Quote Originally Posted by Mike_G View Post
...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.

Quote Originally Posted by Mr Beer View Post
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.

Quote Originally Posted by Galloglaich View Post
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.