This is where my thoughts went as well. Harry Turtledove is prolific at coming up with scenarios where aliens are capable of interstellar travel but not good at war. His World War series sets up a slightly more plausible scenario. If you haven’t read it, it’s worthwhile and I don’t want to spoil it here. An interesting aspect of it though was the aliens having finite resources with very long delays in resupply. They underestimate humanity who takes advantage of this to slowly turn the tide.
Paxys thanks for the short story, I truly enjoyed that and it was also rather funny.
Regarding the case for lowtech interstellar travellers: I can accept the idea that there is some symple physics trick to make a jump drive that we haven't discovered, fair enough. Just as in the story, there would also had to be a similar undiscovered trick for antigravity, since otherwise they have no way of getting to orbit.
Can you however build a ship that can resist vacuum and provide life support with 16th century tech? I guess perhaps your species might be able to live in vacuum, needs only a bit of heat and doesn't need to breathe gasses?
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Anyway, I’d like to recommend another book. High Crusade by Poul Anderson[0]. In the first chapter pacifist aliens land in 13th century England and get immediately massacred by the locals. Now the king has a starship.
