Official Derailed thread... Wait, what?

Not if you have a great sword.

Fuck those over hyped katanas. What you really want is a greatsword. It cuts through zombie like a greatsword. There's a reason it's called GREAT sword.

Coldsteel are a bunch of but they cut a lot of stuff on their video:

If their people can cut stuff with their blades... catch the drift. I mean, look at them.. No form, no training, nothing.

Here's someone who actually knows how to wield a greatsword (guy in blue)


Essentially, put on full plate and equip yourself with a greatsword and if you've practiced ahead there's no way those zombies are going to simply knock you over.

Greatswords were especially valued for their ability to fight a large number of armed opponents. Fighting a large number of unarmed and unarmored opponents is simply that much easier given that if you practice with this weapon you are assuming your opponents to have shields and weapons with which they'll fight back.

Besides, modern steel is amazing. The zombies could be in full riot gear and that wouldn't even wear out your blade as it sliced straight through. On the other hand they cannot harm you through plate and if you have practiced you can have more agility and mobility with full plate than an untrained person without it.

 

You might be able to decimate them, but like or not if there was enough of them to knock you over and swarm you it wouldn't matter what weapon or armor you had, short of a solar powered tank with it's own method of generating water and a hydroponics gardening system. Even that might not be enough, but you'd stand a far better chance. Even conditioned to wear plate it still has mass and I can pretty much assure you that the same person wearing full plate can probably run farther longer and faster without it.

You really have an exaggerated dislike of the katana, but honestly depending on what kind of zombie we're talking about swords in general might be the wrong method, if they're the slow shambling monsters of old school zombie flicks it probably wouldn't matter what you used because the only way to get caught is to be stupid (caught by surprise) or be surrounded. The newer zombies could be more difficult, especially the super-speed versions like from World War Z, I forget how they bypassed those at the end but honestly I think humanity's fucked in that circumstance. The worst is the ones you can only kill with a directed strike, because then it's not just about getting them down, it's about keeping them there. At that point I'd probably say you want a spear, because it can not only be used to sweep wide and do great damage but it can be used easily to provide swift precise blows that can penetrate deep. Get something more polarm style like a halberd or a lucerne hammer and you can easily use it to trip them up or fend them off as well.

On second thought, I like the full plate, I'd just strap some explosives inside with me so if I ever did get roly poly'd I'd just blow us all to hell before they could work the plates off, heh, deadman's switch, if I'm ever dead... boom, I bet those plates'd make great shrapnel. XD

 

I may have to do this...

 

On the plus side none of the bosses are thirty-foot-tall spiders that respawn every week.

 

But if I kill one I get a reward, if I kill the other I go to jail.


I think I'd rather take the one with the reward.

 

To be honest I'd be happy with artillery, armored vehicles and air support.

You know what artillery, armored vehicles and air support work the best against?

Personnel.

The only way to counter artillery would be to have some kind of zerg hive mind which would make sure the density of the creatures stayed at all times low enough to negate artillery while being able to collectively control them so that they can form sufficient pressure to beat infantry defenses.

That said SPAAGs etc. aren't useless either.

In short there's no way zombies could defeat a military unless they were something like Tyranids, eg. a designed invasion force supported by some kind of powerful invasion fleet or so.

That doesn't mean that zombie stuff isn't great entertainment.

To me, if the story bypasses a whole bunch of physics and such - common sense, I can write myself as some kind of sword saint while at it and able to produce enough vegetables for a year from a 2x2 meter patch without suffering any malnutrition issues from such a limited diet in a world where billions of barrels of fuel have suddenly disappeared!

The only real rule of zombies is the rule of cool. If it's fun, it flies.



From a country that has spent past 73 years preparing for zombie apocalypse:

 

without some kind of cure, or at least a vaccine, attrition would inevitably win, whether it's from zombies doing the killing or simple lack of supplies, it don't matter if you've got a nuke proof bunker artillery, air support and walls of steel lined with anti personal mines if you aren't able to produce food, clean water, and restock your supplies. Maybe it'd be the golden age of remote robotics development, there's always a chance someone will develop a way outside of what we currently have available to us and they'd survive long enough to enact it, I don't doubt that large pockets of people would be able to survive for a reasonably long period of time, but fighting that particular battle on the defensive is an entirely losing proposition. Unless you're Simon Pegg.

 

Aye, depends on the story setting and the rules of the universe. I'm always leaning towards a lesser leap of faith / less fantastic setting where you can just use existing military formations to decimate the pops that turn into zombies.


I just wanted to also mention that I don't hate katanas. I am irritated by how over hyped they are. Modern katana is a great sword and many Europeans really loved their sabers as well.

Historical katana? Waaay overrated in popular culture but worked just fine for what it was for. Then again popular culture has swords all wrong in general - because swords are more cool than spears.

Bring a guy who knows how to fence and give him a historical katana with bits of sand within the blade's steel and give me a longsword from modern L6 tool processing steel and I'd die in ~1.5 seconds.

Israeli tankers have a saying about it not being the tanks but the men in the tanks that win battles. Kind of same with swords. I know an instance where a fencing teacher held back a bunch of cossacks while he was armed with nothing but a steel umbrella.

 

Given that zombies don't regenerate from injuries, all the liitle cuts, bruises, breaks and so forth would add up to wear them down to nothing pretty quickly. Plus weeks of constant use on their muscles will take its toll. I figure they'll be unable to move pretty fast just from random crap happening to them.

They may not keep rotting, but they have no self preservation instincts, and injuries will add up quick.

I figure the zombie "apocalypse" will last 2 to 3 weeks, tops.

 

think ill just move to a area that has a much cooler weather 40% of the year.


the dead cant move if they are frozen Popsicle.

 

Technically they'd need food just like every other living thing. We're talking about joules here - you need to spend 'em if you want to get shit done.

As you're spending 'em they gotta come from somewhere. Even assuming they somehow change the entire metabolism and body chemistry they're either eating stuff and/or consuming fat and muscle from their bodies.

If they don't behave in organized and intelligent fashion they're going to face massive starvation really quickly because the human societies are built upon complex logistical networks to provide bioenergy to sustain the dense populations. Most humans live very densely these days.

30 days later was a good one on that, the zombies will eat out all the storages within a week or so, then they'll eat each other and eventually the remainder will be a fraction of the initial number and constantly weakening.

Another technical fallacy involves muscles. Assuming they somehow replace heart and circulatory system and lungs with some kind of superior decentralized solution, muscles are still damaged from wounds. Meaning your thigh kind of stops working when someone fires a 5.56 round through it and you'll bleed out.

If they don't have a circulatory system then their muscles will simply die or hibernate as they very quickly run out of oxygen and energy.

Essentially, hit a zombie in the heart or lungs and it ought to die just like any other animal.

Assuming "The Thing" kind of 'self adapting sentient biomass'...

Hence why I posted that winter video with our guys firing a shit ton of artillery into woods.

The two things that a military formation can do during winter is keep relocating itself rapidly while scouting and hitting the enemy from a distance. When you do this in snow and 15 to -40 Celsius range you will be fine but zombies will be freezing and slowing down significantly. Unless they have some kind of solution for it freezing is going to turn every cell in their body into mush and if they have a solution then they face two alternatives:
- provide enough heat to keep themselves from cooling down and slowing down significantly
- cool down and essentially stop moving

Animals that live in winter and move around need to keep themselves warm. They do this by consuming energy and producing heat with their muscles. Sustaining a moving body during winter consumes significant excess energy and you have to keep yourself warm 24/7. If you've cooled down it takes that much longer for you to get back to moving because metabolism and chemistry slow down.

Meaning they'll starve or freeze within a day in cold and the funny thing about winter is that there's not that much food lying around.

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I do still watch all the zombie movies. They're fun. I just refuse to imagine myself in such a scenario where I'm overwhelmed by fantasy creatures. I think Russians are a lot scarier than zombies and I'm going to see Spetsnaz moving against our local armory a lot sooner than I'm going to be putting my historical armor on to go slice zombies with my longsword.

Silly umaricans, needing to make up fantasy threats

 

Mounted Combat.