Advice requested: builing a army

[Dry]

Hi i'm new here, (been reading as a guest for some time though) And i come seeking advice

I am writing a sci-fi fantasy novel and looking for ways to make the background more detailed.

More to the point, my question is this: What would a army look like that has been fighting a 70year war of survival against the enemy detailed below, with the following aditional parameters.
And with look like I mean things like unit size, weapon choice, etc.

Techlevel is equivalent to our own world with the exeption of powered flight and space exploration wich are non-existant.
Other than the war against the Enemy(tm) there is a three way cold war going on between the surviving superpowers of this world. (so any army must be able to fight its own equivalent so to speak)


Enemy details: The enemy is in essence a continent's worth (Think Eurasia) of Undead that stil retain some rudimentary knowledge on how to operate weapons and equipment. (think Dawn of the Dead zombies with assault rifles)
They originate from a MagiTek doomsday device gone terribly wrong, any sentient being dying in this setting will turn into one of these things within 30hours of dieing.

My own view on the armed forces of the survivors is that of a mostly infantry army fighting a serriously upgunned version of WW1 with massive artillery support, with special units equiped with flamethrowers and such to dispose of any bodies, (friend or foe)

Well, that is my question and i hope to get some of the trademarked (and brutaly honest) opinions of the more military minded people here.
If not, well thanks for reading this far and good night.

Regards
Dry

[Sea Skimmer]

Modern technology with no powered flight doesn't really make sense, unless you only mean 'modern' in a very generalized manner, the last century or so. A modern tank is much more advanced then a WW2 aircraft, and making anything with transistorized electronics in it will be more complicated then making basic aircraft. Not being able to make aircraft would basically have to mean you also can't even make trucks, or more then basic steel artillery pieces. Trucks and tank need internal combustion engines, and the engine is the hard part of being able to build aircraft. Did you also intend not to have rocket or missile weapons? That would also be an issue, rockets being rather easy and even basic missiles can be made to work fairly well without transistors.

If you just meant they still have roughly 1900ish modern technology, and no decent internal combustion engine production, then never mind about what I said above. As a question, can chemical weapons kill the undead or not? If not, can mustard gas still chemically burn them on the skin?

If resources are limited then machine guns are really economical ways of killing people. Mass use of artillery demands a massive industrial base to back it up, even if the shells being fired from somewhat modern styled steel cannon are cast iron and filled with black powder for economy. If they can afford huge masses of actual WW1 artillery with high explosive steel shells and chemical weapons then its hard to see defeating a huge hoard of undead with only rifles as being that hard.

[Ghost Rider]

One thing that would help before the screaming starts is tell us what the economic scenario is. Nothing too detailed but an idea of the level and intesity of trade.

As it stands, it sounds too much like apocalyptic scenario but no real idea of how devastating such a scenario is to any sort of military.

[Razor One]

What follows is my uneducated opinion here. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

Agreeing with Sea Skimmer here, the lack of aircraft with "Modern" tech is a bit of a stretch.

In fact, you really don't even need "Modern" tech to begin with, hot air balloons and basic zeppelins can be made without too much fuss with 19th century technology and the advantages in reconnaissance would definitely make such airships worth the effort.

If the corpses of soldiers and the deceased keep coming back as zombies, that will by default make most military powers highly casualty averse, which in turn would mean that there would be a trend away from massed infantry tactics and a trend towards tank warfare and small squads of highly trained elite troops.

About the enemy... how much of their prior lives do they retain? Clearly they retain enough knowledge to move, fire weapons, presumably reload and keep them in good condition. If they retain enough knowledge about themselves and their prior lives they kind of cease to be Dawn of the Dead style zombies and become more World of Warcraft's Forsaken.

If the war has been going for 70 years, depending on the timeframe, how much progress has been made into researching undeath or the Magitek device that's causing it?

[Dry]

First let me say sorry for the vague opening , i'll give some aditional background information.

The world I depicted was hit by this 'plague' at a time in its history that roughly resembles the napoleonic era, so massed infantry armies with cavalry and artillery support.
The reason for the missing airpower is handwaved with the mention that the survivors just went with that wich they knew and only upgraded existing tech instead of inventing new things.
So field guns become artillery and so forth.
Internal combustion engines do exist and trucks and such are used for transportation, but aircraft and such simply haven't been invented.

The 'plague' has been contained on the continent i mentioned in my opening post and the war at this piont consists of the three surviving superpowers trying to carve up these so called 'Lost lands' all the while trying not to become too commited and leave themselves open to attacks from the other two.

The economy outside the conflict zones resolves mostly arround the constant war effort, i'll admit that i neglected the economical implications other than the fact that i modeled them after the situation at the time of WWII, its even a minor plotpiont that the goverments are in no hurry to 'end' the war just because it keeps the people secondguesing the situation.


The enemy on the other hand retain some semblance of intellect, and also some of their former lives.
So a turned soldier will keep a little bit of his or her instincts and reflexes, i.e. taking cover when shot and such.
As a whole they behave in a way that can be viewed as a Undead third world millitia.
On a further note, the rate of 'turning' is quickend by the proximity of other 'hosts' so someone dieing in the middle of nowhere all by himself will turn in 30hours while a soldier killed while facing a horde of these things wil turn in 30seconds.

Furthermore the 'plague' has affected the day to day lives of the entire planet, all sentients are required by law to wear a bracelet or necklace that upon death emits a loud sound and triggers a alarm and locator signal in the local garrison.
Cities resemble medieval walled settlements and even in the 'civilised' world there is a threat for localized outbreaks of the plague due to accidents and such.
There has been exstensive research into the 'plague' but no real results, i called it magitek because the world the story plays out on is my vision of a world where magic and technology coexist and complement eachother. Its starting point was a desperate act of the fourth superpower (the now infested continent) faced with a civil war, one faction triggerd a untested magical doomsday device for wich there where no countermeasures, a kind of magicly enhanced element that since then has become a intrical part of the makeup of the atmosphere, i.e someone dieing in a vacuum will not turn, but at the point of the story nobody knows that.


Hope this helps, and on another note: As you might have noticed english is not the language i was raised with but i hope i get my point across.
In any case thank you for your replies and you have allready helped me by pionting out some weak spots in my logic. (and that by the way was my point for asking this in the first place)
And let me explain again, the information i asked for here is not integral to the plot wich stands on its own, the reasoning behind this is that my proofreaders told me that some points of the background should be fleshed out more, and my idea was to use the knowlegde i see floating arround these forums to get a different view.

thanks again and have a nice day.
Dry

[Feil]

You're might want massive cultural prejudices against aircraft if you want this to work. Simply saying 'it hasn't been invented' isn't going to fly very far. Like, airplanes are as bad as child abuse. People suffer nervous breakdowns if they get touched by birds.



A modern, or even a WWI-era army is going to murder a Napoleonic army. Their infantry arms have five times the effective range, five times the accuracy, and five times the rate of fire, and machine gun support, not to mention considerably more accurate and lethal artillery. The WWI army can entrench at half their effective range from the Napoleonic army and shell them to death without ever fearing return fire. If we start adding modern technology - even excluding anything aircraft based, including powered human flight, unmanned aerial vehicles, rockets, and missiles - things get even more one-sided. Even if by some bizarre turn of events the zombies manage to make their forces a solid match to a modern army, a modern army can just manufacture a few dozen kilotonne-order nuclear artillery shells, punch their way through the the zombies' manufacturing centers by nuking the front lines once and then just using your mobility advantage (trucks and tracks > horses and infantry), and reduce the cities to ash. A fewscore brave soldiers will get cancer in a few years, but the zombies will run out of ammunition in a month.

Can a person avoid turning into a zombie by shooting himself in the head before he dies? In the heart? What does it take to kill a zombie or keep it from returning from the dead?

Minimum time to transform into a zombie is 30 seconds? Replace your necklace/bracelet with an easily deactivated, easily removed collar with a heartbeat sensor and a 9mm bullet in a disposable mini-barrel. Issue one to every human civilian and soldier. If they stop detecting a heartbeat for more than two seconds, they are programmed to emit a piercing beeping noise for twenty-five seconds, then discharge the bullet. Punish failure to wear your collar with a year of slave labor in support of the war machine.



--

What about a purely Napoleonic conflict? Hell, if you did some research, you could try re-creating the Napoleonic wars except supposing that the French Revolution was actually the outbreak of a zombie plague, and the evil necromancer Napoleon armed the zombie Frenchmen and sent them out to conquer all of Europe.

[Simon_Jester]

Dry, I suggest you sit down and give some hard thought to the tech level. Handwaving away aircraft at any tech level above WWI is really implausible. You can have crude (steam-powered) land vehicles with no airplanes, but you can't have advanced WWII-level ones without making the absence of powered flight utterly ridiculous.

Also, WWI technology is already dangerously high if you want a Gunpowder Age opponent to be a significant threat. Even one considerably more advanced than the Napoleonic Wars.

Exactly what is the opposition supposed to be capable of, anyway?

[adam_grif]

As an aside, why is it ridiculous for them not to be using aircraft? Technologies get discovered at different rates, it's not like "They have tanks" means that they absolutely must have aircraft. Is there something fundamental about airfoil design that means you can't advanced your other techs before you build them? Certainly such a tech base has the capability to build aircraft, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know the nitty gritties of it. It may be as simple as society having given up on the idea of heavy than air flight as a whole, and there aren't any inventive people with lots of free time to invent aircraft since they've been fighing off some grand plague for decades.

I mean shit, tanks themselves didn't get invented until halfway through WW1, even though they are, fundamentally, "put armor and guns on a motorized chassis". Aircraft seem an obvious invention in retrospect, but how much of that is just our 20-20 hindisight?

[Kuroji]

It's entirely possible that they simply can't build engines light enough to propel an aircraft, or perhaps build aircraft without requiring absolutely absurd levels of maintenance that other vehicles on the ground are able to tolerate a little better. If they don't have much of an established industrial base, i.e. they've got the technology but it's an agrarian society, it's possible that they could have a few aircraft and more likely automobiles, but the aircraft are few in number and not much more than a curiosity, and none of the designs are fit for combat. It's a lot easier to throw armor on a truck and add a cannon than it is to whip up the designs for a bomber from scratch, or at least, I would imagine this to be the case.

Zombie outbreaks happening in certain places could also impede this pretty seriously too -- you get a manufacturer who's just come up with a new design and someone has an industrial accident, starts frothing at the mouth after he dies of blood loss and starts eating everyone, and suddenly the place is depopulated and burning to the ground. Or for a notable inventor who's working on something along the lines to have an accident and be zombied himself. Would be interesting to have maybe once, but past that it would end up looking more like a deus ex machina.

[Feil]

Is there something fundamental about airfoil design that means you can't advanced your other techs before you build them?

Quite simply, yes. Any rudimentary scientific analysis of triangular sails, kites, gliders, and any number of naturally occurring airfoils (particularly including the wings of birds) will identify all the principles needed to manufacture primitive aircraft.



Take a few steps back and repeat your own comment about tanks:

Tanks (being defined in this case as a tracked vehicle, capable of traversing trenches, having fully-enclosed armor and at least one gun) were invented less than three years into the first major war in which they were technologically possible and tactically viable.

Furthermore, your 'fundamentally' comment is just plain wrong. 'Armor and guns on a motorized chassis' describes an armored car, the first practical example of which was manufactured in numbers as early as 1902, only six years after the first petroleum powered vehicle to be produced beyond a single prototype.

[Serafina]

Your army goes against zombies? There is a chance that they might actually get turned into zombies?

Give them vests that contains explosives and a biomonitor. If they do not have a heartbeat for, say, a minute, a warning sign will go off (giving a living, intelligent soldier some time to activate an override). A minute later, the whole things blows up.
Also available for decapitation, piercing the heart with shrapnel or going off without warning if the zombies are smart enough.

Now, you might have to worry about morale - the most important thing is that you make damn sure that the thing only goes off when the wearer is really dead. If you can rule out malfunctions, you should be on the good side.
And getting your corpse blown to pieces is definitely preferable to being a corpse who turns on your friends.

And BAM - no more additional zombies for anyone. Anyone who gets turned and subsequently dies is now a smoldering instead of a lumbering carcass.


Of course, any decent army doesn't have to do this. Artillery, tanks, machine guns, autocannons and automatic weapons will make short work out of any zombie army, even if that army has firearms.

[Simon_Jester]

Again, I think we can work with this concept, but we can't have "no airplanes!" in a modern context, and we can't have very modern technology because there's no way for zombies to fight effectively against anything beyond about 1900-level military technology.

As an aside, why is it ridiculous for them not to be using aircraft? Technologies get discovered at different rates, it's not like "They have tanks" means that they absolutely must have aircraft. Is there something fundamental about airfoil design that means you can't advanced your other techs before you build them? Certainly such a tech base has the capability to build aircraft, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know the nitty gritties of it...

I mean shit, tanks themselves didn't get invented until halfway through WW1, even though they are, fundamentally, "put armor and guns on a motorized chassis". Aircraft seem an obvious invention in retrospect, but how much of that is just our 20-20 hindisight?

Tanks put armor and guns on a tracked chassis; the need for that was not seen until 1914. The British started tank research almost immediately after the trench warfare conditions of the Western Front became evident in late autumn 1914, and had the first working models ready by September 1916- less than two years later.

Prototype tanks were made even before the wars, but no one saw any need for them because the technology of the day limited them to the role of siege engines, and they weren't seen as all that helpful until people realized that the next war was going to bog down into a massive siege on the front lines.

Now, it's conceivable for you to have WWI-level techology and no airplanes, or no useful airplanes, if research into aerodynamics has been retarded by ten years or so. That much you can fudge. But to have a modern society (one with technology typical of 1925 or later) without airplanes is increasingly silly the farther into the modern era you get.

Compared to the task of designing a modern automobile or tank, the task of designing an early airplane is trivial. It requires much less knowledge of science and engineering, and much less in the way of advanced material science. It would be like having a civilization that makes razor-sharp metal weapons... but has no concept of making any kind of "armor" and goes into battle naked. Or that builds highly advanced artillery pieces but doesn't use personal firearms for the infantry. It's nonsensical.

It may be as simple as society having given up on the idea of heavy than air flight as a whole, and there aren't any inventive people with lots of free time to invent aircraft since they've been fighing off some grand plague for decades.

The problem is that if they're devoting all resources to arms production, with zero funding for theoretical research into fields like aeronautics... they probably haven't gotten to modern technology at all. Too many advances in 19th century engineering depended in part on pure research into fields like chemistry and electrical engineering. A society that was really devoted that fanatically to total war would advance much more slowly, because improvements in metallurgy and such wouldn't be there.

Your army goes against zombies? There is a chance that they might actually get turned into zombies?

Give them vests that contains explosives and a biomonitor. If they do not have a heartbeat for, say, a minute, a warning sign will go off (giving a living, intelligent soldier some time to activate an override). A minute later, the whole things blows up.

Of course, that isn't really practical at WWI levels of technology.

[Zinegata]

It's probably more plausible that people chose to discontinue using aircraft (rather than nobody inventing it) - either because they weren't cost-efficient against the undead or because fossil fuels needed to power them are in short supply.

If we go with the latter - then perhaps we can make the setting a bit more steampunk? Let's say that while coal is in abundance, oil is in very short supply (presumably the undead have overrun all the major sources). Due to the weight of coal, only large ground vehicles and water vessels can be equipped with a steam engine. So most of the transport is actually done using trains and steamships (following the same pattern as WW1) supported by large trucks. Tanks may be unwieldy land battleships as opposed to vehicles of blitzkrieg.

As for units... the principle fighting unit of the First World War is the Division. It is a largely infantry force consisting of around 12 battalions (1,000 infantry each, with 2 MGs per battalion), and 12 batteries of artillery (6 cannons each). The organization varies slightly per country (Russians had 16 battalions per Division for instance), but this was the principle combat unit of the age that wasn't too small to be crushed like a bug and yet small enough to be parcelled to trouble spots as needed without committing a whole army.

However, with a 70 year war it is highly likely that manpower reserves have been depleted to near breaking point. Certainly, by the end of the First World War most Divisions had been reduced to a mere 9 infantry battalions (down from 12), albeit the artillery component was expanded - sometimes even doubling or more. Your world may have divisions that are even smaller (perhaps 6 battalions), supported by a much larger number of field guns, tanks, and other support weapons.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I'm not sure if this is workable; but perhaps the reason why they have no aircraft is because their planet is more prone to extreme winds or other phenomenon that would down aircraft. Say, a high gravity, slow rotating planet (the latter causing large temperature differences to drive constant high winds).

Or since there is magic in the setting, perhaps they just get slapped out of the sky by irritated air elementals or other magical effects.

[Serafina]

Of course, that isn't really practical at WWI levels of technology.

Make it a timebomb then. Set the timer for, say, 24 hours. If the Zombies are too stupid to rewind it, they'll blow up. Add area effects for maximum FUN.
Less practial, but still potentially usefull if you are actually running into trouble against zombies.

[montypython]

Valkyria Chronicles is an example of a story where the tech level is Inter-War with rudimentary flight, due to greater focus on ground tech rather than aerial technology, so that might be something worth looking at.

[Sea Skimmer]

As an aside, why is it ridiculous for them not to be using aircraft? Technologies get discovered at different rates, it's not like "They have tanks" means that they absolutely must have aircraft. Is there something fundamental about airfoil design that means you can't advanced your other techs before you build them? Certainly such a tech base has the capability to build aircraft, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know the nitty gritties of it. It may be as simple as society having given up on the idea of heavy than air flight as a whole, and there aren't any inventive people with lots of free time to invent aircraft since they've been fighing off some grand plague for decades.

The incentive for better reconnaissance would be overwhelming, because minimizing your own losses would be vital in a total war against the zombies. After all each human power doesn’t just need to worry about the zombies, it has to worry about being left too weak to fend off the other two human powers when the war is over. That human interaction also provides all of the normal rational for planes.

Airfoil design is not the hard part; gliders are at least as old as 1,000A.D. What held planes back was a lack of sufficiently good engines which had to come from the evolution of internal combustion. I’m not suggesting that huge fleets of bombers or fighters have to exist, but by the time you get to 1914 someone is going to have recon planes. Remember the first recon and bombing and anti ship missions all occurred before WW1 in real life. The only thing that was invented in WW1 was the fighter, because it was the first war in which planes or flying craft of any kind met in battle.

I mean shit, tanks themselves didn't get invented until halfway through WW1, even though they are, fundamentally, "put armor and guns on a motorized chassis".

Tanks weren't invented earlier because tracks had too little mobility, and could not have mounted guns heavy enough to defeat fixed fortifications. Armored land vehicles meanwhile date to some time before the US Civil War, when armored wagons and armored rail cars were produced, and quite a few people had armored cars when WW1 broke out. Specialist APCs and mobile armored anti aircraft guns had also already been produced.

But I think you missed something big besides that, mainly that war drives invention in weapons, and it will drive invention in devices to propel weapons like engine technology just as knights bred bigger horses. This story has three human major powers specified, which kind of clearly indicates a fair bit of economic base and government exists. This cold war setting, in which none of them are trying to wipe out the zombies as quickly as they can, would really provide a huge invention to develop new things to gain a decisive advantage. The fact that the cold war can exist and the zombies are not being wiped out as quickly as possible means someone has surplus resources. Aircraft are all the more attractive since zombie aircraft aren’t happening.

Aircraft seem an obvious invention in retrospect, but how much of that is just our 20-20 hindisight?

Aircraft are an obvious invention. Everyone in the world who has ever seen a bird has wondered about why it can fly, and experiments are at least one millenia old. Its just without a good enough engine you never will get anywhere with powered flight. But still balloons and airships were built well before powered flight and were developed aggressively as soon as they could work at all. Some of the earliest creators of powered flight like Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin pushed the idea of using the craft for warfare before they even had it working. Zeppelin got the idea for his airship seeing US Army balloons in the US Civil War, though he didn't build anything for lack of money until after other men had proven the concept. So the idea is obvious and so are the applications. Futurists in the 1870s and 1880s sketched air wars all the time.

More didn't happen before WW1 only for lack of money. Militaries were mostly content to buy just a few new planes a year for tests, because each year’s new aircraft was radically better then the last so why buy many? Just as importantly, cavalry officers dominated almost all armies, and since cavalry was very expensive to feed and equip these officers objected to almost all other spending. That’s why no one had detaching box magazine self loading rifles in 1914. Practical designs had existed for years, but the generals objected to paying a few cents for each magazine. Meanwhile such designs would quickly make massed horse cavalry obsolete, as WW1 did anyway. WW1 also saw planes spammed all over in about a years time.

If internal combustion trucks just didn’t exist, it’d be simple enough to discount aircraft as just not invented yet. But frankly trucks took longer to evolve then aircraft if anything. Most trucks in WW1 for example lacked vital four/all wheel drive systems to allow them to operate off road. They didn’t get to be really good and something like the vehicles we have today until the 1930s. You could have steam trucks, but steam trucks depended on a great deal of technological advancements, many of which are common to those of IC trucks. Tires that aren't solid rubber or wood being one example

Also the job of trucks could clearly be done by horses and railroads, with a few steam road locomotives to move really heavy artillery in places you can't easily lay a spur track. Its just trucks made life a lot easier by having an on/off switch capability you don’t get with a living draft animal or a steam train that needs to raise steam. Aircraft meanwhile provide capabilities nothing else can really do. If anything I would expect more planes then trucks. Trucks are a quite expensive luxury to build and keep going, but planes are vital. Just look at WW2 when the Nazis the biggest and best air forces in the world in 1939, but an army which was almost entirely horse drawn.

[Dry]

Seeing that the main problem seems to be the lack of airtravel, how plausible would it be to mention airplanes in passing but having them as the 'strange new' invention and only being used by the military for recon and artillery spotters and such?
But prohibited by treaty from flying over the populated areas of the main powers (So a form of ban on spy-planes) the world being a very mistrusting xenophobic place and all.

The reason the main powers are each carving up the infected continent was the resources it contained in the first place, the world took a hefty hit to its population so there is enough room to expand in 'safer' locations, but some resources can only be found in those 'Lost lands'

And before anyone asks to post some of this story i'm afraid i can't do that.
First because its roughly 800 pages, in dutch...
Second because i'm only ironing out the final creases and then its of to the publisher.



I must say you have all been very helpfull, thanks and good night.
Dry

[Samuel]

Valkyria Chronicles is an example of a story where the tech level is Inter-War with rudimentary flight, due to greater focus on ground tech rather than aerial technology, so that might be something worth looking at.

I think it was because they were actually technologically backward- they only can run engines with the magic rocks and they make a poor fuel source for a plane (probably too heavy and bulky).

Second because i'm only ironing out the final creases and then its of to the publisher.

Smart man. I think the author's guild (a user group) it would be safe to post, but the rest of the forum is not a good idea if you want to have it published.

[Purple]

Can I just ask the obvious question here?
When someone dies, regardless if he is near zombies or not he eventually turns undead (or has a chance of turning undead). Is that correct?

If so what happens if an airplane falls over a populated area or otherwise over "friendly" territory?

With ground forces you can always keep track of them easy as they will use roads and have each of their moves charted so you can rapidly find them if they go missing and destroy them if they turned.

But what happens when a WW1 era biplane with no radio crashes into a forest near a village in the middle of nowhere? Without at least WW2 level radar and superb coverage you run the risk of opposing superpowers sending over infected pilots to mess up your population by crashing into some desolate area. Or as a less sinister option a pilot simply getting lost and crashing in the middle of nowhere starting an epidemic. First some local hunters start vanishing, than a village or two and all hell breaks loose.

These might very well present reasons for the governments not to fund research into air travel.

[Zinegata]

Seeing that the main problem seems to be the lack of airtravel, how plausible would it be to mention airplanes in passing but having them as the 'strange new' invention and only being used by the military for recon and artillery spotters and such?
But prohibited by treaty from flying over the populated areas of the main powers (So a form of ban on spy-planes) the world being a very mistrusting xenophobic place and all.

The reason the main powers are each carving up the infected continent was the resources it contained in the first place, the world took a hefty hit to its population so there is enough room to expand in 'safer' locations, but some resources can only be found in those 'Lost lands'

I'd like to reiterate again the fuel problem - airplanes need some kind of oil in order to function. It's simply not practical to use other fuels such as coal for planes. Even synthetic oil (manufactured out of coal) tends to be the low octane sort suitable only for lower performance engines.

In a world where fuel oil is rare, it's likely that what little reserves are used mainly to power ground vehicles - which can be used to supply troops once they move away from the railheads and into the Lost Territories.

[Samuel]

Can I just ask the obvious question here?
When someone dies, regardless if he is near zombies or not he eventually turns undead (or has a chance of turning undead). Is that correct?

If so what happens if an airplane falls over a populated area or otherwise over "friendly" territory?

With ground forces you can always keep track of them easy as they will use roads and have each of their moves charted so you can rapidly find them if they go missing and destroy them if they turned.

But what happens when a WW1 era biplane with no radio crashes into a forest near a village in the middle of nowhere? Without at least WW2 level radar and superb coverage you run the risk of opposing superpowers sending over infected pilots to mess up your population by crashing into some desolate area. Or as a less sinister option a pilot simply getting lost and crashing in the middle of nowhere starting an epidemic. First some local hunters start vanishing, than a village or two and all hell breaks loose.

These might very well present reasons for the governments not to fund research into air travel.

I don't think the bodies would be intact enough for that to be a problem. Wouldn't a crash shatter enough bones most of the time to make the resulting zombie useless?

[Simon_Jester]

Seeing that the main problem seems to be the lack of airtravel, how plausible would it be to mention airplanes in passing but having them as the 'strange new' invention and only being used by the military for recon and artillery spotters and such?

That is consistent with a tech level around 1910-15, so it works. Development in aviation will be fairly rapid, as it was historically, mostly driven by the "cold war" rivalry among the human powers and NOT the drive to recolonize the lands held by zombies.

But prohibited by treaty from flying over the populated areas of the main powers (So a form of ban on spy-planes) the world being a very mistrusting xenophobic place and all.

Surely nations would not ban their own aircraft from flying over their own territory, though.

And before anyone asks to post some of this story i'm afraid i can't do that.
First because its roughly 800 pages, in dutch...
Second because i'm only ironing out the final creases and then its of to the publisher.

A wise choice. If you have a core of pre-readers to iron out the creases, that's fine.

If you don't... well, eight hundred pages of Dutch would be a pain to translate, and I don't know if anyone here actually speaks Dutch. If the novel were in English, I'd suggest joining the Writer's Guild private sub-forum, where you could post the story among a small community of fairly dedicated writers. Or at least talking the idea over with some of the people who administrate the Writer's Guild, like RedImperator.

[Purple]

I don't think the bodies would be intact enough for that to be a problem. Wouldn't a crash shatter enough bones most of the time to make the resulting zombie useless?

Airplanes are not like airships. Especially WW1 vintage military planes. They don't drop from the sky like rocks. Imagine if the pilot gets lost over a forest, he runs out of fuel, he crash lands his airplane, alive but wounded. Animals maul him.

In retrospect it might not be enough of a reason to ban airplanes but it could sure spawn some major public opinion crisis.

[Sea Skimmer]

Seeing that the main problem seems to be the lack of airtravel, how plausible would it be to mention airplanes in passing but having them as the 'strange new' invention and only being used by the military for recon and artillery spotters and such?
But prohibited by treaty from flying over the populated areas of the main powers (So a form of ban on spy-planes) the world being a very mistrusting xenophobic place and all.

That would work fine. Early planes in the 1903-1914 period didn't have all that much range anyway, so they would not be able to fly deep over enemy territory. But the ability to look over the next hill or the next mountain while operating from a base which is nothing but a grass field, is just invaluable. Ground based recon is just too easy to block. Airships had more range, but they needed big fixed bases because they need mooring masts and hangers. Otherwise the wind will destroy them easily, as it often did anyway.

I really like the 'Somalia militia virus' zombie idea BTW.