I found this one. "Would Godzilla be an “Act of God?” "
Originally posted by ivn1188:
“thermal sights and accurate coax fire out to a thousand yards. . .”
They’re dead. The thermal sites wouldn’t work.
Remind me again: who’s in charge of Mogadishu these days? And has been since 1994? Zombies are even more negligent of casualties.
Zombie aliens. 
Shoot all you want, Tex. You got enough bullets for the entire, supernaturaly resilient population of the country ?
See, the big problem with zombies is that they don’t stop. They don’t rout. They don’t flee. Even a human wave, banzai-charge kind of suicidal assault will stop and retreat when faced with moderate casualties (relatively speaking). Battles are hardly ever fought down to the last man. But they are definitely fought to the very last charred bit of zombie still crawling around.
So, yeah, sure, you’d start at a 1000 to 1 casualty rate. But when the last mag. goes “click”, and no supply or reinforcement’s coming because every base in the country is facing the same situation and they just won’t stop… things start getting interesting
That thread contained my all-time favorite disclaimer from any SD thread:
Quoth pravnik:
I’m pretty sure you’re talking about Zombie Squad. It’s one of my other haunts, so I’m pretty certain that’s what you’re talking about.
This is very definitely true, since it’s been demonstrated twice now that when anarchists organize in a formal army structure, they fight like an army ten times their size. In both Ukraine and Spain, untrained, poorly-equipped, and unsupplied anarchists defeated much larger, professionally-trained and well-supplied military forces many times their own size. In Ukraine, for example, Nestor Makhno’s anarchist army, the Makhnovshchina, drove 600,000 German soldiers out with an army which was never larger than 50,000 and had no arms or supplies other than what they could capture from the enemy.
The reason for this is that in even the bloodiest of battles, there are rarely more than 20% or so losses to either side. This is because each side fights until the officers are dead, at which point the enlisted men retreat or surrender. An anarchist army never retreats and never surrenders. Each soldier is there of her or his own free will, and any command structure is elected by the soldiers themselves. If an officer is killed, anyone can take her or his place. To defeat an anarchist army, it is necessary to kill every single last individual, down to the last bitter retaliatory bullet.
With zombies you’re going to facing the same situation. They never break. Their morale never fails. You can’t kill their officers. They won’t surrender. And they remain utterly lethal until every single last one is destroyed. And the zombies don’t need to kill the whole army, they only need to kill the officers and the rest will rout.
But, here’s the problem: Unless you have some magical power animating the zombies, you’re going against the maximum physical resiliancy of a human. And the problem with “zombies everywhere” is just that there aren’t that many people/fresh bodies to turn and a zombie horde is almost by definition unorganized. But even assuming a (low) rate of 1000 to 1, that means that a few hundred troops could exterminate a small city worth of zombies. Chicago’s 2.8 million would only require 2800 troops or so – not a small unit, but nothing stretching the capabilities of our current military. Adding in assets like air support, artillery, fences, etc makes the job even easier.
Of course, this implies a 28 days later type scenario. You want to add in some sort of magical BS, then it’s an unsolvable problem, because you can magically make however many and however tough zombies you want, or make them reconstitute themselves, or make them shoot fireballs out their asses. In that case all bets are off, but that’s a boring scenario.
Incorrect. Zombies, being moving objects, will be expending some energy and thus be slightly warmer than the environment. Even if not, ambient temperature objects are clearly visible through thermal sights, because of the different albedos/thermal capacity of the various materials that they are made of. Thermals aren’t like those crazy colored cameras you see on TV; think more like the FLIR of a police chopper on one of those Sherriff John Bunnell shows except better.
The solution is simple: Our fighting men and women need to be equipped with the magical bullshit weapons they need to survive and win on the battlefield! We must not allow a bullshit gap!:mad:
Lines like this is why I’m still here.
Seriously :rolleyes:, I would think that the first time Grandma tried to [del]gnaw[/del] gum off little Timmy’s face, people would quickly get wise to the idea that Granny really needs a lead-induced labotomy.
I don’t think a 1000 to 1 kill rate is realistic in a street by street, house by house search and destroy operation over such a large area with tons of hidey holes, sewer lines, subway tunnels etc…, especially if there’s any concern about survivors to rescue (hence a “don’t shoot on sight” directive). Blue-on-blue incidents alone would tank it.
A quick, Wikipedia tally puts the total fighting force of the US at 3-4 million men, all branches combined. Of course, that includes desk jockeys, weathermen, submarine cooks and chiefs-of-staff, all kinds of people who wouldn’t know a defensive perimeter from a garter belt. And, of course again, most of those are deployed overseas.
One the other hand, the population of the US is 300 million. A hundred to one kill tally for everyone, no mistakes allowed is a difficult proposition (esp. since every dead soldier adds one to the zombie crowd)
Then there’s the matter of *disposing *of those 100 re-dead zombies a man, without polluting the soil, contaminating the water table or just staging every epidemic known to man.
And finally, there’s the question of the *point *of it all : assuming those 4 million guys survive and save, say 10 million civilians… would they keep the trains running ? The power and water facilities active ? Do G.I.s know how to grow food, operate oil drills, manufacture medical drugs and equipment etc… ? How would they simply keep the US from crumbling to dust everywhere outside their designated compounds ?
Ive seen you have either been playing too much Resident Evil or Left 4 Dead. Real Zombies are mindless creatures, they dont really think much less attack.
It’s more than reasonable, it seems unavoidable. I’m assuming we are dealing with classic zombies here, so your zombies are brainless, they have no tactics, no ability to seek shelter, no ability to hide. When they see a target they will do nothing but move towards it as rapidly as in a straight line possible.
To give a simple illustration of how the military or a few clever civilians could use this to advantage, you simply have to take out a ~7’ section in the middle of a bridge, seal off one end of the bridge with barricades and stand on that side of the gap shouting. Any zombie will move towards you until it reaches the hole. It will then stand there and let you dispatch it. And you can never, ever be overwhelmed by numbers because once a crowd builds up at the back the will push those at the front through the hole, where they will be swept out to sea or at least several miles downstream. A team with a ballista and a harpoon on a rope could sit here forever killing zombies at their leisure with no expenditure of ammo and no risk to their own life. If they want to leave they need only climb down a ladder to a waiting boat, and return the following morning via the same route, refreshed and ready to eliminate more corpses.
If I were a military commander I’d set up a fortified location with high visibility and fences that funnel the zombie hordes into a pitfall traps that lead to a woodchipper or into rotating knives set at head height. Not difficult for an engineer, and the zombies would be destroying themselves day and night for free. Set up a few of these in the heart of a city and you could destroy tens of thousands of zombies every hour with zero casualties and zero ammunition. Only when the hordes had been reduced to managable numbers would even consider a house to house search.
It’s as ivn1188 says, the zombies’ lack of tactics and fear are the very problem that prevents them from ever being a credible threat to team of well organised humans.
Not a serious problem most places. You can simply dispose of the into the same body of water where you dispose of your sewage. A modern city dumps something like 5% of its human biomass into the sewage system every day anyway, so you’d have a short, down stream problem at worst. Maybe not environmentally sound but not an insurmountable medical problem.
Alternatively a D12 dozer could dig a hole big enough to bury the population of New York in just a few days.
Well that’s another debate, and one we’ve had multiple times.
Essentially you wouldn’t bother trying to maintain the whole USA. You’d occupy one approximately self-sufficient area at high densities and maintain that with a few resources colonies for essential imports and re-colonise from there. Bare in mind that Australia was fully self-sufficient at 1960 technology levels with a population of 10 million people. NZ is largely self sufficient today with a population of just 5 million. So a population of 15 million with access to the resources of the whole USA would have no trouble at all maintaining 20th century technology levels and prospering.
Assuming zombies remained a long-term problem you would locate somewhere like Florida or New Zealand that could support your population and be easily isolated. You would scour that area, then fence it off across the peninsula (for Florida). You maintain forts around any mine colonies and so forth that may be needed. As resources allow you would make sorties into other areas to remove the zombie threat. Even assuming your zombies are immortal you would eventually eliminate them even from a large continent.
Why go exterminate zombies? You set up refugee centers and safe zones, and then you wait for them to starve out and die. Friendly fire? If these zombies were voracious killing machines, why would there be survivors? If there are surviviors, then the zombies can’t be all that terrible. If you just mean friendly fire as in army shooting army, well, we managed ok in WWII in house-to-house fighting against smart Germans with some of the best weapons on the planet. Shambling retards? Not so much.
As for keeping civilization from crumbling, the other alternative is… ? Giving up?
ETA: On edit, what Blake said.
Does the DoD have a plan in the event Superman becomes a zombie?
No, but you can be sure Batman does.
No. Superman no become Zombie. Superman zombie be Bizzaro
I would bet any amount of money you care to wager that the Pentagon pays a crack team of sorcerers, witches, and exorcists to stand by just in case someone stages a supernatural attack against the State. Just as when the Soviets began researching psychic phenomena and the US followed suit, it doesn’t matter whether or not anyone thinks it’s real; they can’t afford to take the chance it might be.
Actually, there’s an even better example. While orgone theory is clearly bunk, it’s well-documented that the US government treated it like it was real, using covert ops and harassment against poor Wilhelm Reich, whose only crime was being gently dotty (and threatening the hegemony of the oil industry with make-believe orgasm power).
Why, all that needs to be done is;
[ol]
[li]Train each soldier to lift at least an average human being (in teams if necessary)[/li][li]Restructure the government, so that we have more politicians from [political party you don’t like]. Re-designate all government buildings as “armories” and assign them a quartermaster.[/li][li]Ensure each politician has a speech on hand about [subject you consider controversial].[/li][li]When the zombies appear, have the soldiers issued a politician from a nearby armory.[/li][li]The soldiers need only point the politicians at the undead and request their speeches be read.[/li][li]Let loose the magical BS of war![/li][/ol]