The Soldier-class Venator strain in particular is made by recycling humans.
The invention of the TSF helped level the field somewhat. It's the main reason why there are only 1 billion people now. Curb-Stomp Battle: They gave one to humanity as a whole, excluding islands and the USA.Colony Drop: How they invaded the Earth: launching enormous pods filled with BETA from the Moon.Bug War: The whole conflict against humanity.The reason being that BETA are, on the whole, very disturbing, with a bizarre mix of alien and uncomfortably human looking features. Body Horror: The civilian population is kept in the dark as to what BETA look like, for the sake of morale.Adaptive Ability: Once they interact with a Hive Reactor, the Superordinate gives them information to adapt to human strategy.They cannot fly, but the Laser and Heavy Laser-class BETA shoot down anything that does, rendering aircraft useless and making any aerial military operations much more difficult. The BETA vary greatly in size, with the smallest identified strain (Soldier-class) being around 3 meters tall, and the largest identified strains (Fort-class) at over 60 meters tall. By 2001, the world population was down to about 1 billion people.
They quickly spread from their landing point, Kashgar, and proceeded to invade the Eurasian, Middle Eastern, and Asian regions when they finally reached Japan in 1998, 36 million people were killed within a week. They arrived on the Moon in 1967 and, after a brief conflict with humanity's space forces known as the First Lunar War, invaded Earth in 1973, making humanity abandon the Moon. In the Alternate timeline, they were first spotted on Mars by a probe in 1958. The BETA ( Beings of Extra- Terrestrial Origin and Adversaries of the Human Race), are the main enemies in Muv-Luv Alternative and its spin-offs.