Cracked Cracks the Zombie Apocalypse

[MKSheppard]

Sheppard said that Brooks had the Romans figure out how to fight zombies, but 21st century man could not. I was pointing out that this was simply wrong; in WWZ, when 21st century man finally pulls its head out its ass and decides to actually deal with the zombies, it deals with the zombies. Rather easily too. I don't believe they suffer any casualties to their rifle formations.

So Brooks solution to the Zombie horde is for everyone to make like it's either the ancient world or the Napoleonic era with box formations and staggered shifts to prevent zombies from overrunning military groups at night when they're sleeping.

Hey genius; here's away to do that, and not require 500 men in four ranks like it's fucking Waterloo again and zombie napoleon is coming to bite your brains:

Others have mentioned that AFVs provide mobile instant protection boxes earlier in this thread; a platoon of vehicles provides that capability for only 12-20 men depending on how many men are in your crews.

Also, we didn't need Brooks going on and on and on about how the military fucked up Yonkers and other stuff due to gizmos and gadgetry......and then going on to create that same gizmogadgetry he despises later on:

The Standard Infantry Rifle.

You could drag it through the mud, leave it in the sand, you could drop it in saltwater and let it sit there for days. No matter what you did to this baby, it just wouldn’t let you down. The only bells and whistles it had was a conversion kit of extra parts, furniture, and additional barrels of different lengths. You could go long-range sniper, midrange rifle, or close-combat carbine, all in the same hour, and without reaching farther than your ruck.

....

Our staple ammo was the NATO 5.56 “Cherry PIE.” PIE stands for pyrotechnically initiated explosive. Outstanding design. It would shatter on entry into Zack’s skull and fragments would fry its brain. No risk of spreading infected gray matter, and no need for wasteful bonfires.

*fapfapfapfapfap*

Of course he later talks about how they use 'sandlers' in his civil war style firing lines:

The Sandlers ran up and down the line collecting empty clips, recharging them from crated ammo, and then passing them out to anyone who signaled

Right, you know....because...semi automatic belt fed weapons don't exist?

There's a huge market for this in the US, because people can't buy a Class III belt fed machine gun -- that would cost them $20-40 grand. But a semi auto replica? That's cheap.

So just order some semi auto machine guns and have the unit armorers give them scopes, like Carlos Hathcock rigged up for his in Vietnam:

Possibly Hathcock's M2HB

Hathcock was able with his jerry rigged scoped M2, to kill at 2280 meters; but your average joe will probably do about 1400 meters.

It kind of helps that your opponent is moving slowly towards you (reducing deflection), so even an inexperienced shooter will be able to score long range kills, and unlike a purpose built sniper rifle; you won't need to keep reloading the weapon; you can just have a huge box next to your machine gun with a hundred rounds of belted .50 BMG.

So let's say we start shooting when the Zomboids come within range at 1500m. Given the average human walks at 1.5 m/sec; we'll say a zombie can handle 0.7 m/sec.

We'll assume that we have a "danger close" zone of 150 meters (about 1.5 football field lengths) upon which you stop shooting and retreat.

That gives the zombie 1,350m to cover, and at 0.7 m/sec, they'll cover it in 1,928 seconds.

At about one shot every 3.5 seconds (hey, these will not be Carlos Hathcocks), you'll kill 550 zombies.

What then?

Because we're not stupid, we've just simply mounted our scoped .50 MGs onto Humvees. So we just have the gunner drop down into the Humvee from the machine gun mount, slide the mount plate over the gun open gun ring, lock it into place; and your assistant gunner drives the humvee down the road to another shooting spot.

Of course, there may be problems like the mount hatch doesn't lock into place right; or one of the doors doesn't lock up tight...but that's why I specified a 150m danger zone; you'll have 3 minutes to fix that problem safely.

You then open up the mount again after you've arrived at the new location and repeat as necessary until you've killed thousands upon thousands of zombies for that day.

If by some random chance, you get overrun by zombies; you can just lock the doors and secure the mount plate and wait for rescue...because the vehicle has also been provisioned with plenty of MREs and water, along with a backup radio and batteries.

Oh, and because you're using a machine gun, you have a last ditch defense against an onrushing zombie hoard, you can just go cyclic.

Simple. Cheap, and efficient.

Oh. And just about every US Army Armory/National Guard Depot, etc has a bunch of Humvees sitting around. Even small bases like Fort Meade have a ton on base.

Of course, if you are facing zombie hordes a bit more powerful than scattered zombies, you can swap out the scoped M2HB with a scoped Mk 19 grenade launcher and a laminated card for the newb gunner for the proper elevation settings for the scope.

[MKSheppard]

Simon, hope you don't mind if I snip your post:

Yes. On the other hand, you are now a soldier in the U.S. Army... with the unit cohesion of a bucket of warm spit. You'll wind up needing a lot of foot soldiers just to corset the Unorganized Militia.

...

It's the logistics of keeping the population alive, safe, and out of the way while this is done that presents you with a problem.

The CIA world fact book has the US population pyramid having about 67% of the population being age 15-64. We'll drop that down to 50% to account for squish, people who are bedridden, totally UNSAT people...etc.

So with a US population of 200 million (we'll assume 100m have fallen to the Zombie hoard for this calculation), we'd have 50 million people available for the unorganized milita as shooters.

People will still need medical attention, food must be distributed, infrastructure must be run, all this will cut into our available numbers; so lets call it 35 million who can devote a decent amount of time to anti-zombie measures.

One of the first things that would happen logically with an activation of the Unorganized Milita is that gun laws go out the door; enabling the arming of significant fractions of the population.

The government would likely just go to gunstores, say "here's x million for your inventory's worth; we'll distribute the guns through police stations." to prevent widespread looting and fighting for guns; and also to provide a stockpile to arm the Unorganized Milita auxilary of the US Army.

Basically, it's organized around doing one day a week (or less) taking your turn guarding a school, acting as on call QRF.

The milita members wouldn't be tasked with going to another city to put down an outbreak, or being sent to Europe to kill zombie germanoids while the zombie germanoids shell you with artillery and fire machine guns at you.

Basically, a lot of the stressors that cause green troops to panic, drop their weapons, fire randomly, massacre civilians, etc are gone if you just have these newly minted US Army Auxilaries stay in their hometowns as mobile zombie protection.

"Quick, there are zombies at the 7-11!"

"...those bastards...they won't take my slurpee from my cold dead hands."

They're certainly not going to be useful in clearing a high rise building full of zombies...but they can act as perimeter guards and contain the outbreak until the military can arrive to torch the building or clear it.

Other tasks they can do are stand on a street corner with a rifle, ride shotgun in a truck in front of a food convoy, etc.

[Joe Momma]

If you think that losing most of the worlds population, infrastructure, knowledge, etc. constitutes a victory because humanity survived, then all power to you.

Where are you getting that from? At most half of the population was last and the infrastructure and knowledge lost was not nearly that extensive. Even in the overrun areas vital infrastructure was protected and maintained by reserve units until the military was able to retake that territory. There are also many civilian enclaves in that territory that likewise made it through intact.

(I do have to admit that when reading these partial-collapse-of society types of stories I always wonder if I'd be lucky enough to have the info about my remaining student loans "tragically" lost.)

industrial civilization was probably (or should be) set back a hundred years or so.

But it wasn't. By the end of the war civilian space flights were being launched, energy-independent buildings were benefitting from more efficient technology, the army was experimenting with particle-beam weapons, etc. Certainly, luxury items such as DVD players and sports cars were not in as much supply as before, but that hardly equates with being reduced to an early 1900s industrial base.

Yeah, instead most of the population left has useless skills, is traumatized and depressed to no end, and now have to live with a standard of living that is more comparable to a third world country.

The situations you describe do occur during the darkest parts of the war, but they were addressed and corrected before well before hostilities ended and certainly aren't a general issue in post-war life. There's an entire chapter devoted to the jobs training programs that made sure everyone had useful skills even if they didn't before, and another chapter discusses how propaganda was used to restore public spirit. The whole point of retaking the lost territories was to combat the trauma and depression more than anything else, which seemed to work very well given the attitudes of the people interviewed in the book. The standard of living in general is by all appearances quite good if not as luxurious as before in some respects.

Should it have been a curbstomp? Sure, but the concept of winning doesn't deal with what 'should' be, merely what 'is', and in WWZ, the story is about people barely scraping victory against the zombies and retaking the world, thus they won.

It's worth noting that they'd won even before retaking the world. The situation had stabilized and it was generally agreed that all humanity needed to do was wait for the zombies to rot away on their own and then move back into the abandoned locations. Retaking the lost territory immediately was pushed for restoring the morale of humanity as a whole, not because it was necessary for ending the zombie menace.

We're supposed to accept that only because the US supposedly lost most of its military infrastructure and thus has to reserve its high end goods for other threats as opposed to zombies.

It was presented as more of an economic measure than anything else, with resources such as jet fighters being mothballed in favor for more cost-effective weapons (though other posts in this thread have pointed out that said reasoning has some flaws itself).

Somebody marketed a fradulent vaccine? And nobody notices until its too late? It reads more like a conspiracy theory than satire.

The vaccine wasn't entirely fraudulent. It was an effective rabies vaccine, and a fair number of people believed that the plague was something analogous, so it was re-marketed. This was assisted by a push from government officials who either owned stock in the pharmaceutical company or hoped that making the vaccine available would curb panic, as well as testimonies by people who mistakenly thought the vaccine had saved them from infection. Even then, belief in its efficacy was very short-lived, only lasting from the time the plague first began to hit the news until the zombie horded started emerging in force.

And the world ecosystem/environment is screwed after the war, meaning that we're effectively seeing a global meltdown of agriculture and the environment decades later?

There's no evidence that the consequences will be that dire. There was considerable additional pollution during the war years that have affected the environment, but the much lower population will lead to lower pollution going forward. The introduction of more energy-efficient technologies and practices mentioned in the book to ameliorate rationing will also help. It seems like a bit of a leap to assume a global meltdown of agriculture would ultimately occur.

Just tell people to lock their fucking doors and then hide in the fucking attic or similar if they still aren't happy with their security then have the police/military cruise the streets killing everything else.

This actually brings up an interesting plot hole in WWZ: How exactly do the zombie hordes arise? At first, things work out pretty much as you describe. There are some notable outbreaks but they're all put down pretty quickly, enough so that even people actually present for them don't necessarily see the zombies themselves. Hell, even the uneducated villagers in "New Dachang" are able to halt the spread of the plague by having the common sense to isolate the infected until they can get professional help.

Then there's the Great Denial and the Great Panic where somehow things go from small, easily quashed outbreaks to "holyshitzombieseverywhere!"

[D.Turtle]

Where are you getting that from? At most half of the population was last and the infrastructure and knowledge lost was not nearly that extensive. Even in the overrun areas vital infrastructure was protected and maintained by reserve units until the military was able to retake that territory. There are also many civilian enclaves in that territory that likewise made it through intact.

(I do have to admit that when reading these partial-collapse-of society types of stories I always wonder if I'd be lucky enough to have the info about my remaining student loans "tragically" lost.)

At the very least a very large amount of people died, I don't know if there are ever any hard figures mentioned in the book. However, large parts of China were overrun, most of Japan was overrun, Germany was overrun (don't know about the rest of Europe), everything east of the Rockies in the US was overrun (yes, there were some enclaves, but they won't alter the amount of dead to a significant degree).

I don't know where you got the idea that vital infrastructure was protected by reserve units. Its a large part of the book that everybody had to pull back their military a large way in order to organize before the zombie horde reaches them. Organized military resistance beyond that point fell apart or was abandoned (except for some sanctuaries/enclaves).

Frankly, your comment about student loans - even if tongue-in-cheek - shows that you completely fail to realize the amount of devastation that occurred or would (should) have resulted from the actions taken. Even the author fails to realize short-tem, mid-tem, and long-term consequences of the actions taken.

But it wasn't. By the end of the war civilian space flights were being launched, energy-independent buildings were benefitting from more efficient technology, the army was experimenting with particle-beam weapons, etc. Certainly, luxury items such as DVD players and sports cars were not in as much supply as before, but that hardly equates with being reduced to an early 1900s industrial base.

This just shows that the author has no idea what goes into keeping modern civilization running, or how vulnerable it is too shocks. Look at New Orleans post-Katrina, for the effects of a one-time shock. the Zombie Apocalypse - as depicted - would have results a lot worse.

The situations you describe do occur during the darkest parts of the war, but they were addressed and corrected before well before hostilities ended and certainly aren't a general issue in post-war life. There's an entire chapter devoted to the jobs training programs that made sure everyone had useful skills even if they didn't before, and another chapter discusses how propaganda was used to restore public spirit. The whole point of retaking the lost territories was to combat the trauma and depression more than anything else, which seemed to work very well given the attitudes of the people interviewed in the book. The standard of living in general is by all appearances quite good if not as luxurious as before in some respects.

Yes, the author handwaves these problems away (seriously, movies curing death-inducing - not suicides, but literally dying in your sleep - depressions?). People simply and gladly accepting (after the movies) that they now lived in a society in which they had lost most of their amenities. A society that was completely dominated by skilled workers, with the service industry completely eliminated (2/3 of the surviving population supposedly had no useful skills).

The author might handwave all these problems away, but any sane person realizes that the problems aren't as easy to solve as the author makes it seem. Just as an example, if you are somewhat depressed over losing a loved one, or even only a girlfriend/boyfriend, how long does it take people to recover? And he has people recover from something several orders of magnitude worse just because of some movies ...

The consequences of the actions and situation that occurred in the book, are simply completely implausible.

[Thanas]

Yeah, I am still wondering how they overrun Europe. It is full of natural defenses and chokepoints, has a far greater number of military reservists than the USA and much smaller logistics than the USA does. Heck, Italy alone should be a mass graveyard for the Zombies, as should be the Balkans. That is not to mention how the heck they ever got there - overrunning Turkey is very hard and then you got to cross the Bosporus, which should be impossible...

[D.Turtle]

The way to make a Zombie apocalypse believable is to do what somebody (can't remember who) suggested might have happened in the Walking Dead: A killer-flu wipes out a very large part of humanity, and then all the dead start rising as zombies. That way you immediately have large swarms of zombies, already overstretched government forces unprepared for the new threat, an already collapsed society, infrastructure, etc.

An exponential growth of zombies however is simply impossible (at least for standard zombies), as they die way too easily.

[Joe Momma]

I don't know where you got the idea that vital infrastructure was protected by reserve units. Its a large part of the book that everybody had to pull back their military a large way in order to organize before the zombie horde reaches them. Organized military resistance beyond that point fell apart or was abandoned (except for some sanctuaries/enclaves).

Because it's specifically mentioned repeatedly, including the use of major bases in the lost territories still being used as air traffic hubs. More examples were already noted previously.

Frankly, your comment about student loans - even if tongue-in-cheek - shows that you completely fail to realize the amount of devastation that occurred or would (should) have resulted from the actions taken.

I see where the disconnect is here. I misread you as saying these were the results being depicted in the book, which was what I disagreed with given the examples previously stated. I do agree with the idea that the losses suffered should have fucked up things more than were shown in WWZ.

That aspect falls into Stavro's description of it as a fantasy as much as anything else: A bunch of shuffling cannibalistic idiots are somehow able to swarm the entire world, but it all comes out fine in the end.