The cheer up thread.

[Tyrendian]

sadly accurate lol

[Psychosplodge]

But what about Apocalyptica?

[Psychosplodge]

[Mr Mystery]

And yeah - hence Shaun of the Dead remains the most likely outcome for any actual Zombie invasion. Spesh as they're proper slow Zombies, and not this modern 'makes you Undead and an Olympic Athlete nonsense...

[Psychosplodge]

And yeah - hence Shaun of the Dead remains the most likely outcome for any actual Zombie invasion. Spesh as they're proper slow Zombies, and not this modern 'makes you Undead and an Olympic Athlete nonsense...

pretty much.

[Mr Mystery]

It's one of the reasons I didn't take to Fear The Walking Dead.

Given it was meant to explore why the world fell so completely, I think they botched it good and proper.

Walking Dead itself gets a certain pass there because the world just fell. OK, cool. I can run with that. But if you're going to explain it, make it convincing. Make it good. Especially when the Zombies themselves are actually pretty feeble. Shaun of the Dead style panic and anarchy at first whilst people come to terms with what's happening, then 'dakkadakkadakkadakkTANKSTANKSTANKSNAPALM' oh look all is more-or-less sorted now.

In short, only stupid people should die in Zombie outbreaks. And sadly, stupid also includes those who can't bring themselves to brain an already dead relative (Rick's crew have that down though. Carol especially, for taking it to the next logical step and doing what needs to be done before bad stuff happens.)

[Kirsten]

killing all my relatives is the bit I am looking forward to most

[CoffeeGrunt]

I liked the World War Z scenario, where the major problem was caused by Mankind's refusal to admit the problem even exists until the catastrophe is already was an outbreak. From there the military attempted to take on the infection outside of the cities as within the cities it was a clusterf*ck of gung-ho civilians, not-gung-ho civilians, zombies, and the odd police force all creating an impossible to contain melee.

Except they were underequipped to deal with the sheer volume of zombies. 18 million German Wehrmacht may have been committed to the war, but only 4.3-5.3 million were actually killed. Most surrendered, because wars are pretty much never a game of slaughtering the opponent to the last man, (even the Imperialist Japanese wouldn't fight to the last so much as commit suicide rather than be captured, but more of them would fight to the last due to their mentality.)

The Total War chapter of WWZ gets across really well that you can't break a zombie horde's supply chains, nor assassinate their commanders. Unlike a soldier, who needs to be fed, watered, told what to do, what ground to hold, where to fall back, where to shoot and who to suppress. Unlike a soldier, who wants to go home to a family, who ultimately has some form of self-preservation, who has aspirations and dreams beyond dying in a war, zombies exist solely to eat. Soldiers sleep, rest or get distracted, zombies don't.

TL;DR, the new "fast" zombies are stupid, and if done properly it makes a lot of sense that a military would have trouble against zombies. Tanks need fuel and parts, explosives are designed to dismember, not kill, and soldiers are trained to aim for center-of-mass, not the head.

[Psychosplodge]

Artillery seems too inaccurate to use in this setting, (the televised cluster**** depicted in that book is a marvellous piece of writing) But reasonably disciplined firing lines should have success even aiming for a smaller slow moving target. Introduce a .50 machine gun at knee height and you should be able to just walk through the immobilised zombies stabbing them with a knife on a stick?

[Morgrim]

Not really. Bullets tend to immobilise through pain and shock rather than brute force damage. That's why people on certain drugs or hyped up on adrenaline can keep charging through gunfire as if they're bulletproof. Sure, they're going to die from their injuries, but they're not going to die quickly. You need something that takes out key parts of the brain, or a shot directly to the heart, or something bio-mechanical like cutting the achilles tendon or shattering the ankle. Busted kneecaps would slow motion, not stop it, you'd need to smash the hinge joint itself. With zombies it'd be worse because they'd still crawl.

Chainmail (they make lightweight aluminium sets for shark diving that'd work well), a face mask/shield to protect from splatter and a suitable crushing melee weapon would probably work well, as long as you weren't dogpiled. But the threat of zombies is that you have to kill every single last one of them by hand, and missing one can restart an outbreak. They're not an enemy army, they're polio in a world where polio can eat you.