Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXV

[KiwiQuest]

Regarding the zombie apocalypse, it would require some equipment and munition changes, but I am fairly certain the military could adapt to it.

A lot of damage from artillery and mortars comes from shrapnel and not the actual explosion, because it’s the most efficient when it comes to regular warfare, but changing the ratio would not be particularly difficult. Not to mention that – to a person/zombie standing upright – the shrapnel damage is not insignificant (even if the only meaningful damage is completely disabling a limb or head trauma). However, delivering shrapnel is much more efficient in terms of grenade size, so I think we’d see a shift towards larger caliber artillery.
Bear in mind that as we speak, more effective types of explosives are being researched, partially driven by the need(/wish) to deliver them by drones. While they are more expensive, they are also expected to deliver up to 10 times the power/volume. This research could potentially become much more relevant in the zombie scenario, and it would radically increase the effectiveness of any indirect weapon system.

Thermobaric weaponry (fuel-air explosives) would probably work very well, as they deliver a larger shock wave than normal munitions. While the zombies would be indifferent to the rarefaction (creation of a vacuum which ruptures the lungs), the high temperatures and burning could potentially be significant as well.

IEDs and similar would also prove very effective if zombies could be herded or lured into appropriate areas. The real limit to explosive force is usually in the delivery method – you have to somehow propel it towards the target, and/or hide where you place from the enemy. With zombies neither is an issue, so the only limit to the size of your IED is the time available for digging and the amount of explosives at hand.

Finally, the zombies lack a real answer to even lightly armoured, tracked vehicles. I imagine existing vehicles could be adapted to simply run over a large amount of zombies with little to no threat to themselves – even if they’re stuck, they can realistically stay holed up inside the vehicle for days while awaiting rescue.
Consider something like a mine flail. An armoured vehicle with a spinning wheel of chains with fist-sized iron balls at the ends would probably make short work of a large amount of zombies if employed correctly. A main battle tank might even be better employed simply running zombies over than actually firing.

My initial reaction is I wouldn’t even bother with melee weapons at all. Unless the zombies are somehow sneakier than expected, or much faster than a human being, I simply don’t see large-scale melee combat breaking out. Small arms would probably see a shift towards higher caliber rounds with more kinetic energy delivered (so even if you don’t hit it in the head and kill it, you at least stop it momentarily, knock it down for a second or destroy a limb), but they’d still be much more relevant than duking it out face to face.

It is probably true that for a high enough ratio of zombies-to-soldiers, especially if preparation time is limited or non-existent, there’s a point where everyone gets overrun, but it requires a very specific scenario to get to that point I would say. I guess some sort of dormant virus that zombifies a huge part of the population at once. Anything less, or if it is isolated to a specific state or country, I think it would be possible to buy enough time to tailor a response.

Source: I’m an army officer and – believe me – it’s a regular debate at the office :P

[Mike_G]

1. Oh absolutely, but the absolute minimum pulp radius is quite small, a 1000lb bomb only has a radius of 5m. Now given fles is less tough than soil i'd say it's probably greater than that, and all the body parts are going to become shrapnel. My point was more you can't expect a kill radius of 50m on a 155 shell, that value was derived against sensibly organised troops. Against tight packing the sheer amount of mass in the way is going to really degrade it, anything within close rnage of the blast is toast, but when you'v got carpets of zombies covering multiple square miles it's going to take a LOT of heavy ordnance to get them all.

Like I said, prepare the field, channel the enemy into where you want them, and use things like fire. And You are vastly underestimating the damage a 155 mm shell can do.

2. I think most of the rest of what you have to say once again is just not getting your head around how outnumbered the military was. it wouldn't be your rifle company, (about 150-200 troops i believe from memory), vs a few thousand zombies. It would be your rifle company vs a half a million zombies spread across a 4 mile front stacked a third of a mile deep. Yeah you grenades and mortars and vehicle mounted weapons will tear them up, but how many can you kill before you start running out of ammo?

Plenty.

And when we think we're getting low, we hop in out Bradleys or LAVs or AAVs and drive slowly away, taking casual headshots as we go. I don't see how they can counter that. Even if they catch up, how does a zombie open a Bradley?

Seriously, we could make such a mound of corpses that just the climb would slow down the zombie horde.

If you think the military would just stand and fight until they ran out of ammo and then go down under the claws and teeth, you've watched too many movies.

Airstrikes would decimate the horde, then artillery, then the infantry would do their part, inflicting the most damage the could to a crowd tangled in wire and channeled by obstacles and probably on fire, then fall back in vehicles to a prepared position that the engineers have been working on while we held the line and the aircrews restocked and rearmed and slaughter another few thousand zombies ten miles down the road when we made our next stand.

Unless zombies are smart enough to not make frontal assaults, or learn to drive, or the human general is dumb as a box of rocks with the smart ones taken out, this is no contest.

[Galloglaich]

If zombies are attracted to loud sounds, just dropping shells into a big wide open field somewhere, repeatedly,


In WW1 they had artillery barrages that went on for days, and that's with thousands of guns firing. Again, with relatively light guns especially, you can keep shooting and shooting and shooting. One mortar company with a 'good' supply could keep dropping shells every few minutes into the same area for a long time, maybe weeks. If the crowd got thick enough you could drop a lot more.

Just to give you an idea of the scale, in one battle in WW2 US forces fired 75,000 shells in a half an hour. For zombies, you could do say, 75 shells in half an hour, and stretch that out for 500 hours - 20 days. With Mortars by the way, the launcher doesn't even necessarily make that much noise and the range is more than you would expect 5000 meters for a standard 81mm mortar. You could put a few on top of a tall building and muffle the sound in various ways, and just devastate.

Anyone who thinks the zombies would prevail in a situation like that is underestimating military capabilities.

G

[Mike_G]

And I think you could just leapfrog by company or battalion more or less forever.

The zombie horde moves at like 3 miles an hour over good terrain. So you set up a defensive line ten miles away and one unit fights there, with air, arty, etc, while ten miles further back a second unit is preparing a defensive position. When the zombies get close, or ammo gets low, the first unit retreats twenty miles to a third position where your rea untis have stockpiled supplies.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Funneling the attack to expected areas is easy if they are mindless or respond to something we'll known like noise or smell, and if we have air or drones to keep an eye on the path of the zombie horde.

[Carl]

Like I said, prepare the field, channel the enemy into where you want them, and use things like fire. And You are vastly underestimating the damage a 155 mm shell can do.




Plenty.

And when we think we're getting low, we hop in out Bradleys or LAVs or AAVs and drive slowly away, taking casual headshots as we go. I don't see how they can counter that. Even if they catch up, how does a zombie open a Bradley?

Seriously, we could make such a mound of corpses that just the climb would slow down the zombie horde.

If you think the military would just stand and fight until they ran out of ammo and then go down under the claws and teeth, you've watched too many movies.

Airstrikes would decimate the horde, then artillery, then the infantry would do their part, inflicting the most damage the could to a crowd tangled in wire and channeled by obstacles and probably on fire, then fall back in vehicles to a prepared position that the engineers have been working on while we held the line and the aircrews restocked and rearmed and slaughter another few thousand zombies ten miles down the road when we made our next stand.

Unless zombies are smart enough to not make frontal assaults, or learn to drive, or the human general is dumb as a box of rocks with the smart ones taken out, this is no contest.

1. In the book they mobility kill AFV's by getting in the way till the ground up bits causes something to break, (thrown track in the case of an abrams).

2. I'm not remotely suggesting that they stand there till the zombies get them as such. That's not really realistic unless it's an objective that has to be defended. Which was sotr of what the first battle of the book was about, the zombies had started moving out of NY trying to break quarantine and they had to be stopped before they dispersed into the countryside or they'd be even harder to deal with. Even then most got away apparently. They just couldn't stop the zombie horde with what they had.

3. All of that prep sounds nice, if you can do it. The point about he WWZ scenario is that they couldn't. Again going from memory of the past discussion the timeline starts with the initial disease in NY with no one knowing it was a zombie plague, they try and fail to contain it and are slow to realise it is a zombie plague. By the time they do they've got outbreaks in every city, NY is overrun and it's gone global. Martial law has been declared everywhere with troops backing up the police and more troops around every military stockpile and base to defend against rouge zombie groups. But NY seems contained, the zombies aren't leaving so they put a small quarantine force in place, (few thousand troops, a company of tanks), to maintain it against the odd small zombie group and pour the rest of their resources on trying to piss on all the bonfires they have to deal with, (and be fair, in a modern western military on home soil there's going to be a very strong tendency to not abandon anyone by the higher ups, they're US/UK/French/German/Whoever citizens). When the zombies suddenly decided en mass to move out of the city all the brass could commit was a few planes.

The discussion focused on that battle so my knowledge of what happened afterwards is very hazy, but from what i do know it sounds like roughly the same pattern kept repeating with a severely overstressed military, (with an equally overstressed logistics system), trying to be strong everywhere kept getting overrun in small groups because no one group had enough men and heavy ordnance to make it work. They basically suffered a severe case of defeat in detail. At that point they have few cities, no real manufacturing, (or oil refining), pipeline and millions of refugees to look after with tens to hundreds of thousands of swarms of zombies numbering anything from a few tens of thousands to a million or so spread all over the US and wandering in every direction.

If zombies are attracted to loud sounds, just dropping shells into a big wide open field somewhere, repeatedly,


In WW1 they had artillery barrages that went on for days, and that's with thousands of guns firing. Again, with relatively light guns especially, you can keep shooting and shooting and shooting. One mortar company with a 'good' supply could keep dropping shells every few minutes into the same area for a long time, maybe weeks. If the crowd got thick enough you could drop a lot more.

Just to give you an idea of the scale, in one battle in WW2 US forces fired 75,000 shells in a half an hour. For zombies, you could do say, 75 shells in half an hour, and stretch that out for 500 hours - 20 days. With Mortars by the way, the launcher doesn't even necessarily make that much noise and the range is more than you would expect 5000 meters for a standard 81mm mortar. You could put a few on top of a tall building and muffle the sound in various ways, and just devastate.

Anyone who thinks the zombies would prevail in a situation like that is underestimating military capabilities.

G

Sure they can do that. If that have enough guns and shells and can concentrate adequately, the US only has so many guns though, (and much of the rest of the world proportionally is even worse off), and the point about the WWZ scenario was that they basically couldn't/didn't concentrate in the early stages trying to hold onto every city and town and protect every part of the US at the same time. And i don't think thats unrealistic. However practical abandoning some area to focus on some area's first then going back and clearing the abandoned area's afterwards may be i just can't see anyone doing it without a lot of messes when citizens of their own country are involved.

[Mike_G]

1. In the book they mobility kill AFV's by getting in the way till the ground up bits causes something to break, (thrown track in the case of an abrams).

...Not buying it.

First, I don't think there is a maximum number of bodies you can run over with an Abrams, and second, why would you ever let them get that close?

If zombies move at walking speed, and you have GUNS that work at range, just keep backing away while you mow them down. This pisses me off and I've seen movie soldiers do this all the time. Like the guy in the Humvee with the .50 cal that drives TOWARDS the Hulk while shooting. Why? The damn thing has a range of a mile. Drive AWAY from the guy who can only hurt you in melee.

If your mechanized force winds up in melee with a guy who can only shamble, you deserve to get your brains eaten, because you weren't using them.

2. I'm not remotely suggesting that they stand there till the zombies get them as such. That's not really realistic unless it's an objective that has to be defended. Which was sotr of what the first battle of the book was about, the zombies had started moving out of NY trying to break quarantine and they had to be stopped before they dispersed into the countryside or they'd be even harder to deal with. Even then most got away apparently. They just couldn't stop the zombie horde with what they had.

But they could have retreated and fought another day. No US unit has so little transport that it couldn't retreat from a horde of movie zombies.

3. All of that prep sounds nice, if you can do it. The point about he WWZ scenario is that they couldn't. Again going from memory of the past discussion the timeline starts with the initial disease in NY with no one knowing it was a zombie plague, they try and fail to contain it and are slow to realise it is a zombie plague. By the time they do they've got outbreaks in every city, NY is overrun and it's gone global. Martial law has been declared everywhere with troops backing up the police and more troops around every military stockpile and base to defend against rouge zombie groups. But NY seems contained, the zombies aren't leaving so they put a small quarantine force in place, (few thousand troops, a company of tanks), to maintain it against the odd small zombie group and pour the rest of their resources on trying to piss on all the bonfires they have to deal with, (and be fair, in a modern western military on home soil there's going to be a very strong tendency to not abandon anyone by the higher ups, they're US/UK/French/German/Whoever citizens). When the zombies suddenly decided en mass to move out of the city all the brass could commit was a few planes.

Again, prep should have been done if they were trying to quarantine the city. Especially with limited troops. This is the cheap and easy way to multiply your forces. That's War 101.

You build obstacles, a mindless mob follows the path of least resistance, which is into your klll zone, you kill loads of them then you fall back if you run out of ammo.

This is Zulu War level training. This is the easy stuff. The average US general trained to face Soviet armor coming through the Fulda Gap and infiltration by Taliban insurgents. They aren't going to get overrun by mindless shamblers. They've heard of Isandlwana and Little Bighorn. They know to take precautions.

And NYC is on the ocean, so there's no excuse not to have some naval resources nearby, like a carrier (of which we have loads. Can't believe NYC isn't worth one.)

The discussion focused on that battle so my knowledge of what happened afterwards is very hazy, but from what i do know it sounds like roughly the same pattern kept repeating with a severely overstressed military, (with an equally overstressed logistics system), trying to be strong everywhere kept getting overrun in small groups because no one group had enough men and heavy ordnance to make it work. They basically suffered a severe case of defeat in detail. At that point they have few cities, no real manufacturing, (or oil refining), pipeline and millions of refugees to look after with tens to hundreds of thousands of swarms of zombies numbering anything from a few tens of thousands to a million or so spread all over the US and wandering in every direction.

If the zombies has already spread out and were everywhere before the big battle, that's a plausible tough scenario. Because you can't defend everywhere.

But a concentrated zombie horde in NYC is far less difficult than that. Circumvalation with much better boom than the Romans had and dumber enemies and the ability to drive away at 60 mph.

Sure they can do that. If that have enough guns and shells and can concentrate adequately, the US only has so many guns though, (and much of the rest of the world proportionally is even worse off), and the point about the WWZ scenario was that they basically couldn't/didn't concentrate in the early stages trying to hold onto every city and town and protect every part of the US at the same time. And i don't think thats unrealistic. However practical abandoning some area to focus on some area's first then going back and clearing the abandoned area's afterwards may be i just can't see anyone doing it without a lot of messes when citizens of their own country are involved.

We have a lot of stockpiled weapons, especially if we don;t need the most modern stuff, but can drag out the old stuff that may not kill a Russian T-80 but will rip up zombies all day long.

[Mr Beer]

First, I don't think there is a maximum number of bodies you can run over with an Abrams

Really a shame that Mythbusters has stopped making new shows.

[Gnoman]

Unlike a living being, a robot does not go into shock when severely damaged. There's the possibility of using genetic algorithms to allow a robot to continue functioning (at decreasing effectiveness) as it is damaged. If you disable one weapons system, or one ammunition feed, or one turret motor, a well programmed combat robot might be able to continue fighting. Anti-material would definitely work. Do you think Armor Piercing Incendiary rounds would stay inside the robot long enough to cook the electronics? I'd be worried that they'd overpenetrate and shoot out the far side without spending enough time inside to transfer their heat.

API would almost certainly stay in (by the time it penetrated the initial armor, went through whatever components are there, and struck the other side, it would have shed way too much velocity to keep going), and it wouldn't take that long to transfer the heat.

Secondly, you're seriously overestimating the durability here. Get a hit on the battery? The battery bursts into flames and cooks the robot (remember a few years ago when one of the Samsung phones was banned from aircraft because the battery was spontaneously combusting? Same principle applies here). Strike an ammo feed? The ammuntion is likely to chain-fires and combust, cooking the robot. Strike a motor? Might just disable it, might cause an arc that cooks the robot.

Looking at your idea in more specific detail:

Think of a robot that's roughly the size of a car tire lying flat on the ground. It's got treads underneath, an articulated sensor "tower" that can be raised over obstructions, an array of cameras and sensors in the shell and an armored carbine-caliber turret on the top of the shell, and is deployed by the hundreds.

There's simply no possible way you can construct this and have it armored against any real firepower, by simple size. If we are looking at it with a near-future technology bias (which is critical, otherwise the weapons used against it would be better as well), a car tire is about the minimum possible size for a turret, depending on what you intend the meaningless phrase "carbine caliber" to denote. So, best case scenario, you have a car-tire turret stacked on top of a car-tire body.

Let us assume that the designers are not stupid, and go for a round turret on top of a square body instead of making both round. This allows for much more efficient use of internal space. For a power supply, let us assume an electric drive. You'll need at least one, probably two Lithium-ion battery packs roughly the size of a car battery to get any kind of endurance. So two battery packs. Some research suggests that an electric motor roughly equivalent to 2 horsepower is also about the size of a car battery. So you get two of those, one to run each track. Now, you need a brain, which will require a CPU, a PLC, some communications equipment, and some relays (the motors will draw too much power to switch directly - a burning PLC taught me that). Since it's going into combat, put this in a 5mm armored box with data ports on the bottom (where fire is least likely to come from). Charitably, you'll wind up with a box about the size of a car battery. The result would be five equal-sized boxes all in a row. Almost forgot - you'll need a sixth box, because all of these components are going to generate a lot of heat and simple ventilation won't cut it. That means you'll need to install a radiator block and run cooling lines. Put that on the back. Once you've run all your wiring, installed the tracks, and run the cooling lines, you've used up pretty much the entire "car tire" worth of space, and put in between 100 and 150 pounds worth of weight. Ignore the body armor for now.

Your turret needs to carry the weapon itself (as I alluded to earlier, "carbine" is a very sloppily defined word that could mean anything from a long-barreled gun firing pistol cartridges, to a P90-style PDW, or simply a short assault rifle - given the need to balance size and firepower, I think a P90-analog is a good pick for your proposed idea), a plentiful supply of ammunition (500 rounds minimum if you want any kind of sustained combat capability), rotating gear, and at least two high-quality cameras for sighting and observation purposes. You'll probably also want another water-cooling system, but that's probably optional here. You won't be able to pack this in as tightly as the hull, because you'll need easy access to resupply ammunition. Before armor, let's call this fifty pounds with the bare minimum framework to hold it together.

Now, let us turn to armor. Assuming a square box, 5mm of hardened steel will weigh about 16 pounds per face. The rounded turret is more complicated, but assume similar weight for napkin calculating. This means that putting 5mm of armor on all sides of both hull and turrent will add about 128 pounds of weight. Alternatively, you could use composites. Each "face" would have about the same surface area of a chestplate, so we can use that as a basis. A chestplate rated to stop a single rifle-caliber AP round (it will stop all lesser rounds, but multiple AP shots will shatter it and allow penetration) weighs 7.5 pounds. Round that up to 8, and you can armor it for about 64 pounds.

So that puts us at 328 pounds for the steel-armored version, and 264 pounds for the composite-armor one. This would be more than adequate protection from intermediate rifle cartridges (such as an M4 or AK), and will even keep out battle-rifle or machine gun fire as long as they don't have AP rounds handy. It would be a wise idea to reduce the rear armor to boost the frontal armor - that could bring you high enough to keep out rifle-caliber AP rounds from the front, at the cost of opening up the rear to just about anything - this is offset by putting the radiator in the rear, which would be very likely to convert a penetration from a hard kill (the thing is destroyed completely) to a repairable mission-kill (radiator destroyed, unit goes into preventive shutdown).

If, however, the machine was penetrated, it would be disabled or destroyed easily. With everything packed so tightly, the bullets would have no place to go except through very valuable and volatile components. With that in mind, I'd suggest that thinking of them as disposable would be ideal, and don't bother increasing the armor further. This is particularly sensible because you can't armor the sensors (which is critical for a remote-operated vehicle, and even more critical for an autonomous one) much.

[Galloglaich]

Sure they can do that. If that have enough guns and shells and can concentrate adequately, the US only has so many guns though, (and much of the rest of the world proportionally is even worse off), and the point about the WWZ scenario was that they basically couldn't/didn't concentrate in the early stages trying to hold onto every city and town and protect every part of the US at the same time. And i don't think thats unrealistic. However practical abandoning some area to focus on some area's first then going back and clearing the abandoned area's afterwards may be i just can't see anyone doing it without a lot of messes when citizens of their own country are involved.

Lets try to remember, WW Z isn't history, it's just some kids notion of how he imagined the zompoc to go down - some kid who obviously never experienced military life and didn't know much about military history.

I don't know what you mean by "the US only has so many guns though" but every major metropolitan area in the United States is reasonably close to a big military base, at the very least a national guard unit, which would have sufficient firepower in terms of mortars or artillery to do what i described, not to mention enough armored vehicles to do what Mike G described.



Even the 'minor' bases on this map would have more than enough ordinance to deal with what I was referring to.

Plus things like bulldozers to dig trenches or build up walls, and claymore mines and C4 to set up 'IED' type defenses and much more besides that.

I don't think y'all realize how many military assets there are in the US, and the rest of the world too for that matter. We don't usually think about it, but it's there in a heartbeat if ...stuff goes sideways.

I'm not even mentioning here the massive firepower deployed in our naval fleets by the way which, most of them being off shore at any given moment, would presumably be immune to the zombies and would provide an obvious and easy staging area to recover from any surprise.

Nasty surprises are what wars are all about, it's how they typically start. See Pearl Harbor, Operation Barbarossa, etc. etc. So that is what military units prepare for.

G

[Carl]

...Not buying it.

First, I don't think there is a maximum number of bodies you can run over with an Abrams, and second, why would you ever let them get that close?

If zombies move at walking speed, and you have GUNS that work at range, just keep backing away while you mow them down. This pisses me off and I've seen movie soldiers do this all the time. Like the guy in the Humvee with the .50 cal that drives TOWARDS the Hulk while shooting. Why? The damn thing has a range of a mile. Drive AWAY from the guy who can only hurt you in melee.

If your mechanized force winds up in melee with a guy who can only shamble, you deserve to get your brains eaten, because you weren't using them.





But they could have retreated and fought another day. No US unit has so little transport that it couldn't retreat from a horde of movie zombies.



Again, prep should have been done if they were trying to quarantine the city. Especially with limited troops. This is the cheap and easy way to multiply your forces. That's War 101.

You build obstacles, a mindless mob follows the path of least resistance, which is into your klll zone, you kill loads of them then you fall back if you run out of ammo.

This is Zulu War level training. This is the easy stuff. The average US general trained to face Soviet armor coming through the Fulda Gap and infiltration by Taliban insurgents. They aren't going to get overrun by mindless shamblers. They've heard of Isandlwana and Little Bighorn. They know to take precautions.

And NYC is on the ocean, so there's no excuse not to have some naval resources nearby, like a carrier (of which we have loads. Can't believe NYC isn't worth one.)




If the zombies has already spread out and were everywhere before the big battle, that's a plausible tough scenario. Because you can't defend everywhere.

But a concentrated zombie horde in NYC is far less difficult than that. Circumvalation with much better boom than the Romans had and dumber enemies and the ability to drive away at 60 mph.




We have a lot of stockpiled weapons, especially if we don;t need the most modern stuff, but can drag out the old stuff that may not kill a Russian T-80 but will rip up zombies all day long.

1. Your telling me you can't get an abrams so mired in mud it will throw a track? Pulped flesh and cartilage should create roughly the same issues AFAIK. The human body is mostly water after all.

2. Again AFAIK they weren't totally overrun at any point except possibly when defending civilians, (in which case you can hardly complain about them standing their ground).

3. I don't know NYC geography but the battle is known as the battle of junkers if memory serves me right so maybe that helps. All i really know is that wherever it took place it was the last place before the hordes could start to spread way out and go every which way. It's also important to note that once again everyone underestimated the zombies. They'd shown no sign of moving out en mass for some time since the city fell, so apparently everyone just assumed they'd stay there the odd stragglers aside and that was all that the deployed troops were assigned to cope with, the mass movement flat footed them because no one expected it. Weather that's completely realistic i can't say and i'd defer to your judgment on.

4. My understanding is they weren't so much spread out as the disease was and everyone kept underestimating how fast spreading and virulent it would be, and just how difficult the zombies would be to deal with.

5.Yeah but where are they stockpiled, if most of it's stockpiled at a limited rnage of locations it may not be available on hand at a moments notice. What about the munitions, are they stockpiled with the weapons or elsewhere, if it;s old enough do you have anyone who even knows how to oporate or maintain it.

Really a shame that Mythbusters has stopped making new shows.

So true, i've often though wwz would provide dozens of good myths for them.

Lets try to remember, WW Z isn't history, it's just some kids notion of how he imagined the zompoc to go down - some kid who obviously never experienced military life and didn't know much about military history.

I don't know what you mean by "the US only has so many guns though" but every major metropolitan area in the United States is reasonably close to a big military base, at the very least a national guard unit, which would have sufficient firepower in terms of mortars or artillery to do what i described, not to mention enough armored vehicles to do what Mike G described.



Even the 'minor' bases on this map would have more than enough ordinance to deal with what I was referring to.

Plus things like bulldozers to dig trenches or build up walls, and claymore mines and C4 to set up 'IED' type defenses and much more besides that.

I don't think y'all realize how many military assets there are in the US, and the rest of the world too for that matter. We don't usually think about it, but it's there in a heartbeat if ...stuff goes sideways.

I'm not even mentioning here the massive firepower deployed in our naval fleets by the way which, most of them being off shore at any given moment, would presumably be immune to the zombies and would provide an obvious and easy staging area to recover from any surprise.

Nasty surprises are what wars are all about, it's how they typically start. See Pearl Harbor, Operation Barbarossa, etc. etc. So that is what military units prepare for.

G

What i mean by limited guns is the US only has so many tube artillery, so many SPG, so many rocket systems e.t.c. Start putting those into their organizational units and you actually can't go out and say every base has enough, and thats assuming none have been frittered away in penny packets. That same penny packet problem could also impact your recon ability curtailing your maximum effective rnage.

And thats just looking at he USm, an attempted search turned up a lot more info o the UK army which apparently has 7 regiments equipped with 105's, 3 with mixed 155/MLRS and 1 with pure MLRS at 32 units a regiment, thats a significantly lower number per pop than the US, (numbers i dug up said 2k 155, 1k MLRS, and unknown on 105 or HIMARS), with just 350 systems, most of which are either small calibre 105's or slow reloading MLRS systems.

That said a military base allowed to fort up could probably hold off a zombie attack no problem. But in a zombie apocalypse, you, (and for that matter the troops if their locals), are going to want to protect all the civilians that didn't get zombified in the surrounding area, (and beyond), and then we once again come back to the penny packet problem. Any single force might be able to handle X zombies, or run away all day, but if the zombie drift carries a force bigger than X to them and they've got civilians or some other must hold objective to defend then you've got a real problem.

That said i never claimed the book was 100% acurratte, if there aren't issues i'd be amazed, there's no such thing as perfection. For example AFAIK the bomblets of an MLRS are airbursting by default whilst i believe the book treated them as ground contact detonating, which changes one scene i had brought up in the last discussion significantly.

[snowblizz]

Lack of plate is true, but did India use the combined mail and plate style of armour we see in the Middle East? I am referring to the suits that look like a combo of mail and a coat of plates, with the plates connected together via mail. I wouldn't be surprised if the north of India did, but the south didn't. Armour seems to be unpopular in tropical regions, due to the climate and issues in overheating I assume.

Forgot to reply to this amidst the heaivng mass of "braaaaains".

The combination of mail and plates was a very common type of armour in the Indian subcontinent yes. Not in the least because the major power on the Ganges plain was often a conqueror from the outside with an origin back into the areas that used such styles.

However, this is a very different beast from Western platearmour and is no where near as protective as full on platearmour. It's more accurate to consider it a special type of chain/splint mail really, or a chainmail with some excessively large rings included. So to say. I will still contend that there was no actual platearmour in any wider use as was the case with Europe. Obviously the heat and humidity are a problem also for plate wearers. And note all of the Indian continent is more or less tropical, the Northern parts are still decidely hot in summer. The British Raj had a summer capital in the Himalayas 2kms altitude for a time to get some decent coolness.

Re: Zombie stuff. This is a link to what I believe is part of the sparks for the discussion: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers
So have go at reading that description and poke holes in the explanaiton I guess. Am sure tere are some. It seemed a bit more involved than what I recall from the book, which ofc is framed as the memorires of various people living thorugh WWz.

[Mike_G]

1. Your telling me you can't get an abrams so mired in mud it will throw a track? Pulped flesh and cartilage should create roughly the same issues AFAIK. The human body is mostly water after all.

Not even close.

This is beyond apples to oranges. The density of human tissue is so far below that of the kind of mud that sticks a vehicle it's not even comparable. Go outside the next time you get a real good rain or spring melt, the kind of mud that sucks your shoes off your feet. Take a shovel full of it and see how much that weighs. Now imagine the volume of a human body, all that density. Human tissue isn't nearly as dense or viscus as that.

And, yeah, we're theoretically 70-ish percent water, but that's not the same as a barrel of water for purposes of stopping fragments or vehicles. Flesh isn't very dense. And the dead will dehydrate pretty quickly, since they aren't drinking and they are losing vapor to the environment constantly, ever more quickly as the skin disintegrates ans stops doing its main job of keeping the moisture inside.

I don't want to harp on this point but I've shoveled a lot of mud and I've seen what bodies do when hit by vehicles, and unless you are feeding zombies into a blender and shoveling in gravel at 1 part to three, you won't get mud that will throw a track.

As for the rest of it, we have loads of weapons and munitions, and loads of old lifers who know ho w to use them. Hell, I'm sure with five minutes on Youtube you could learn how to operate a recoiless rifle.

The only way a zombie apocalypse is even mildly concerning is if the disease is widespread before the threat is realized, and you have millions of zombies spread all around the country, in among the people and stuff you want to protect.

[Clistenes]

About the zombies, I think the main issue would be that it would take forever for the authorities to order the police and army to shoot the zombies. They would treat the zombies as sick people and tell the police to try to restrain them and take them to the hospital, use riot gear and equipment to control zombie mobs and arrest people who did kill zombies. Policemen would soon get zombified or leave town, and soldiers would get the same problem later... Zombies would be everywhere before real measures were taken...

And yes, many, maybe most zombies would get their bones broken by cars trying to run away...

[ExLibrisMortis]

The only way a zombie apocalypse is even mildly concerning is if the disease is widespread before the threat is realized, and you have millions of zombies spread all around the country, in among the people and stuff you want to protect.

Blowing up zombies isn't the problem, it's telling zombies from humans at mortar range . Is anyone else reminded of the Pandemic games, where this is pretty much the winning strategy?

[Max_Killjoy]

Let's not forget how well armed the US population is and how many people would volunteer to assist in the patrols, including many people who used to be in the military or who have target shooting practice.

Maybe it's just my utter lack of regard for the zombie genre, but, meh.

[Brother Oni]

Consider something like a mine flail. An armoured vehicle with a spinning wheel of chains with fist-sized iron balls at the ends would probably make short work of a large amount of zombies if employed correctly. A main battle tank might even be better employed simply running zombies over than actually firing.

You'd probably want something more like an Aardvark JSFU rather than a Keiler though, simply because the crew is more inaccessible and has better line of sight.

Spoiler: Aardvark JSFU

Show

Spoiler: Keiler

Show

I'm not 100% sure a tank flail can be retro-fitted to a MBT, at least not like a Sherman Crab though.

Source: I’m an army officer and – believe me – it’s a regular debate at the office :P

With regard to a government/military response, various organisations have actually used a zombie apocalypse as a training scenario. Off the top of my head, the CDC have one, as the US government (CONPLAN 8888-11) which are freely available on the internet.

CONPLAN 8888-11 also addresses the potential response to several different types of zombies, from the real Haitian ones, shamblers, fast and zombie chickens (no, really).

[Mike_G]

Re: Zombie stuff. This is a link to what I believe is part of the sparks for the discussion: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers
So have go at reading that description and poke holes in the explanaiton I guess. Am sure tere are some. It seemed a bit more involved than what I recall from the book, which ofc is framed as the memorires of various people living thorugh WWz.

Just read the link.

So, yeah, if you assume that explosive don't work right, because crowds of flesh somehow make them less effective, and assume that the military makes the worst possible decision at every turn, then yeah, I guess if you try real hard you could lose that battle.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Zombies would never be a problem, and especially not in the US (or other places with that many guns, which the zombies themselves conveniently can't use at all). Maybe people shooting each other en mass in a zombie scare, but the zombies themselves?

It might be different for a virus that just makes people hyper aggressive and looking to bite others without making them super stupid at the same time. Zombies using guns and setting traps and acting like they're sick and they need help. Now if that were to happen we might all die. But normal zombies, not really. If you had an unreasonably fast acting virus, super fast super strong zombies, zombies looking to bite others without eating them, the sudden appearance of the disease without anything similar being previously known, basically the WWZ movie rules, you could probably get a city in big trouble. If randomly some people take longer to turn (more basically the WWZ movie rules) maybe a state. The world? I don't see it. Actual zombie zombies doing any of that? Not a chance.

That's probably the main reason the fantasy is so popular: Zombies are supposedly threatening enough to kill most of the world, but you could handle them! That makes you one of the best humans, the best! Congratulations! To be actually dangerous the average zombie would have to have an above 50% chance to take down and turn the average human, and the military is included in that average. If they don't live up to that standard they just fail. Maybe we should start with a virus that turns the infected into theropod dinosaurs or something, or like bears and sharks and birds of prey, just to make it a little sporting.

[Vinyadan]

How about using the Assault Breacher Vehicle's mine-clearing line charge system against zombies?

[Knaight]

On a totally different note - molotov cocktails: How effective were they, really? Similarly what do they actually do?

I'm used to the media depiction of molotov cocktails as a big fireball in a bottle, and I trust it roughly as far as the usual media depiction of weapons (where all explosives are big fireballs with nothing in the way of pressure waves, spears are held in the middle and usually have a range disadvantage to one handed swords, and big swipes with no defense is how one fights with a sword). I'd be interested in finding out how they actually behave.

[Mike_G]

On a totally different note - molotov cocktails: How effective were they, really? Similarly what do they actually do?

I'm used to the media depiction of molotov cocktails as a big fireball in a bottle, and I trust it roughly as far as the usual media depiction of weapons (where all explosives are big fireballs with nothing in the way of pressure waves, spears are held in the middle and usually have a range disadvantage to one handed swords, and big swipes with no defense is how one fights with a sword). I'd be interested in finding out how they actually behave.

They're fine for starting fires. When the bottle breaks the liquid (generally gasoline) inside does splash and spread and vaporize which does make a nice fireball. And burning fuel on your clothes is terrible, and if thrown into a place filled with flammable stuff it could be really bad. They were really used a lot by forces that don't have access to real grenades. Lobbed out of a second story window onto an open vehicle they would be pretty dangerous. And they're pretty easy to make, so if you're a poorly supplied rebel, and the Russians are rolling tanks through your city, that might be a way to go.

But there's only so much volume of flammable liquid you can get into a bottle that's easily thrown, you risk setting yourself on fire if you screw up, so it's a weapon of desperation.

[Mr Beer]

On a totally different note - molotov cocktails: How effective were they, really? Similarly what do they actually do?

I'm used to the media depiction of molotov cocktails as a big fireball in a bottle, and I trust it roughly as far as the usual media depiction of weapons (where all explosives are big fireballs with nothing in the way of pressure waves, spears are held in the middle and usually have a range disadvantage to one handed swords, and big swipes with no defense is how one fights with a sword). I'd be interested in finding out how they actually behave.

They are not terribly effective, but if you don't have anything better, you can use them to attack armoured vehicles. In fact I believe that's how they got their name, the Finns called them 'Molotov cocktails' because Molotov was a Soviet bigwig at the time.

I guess they tried to get them inside the hatch if it was open and in that case it would be extremely effective - a bunch of guys in a very cramped space with fuel supply nearby are in major trouble. I don't know if dropping a few Molotovs on a T34 would reliably incapacitate it or not. A modern tanks would probably be virtually immune to them otherwise insurgents would use cheap petrol bombs instead of massive IEDs.

Other than that, they are an effective terror weapon, so for example if your house is surrounded by a mob, chucking petrol bombs at them will probably slow them down. No-one wants to get burned to death.

It's hard to really immolate someone with them though, because they are slow moving, therefore easy to dodge and bottles don't tend to reliably break on people. If it lands at your feet, you will get badly scorched in the fireball and splashed with burning fluid but you are unlikely to just keel over and burn to death.

You will notice that rioters tend to use them and police don't feel the need to respond by shooting people. If rioters used guns or grenades, I think it would be a different story. So that should tell you something.

[rs2excelsior]

I guess they tried to get them inside the hatch if it was open and in that case it would be extremely effective - a bunch of guys in a very cramped space with fuel supply nearby are in major trouble. I don't know if dropping a few Molotovs on a T34 would reliably incapacitate it or not. A modern tanks would probably be virtually immune to them otherwise insurgents would use cheap petrol bombs instead of massive IEDs.

I believe they were more commonly thrown onto the engine deck of an enemy tank. The burning gasoline/whatever fuel you have would get down into the engine and hopefully ignite the tank's own fuel. At least that's my understanding of how they're used. Aside from obvious applications against wooden structures, I imagine they could also be used for area denial, if the liquid keeps burning for a bit--not sure how long it'd last, though.

They can have an effect, but there's a reason armies who have access to other weapons generally don't use them.

[Carl]

Forgot to reply to this amidst the heaivng mass of "braaaaains".

The combination of mail and plates was a very common type of armour in the Indian subcontinent yes. Not in the least because the major power on the Ganges plain was often a conqueror from the outside with an origin back into the areas that used such styles.

However, this is a very different beast from Western platearmour and is no where near as protective as full on platearmour. It's more accurate to consider it a special type of chain/splint mail really, or a chainmail with some excessively large rings included. So to say. I will still contend that there was no actual platearmour in any wider use as was the case with Europe. Obviously the heat and humidity are a problem also for plate wearers. And note all of the Indian continent is more or less tropical, the Northern parts are still decidely hot in summer. The British Raj had a summer capital in the Himalayas 2kms altitude for a time to get some decent coolness.

Re: Zombie stuff. This is a link to what I believe is part of the sparks for the discussion: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers
So have go at reading that description and poke holes in the explanaiton I guess. Am sure tere are some. It seemed a bit more involved than what I recall from the book, which ofc is framed as the memorires of various people living thorugh WWz.

Didn't know about that, will have to find some time to read it, though from what mike G put below it sounds like maybe the scenario was somewhat different to how it was described to me in the past discussion.

Not even close.

This is beyond apples to oranges. The density of human tissue is so far below that of the kind of mud that sticks a vehicle it's not even comparable. Go outside the next time you get a real good rain or spring melt, the kind of mud that sucks your shoes off your feet. Take a shovel full of it and see how much that weighs. Now imagine the volume of a human body, all that density. Human tissue isn't nearly as dense or viscus as that.

And, yeah, we're theoretically 70-ish percent water, but that's not the same as a barrel of water for purposes of stopping fragments or vehicles. Flesh isn't very dense. And the dead will dehydrate pretty quickly, since they aren't drinking and they are losing vapor to the environment constantly, ever more quickly as the skin disintegrates ans stops doing its main job of keeping the moisture inside.

I don't want to harp on this point but I've shoveled a lot of mud and I've seen what bodies do when hit by vehicles, and unless you are feeding zombies into a blender and shoveling in gravel at 1 part to three, you won't get mud that will throw a track.

As for the rest of it, we have loads of weapons and munitions, and loads of old lifers who know ho w to use them. Hell, I'm sure with five minutes on Youtube you could learn how to operate a recoiless rifle.

The only way a zombie apocalypse is even mildly concerning is if the disease is widespread before the threat is realized, and you have millions of zombies spread all around the country, in among the people and stuff you want to protect.

I'll take your word on the throwing a track. As far as the effects of explosive weapons, i'm not basing that on the water content, (though i'm sure thats part of why it's so), but rather on a number of times mythbusters did tests involving human analogues and shrapnel or shrapnel like objects. They've shown that the human body has a remarkable ability to absorb shrapnel and shrapnel like objects. Often without bone analog present to make it worse. I don't expect a 155 to behave like the hand grenade in their jumping on a grenade test, but i do expect a correlation in that the maximum number of bodies it can go through is going to be severely limited even accounting for the pulping effect vs zombies within a few meters of the initial impact point producing extra shrapnel. It's a shame they aren't still going as it would be a great myth for them to test IMO.

As for the drying, again we come back to zombie types, some don't decay and seem to get moister.

Just read the link.

So, yeah, if you assume that explosive don't work right, because crowds of flesh somehow make them less effective, and assume that the military makes the worst possible decision at every turn, then yeah, I guess if you try real hard you could lose that battle.

I'll take your word on that, but i don't think that invalidates the scenario as i understood it, namely a military dealing with mass outbreaks due to improper early recognition of what was going on, severely overstretched, and with friendly fire concerns on civilians coupled with i'd imagine severe political interference from on high. I don;t think the scenario is unreasonable given human nature, and i suspect that would give most militaries a hard time, (somwhere like switzerland would probably fare quite well, they make the US seem positively gun free due to how their military reserves system works), although they might have issues with soldiers being trained to go for center mass leading to a lot of ineffective small arms fire as everyone's training kicks in.

[Mabn]

so I was thinking. At some point spears became two handed and swords became two handed because they would reach longer and hit harder. But all the depictions of lances I've seen were one handed and I know they did every other thing they could think of to make those long and hard hitting. So why did people use lances with one hand?

[Kiero]

so I was thinking. At some point spears became two handed and swords became two handed because they would reach longer and hit harder. But all the depictions of lances I've seen were one handed and I know they did every other thing they could think of to make those long and hard hitting. So why did people use lances with one hand?

Spears never "became two-handed", pikes came into use but they're not simply a longer spear. Spears remained one-handed, because they were almost always partnered with a shield. They were counter-weighted to keep them handy with one hand.

Some lances were used two-handed, like the xyston and kontos.

[Mabn]

Spears never "became two-handed", pikes came into use but they're not simply a longer spear. Spears remained one-handed, because they were almost always partnered with a shield. They were counter-weighted to keep them handy with one hand.

Some lances were used two-handed, like the xyston and kontos.

any reason both those lances were from way before the invention of the stirup? Like, did 2 handed lances stop being efficient?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I suspect a large part of the story is that the point (not the literal one) of a lance is using the speed and mass of a horse. You don't need two hands to hit harder, and ideally you don't even need them to aim better, you're using your horse for that.

[Vinyadan]

On a totally different note - molotov cocktails: How effective were they, really? Similarly what do they actually do?

I'm used to the media depiction of molotov cocktails as a big fireball in a bottle, and I trust it roughly as far as the usual media depiction of weapons (where all explosives are big fireballs with nothing in the way of pressure waves, spears are held in the middle and usually have a range disadvantage to one handed swords, and big swipes with no defense is how one fights with a sword). I'd be interested in finding out how they actually behave.

(Polanski, as usual.)

[Knaight]

Spears never "became two-handed", pikes came into use but they're not simply a longer spear. Spears remained one-handed, because they were almost always partnered with a shield. They were counter-weighted to keep them handy with one hand.

There were spears that saw two handed use other than pikes though - any number of hewing spears, records of normal spear techniques for two handed use (especially in Chinese and viking documents), so on and so forth.