SWAT checkpoint VS Dinosaur

[Joun_Lord]

Actually, the ones which were electrocuted might look like they were killed by the cops by a while. The ones which were 'squished' might have been run over by police APCs, I guess. They could have just electrically charged the outside coating of their APCs and then charged them at full speed through a bunch of people in the city and repeated this until everyone was dead.

How would they look like they were killed by cops after awhile? It typically takes several days for a dead body to enter the stage where maggots starts bursting through the skin in a manner that could possibly maybe be seen as bullet holes. Initial elements of the military is going to be there in hours, a day or two at most. That doesn't even get into the fact there are millions of people in New York atleast some of which will be armed and will fight back, overwhelming the police by numbers alone.

How exactly would the police be able to hunt everyone down in APCs. People wouldn't just lay down and die, there are millions of people in New York who again would easily overwhelm the police attacking them. Plus getting squished by a giant kaiju is going to leave considerably different marks then getting ran over by a APC.

Sure, people could simply go where the APCs cannot go, but these ones would have retreated into secluded areas, where they would have been hunted down and shot. You see, the military would only quickly check the most obvious bodies on the roads, not too many people in the sewers or dodgy apartments. That being said, the police could use chemical weapons to kill the hiding people, or modify their house's electrical system to make it dangerous for anyone using the building. The average army grunt will not tell the difference between electrocution and any other form of death which does not leave an obvious mark without stripping them and properly scanning their bodies. They will just go "huh, dead guy with no marks/few burn marks" which could be really anything.

Where would the NYPD get chemical weapons or make enough to kill millions of people? How would they get the know how to modify millions of buildings electrical systems to do something they are designed not to do?

And the average military soldier isn't that stupid. Even if they were many soldiers nowadays in the US are combat veterans, they know what someone getting shot looks like. Even if they don't know what someone getting killed by electrocution looks like they would be able to tell it was not by bullets.

If there is no obvious signs of death, which there should be considering electrocution should leave burn marks, the military isn't going to automatically assume it was the cops without evidence. They'll assume it was terrorists or natural disaster but not automatically blame the cops. They probably be asking the cops what happens considering they are the authority on the scene. Thats assuming somehow they don't know what happened which they should considering this is the information age where everyone has a camera and would be uploading videos of either a giant monster rampaging or giant cops rampaging.

Oh, and most civilians will not realise that the police are killing them and when they see the police APCs driving about everywhere they will think that they are actually evacuating all the thousands of people onto their tiny APC somehow and then will run up to them and try to enter the vehicle, resulting in their death.

Civilians aren't stupid either. With social media or even just plain word of mouth if a bunch of people were being killed by cops. They'd know a APC can't hold anybody really, they'd figure out when the APC is driving over people, and they'd share it with the word. There is no way for cops to sneak kill thousands or millions of people with an APC without anyone noticing.

Well, what if ALL of the police were actually terrorists and knew that they have to sacrifice some of their lesser brethren for the greater good? Then they could just make a massive dinosaur by getting a bunch of really common animals like dogs, rats, birds, etc and fusing them together in a massive triangle of flesh and removing all their useless organs and replacing them with a organic-synthetic electrical generator win the middle of it to keep the flesh alive and working with power.

They could be terrorists who actually created the dinosaur in a tunnel of thousands of interconnected underground basements where they had captured thousands of the most brilliant scientists and biologists in the entire history of mankind and forced them to work on the massive triangle of flesh or they could just be exceptionally lazy or maybe just don't believe anyone.

Well what if ALL the police were actually unicorn fairy princesses going to have a tea party with the Mole People of Manhattan? Because thats equally likely to them being all terrorists. There could be terrorists cops but nowhere even close to being all the cops and any terrorists cops would mostly get caught very quickly when they try to recruit. Any terrorist cops would be a small cell of a few people, nothing larger.

But even if they were all terrorists and the sky is yellow and the upcoming US election isn't a massive dumpster fire, would purpose would the terrorist NYPD have with building a giant monster? A better question, what ability would they have to build a giant monster? Terrorists want to terrorize people for a purpose. Attacking the people of New York would be for a reason, what reason would the police have to attack their own people, their own families, their own friends and comrades?

What skills would they have to transmute a bunch of common animals into one big animal? How would they build a organic synthetic generator to power it? Those aren't skills that the common cop, common terrorist, or common anyone is going to have.

Even with the thousands of scientists they somehow spirited away without anyone noticing building a giant monster is impossible.

The military isn't going to jump to outlandish theories of what happened. They are going to look for the most reasonable and simple explanation and its not going to be "all the cops are secret terrorists who built a giant monster or killed everyone with small arms and APCs".

I mean, I'm not sure if a real life police station would believe that a massive triangle of flesh is invading. I'd say it would be more likely for the officers to simply blame the chemicals in the water and tell everyone that it's just their imagination but to stop operating heavy machinery, driving, etc and return to their homes and not drink too much tap water and wait for the CDC or whoever to respond and fix everything while drinking expensive bottled water in their station.

They'd believe it when they see new footage of it, when they see Youtube videos of it, they'd believe it when they look out their windows.

And even if they don't believe it they'd still send people out just thanks to the thousands of 911 calls. If they believe its a chemical attack or leak they'd send out hazmat teams to assess the situation and send out everyone else to evacuate people. They wouldn't just be sitting on their behinds waiting for the CDC.

Since when was this supposed to be an accurate description of how police officers actually work in cities?! Also, I would believe that in real life they probably would run away from the dinosaur, at least at first without appropriate amounts of weaponry considering their small pistols probably wouldn't do much.

Well you're the one that brought it up as evidence of how police would respond to a dinosaur.

And yes they would probably run away at first but thats the important bit AT FIRST. Patrolmen would see some giant monster or dinosaur, radio it in, and back away and shadow it while waiting for SWAT, animal control, or the military to arrive. If its attacking people they probably would even wait. Most patrol cars have shotguns or AR-15s nowadays which might not kill a dinosaur but would certainly get its attention so it isn't attacking civilians.

Rats have good enough tactics to be able to outsmart and outmaneuver cats in battle and slaughter them effortlessly, they're actually quite intelligent and isn't that a well-known thing? I mean you have all the sayings like "clever little rat" and whatnot, so I'd assume rats are quite intelligent.

Are you from bizarro Earth because on this Earth the slaughtering is done by the cats on the rats. Thats a cat's job often, to catch and kill rodents. They are scarily good at it. The only time a rat is going to win against a cat is when it has a size advantage.

And I've never heard the phrase "clever little rat". A google search shows the Googles hasn't heard of the phrase either, the only results for "clever little rats" is pictures and videos of trained pet rats acting clever. And you can't use the actions of a trained animal directed by a trained human as a indicator of their intelligence.

Okay, the wings work within a small, pouch filled with air in which the wings have space to move freely around and when they flap, that air goes downwards, through some thinner pockets of flesh which have little organic 'fans' in them to help the air keep moving but are not powerful enough to generate their own thrust and then finally out through a tiny circle of very weak flesh and skin on the bottom of the kaiju which then lifts it into the air. However, this weaker patch of skin is colored and textured exactly like the other patches of skin, so it won't be a viable weakness unless it's flying and a bullet randomly hits that part, in which case it could probably damage the wings.

I don't wings work that way. Wings need a large amount of air to interact with and need to be big to create lift. The creature should be mostly wing for it to create enough lift to fly. Maybe if you said it had air bladders it squirted out air enough to propel it it might make a bit more sense. It needs openings for air to enter and escape for the air bladders or wings, even small openings. Wings or air bladders are still going to make noise.

Ah, alright, the kauji has the ability to make all it's flesh inhale all the air around it which has the effect of making it monstrously heavy but at the cost of the complete lack of mobility while in this state and the fact that it's legs can only survive for less than a minute in this state or they will shatter and then the flesh triangle will hit the ground and it's structure will probably just dissolve completely.

Its already going to be monstrously heavy. A giant triangle of flesh is going to weight alot even if its mostly empty spaces. A giant triangle of flesh with hardened skin, air pockets, blood, and other bits is going to weigh more. Even just a hot air ballon minus the basket, burner, passengers, and air is going to weigh several hundred pounds,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_b ... bined_mass

If it does this while in the sky, then it's wings which are designed to propel a beast weighing 1 gram will no longer work and it will fall out of the sky while at the same time not being strong enough to dispel it's air anymore because there will be too much resistance from falling to be able to squeeze any air from its flesh at all, so it will fall to the ground and be utterly annihilated.

The thing should not be able to weight a gram but either way it sounds like the creature is incredibly fragile.

Dude I'm not one for giving people shit for outlandish scenarios considering I create similar shit myself. But if you are trying to create a realistic scenario it cannot rely it outlandish bullshit or outright fantasy. If you want this scenario to be anchored in something close to reality the creature should follow the laws of mass, laws of thermodynamics (something that big would need a massive amount of energy intake) and the laws of gravity. If it disregards all that shit then the scenario is magic and we don't know how shit is going to respond.

Also the people in the scenario should act like real people, not cardboard cutouts or how you want them to act. If you want them to act then the setting stops being realistic and becomes some magical author fiat driven setting.

[Sea Skimmer]

[
That sounds a bit far fetched, if light assault rifles can easily penetrate 10mm of armour with a few shots, then why are light APCs like the VAB, M113, and other light APCs?

I'm interested that I mention modern ammo , and you reply by mentioning a vehicle like the M113 which entered service in 1960. You might want to look at the vehicles which replaced those things, in some cases several times over... Compare the VAB to the VBCI for example.

5.56mm M995 ball ammo, which entered service in the early 1990s penetrates 12mm RHA at 0 degrees at 100m according to Nammo, one of the top ammo makers in the world. This really should not be surprising for tungsten ammo at 1030m/s. Though you do need a full length 20in barrel on your weapon to get a firing velocity that high, a stubby M4 carbine would be a little weaker.

A Swedish company also now makes a discarding sabot 6.5x25mm round, not much bigger then a 9mm cartridge, that penetrates 7mm at 50m, and demonstrated firing it through plates cut from the hull of a BTR-60. Only needs a 10in long barrel to do this too. So your Glock joke below is a lot little closer to TRUTH then you think.

Some APCs have even less than 10mm of armour

Yeah they did in the past, but it was generally steeply angled, and often the steel was some kind of high hardness armor rather the RHA, or had a surface treatment to make it harder. These vehicles were also simply never meant to take a leading role in any kind of assault, thus the term battle taxi. Small caliber bullets loose velocity and stability rapidly, so by 500m they wont penetrate much, but the velocity loss out to ~150m isn't much and inside of that light armored vehicles are extremely vulnerable.

Stuff like this is why the doors on the latest armored hummers are inch thick high hardness steel meanwhile, MRAP hulls even thicker, the Bradley thicker still and heavily uparmored on top of it. Get the picture? It isn't for nothing that the US Army considered replacing the Bradley a few years ago with an 84 ton vehicle.

and some art not even steel but aluminum

Only the US ever did that on a relevant scale, and has regretted it for along time. It only made sense to make the vehicles amphibious, and both the M113 and Bradley series rapidly gained too much weight to float anyway. However this material was much thicker then 10mm, 44mm everywhere in the case of the M113, variable but generally thicker in the case of the Bradley but designed to resist 14.5mm steel cored ammo at 300m anyway. Precisely because this standard proved too weak in the face of newer 1980s era weapons, the Bradley hull is rather older in conception, the vehicle was heavily uparmored in service. Like 50% increase in total weight uparmored! They used steel and composite materials to do so.

Those light APCs were only ever intended to resist artillery fragmentation and 7.62mm bullets with lead or at best steel cores and only then at a distance of 300 yards. The first time the M113 ever saw action in a major battle several were in fact destroyed by hand grenades and concentrated 7.62mm bursts because the ARVN decided to charge the enemy with them.

Aluminum does very well against artillery fragmentation, better then steel per mass in fact, because its greater thickness has a ballistic advantage against irregular shaped projectiles like fragments. But its almost hopeless against something as hard as tungsten. Tungsten small arms ammo didn't exist on any noteworthy scale before the 1980s though. Now its downright typical for nation state forces, and like I said above, you can now get sabot rounds in pistol calibers. That was long dreamed of but it wasn't until the later 2000s that it became feasible to mass produce such cartridges at a sane price and acceptable quality.

[Sea Skimmer]

https://www.nammo.com/globalassets/pdfs ... 3_2015.pdf

Here download this, it covers it and a bunch of other ammo arranged by caliber and up through 25-30-40-57mm autocannon rounds with some penetration data. Useful reference. Civilians can't just go buy certain AP ammo even in the US, but law enforcement can and totally does for special circumstances.

For another prime reference point, they give a very new model, it was designed for the USMC EFV, Mk258, tungsten 30mm sabot round as 100mm RHA at 1000m. That's pretty well the baseline for reasonable armor protection on infantry fighting vehicles these days. On the front you can get that protection from 50mm of steel angled at 60 degrees. So that's roughly similar to the protection of the frontal armor of a Sherman or T-34 sized tank from WW2.

These days though you wouldn't just have steel armor. Put a layer of ceramic on fiberglass over it or strips of very high hardness armor and you can physically blunt the incoming round. That lets the steel or aluminum spend more time actually absorbing energy, and the advantage of a superdense tungsten or DU projectile is lessened.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

I would think that if a giant...whatever the fuck this is supposed to be, teleported into being over NYC and started randomly slaughtering people, that the mayor would have the sense to have the National Guard called out there and then. In particular, the 1/69th, who are from NYC?!

[Zixinus]

In particular, the 1/69th, who are from NYC?!

Are they FROM NYC or STATIONED in NYC? Is there a National Guard base in or near NYC?

[U.P. Cinnabar]

1/69th Infantry are stationed in NYC, Long Island, and at Camp Smith, 30 miles from NYC. The regiment's armory is in the city's Flatiron District, and serves as the regiment's headquarters.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

GHETTO EDIT: Also looks like there's a battery of NG artillery(M119 towed 105mm howitzers) stationed in the Bronx as well.

[Zixinus]

That will speed up the military response considerably. The only reason then not to fire would be to avoid civilian casualties.

[Adam Reynolds]

I wonder what the response time of the National Guard would be to a sudden threat? They presumably do have the ability to deploy rather quickly. but it would certainly at least take hours for a serious deployment.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I wonder what the response time of the National Guard would be to a sudden threat? They presumably do have the ability to deploy rather quickly. but it would certainly at least take hours for a serious deployment.

According to this document from the National Guard website, every state has a National Guard Reaction Force, which claims to be able to mobilize a unit of 50-75 personnel within 4-8 hours and a follow-up force of up to 400 personnel within 24-36 hours. Not sure what they would be expected to be equipped with, or whether any of the units at the given NYC bases are part of the "Reaction Force" (or, indeed, how the RF relates to the NG as a whole). But it doesn't seem unreasonable for them to have at least some mobilized presence within a day, with presumably larger forces within 2-3.

How quickly would it take for the Army itself to get involved?

[Sea Skimmer]

Around 20,000 US Army troops are kept on alert for homeland security missions on a less then one days notice timescales, some on hours, but a high proportion of those are engineers, medical and NBC warfare specialists. A monster as dumb as a rat would be easy for engineers to blowup simply by parking a truckload of explosives and herding it into said ambush, but after three or four hours the first Air Force jets would show up with bombs and settle the matter before such a plan could be implemented.

Giant monsters are only a problem if they are like Godzilla, magically immune to even concentrated air and artillery power while also being highly mobile. Slow, dumb, vulnerable and limited to one city just isn't going to be hard to beat. Messy on property damage sure, but not overwhelmingly so and nobody would care how many windows the first Maverick shatters.

Oh also worth giving the Coast Guard some love, they have a major base in NYC and would have .50cal and 25mm cannon around if nothing else which could be realistically dismounted and brought into the streets if need be. Visiting cutters would commonly have 57mm or 3in guns but it'd be rather harder to employ those.

[Tribble]

Since this "dinosaur" is almost certainly going to go down fairly shortly with the only real matter being the number of casualties, my questions are: how does it taste, and should I choose red or white wine?

[Esquire]

Since we're talking about pairings for a floating monster, you'll want to choose a wine with a light body and no legs. Maybe a nice rose, if such a thing can be found?

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Since this "dinosaur" is almost certainly going to go down fairly shortly with the only real matter being the number of casualties, my questions are: how does it taste, and should I choose red or white wine?

Like chicken. Doesn't everything?

[Zixinus]

Since chicken are descended from dinosaurs, that's actually a good guess as any.

[Simon_Jester]

On the contrary, the one thing we know about this critter is that it is NOT a dinosaur.

[Sea Skimmer]

Physics would demand that it be really tough and stringy, so it'd be ineditable without boiling the crap out of it at the least.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Around 20,000 US Army troops are kept on alert for homeland security missions on a less then one days notice timescales, some on hours, but a high proportion of those are engineers, medical and NBC warfare specialists. A monster as dumb as a rat would be easy for engineers to blowup simply by parking a truckload of explosives and herding it into said ambush, but after three or four hours the first Air Force jets would show up with bombs and settle the matter before such a plan could be implemented.

Out of curiosity, any idea what the size/general disposition of the forces that would likely be able to respond to NYC, specifically? I imagine forces assigned to Fort Hamilton and Fort Dix would be the first responders in this case, but I'm not sure what else is immediately nearby. Do places like Picatinny, Watervliet, and Tobyhanna have active complements beyond whatever is directly needed for guard duty?

[Sea Skimmer]

The actual locations of those Homeland Security tasked troops are variable, but they are all alert elements of normal garrisons. The places you named are all R&D and repair facilities, they would not even have US Army troops as guards, we use rent a cops for that kind of security. However given historical precedent of American forces responding to the unexpected the civilian and military employees would probably come swarming out with personal vehicles loaded with whatever the hell was on hand. Nothing says you actually need the tank to make a 120mm gun shoot, just a car battery and insanity ought to do it. Tobyhanna repairs tactical missiles and launchers among other tasks, and could probably scrounge up a few workable anti tank weapons on short notice. A huge ammunition depot also exists in North Jersey, and another about a third of the way west into PA, so that end of life wouldn't be a problem. Also 10mm RHA would be vulnerable to some civilian arms, such as anyone who has M2 AP ammo, which is very common in civilian hands in the US,would be able to inflict damage with an M1 Garand. Plus you'd have to factor in stuff like hey, how many gasoline tanker trucks can we get through traffic (maybe zero lol) to unleash on the monster if it stays underground.

You'd also have the factor of say, Fort Bragg for example has enough planes and troops on hand, at the same base, to bring in battalions on hours notice if all that was required was man portable stuff grabbed from the armory. But so many fast jets are based within unrefueled range of NYC that I can't see it mattering. The main need for a military ground response would be to deal with the disaster aftermath.