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Subject: anti-zombie weapons
Dauphin    4/27/2005 1:45:30 AM
How about a mononuclear battle lash-whip combo?
 
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00_Chem_AJB       6/27/2007 8:34:10 AM
Also just going from my point above, a person was shot square in the chest by a APFSDS, there would be no torso left, yes the head would proably be intact and maybe some limbs, but how can a head move on it's own? Now firing a APFSDS inot a zombie square, and thats alot of shreaded bodies, again not completely destroyed but far less capable then they were.
 
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flamingknives       6/27/2007 9:07:55 AM
The more I hear about this WWZ story, the worse it sounds, to be honest.

The modern technological army is designed to fight other modern technological armies, the key feature of which is that they rush about and hide, notably unlike zombies (unless of course you're talking about "28 Days Later" style zombies) In Vietnam, for the sake of example, 10,000 rounds of S.A.A. was expended per casualty caused by S.A.A, so that covers rifles and machine guns, both with the infantry and vehicle mounted.

When the targets are walking about in plain view and slowly, modern firepower is simply going to wreck impossible numbers. As 00_Chem_AJB notes, even impacts from large calibre weapons that do not kill outright with a head-shot are going to smash the body apart. Unless these are magic zombies, they need bone and muscle structure and nerves to function. Smash the bone, pulverise the muscle, sever the nerves and you the zombie will be slowed or stopped, so you can apply the coup de grace at your leisure.

Nerve agents do not need to be breathed in to function - AIUI they attack via exposed skin, but you might need some kind of circulatory system to get it into the brain. when combined with artillery, the non-'lethal' wounds would create a route into the body for the nerve agents. Combined arms - you know it makes sense.

If, however, they are magic zombies who can ignore the laws of physics as we know them and be subject only to common misconceptions, then this shouldn't be in a Science Fiction forum, but a fantasy forum.
 
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Ehran       6/27/2007 12:07:37 PM
look back at the flail tanks the allies used on the beaches at normandy.  imagine what something like that would do to a zombie horde. 
i think it would be a heck of an idea to avoid any kind of hand to hand combat with zombies. 
 
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swhitebull       6/27/2007 3:19:49 PM

The more I hear about this WWZ story, the worse it sounds, to be honest.

The modern technological army is designed to fight other modern technological armies, the key feature of which is that they rush about and hide, notably unlike zombies (unless of course you're talking about "28 Days Later" style zombies) In Vietnam, for the sake of example, 10,000 rounds of S.A.A. was expended per casualty caused by S.A.A, so that covers rifles and machine guns, both with the infantry and vehicle mounted.

When the targets are walking about in plain view and slowly, modern firepower is simply going to wreck impossible numbers. As 00_Chem_AJB notes, even impacts from large calibre weapons that do not kill outright with a head-shot are going to smash the body apart. Unless these are magic zombies, they need bone and muscle structure and nerves to function. Smash the bone, pulverise the muscle, sever the nerves and you the zombie will be slowed or stopped, so you can apply the coup de grace at your leisure.

Nerve agents do not need to be breathed in to function - AIUI they attack via exposed skin, but you might need some kind of circulatory system to get it into the brain. when combined with artillery, the non-'lethal' wounds would create a route into the body for the nerve agents. Combined arms - you know it makes sense.

If, however, they are magic zombies who can ignore the laws of physics as we know them and be subject only to common misconceptions, then this shouldn't be in a Science Fiction forum, but a fantasy forum.

WE're talking literally MILLIONS of zombies, all advancing, with one thing in mind -  trap and eat. I do NOT believe, short of nukes - that the armed forces would prepare for that. IN the fictional battle of Yonkers, the army prepared for 1000s, not millions, prepared with heavy biological suits (they didnt know at that point if the virus was airborne or not), The first MLRS tookout 3/4 of the zacks, the others were all shredded but kep t on coming, crawling, dragging whatevef, with 10 of thouasands behind them, coming up from NYC, backed up to Times Square. Second waves of MLRS and HE didnt have the same effect, because the tightly bunched Zs tended to shield each other from head shots.
 
No balloon effect either -  when a bomb goes off close to you, it causes the liquid in your body to burst, like a balloon. Since the Zs have gel rather than blood , there is less bosy fluid, hence less effect.
 
No Sudden Nerve Trauma either from bomb bursts - not a lot of electrical nerve system in the zombies. (Brooks goes into  physiological depths to explain the physical effects of his brand of zombism. a virus that reposits in the brain, and shuts down all systems not necessary for mainitainin the virus - i dont have my handbook handy to explain).  Which explains why nerve agents didnt have much effect, if any.
 
 
His next wave of kill zone was the heavy arms, tanks, bradleys, chain guns FOTT missiles, grenade launchers, mortars,
Comanches, etc. 1000s of zombies bought it then. That's when the fire power started to slowly die down as unit loads started to diminish.  No one thought how many rounds would be needed for sustained operations - or the sheer numbers of zombies (upwards of a million),  budget cuts under the previous administration that was tired of fighting brush fire wars after Iraq, etc. 
 
 
What collapsed the last line was NOT the courage of the troops (though that too was suffering due to watching so many zombies coming and being wired in to the Net so that each trooper could see what was happening on the battlefield), but in the haste to set up the defense lines, not ALL the buildings were searched thoroughly, and there were zombies in surrounding buildings, including behind the troops. NOt many, but enough to begin to cause panic. NOr did th emilitary put the ground troops up on the buildings, where they would have been safe. Plot device of course, but could the military screw up like that?  Certainly, especially in a panic situation where NYC had millions of zombies, all coming your way. PLUS a belief that SHock and Awe, which worked so well in Iraq, would work against zombies. (THis was in the early stages, and not a lot was yet known about the zombies, other than they moved slow, ate
 
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00_Chem_AJB       6/27/2007 7:18:50 PM
So it was more of a case of running out of ammo, at this point, I would of used heavy armour to charge the horde, as I doubt a zombie or whatever number can get inside a a locked down tank, this would of given time to evacuate the infatry and other soft units. Though if millions of zombies where coming out of a doomed city, I would think twice about using tactical nuclear weapons or FAE and incendiary/napalm  stirkes.
 
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Jeff_F_F       6/28/2007 12:38:56 PM



Tanks

Big ones little ones, MBTanks, Anti-infantry rapidgattling gun tank, Flame tanks. All tough and NBC sound.


Uh Uh -  Read about the battle of Yonkers in World War Z? - wrong battle, fighting  the wrong war with the wrong weapons against the wrong enemy. Zombies have no morale to break and have no fear. Their only motivation is to catch you and eat you. But they have the intelligence of a newt. and the ONLY way to kill them is to destroy the brain. A decapped head will still snap at you. Very few soldiers are trained for those head shots.

 

 

Result?  Massacre of the high tech army. They just keep coming - hundred, then thousands, then millions of them swarming from NYC.   Lines were set up on the ground, not in the surrounding heights which zombies couldnt climb. Now if the tanks were loaded with flechettes - ALL rounds -  that might make a difference, but they were armed with conventional AP, HE, HEAT, and few Flechettes. But not shells, not flame unless it fries the brain.

 

Infantry are trained to hit the body mass - not sharpshoot the brain.  Would need retraining. And in a zombie catastrophe, where logistics fall apart, bigger ticket items would be worthless -  bad bang for the kill, so to speak. Japanese polearms are excellent - blade combined with crossarms for standoff, and can sever at the neck by thrusting the moonblade. Pretty cool, as long as the head is destroyed. (See WWZ for the blind martial artist and how he survived!)

 

Best tactic?   Prepare the ground, make them come to you, form huge Infantry square,  with reserves and triple lines, a la the movie 'Zulu' , massive division resupply, with pikes  as standoff, unlimited ammo supply and resupply, NO heavy weapons (bad Kill-Cost ratio compared to shooting where a trained infantry with supply can kill hundreds) and all infantry trained to shoot the head. You start shooting the Zacks until you start building walls of them all around you, which becomes part of your defense, then pick off the zombies as they manageably try to scramble over the bodies.

 

Eventually, you will clean out an area.  Call in the cleanup crew, then move forward and repeat.

 

 

swhitebull -  just finished reading World War Z again, coupled with the Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks, son of Mel. WW Z is a book interviewing about 40 survivors from the war from across the world, from the initial outbreak in China to the spread of the infection,  to the near extermination of the human race, to the resurgence of humanity to triumph.   Well worth the reading, and wait for the movie on it next year. 


Read the critique of WWZ earlier on this thread, and it will be clear that Max Brooks has no actual knowledge of how war or military technology works.
 
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Jeff_F_F    Not even worth thinking about again so...   6/28/2007 12:46:38 PM
...My analyis of WWZ on the WWZ thread :
 
Improved Conventional Munitions. Need the discussion even progress past that point? It is essentially the same question we faced in Korea with human waves of Chinese, but this time only headshots work. Artillery is still the solution, and now we have much better options than we had in Korea. "HEF" DPICM is the primary US Army combat artillery round. Normally not used in urbanized scenarios, but this isn't exactly a normal scenario. Beyond that, there are Mk.19 40mm machineguns/automatic grenade launchers can be mounted on any vehicle from a humvee on up, or fired from a tripod.  If all of that doesn't count as a "headshot," just because the author is a dork, then you could just use C-130 cargo planes, and drop daisy cutters. Since the standoff fuse detonates them well above ground level it should definitely count. Personally I'd say the author is an idiot. I take the view of zombies expressed in the FPS game Quake : "That which is already dead cannot die. But it can be blown to bloody kibbles."
 
 
MLRS is nicknamed "The grid-square destroyer" because an MLRS strike can roughly cover an entire 1km x 1km map quare with DPICM bomblets. If zombies were massed at a density of only one zombie per square meter, there would be 1,000,000 zombies in that area. There is no deficiency in the capacity of modern militaries to destroy large numbers quickly. Real wars are harder because the enemy is hard to find and/or shooting back. An unarmed "human wave" can be disposed of easily by any number of means. After reading the synopsis of the book on Wikipedia I must conclude that the author has completely no idea about military capability.
 
Even low tech -- hopelessly primitive 3rd world low tech -- militaries could achieve significant effects with options such as trenches filled with burning fuel, flamethrowers, IEDs, etc. More advanced 3rd world militaries with actual artillery would be even more effective even with conventional high explosive rounds - it just takes more of them and longer to do the same damage that ICM does. Note that artillery does not simply make a big boom, but physically sheds unprotected flesh with thousands of tiny splinters. Since the zombie hoard is presumably not taking cover to minimize the effects of such splinters, even ground bursts would be fairly effective. Airbursts would be even more so but require a fair degree of proficiency. Since the zombies are not shooting back it is not necessary to use indirect fire which requires a high degree of skill to be effective -- direct fire is fine. If the zombie hoard closes with the artillery unit, an option is HE rounds with time fuses dialed down to the minimum time, basically turning the howitzers into 155mm shotguns. There is a minimum range which if the hoard was able to reach would require the artillery be either moved or abandoned, but the numbers destroyed up to that point would be huge Also, though a theoretical zombie hoard would be able to overcome conventional countermobility measures such as concertina wire or barbed wire entanglements by simply climbing over the zombies entangled in the obstacle, arranging such defenses in depth would deplete the horde as more and more of the zombies became part of the landscape. Once immobilized the zombies could be wiped out at leisure. Even if these techniques didn't completely wipe out a zombie hoade, either because not every single one was killed by DPICM or cluster bomb bomlets or artillery, or because a flaming trench was eventually overwhelmed by bodies or whatever, it should at least thin their numbers enough that simple marksmanship would be sufficient to finish the rest off.
 
The following is a side trip from this discussions' main topic of military intervention in a zombie plague, but I feel compelled to point out that the author's lack of epedemiological understanding is mind boggling. Compared to a disease such as pandemic flu, a zombie virus would be easily and quickly contained. Simple biological spread from one person to another that requires such direct and obvious contact with the infected individual as a physical attack that wounds the victim has a number of consequences for a disease. It means that the number of people who are infected before the onset of the disease becomes obvous is negligible, unlike HIV. Also, the victim's behavior will cause people to avoid the person and report them to the authorities. It actually makes the disease easier to contain than conventional diseases because the victim does not require treatment by the medical personnel or
 
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Jeff_F_F    Nerve agents   6/28/2007 1:04:38 PM
Nerve agents don't attack the central nervous system. They bind to and inhibit the action of the enzyme acetylcholinesterase aka cholinesterase which breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction between the nerve and the muscle cell. Acetylcholine transmits the impulse to contract to the muscle but the muscle cannot stop contracting until the acetylcholine has been broken down by the cholinesterase enzyme. The cholinesterase enzyme is normally extremely efficient, so there is very little amount of enzyme in the body and because the enzyme is not broken down during its action on the acetylcholine molecule very little is produced over time. As a result it takes a very small dose of a cholinesterase inhibiting toxin such as the organophosphates to be fatal compared to conventional toxins. While on the subject, atropine kills by enhancing the action of cholinesterase which directly opposes the nerve agent by helping the remaining cholinesterase enzyme make up for the cholinesterase that has been bound.
 
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flamingknives       6/28/2007 2:35:38 PM
swhitebull:

Tightly bunched zombies prevent headshots? Doubt that. If they're very tightly packed, it would increase the incidence of head injuries, as the bomblets would hit them on the head, leading to a quasi-airburst that would have increased effect on the heads of those around them.

Balloon effect? What is that? Sounds like a laymans interpretation of a blast effect. Allow me to reiterate: Blast is not the casualty causing mechanism of HE. The primary casualty causing agent of HE is primary and secondary fragmentation. Body fluid, or lack thereof, is utterly irrelevant.

Sudden Nerve Trauma? See above regarding primary and secondary fragmentation being the primary casualty causing effect of HE.

If artillery wasn't effective at inflicting head wounds, why was the first bit of body armour to return to the battlefield the helmet?

Ammunition shortages might be a problem, but with standard loads based on the sort of statistic that has 10,000 rounds of small arms ammunition (S.A.A) to kill one man in conventional warfare, there is going to be a very large amount of ammunition available. Tanks carry several thousands of rounds of MG ammunition, which is enough for about half-an-hour of continuous sustained fire, assuming absolutely no pauses for resupply, using the main gun or not shooting at zombies for a bit because there are none left on your part of the line.

The question has to be asked:
1) Why were MOABs effective when conventional artillery and airsupport were not.
2) Why do you need cover to withdraw away from an enemy who cannot keep up with a brisk walk?
 
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Jeff_F_F       6/28/2007 6:58:53 PM
I like the flail tank as zombie masher idea, but watching some landscapers use a trimmer gave me the idea of turning the flails so that the chains spin in a horizontal arc and speeding them up turning it into a giant, armored weed-wacker.
 
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