OK I have a fascination with the Zombie Horror concept, the movies and games. But after a while I began to wonder if Zombie Movies/Game/TV downplay the effectiveness of the modern military.
In the UK there has been a good deal of memorial programs and media coverage regarding the first world war. As you know soldiers ended up in bogged down trench warfare where the ‘no mans land’ was dominated by the new technology of machine guns.
Yet in the Zombie genre the effectiveness of automatic weapons, machine guns and artillery is often forgotten or skipped over as they drop you into the world without the military or government or the Zombie Apocalypse.
My theory was that a platoon of modern infantry could fight a retreating action against a streets full of zombies. And with enough platoons even massive hordes could be whittled down and eradicated.
Anyway I raised this as a subject on reddit and it got people thinking and talking. I got some great feedback on issues I had not considered. The fact that the military is taught to shoot centre of mass and head shots are very hard to do at range without a scoped sight.
But I thought a better way to test my theory would be to build a simple simulation in Unity. So I developed ‘Hold the Line’ a very simple zombie horde fighting simulation.
Initially I had only the players gun but that didn’t match my theory so I added more weapons slaved to the players gun and 9 troops or guns firing into a street full of zombies can make quite an impact.
Possible Conditions (conditions stack, maximum -95%):
Day, +0%
Night, moonlight -50%
Night, no light -60%
Light Rain -10%
Moderate rain -15%
Heavy rain - 25%
Fog -5% to -25%
Range 10 meters to 100 meters. Distance also increases the “cool down” timer on when a soldier can take a head shot.
1 head shot every 1 seconds per 20 meters so about 5 seconds per head shot without a scope at 100 meters.
With scope it is one shot every 1.8 seconds per 40 meters. so 3.6 seconds at 100 meters.
Zombies move about 2 meters every 4 seconds.
Soldier is dead when it collides with a zombie.
So a soldier with 85% skill who is fighting zombies at night under moonlight with moderate rain would be 85% - 65% = 29.75% chance with distance starting at (100 meters - 65%) = 35 meters distance.
@NTDC-DEV LOL 350 rounds, that’s 11 and a bit magazines each I don’t think so, you probably need to factor in the fact that a lot of military personnel are logistics, command and support.
But good points.
@derf it’s based on physics and all the guns mimic your own aim. In theory you could make the ideal zombie weapon by creating a rig that lines up and link fires/aims a bunch of belt fed machine guns. Mount it on the back of an armoured vehicle and lay waste to one horde at a time.
Machine guns likely wouldn’t be used by the military against a horde of zombies. What you are describing is basically “spray and pray” and it doesn’t happen outside of the movies. To explain why, imagine you have a soldier with an M16 set to 3 round burst. He lines up his head shot and gets the kill. Congratulations, he’s just used 3 bullets to kill one zombie. The most zombies he can kill with a 30 round magazine is 10. Whereas a solider firing in single shot mode, or a civilian with an AR-15 could potentially kill 30 zombies with that same magazine.
Now, imagine he puts his gun on full auto and sweeps from one zombie to the next. He’s just used well into the double digits of ammunition to kill two zombies, assuming of course they are shoulder to shoulder. It would be more rounds if they are spaced out more. Even if they are packed in like sardines, his kill count won’t be higher than four or five.
Muzzle drift and rise also make moving from one target to another more difficult during automatic fire, decreasing your chances of hitting the second target. This is even more disastrous against zombies where a head shot is all that matters. Putting a three round burst into a human’s chest is better than one round because, also contrary to movies, one shot is not a guaranteed death. Putting three rounds into a zombie’s chest is pointless because it can’t kill them at all. So the shots still need to be controlled and precise.
Machine guns are used primarily for suppressive fire. If there is a hailstorm of bullets flying about, a rational human being is going to take cover and stay there. Not because death is guaranteed, but because taking the chance is stupid. This means that while the machine gun is firing, the enemy is not advancing and is spending far less time firing back. Zombies aren’t particularly scared of bullets, so suppressive fire is not a valid tactic.
You do understand the realistic damage a single round can do is quite phenomenal. OK let’s presume that Zombies can only be ‘killed’ with a head shot. But every ‘non-supernatural’ zombie needs muscles, tendons, bones and nerves to move. Bullets destroy those bits of a Zombie as well as they destroy those bits of a human. Bullets hit bone and tissue destroy the effectiveness of limbs to work. Say an 800 round burst of bullets against a horde of thousands only head shots a hundred or less. The 700 rounds that still hit a horde of zombies tear through their muscles. bones, tendons and nerves. Reducing their ability to move and attack.
And Zombies don’t dodge.
Ideally each round would be a head shot but does it need to be? Machine gun fire would reduce the zombies flesh to ineffective zombie burger. And each zombie with limited mobility would be a hindrance to the zombies behind it. Kind of a zombie traffic jam.
I am making the presumption that bullets cause real world damage and are not the “shoulder wounding” type used in hollywood.
The guy was shot five times and still managed to get to his car and drive away. A single bullet likely wouldn’t have even stopped him. Over 80% of the human body is a non-lethal target. Bullets aren’t one shot, one kill things. That is Hollywood. It’s why police officers are trained to keep shooting until the target goes down.
You are right that higher calibers would likely do a significant amount of damage to the zombie horde, but it would still be more efficient, and quicker, for the soldiers to take single shots to the head. Otherwise you have a pile of zombies to sort through that may or may not be capable of reaching up for a bite.
If you do a bit of looking online you will find that the .38 round can have a big difference in it’s muzzle velocity depending on the actual round used. .38’s tend also to have very short barrel lengths decreasing accuracy.
You do have a good point that a gunshot wound may not result in death to a person as long as the round or rounds miss, major arteries, nerve clusters and major organs. But one incident where probably very low power or even old ammunition was used. Should be viewed in comparison that every year in america thousands of people are shot and killed with handguns.
And that’s the key difference you are comparing the one incident using a probably underpowered and inaccurate firearm used by a person in distress with limited training. To the effectiveness of trained infantry with modern assault rifles and machine guns against a zombie horde.
I think the ineffectiveness of the military breaks down to two major factors:
Mass defection from a breakdown of the social contract. It’s hard to give orders when there are no social rules and each troop has to fend for themself.
All of our warfare is built on psychological warfare. Fully automatic weapons hit less targets over all, but it provides defense through the terror it induces in the enemy. Zombies don’t care and are ruthless.
Yes, thousands of people are shot and killed. But how many are shot and not killed? Thousands of people are also killed with blunt force weapons. Are you going to claim that hitting someone in the legs with a baseball bat will kill them? See the article below for more information on gunshot mortality rates http://www.emsworld.com/article/10319706/gunshot-wounds 25% is the mortality rate for the abdominal area. I’d imagine it’s even lower for the shoulder shot that you think is going to kill someone. People die from gunshot wounds when they bleed out, zombies don’t bleed out. A person hit in the leg with a large caliber rifle is going to go down in pain. Zombies don’t feel pain. Hitting a zombie in the heart will also no bring the high mortality rate listed. It won’t bring any mortality rate. Zombies only die by severing the brain stem.
See this article: The Myth of Handgun “Stopping Power” - The Shooter's Log particularly the part that says “A good friend of mine was in a shootout two years ago and was hit three times with .38 Special Speer Gold Dots before he even began to return fire. He scored two hits on the bad guy with .45 ACP Winchester SXT rounds (the ones that known as “Black Talons” back in the day) and the assailant ran off.” Black Talons are particularly nasty rounds.
I’m going to assume that you have never been hunting, or don’t know much about hunting. When hunting, it is important to hit the so-called “kill zones” the areas with the vital organs. In my state, Virginia, it is illegal to hunt deer or bear with anything smaller than a .230 caliber due to the decreased likelihood of a humane kill. That rules out AR-15s and the military’s M16. Of course on burst or full auto, the likelihood of death to the deer would increase dramatically, but absent a shot to a vital organ, you are still relying on them to go down in pain and bleed out. Zombie deer would not do that. http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/hunting/regulations/general.asp
It depends on the game. The Dwarf Fortress code, as a fun example, allows any remains that contains a body part that can grasp to be re-animated. This can lead to zombie hands crawling towards you.
I would think the military would be using flamethrowers over conventional bullets. Flaming zombies could always potentially set other zombies on fire depending on how grouped up things become.
And the military have mounted machine guns that fire high caliber ammunition at staggering rates or gatling and vulcan machine gun and small and large caliber artillery/mortar rounds. The military don’t hunt deer they aim to kill/destroy/explode their enemy.
OK my point is take your deer hunter and multiply him by 30-40 give them an assault rifle, grenades, mortars, sniper rifles, designated marksman rifles, bayonets, armoured vehicle, SAW and Heavy machine guns, .50 caliber anti-stuff rifles, grenade launchers, shotguns semi-auto, pistols automatic, body armour and helmets. Fire support, drones, tanks, attack helicopters, bombers, A10 warthogs, artillery support, C130 magic dragons, claymore, mines, hellfire missiles, laser guided bombs and C4.
The Zombies have teeth, hands and a level 5 biohazard virus.
Tactics for fighting the zombie horde, engage at range, armour up and keep the ammo coming.
Or take your initial premise of the guy breaking into the house, only this time fill the house with a SWAT team or Infantry Squad and send in a Zombie.
The military probably would take a battle or two with a horde to adapt their tactics but that tends to be the case for all wars as technology marches on.
As you said, they list petroleum for fire barriers, not bullets as defensive requirements. They list airstrikes as offensive measures.
That’s correct. Mounted machine guns such as the M60 or the M2 can fire at staggering rates. But not at the rates they do in the movies. 1000 rounds per minute is the maximum fire rate, not the effective fire rate. Barrels overheat if fired continuously. Mounted machine guns are only useful in the open, and even then it would be a massive waste of bullets to spray and pray unless the zombies are packed together like sardines. And even the loss of their arms and chest muscles isn’t going to stop or deter them, you’d have to take out the legs. Which would mean actively aiming away from the kill zone. And then, you’ve stopped them but not killed them. You’d still need to go in with something else to finish the job. 30-40 men taking targeted shots to the head on with the semi-auto selection would kill zombies more quickly and with far less bullets than firing thousands of rounds from an m60 and hoping to get a lucky head shot or take out both legs. And mounted machine guns aren’t the same thing as the light machine gun that you original said they should outfit everyone with. Conservation of ammo would be of vital importance since we’d have no way of ensuring that manufacturing facilities don’t get overrun with zombies. Firing thousands of untargeted rounds would not be even remotely strategic.
You just listed a whole bunch of stuff other than machine guns. All of which they would likely use in place of the machine guns. If the zombie horde is packed tight enough for machine guns to be effective, than other forms of weaponry would be much more effective and would reduce the risk of stray bullets hitting civilians.
Except the real life scenario would likely be the opposite. It would be a building filled with zombies that a team must clear. You aren’t going to have Seal Teams waiting around in hospitals, malls, and other large buildings waiting for zombie outbreaks.
Or we could build a realistic mod for say battlefield or one of the other multiplayer FPS games turn up the simulation to as realistic as possible and and drop in the zombies and civilians and troops. Which would be much more fun!
@HemiMG_1 and @Skibo187 so what tactics would you use to combat a citywide zombie outbreak?
Say the city of Los Angeles, and a zombie outbreak occurs there with patient Zero arriving on a flight to LAX. The virus turns people who are bitten into rabid crazies who attack others who are then turned and the process only takes about 10-20 seconds. Although it also spreads via bodily fluid but can take from 3-10 days to have the same effect.
That’s some pretty awesome info to consider. Liked just for how interesting it is, lol.
Covering myself in mud to mask any smells, and live in a dense forest where I could get makeshift weapons from heavy fallen branches & rocks, catch fish in a river and have a good supply of lumber to return to after I scavenge tools from the city. Guns are a no-no. As posted, you’re not going to have enough ammunition to get them all, and a single shot is going to lure them all. Having a mask (to keep flying fluids out of you ) & a blunt weapon is probably ideal because it’ll keep you in shape and build up your stamina to get used to day to day survival.
If you’re looking to add a story that leads to a cure at some point, you have a lot of options but you should stick to 1.
outside research given to you via airdrops for you to experiment on captured zombies with (I am Legend, Dying Light, etc)
research centers you need to find and make friends with the scientists inside and capture & bring zombies to them to experiment on (War Z)
there is no cure, kill everyone and quarantine the infected (Hatred, The Dead Linger, Cabin Fever)
you, the protagonist, are immune to the disease and you need to get yourself to a research center like #2 and have them synthesize a cure from your blood
You’re immune, and your blood is already the cure. You can turn zombies back into people if your blood enters them. You can die of blood loss if they bite you or scratch you too much, but you can cut yourself and fill vials of blood to prep cures. This adds a unique element to your zombie world because you’re less inclined to kill people because you can cure everyone given enough time. (Day Breakers - especially if cured zombies’ blood can also be used as a cure)
I could go on for a while. Zombies were my childhood, haha.
Ah, that’s different. Quarantine and kill or quarantine & cure. An RTS / command game sounds like a great idea at first, but you have to do it right or it could turn out boring xP
Maybe instead of the entire military, you can be a sub commander in a mobile base? And you can set the controls up like that 1 game that nobody knows about where you can switch back and forth at will between controlling an individual character fps style or controller a whole group rts style.
Just… just… make your gameplay more engaging than hacker:evolution and plague:evolution…
) & a blunt weapon is probably ideal because it’ll keep you in shape and build up your stamina to get used to day to day survival.