(HALO) Flood VS Battle of Yonkers Defensive Line (WWZ)

[Archinist]

So basically what the Title says. A sensible backstory is provided below.

--

The USA is ready to take the fight directly to the horde, so they prepare their forces for a massive battle! Sure enough, they form a giant indestructible line of AA missiles, AT missiles, radar jammers, trenches and only their finest tanks, equipped with HEAT and sabot rounds, perfect for stopping enormous hordes of people! Thunder is heard, and soon the shambling dead arrive!

There are literally trillions and quadrillions of them, and some people are slightly worried, but they are just paranoid irrational idiots, which is proved correct when the SAM launchers fire into the clouds, causing the sky itself to fall down, crushing trillions of zombies with a single barrage. The radar jammers open up, causing the very atomic makeup of the undeads themselves to dissolve into pure radiation, vapourizing any nearby surviving undeads!

Already half of the horde has been destroyed when the Zombie Tanks arrive. They are made up of rotting flesh and tentacles, and some people are frightened by this show of force, but this is baseless when the TOW launchers, javelins and AFVs open fire, annihilating every Zombie Tank in existence!

Now there are only a few million undeads remaining, but everyone has run out of bullets and energy! Oh noes! Fortunately, the mere sight of advanced tactics and their offspring, such as trenches, foxholes and covering barricades causes the zombies to become horrified from the sheer tactical genius of their enemy and the undeads survivors all commit suicide by bashing their heads against each other, creating the first armed conflict in which the U.S.A suffered exactly zero losses or even injuries!

But that golden perfect status is quickly lost as a single soldier accidentally wanders into a locked garage with something humming inside and is found dead from unknown causes a few hours later, actually really literally microseconds before the war is officially declared ended.

--

Fortunately for America, its chance for a casualty-free war is renewed when a lonely Q accidentally falls onto the battlefield when a space whale coughed him up. Q is curious about the battlefield and wonders what would have happened if the undeads were actually Flood forms.

He waves his hands around in excitement as a Covenant CCS-class battlecruiser appears in the sky, with strange fungi growing on it and crashes down, some 5000 meters away from the Yonkers defensive line which has for some wacky reason magically reformed itself!? Everything seems to stand still for a few seconds before Q snaps his fingers and vanishes, in which the battle begins!

Round 1: The military are not aware they are fighting the Flood.

Round 2: Opposite of R1

[Tribble]

"sensible backstory" indeed...

May you please clearly explain, and without the backstory:

Number / types of Flood, and whether or not they are being led by a Gravemind - the state of the ladder makes a particularly big difference, as the more intelligent the Flood gets, the more they are able to use tactics / equipment.

Number of troops / type of equipment available for the humans, and what tactics they will be using

Terrain, defensive encampments and other obstacles

I'm not particularly interested in what happened to the WWZ Zombies and Q's antics, seeing as that's not what the scenario is about.

[Vendetta]

Number of troops / type of equipment available for the humans, and what tactics they will be using

If this is the defensive line from WWZ it's basically a couple of modern US infantry brigades with whatever organic vehicle support plus some armour and artillery support, in dug-in positions.

Also magically their guns and artillery are all replaced with nerf versions because WWZ wanted the zombies to win.

If we assume their guns and equipment work as they would in the real world not in the book, and the Flood are at their most basic, then it comes down to whether they know to shoot the infection forms or not and whether any infectors go to ground.

[Sea Skimmer]

The WWZ Yonkers like would probably fail against the Flood, since somehow its rocket launchers were less effective then 'exploding car gas tanks' and the Flood generate at least some useful close range suppressive fire, and would have some random ass Covenant weapons. Which means they'd have some grenade launcher like stuff and all. Against a more or less improvised defense that mightlet them break through various sectors, and the Flood would be dangerous inside a position.

The line described here though would easily hold as it's indicated to be much stronger and better organized, while the ship in question is IIRC around 1 mile long, so it'd hold a damn lot of Flood, but not similar to the population of NYC at all. A 5km gap is enough distance, and time, to call in MLRS fire and even in a dense area once that starts firing its probably going to kill half the flood short of the main line of resistance on it's own. Soviet troops from nowhere aka Red Dawn and World In Conflict would be way more dangerous.

[The Vortex Empire]

Question is whether or not we can sterilize the area of flood spores, or flood infestations will just keep popping up forever after.

[Archinist]

The flood are controlled by a small, immature Gravemind which is well-experienced in commanding his troops against other forces.

The Flood are not stupid enough to pile out of their spaceship and stand shoulder to shoulder in a big open area to watch the artillery shells rain down on them, and I highly doubt even modern nuclear warheads could penetrate the hull of a CCS-class cruiser, considering it takes a MAC round to blast through unshielded armor, which is significantly more effective against armour than a modern nuke.

The Flood spores should be a serious problem, as they spread many kilometers through the air and can infect people if they breath them in. This means that the entirety of the Yonkers population (there were many people to watch the army kick ass) and turn them into hundreds of thousands of combat forms. Unfortunately, the military were so impossibly effective in the Yonkers battle that all the zombies were literally reduced into nothingness.