a "knife beam" which at full power is sufficient to slice away building walls. Ninjas and other lurkers may struggle to hide from the MI, too, as every trooper has not only infrared but radar and various other sensors.

The men inside the suits seem likely to be pretty hard cases as well - Heinlein's MI was all-male, though other branches of the Federation armed forces weren't: indeed it was specified that MI landing boats as well as their transport starships often had female pilots. MI training seems to include most of the elements you'd find in today's special-forces process, and is probably even more severe. Johnny Rico's course starts with 2009 recruits of whom just 187 pass out to become cap troopers, a rate fairly similar to SAS/SBS selection - and in the case of the MI, no fewer than 14 of the rejects are dead (mostly in accidents but one executed on purpose) which even the SAS couldn't get away with today.

All in all, these chaps look hard to beat. But we'll have to see.

Predator aliens

Another dangerous entry here. These chaps have a lot of fancy kit and weapons, and are plainly pretty tasty; just one of them manages to put away most of Arnold Schwarzenegger's elite special-ops CIA mercenary team in the first movie - despite one of them having an early hip-carried minigun, nowadays a standard movie trope despite being rather foolish** - and almost does for Arnie himself. This should furnish a good measure of Predators' performance versus Special Forces, at any rate: and there's also plenty of footage showing them up against Alien aliens, movie super-cops etc.

Klingons

Famously warlike, but you have to remember that this is only in the context of the Star Trek universe: which often seems rather less violent and gritty than many others. Still, the Klingons aren't shy and it's noticeable that they have been judged worthy of inclusion here when other Star Trek aliens such as Vulcans and Romulans were not.

Chuck Norris

At his internet-meme valuation, Chuck Norris could be seen as pretty much invincible as - of course - nobody would even be willing to speak disrespectfully to him on an anonymous intercontinental prank phone call, let alone fight him face to face.

Perhaps a more practical assessment would be to treat him as one of his human-military movie characters: Colonel Braddock, John T Booker, McCoy of Delta Force etc. In this case he is a sort of turbocharged version of Special Forces, perhaps combined with Ninja - or even a pinch of Jedi.

It's up to you.

The Bugs from Starship Troopers

Pretty badass as aliens go, whether you're talking about the movie or the book. The book ones seem to have some modern technology and so are less dependent on chomping or pronging their opponents; on the other hand the larger movie ones can apparently shoot down orbiting starships merely by farting vigorously at them. They're plainly pretty dangerous, as we have it on the best of authorities that even the powerful and militaristic human Federation finds them a troublesome opponent.

Jedi or similar combat mystics

A strange mixture of invincibility and weakness here. Sometimes it seems that the only thing which can stop a Jedi is another Jedi (or a Sith), at other times it seems that all you need to make them surrender is a bunch of slightly less crap battledroids with forcefields on them.

A bit of a wild card.

Daleks

Many would argue that these are in fact cyborgs. No matter how you slice it, they're obviously pretty serious - they're capable of over-running Earth, even though Earth is home to Chuck Norris and many other contenders here. On the other hand there is the issue of mobility, and the possibly limited effectiveness of the bog-plunger arm in close combat. However the actual rayguns seem pretty punchy, and the Daleks' armoured shells are supposed to be strong stuff on their own - while the creature inside is apparently cased in another layer of protection.

A possible dark horse contender here.

Let's get to it

So there we are. Without further ado, let battle commence:

Bootnotes

*Technically these are not Marines as Brits or Americans would understand the term, as they belong to the department of the army, not that of the navy. However the actual French naval Fusiliers Marins function mainly as a base security force: the Troupes de Marine actually do the sort of work that Royal and US Marines do, and historically as Coloniales they were deployed mainly in far-flung colonies - just as the future Colonial Marines seem to be.

**Miniguns weigh around 35lb empty - enough to be cripplingly heavy but not enough to get the recoil low enough for an unsupported man to withstand. The minigunner would also need to carry not only thousands of rounds of ammunition (enough to keep shooting for less than a minute even so) but a heavy battery or generator to power the gun's electric drive. All in all, not a goer even for Arnie, really: you'd need to be in a powered suit or exoskeleton.