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Not Online!!! wrote:
But why would you want that when you could get a browning machinegun?

Well, a 20-round box of .50 BMG is only $75. A 250-round box? $875. Gone before you know it!

And people wonder why I like shooting 'mouse guns'...

Last time I checked, .32 ACP was bit less.

Well, for the moment we can buy ammo online again here in Commiefornia. Just bought 500 rounds of 5.7 for only .70 a round

I have a horrible suspicion our contract works out at north of £1.20 a round for the MP7's.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
But why would you want that when you could get a browning machinegun?

Well, a 20-round box of .50 BMG is only $75. A 250-round box? $875. Gone before you know it!

And people wonder why I like shooting 'mouse guns'...

Last time I checked, .32 ACP was bit less.

Trigger discipline is a thing people should LEARN.

but then again angry swiss fodder complaining about limited ammo with his 60 shots is angry swiss fodder complaining.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I have a horrible suspicion our contract works out at north of £1.20 a round for the MP7's.

First I was like $1.20 is painful.

Then I saw the £

Yep. Then again it is all debt, it isn't real money

On the ammo thing?

In a Walking Dead type scenario? How quickly do you think existing ammo supplies would be worked through?

As in, all the ammo currently on shelves or palettes awaiting distribution right now?

Really depends on what kind of zombie. Fast or slow? Headshots only or can they be killed like a normal human?

While the ammunition available seems to be very large, billions of rounds are bought by US consumers every year, it can go quickly if the SHTF. A war, either normal or vs the undead would chew through ammo very quickly. Though expenditure vs zombies would go down as fast as it started since they'd be thinned out very quickly.

Assuming that the cities were most effected and it spread quickly, you'd probably have huge amounts of zombies in the cities with survivors in the countryside being able to slowly thin the zombies out as they wandered out of the cities.

Zombies compared to a normal war situation have a major disadvantage, they don't shoot back nor do they need to be suppressed. So you can actually aim and make your shots count. You're not hiding in a trench spraying at the oncoming horde. You can basically do walking fire and stay mobile. This would probably counteract any extra durability the zombies may have on how much ammo it takes to kill them.

So the ammo supply would definitely be chewed through quickly, but since the zombies aren't respawning video game enemies the ammo supply will most likely outlast the zombies.

If its just a normal apocalypse, things are a little murkier. On the one hand, people will be shooting at each other. On the other, the population is still going to dwindle quite sharply. If you keep your head down, your supplies could last for years. If you end up having to fight constantly, it could be gone in days. Either used by you or whoever loots your corpse.

For this, specifically The Walking Dead scenario.

Anyone that dies turns, bitten or not, unless you damage the brain. Zombies are slow, but proven incredibly dangerous in hordes, and attracted to loud noise.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On the ammo thing?

In a Walking Dead type scenario? How quickly do you think existing ammo supplies would be worked through?

As in, all the ammo currently on shelves or palettes awaiting distribution right now?

It's hard to say because after the pandemic, people who might have only had a spare box probably have a case or two in reserve.

As for Walking Dead, as Grey Templar points out, these vastly oversell the zombie population. In the remake to Dawn of the Dead, they show a guy on top of a gun store taking sniper shots at less than 100 yards with a scoped rifle. Ludicrous overkill. If they're classic "brain box" zombies, you could sit up on the roof with a 10-22 and plink them into a oblivion in the course of an afternoon. In addition, each one you drop becomes something the others have to crawl over, and if you have friends and a plan, you can pretty much ring the property with slippery, squishy berms.

If you want to get into Mad Max/Civil War scenarios, realistically whatever militias or neighborhood watch groups exist would be integrated into larger forces, who would handle ammo supplies.

The issue with ammo shortages is a loss of practice ammo, which is important because shooting is a perishable skill. There are electronic substitutes, and the US military has a cool pneumatic system using TV screens where you have to pull the mag (and even clear jams) to shoot the bad guys on TV, but there's nothing like the real thing.

People focus on needing 16 mags to defend house and home, but simply trying to keep the peace isn't the same thing as taking a windshield tour of Fallujah.

Yeah, walking dead type zombies would be very easy to deal with. Easy to kite around, stand on something they can't get up while you spend all day headshotting them.

Heck, have a few dudes in larger vehicles drive around and corral the zombies up so they're in a nice big horde you can dispose of. Make a couple killdozers and you can simply flatten the local population till its gone. Literally any of the exploits you can take advantage of in a zombie game with the bad zombie AI would probably work wonders in an IRL zombie situation.

Hence why the authors of those settings need to handwave the army away, an enemy that doesn't try to take cover, is slow, has no armor and doesn't fire back would get shredded by IFVs and gunships

I have also thought that most zombies would be totally defeated by a good suit of infantry plate armour, as it is definitely bite proof. Small risk of having the helmet levered off, but then the occupant isn't just going to be standing there.

The worst you could suffer in that is being crushed to death.

The big impact from zombies that doesn't get shown that much is to your logistical chain and just in time delivery system. Universal threat, no mater how low, is going to gum up works fast.

Depends. There aren't going to be many zombies out blocking the highway system outside of major cities. And most large cities have the highways elevated. You could simply block off the access ramps and drive along quite happily. Zombies aren't doing much down below the overpass.

And in the event the road is blocked by a horde, thats why you escort the convoys with a couple tanks or killdozers to clear a path.

Yes, it is theoretically possible for zombies to stop a tank with mass. But the amount needed would be far in excess of what would realistically be encountered.

You would think that tanks with mine flails would be the most effective weapons against zombies.

I really like the World War Z book (not the utterly terrible movie) as it has overtones of how just pure organisational incompetence can lead to the problem escalating beyond the ability of security services to deal with it.

 Flinty wrote:
You would think that tanks with mine flails would be the most effective weapons against zombies.

I really like the World War Z book (not the utterly terrible movie) as it has overtones of how just pure organisational incompetence can lead to the problem escalating beyond the ability of security services to deal with it.

On that subject? I’ve often wondered how effective a Combine Harvester might prove in the same situation.

Combine blades look scary, and they will shred a few zeds for sure. But they are a lot more fragile then you think. They 're only made to cut crops afterall. A few dozen and you'd probably be basically useless.

Strategic reinforce and add flails?

Wee bit of Mad Max thinking?

In fact. This needs its own thread in Geek Media.

Living in a rural area, I often thought that the ideal vehicle for a zombie apocalypse would be one of those extremely large, 4wD tractors with the retractable bording ladders. Doesn't need to be armored, high enough they can't get you even if you stall out, good off-road and river fording abilities should roads be blocked or destroyed, okayish top speed, and there are platforms on the side you could have buddies on with guns.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
The big impact from zombies that doesn't get shown that much is to your logistical chain and just in time delivery system. Universal threat, no mater how low, is going to gum up works fast.

For a time, but people will adjust. Areas not effected by the outbreak will convoy supplies. I mean, I know the current thing is disaster pr()n, but we've actually seen total breakdowns and it's nothing like the movies.

Consider New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina. Yes, in some areas there was looting. In other areas, neighborhoods formed ad hoc police forces and provided mutual aid.

I never watched the Walking Dead because the promo art was so stupid. The image of one side of the interstate being jammed up and the other empty showed me that the writers never heard of college football.

You know, the authorities can make all lanes outgoing if they want, and there are car radios and phones and stuff to tell people about this.

That's why so many films/books of the genre fast-forward through the disaster phase.

Since someone mentioned World War Z, never read it, but did read the author's previous work with the Zombie Survival Guide and it was clear that he knew nothing about firearms. You do not need to bother with headshots when firing HMGs. The zombies are just churned into meat.

Max Brooks's zombies become magically more resilient to impact and trauma due the virus thing. They don't really need to conform to human frailties, so to make them more of a credible threat the resilience gets ramped up so that a headshot is pretty, much required

Even if a creature is immune to hydrostatic shock, the physical damage of its muscles being torn, its bones being shattered, etc... will quickly immobilize it.

A lot of zombie authors also underappreciate what damage to the torso does in terms of mobility and such. Even if we assume a zombie is a human who feels no pain and the cells continue to function without succumbing to shock unless they are directly damaged, a few bullets through the chest will majorly disrupt the zombie's ability to move.

You actually need the muscles in your chest to stand up straight. If they start getting chunked the zombie is going to slump over. A broken/damaged spine also won't support the body as well, and a broken spinal cord will paralyze the zombie.

Leg and arm muscles are the same. A bullet through those will degrade its ability to move. Severed muscles are useless muscles.

Any sort of rifle round will blow chunks out of a zombie. .50BMG will completely vaporize anything touched, and would be especially useful against a dense horde. Artillery and such would also be useful as the shockwaves would break all the zombies bones, riddle them with shrapnel, and do the same thing as shooting them in the brain. Even if a zombie survives a cannon or artillery shell, a living goo pile that can only twitch angrily on the ground isn't much threat.

You'd have a lot of zombies crawling around on the ground with broken/paralyzed legs, or not because their arms could be broken too. Zombies with shattered ribcages and chest muscles unable to stand up and so constantly flopping around. Zombies with obliterated neck muscles whose heads are just flopping around their torso holding on only by the neck bones. An angry head detached from its body just sitting on the ground. Zombies that had their biceps blown off so they can't even raise their arms. And any of these injuries would cause the zombies to flail around and hurt themselves further.

Zombies crippled like this would be no real threat to anyone who was paying attention, and after you have coordinated efforts to clear out hordes this would be the majority of zombies.

To be fair, zombie stories are rarely about the actual zombies. It's not really the point.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Even if a creature is immune to hydrostatic shock, the physical damage of its muscles being torn, its bones being shattered, etc... will quickly immobilize it.

Yes. Grey Templar and I have disagreed on occasion, but here we stand in unison.

Bones matter. Muscles matter. Even if you want to do the whole "undead skeletons" thing, at a certain point, the bone boxes are reduced to powder.

The whole "only the headshot counts" concept exists because the authors have no practical knowledge of what bullets actually do.

Not to climb on my soapbox, but there are a lot of fables about firearms (and calibers) that seem to be endlessly recycled, particularly in print media. I have a pretty picture book on firearms that I keep solely because of how wrong it is. For example, the book says that 9mm Parabellum is more powerful than 7.63 Mauser. No. Not even close. Or that the Astra 400 is capable of chambering any 9mm cartridge. No.

These claims are in print, so people repeat them, but they are still wrong.

So yes, the whole "knock down" thing where hitting a guy in the little finger with a .45 ACP will throw him to the ground is not true. However, having 7.62mm NATO rounds tearing through a zombie is likely to render it ineffective, even if the brain somehow doesn't take a hit.

There's a longstanding Hollywood convention that bullets don't break bones, or shear away ligaments and tendons - you know, the things that allow you to actually move.

All that being said, years ago I figured that an M1A (semi-auto M14) would pretty much be the ideal anti-zombie gun for all purposes. I think that's still a defensible intellectual position.

It would definitely be effective. The only reason I might say it wouldn't be effective overall is ammo capacity or cost.

Sure, it might take three shots of 9mm, 2 shots of 5.56, etc... to equal a single shot of .308 but you can afford more than 3 shots of 9mm/2 of 5.56 for the cost of one .308 bullet and the gun can hold more ammo in the magazine.

But if you are in a group and have an ammo supply it would absolutely be a decent choice. Just make sure you've got some buddies with ARs or 9mm subguns watching your back while you reload or take careful aim.



This might also be related to the old movie trope of characters shrugging off leg or shoulder wounds like they are nothing. A shoulder or leg wound is a minor inconvenience in a movie. IRL its life threatening as you have major life juice plumbing in those areas.

When your Grandpa got a purple heart in WW2 there is a reason he got shipped home afterwards, never had to go back, and used a cane for the rest of his life.

It's pretty basic chemistry, but fulminated mercury put into hollow points would be fun in a without-laws world of a zombie apocalypse. Easy explosive ammo, although I have no real world experience with what the outcome would be.

Very bad idea to just stuff that into an exposed hollow point. A hollowpoint which prior to firing will be cycled through the firearm, which usually involves a bit of friction up a feedramp... and will be exposed to some hot gasses as it leaves...

Now putting it into a cavity and then sealing the bullet, that is definitely potentially doable but you'd still have ammo that could explode from a relatively minor impact. Like dropping it on the ground. There is a reason most explosive ammo has a more stable explosive and a primer of some kind.

But some proper explosive rifle ammunition would be very nasty against zombies, though expense would be a problem. There is a reason it was reserved for snipers and airplanes in WW2 and not just given to everybody.

 Grey Templar wrote:
But some proper explosive rifle ammunition would be very nasty against zombies, though expense would be a problem. There is a reason it was reserved for snipers and airplanes in WW2 and not just given to everybody.

Yes, but once again, we're underestimating standard hollow point, which is never used in a military context. That would absolutely change the ballistic performance, and just shred the zombies in new and exciting ways.

Also, I'm going to interrupt our harmony by disagreeing with you on .308. Prices are all over the place, but there was a point in time when it was staggeringly cheap. I'm assuming this was because wartime ammo expenditures had ceased and not a ton of civilians were interested in 7.62mm ball.

Over Christmas I visited with my uncle who served in 'Nam (no, really) during Tet. We were talking about firearms and he is absolutely one of those guys who insists that the M-14 was a better weapon and that the M-16 was utter trash. He got the first-gen complete with defective training ("self-cleaning barrel" he said) and he marveled that we were still using them.

I explained that they've been product improved since then, training had changed, and they were pretty good now.

Now that I think of it, an AR-10 would be the way to go, not an M1A. Stoner knew this.