Cracked Cracks the Zombie Apocalypse

[MKSheppard]

When the country's in the shitter as far as resources are concerned, if a guy with a rifle can do the job of a tank, go with the rifleman and save the tank for things that can shoot back.

The Abrams has about 10,000~ rounds of stowage capability for the 7.62mm coaxial machine gun officially. The gun is completely under armor; as is the operator. There's also a long range capability associated with the coax mount; since you can use the gun computer and optical sight for long range barriage fire.

Plus, there's the 'drive over zombie' feature inherent in a tank in case you get overrun.

Another thing to point out is, that while all active duty (possibly all reserve too) US Army tanks are 120mm armed models of the Abrams; there are a lot of 105mm armed versions in storage; and those can easily fire a lot of ammunition with wider applicability to a zombie outbreak like actual high explosive rounds, rather than the odd HEAT/HEFRAG hybrid that the 120mm has.

[Shroom Man 777]

Turns out a parody/homage/pisstake by Simon Pegg and his fatty nerd buddy, ala Shaun of the Dead, is a more accurate Zombie Apocalypse scenario than any attempt at SRS BSNSS zombie whatevering - lol who knew am i rite *I'm a smarmy asshole*? It basically ends with the Royal Army coming in, shooting all the deadites, and the epilogue has civilization back to normal and with the undead put in shitty British reality TV shows. Hah.

[DudeGuyMan]

So what are the logistics like in your opinion, Shep? That is to say, once the public/government and their "disbelieve then panic" antics have shit things up to the point that there are millions of zombies and widespread disorder, how would you go about killing them?

In the book it was basically "save heavy weapons for killing secessionists, save fuel for both that and for maintaining refugees, shoot zombies with rifles because they'll just walk up and take it."

[MKSheppard]

I was looking on Amazon, and found an interesting idea:

Mad Scientists in LA are experimenting with forces of nature etc etc. They unleash a HORRER on the world....

...at the same time the "Big One" strikes Los Angeles.

I really did not investigate the book any further than that initial blurb, but it has merit in that you could have a larger disaster divert attention and manpower away and let the zombies grab a foothold long enough to make life serious for whoever before the military comes and wipes them out; instead of every SWAT team in the region dealing with them as an afterthought.

[adam_grif]

In Night of the Living Dead it only lasts for one night before all the Rednecks round up and shoot the zombies and black people.

So it's pretty realistic too.

[Raxmei]

In Night of the Living Dead it only lasts for one night before all the Rednecks round up and shoot the zombies and black people.

So it's pretty realistic too.

And then the sequels roll along. Of course Romero zombies get a number of advantages over Brooks zombies. Brooks zombies are an infectious disease, so you can clear an area and keep it clear as long as you can maintain a good perimeter (impossible for most of World War Z, that was the whole point of that one guy's plan). Romero zombies keep popping up every time someone dies, so the threat won't ever go away permanently the way it did in WWZ. The best the authorities can do is suppress it by keeping watch over the entire occupied area. Dawn of the Dead starts with the police slowly crumbling under the strain. It's an unspecified time since the end of the first movie and the authorities are dealing with the crisis but things are still falling apart. I don't know if this was stated or not, but the zombie apocalypse would have to horribly destructive to the economy and in the Night universe people who die from sickness, starvation, and cold become zombies. If people got their act together it should be possible to get the problem down to a manageable level and keep it there but the point of that series was showing people failing to do so.

It would be more realistic for the Army to start fraying at a different point. Have the Guard go around city to city clearing out the zombies building by building and then moving on because the next town over is screaming for help. Then the first town gets reinfested and everyone's wearing themselves out without any visible progress. They just keep hopping from one heavily infested area to another and eventually loop back to the place they started. Yonkers never happens because we're channeling Iraq here and the enemy doesn't give us a neat massed target like that. If it does happen it's another tactical victory/strategic defeat for the US. The Army kills a couple million zombies but New York is still heavily infested and possibly not worth retaking. Meanwhile the fuel shortage starts getting bad. The war starts with troops riding around in Brads and calling in air strikes over a dozen zombies and that all falls away over the course of time. This makes it more obvious that whatever's passing for strategy isn't working and the most viable plan is to consolidate around a smaller and more defensible perimeter as was done in this book's third act.

Now to make that happen you'd have to have total fail with the quarantines and local security so that reinfection can happen and the way that Brooks zombies spread the problem should be local to start with large areas being completely untouched for months.

[Joe Momma]

And if things weren't shit before, they will be after you obliterate all the cities in a zombie-slaughtering airstrike frenzy.

This brings up another element that probably contributed to the minimal use of WMDs -- the army was focusing on cleaning the zombies out so they could retake places for human use. Blowing them up would have run counter to that. It also might have been even harder to perform the necessary sweep and clears mentioned in the book if the troops had to search through rubble. Indeed, collapsing of weathered structures from lack of maintenance was already an issue.

Also, the large concentrations of zombies were clustered around places where living people had managed to hole up. In addition to artillery/bombing mistakes accidentally killing those people directly, there's also the risk that bombardments would break a hole in the fortifications and allow the zombies to pour into the very places the army was trying to save.

This wouldn't completely eliminate bombardments as a viable tactic, but it would certainly limit their use.

[adam_grif]

And then the sequels roll along. Of course Romero zombies get a number of advantages over Brooks zombies. Brooks zombies are an infectious disease,

In NOTLD it was the meteor's strange radiation, but, correct me if I'm wrong, didn't it get changed to a disease in all subsequent Romero films? I've seen Dawn and Day but it was a long time ago so I can't really remember. They share names but they aren't necessarily the same 'verse.

[Bakustra]

And then the sequels roll along. Of course Romero zombies get a number of advantages over Brooks zombies. Brooks zombies are an infectious disease,

In NOTLD it was the meteor's strange radiation, but, correct me if I'm wrong, didn't it get changed to a disease in all subsequent Romero films? I've seen Dawn and Day but it was a long time ago so I can't really remember. They share names but they aren't necessarily the same 'verse.

No, they all have the meteor as the cause. Humanity was supposed to have been mutated by it to rise from the dead as a zombie once killed (as long as the death didn't damage the body too much).

[Raxmei]

In NOTLD it was the meteor's strange radiation, but, correct me if I'm wrong, didn't it get changed to a disease in all subsequent Romero films? I've seen Dawn and Day but it was a long time ago so I can't really remember. They share names but they aren't necessarily the same 'verse.

The cause is never explained fully in Night, though the meteor was one of the candidates. Three minutes into Dawn of the Dead it is explicitly stated that all dead bodies reanimate. It's also the movie that clarified that bites are invariably fatal but that is still not the only way it happens. I haven't seen Day. I'm pretty sure it worked this way in the much later separate continuity Diary of the Dead.

I took a quick look at the beginning of Dawn of the Dead a minute ago. It starts three weeks into the emregency. The government is starting to force people out of their homes and into more controllable centralised housing.

[DudeGuyMan]

WWZ stuff

Yeah. Ultimately there just wasn't any compelling reason for a battered rump state, awash in refugee manpower but short on production capacity, to fuck around using high-tech armored vehicles to kill enemies that were happy to shuffle out and be slaughtered by grunts with rifles.

Once the US managed to consolidate some territory from which to go on the offensive, it just wasn't that hard to roll the zombies up. Laborious maybe, but there were no big reversals or defeats.

March up to an urban area, make a lot of noise, gun down zombies as they stagger out to the attack for hours on end. City reclaimed more or less untouched. Fuel conserved. Tanks and such free to go kill secessionists who actually have guns.

[chitoryu12]

With zombies, there's not really any logistical need for the machine guns. A good rifleman with a Remington 700 and nice optics can have a 1:1 kill ratio if he takes his shots carefully, rather than the Yonkers tactic of massed automatic firepower (including badly-aimed bursts merely glancing off the skull and failing to penetrate, which was another cause of the morale drop as the zombies appeared invulnerable to the soldiers; one of them is described as freaking out when he thought he was getting headshots and the zombies kept coming).

Use the 7.62mm and 5.56mm rounds that would have gone to armor and infantry machine guns for M21 and M24 sniper rifles and M16s with ACOG sights and give the soldiers shotguns for close-quarters building clearing and self defense. Just about anything more powerful than .22LR will consistently make kills if you take careful aim, so why bother using missiles, bombs, and tank shells that could be used on targets who need that much force? Especially if you're trying not to needlessly damage or destroy infrastructure and urban areas.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

... which the book addresses.

The army basically switches over to semi-auto rifles and their users trained to cap one zombie with one bullet per second. It's mentioned that during the re-taking of the US, while zombies were easily the most consistent threat, they were far from the most dangerous. They were well below armed secessionists, random crazies, feral animals, disease/toxins, weather, abandoned booby-traps and unstable structures as far as danger was concerned.

[chitoryu12]

... which the book addresses.

The army basically switches over to semi-auto rifles and their users trained to cap one zombie with one bullet per second. It's mentioned that during the re-taking of the US, while zombies were easily the most consistent threat, they were far from the most dangerous. They were well below armed secessionists, random crazies, feral animals, disease/toxins, weather, abandoned booby-traps and unstable structures as far as danger was concerned.

I wasn't disputing that. I don't have the book at hand, but I have read it three times all the way through recently. What I was bringing up is that the amount of ammo you can load for a tank's machine guns is irrelevant because it's a waste of resources.

[Raxmei]

... which the book addresses.

The army basically switches over to semi-auto rifles and their users trained to cap one zombie with one bullet per second. It's mentioned that during the re-taking of the US, while zombies were easily the most consistent threat, they were far from the most dangerous. They were well below armed secessionists, random crazies, feral animals, disease/toxins, weather, abandoned booby-traps and unstable structures as far as danger was concerned.

Though realistically speaking I'd expect a good fraction of the army to still be using M16s and simply ordered to pretend it doesn't have a burst setting as we already do. The weapons and billions of rounds of ammunition already exist, as do factories. Any simplified weapon procured for the Hands Across America army would probably be in the same caliber for obvious logistical reasons. The passage describing the new gun was basically the author pimping the M1 rifle as a callback to the ZSG. Like the old Japanese guy describing a dull single bladed shovel that he used as a blunt instrument as similar to a Shaolin spade and that out of shape nerdy Japanese guy decapitating zombies with a found katana it was jarring and IMO detracted from the book.

[[R_H]]

Uh, don't anti-tank rounds send jets of superheated metal towards the target to penetrate the armor? Compression shock waves don't sound like AT weapons to me. Why the hell would you use AT weapons on zombies anyway?

HEAT/shaped charge jets penetrate (mainly) because of their high velocity, not because of the temperature of the jet.

[chitoryu12]

... which the book addresses.

The army basically switches over to semi-auto rifles and their users trained to cap one zombie with one bullet per second. It's mentioned that during the re-taking of the US, while zombies were easily the most consistent threat, they were far from the most dangerous. They were well below armed secessionists, random crazies, feral animals, disease/toxins, weather, abandoned booby-traps and unstable structures as far as danger was concerned.

Though realistically speaking I'd expect a good fraction of the army to still be using M16s and simply ordered to pretend it doesn't have a burst setting as we already do. The weapons and billions of rounds of ammunition already exist, as do factories. Any simplified weapon procured for the Hands Across America army would probably be in the same caliber for obvious logistical reasons. The passage describing the new gun was basically the author pimping the M1 rifle as a callback to the ZSG. Like the old Japanese guy describing a dull single bladed shovel that he used as a blunt instrument as similar to a Shaolin spade and that out of shape nerdy Japanese guy decapitating zombies with a found katana it was jarring and IMO detracted from the book.

I wouldn't be surprised if Z-Day hits in real life and nerdy guys with katanas are the first to go. Personally, I put much more stock in my hatchet and collection of knives than I do my katana, and I actually know how to use it more than the average otaku.

In terms of civilian weapons, I think a Ruger Mini-14 would be a prime candidate for zombie killer of the year.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Oh yeah, the book has plenty of problems. I generally dislike weapons-wank of any sort and sorta breezed over those areas. It's just not enough to completely break it for me.

[chitoryu12]

Weapons wank is always so much worse in the movies than the books, because they have to rely on visuals and someone cocking his M4 and emptying it full auto into a crowd of corpses is going to look better than meticulous, aimed shots or someone taking 10 seconds at long range to make sure his shot is perfectly lined up before firing.

One of the worst parts of becoming a gun enthusiast (as I have recently) is that now you start to see so many more problems in media. The worst part is that so many people BELIEVE Hollywood's interpretation and their zombie survival plans include hijacking military vehicles or raiding bases for ammo. I think in an actual zombie apocalypse casualties would be higher than they should be simply because of all the idiots who try to use Call of Duty as their resource.

[Rossum]

That reminds me: What if the zombies aren't so obviously distinguishable from normal humans?

I suppose it depends on the condition of the corpse at the time of reanimation (or how well they are preserved and behave after death) but wouldn't there be cases of idiots who've gotten their zombie information from the movies accidently shooting uninfected humans by mistake? Or people taking advantage of the chaos to look, murder, or whatever?


Also... what if the zombie virus is airborne or the zombies aren't just stupidly trying to claw at people? Suppose the zombie disease is spread through the air, water, or fluids and instead of having the host organism stupidly run into bullets it just sort of keeps them 'alive' enough for them to spread the disease elsehere? Like the zombies get up, stumble around like they are drunk and just breath heavily all over the place or pee in the water or sneeze all over everyones food. Then they beat up on anyone who tries to attack them or go berzerk when injured.

Basically the 'zombie' is a case of a somewhat normal disease ensuring that its hostsurvives long enough to spread the disease as far as possible. The corpse retains a bit of its own self-preservatin instincts (like eating, drinking, and avoiding stuff that looks dangerous) but isn't intelligent and will go berzerk if its getting damaged enough that it won't be able to spread the disease any longer. The last bit of berzerker frenzy is the virus trying to spread itself as far as possible before the host collpses.

Even if the zombies aren't particularly harmful, they are still spreading a nasty disease and will look scary enough that it freaks out the uninfected population and gets them in a zombie hunting mood (which is dangerous since the corpses normally act like drunken idiots who breath on people). Eventually, the virus might evolve into a more stealthy one that infects people and just stays in their system forever and makes them sneeze alot but only animates them after they die of other causes.

[Simon_Jester]

When the country's in the shitter as far as resources are concerned, if a guy with a rifle can do the job of a tank, go with the rifleman and save the tank for things that can shoot back.

The Abrams has about 10,000~ rounds of stowage capability for the 7.62mm coaxial machine gun officially. The gun is completely under armor; as is the operator. There's also a long range capability associated with the coax mount; since you can use the gun computer and optical sight for long range barriage fire.

Plus, there's the 'drive over zombie' feature inherent in a tank in case you get overrun.

Another thing to point out is, that while all active duty (possibly all reserve too) US Army tanks are 120mm armed models of the Abrams; there are a lot of 105mm armed versions in storage; and those can easily fire a lot of ammunition with wider applicability to a zombie outbreak like actual high explosive rounds, rather than the odd HEAT/HEFRAG hybrid that the 120mm has.

The real question is the per-hour operating costs of the tanks.\

There is a lot to be said for giving your zombie killteams the mobility of motorized vehicles, because that lets them outrun any plausible zombie threat: worst case, you can pull your troops back from the city without fear of the Grey Tide coming after you. But putting them under armor is kind of pointless unless you're planning to get right into the thick of enormous numbers of the things, which is usually unnecessary because you can induce zombies to come chasing after you even when you are stupidly faster than they are.

Against zombie hordes that justify the use of large concentrations of heavy weapons (as in "the entire zombified population of Nashville is coming at us"), an Abrams is probably worth it as a mobile gun-carrier. Against a more dispersed zombie threat, you'd probably get better return on investment with a technical carrying a fire team of infantry and a Carl Gustav or something. They don't have as much firepower and they don't have total invulnerability, but they're a lot cheaper to equip, and the fact that the zombie-to-human casualty ratio is now reduced to 500-to-1 instead of 500-to-0 or whatever really isn't going to make that much of a difference.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

There is a lot to be said for giving your zombie killteams the mobility of motorized vehicles, because that lets them outrun any plausible zombie threat: worst case, you can pull your troops back from the city without fear of the Grey Tide coming after you.

As far as Brook's zombies are concerned, a brisk walk is enough to outrun any plausible zombie threat (unless you're completely surrounded). And if you really really need mobility, a prison bus would fulfill any role a tank could, hold more soldiers, and have worlds' better fuel efficiency to boot... not to mention the fact that a lot more people are qualified to drive it in a pinch.

<snip various zombie ideas>

For the purposes of this thread I think we're dealing with the 'stereotypical' zombie. Slow, shambles, spreads through bites/body fluids, no real intelligence to speak of. The problem is that 'zombie' is like 'vampire' or 'werewolf' in that there is a *lot* of variation under each banner depending on which author/producer/culture/whatever you look at. Maybe some day I'll make a thread attempting to detail just what range zombies can cover from the lower end Brooks zombies to, for example, zombies from 'The Dead' which, among other things, run faster than people, have superhuman strength capable of ripping steel doors off hinges and biting off limbs, don't 'die' unless they're completely dismembered (headshots do no good), have human level intelligence and memories (they're essential the souls of everyone who's gone to Hell pushed back into half-decayed bodies), and are capable of speech, using weapons, driving vehicles and using coordinated tactics.

Hell, originally a 'zombie' was someone who was drugged to the point of mental retardation and extremely suggestible.

[Uncluttered]

nerdy Japanese guy decapitating zombies with a found katana it was jarring and IMO detracted from the book.

Yeah. About that. Um. You see, there is an orange tree in the back yard. A lot of time was spend cutting the bottoms of the oranges off with a katana. First you slice the orange while screaming japanese obscenities, then you grab it and squeeze the juice out into your glass. Drink. AHHHHH.
Sometimes an Author has to leave a little fun in the book.


You might also notice.
Baby Bjorns.
Small Dachshunds.

[loomer]

What the fuck are you on about?

[Shroom Man 777]

As far as Brook's zombies are concerned, a brisk walk is enough to outrun any plausible zombie threat (unless you're completely surrounded).

Then how the hell could these creatures have brought about the end of civilization?

Think about it. If we replaced the word "zombie" with another word that won't arouse people's penises and compel them to stroke their cocks (sorry, I just got off from watching pornoes), would people still rave about them being such a threat? How do some slow-ass stupid shits that spread through biting end up ruining countries and shit?

If you replaced the word "zombie" with "mongoloid" and have the "mongoloids" create more "mongoloid" by biting people, so that people who get bit by these "mongoloids" turn into more "mongoloids", and if I made a movie about Dawn of the Mongoloids or shit, Night of the Drooling Mongoloids, whatever, would people seriously buy into the whole "mongoloid" apocalypse and would we have "mongoloid" survivalists and DudeGuyMan justifying how in my awesome bestseller book, a bunch of cockups allow the "mongoloids" to beat the universe?

Because, shit, I think the only thing that makes "zombies" so "awesome" for these "fans" and other "people" is that the "zombies" are "walking" "corpses" that "walk", and apparently the notion of some dead things rising up and doing whatever gets people off, which might be some weirdo metaphor for necrophilia or something. Would my "mongoloids" have this much popular culture fanbase appeal? Would this TVTrope be as awesome? Would "mongoloids" have as much widespread psychosexual connotations amongst fan bases of dorks as "zombies" have? This will be the ultimate SDN versus, quantify the sex appeal of walking decompositionating corpses with rabies and compare it to the sex appeal of the mentally handicapped. Assuming your face is a spherical mass of iron and is vaporized in between frames. What can we infer from that?

Seriously. If I replaced "zombie" with "mongoloid", no one would wank their dicks off to these randome altarante realty hippotheticel scenareos - they'd think it was fucking stupid, and rightly so! Butt replace "mongoloid" with "dead corpses" and apparently the end of the world/civilization/whatever becomes somehow more plausible, even though dead corpses are no better than "mongoloids" and at least the "mongoloids" are smart enough to have their own special olympics (while zombies are fucking dumber).

What a crock of shit.

Jesus, at least the "mongoloids" would have the disguise of being mentally handicapped whereas walking corpses have no such benefit. Imagine, the "mongoloid" apocalypse begins in a special school, where a "mongoloid" is put in with other retarded children. Then it spreads the infection and they start biting each other and the teachers. Then when the parents come to bring the "mongoloid" children home, they also bite them and shit. Then suddenly the "mongoloids" have risen to take over the world! OH NO!

It will be a Smarmageddon.