The first Chill game by Pace Setter called this power HAYWIRE, flash lights would fail, cars stall, guns jam, even doors to be locked/unlocked. Man, I got to dig out my copy!
The Walking Dead
- Thread starter Dannyalcatraz
- Start date
The first Chill game by Pace Setter called this power HAYWIRE, flash lights would fail, cars stall, guns jam, even doors to be locked/unlocked. Man, I got to dig out my copy!
Agree, Zombies are Lemmings...they will chase people off a cliff!
I think you are right on that - zombies don't seem to attract the typical carnivores from what I understand - bears, coyotes, wolves, etc.
Heck, if that were true, there would be a trail of animals following every zombie horde scavenging the bits & pieces that fall of them as they march.
"The devil you say, Chesterton. You mean you've discovered some rank implausibilities in a parlor-kinetoscope serial about a zombie apocalypse?"
Ahem... I've got one episode to go and I'm pretty much loving it.
re: military vs. zombie apocalypse. While it's --incredibly nerdy-- fun to talk about the efficacy of flamethrowers and fuel-air bombs versus the soft rotting flesh of the nearly mindless, shambling dead, focusing on the hardware kinda misses the point. The show is set nearly 200 days into the public declaration of the emergency (nice Andromeda strain shout-out). It's not hard to imagine even military discipline, and the broader chains of command and supply, breaking down in that period, as the dead are coming back to life and, presumably, tens of millions of your fellow citizens, and non-military relatives, are dying. Then coming back life. The military, even with their all their toys, loses because the people in the military, being people and all, break.
I see it going down like this. First, the military doesn't hunker down. They try to maintain order and help folks. Which exposes them to danger, losses. This also points one of the major themes in the genre: do the same morals/ethics/'right actions'/advantageous survival behaviors from the pre-apocalypse still apply?
At some point the military stops trying to aid the civilian population, but by this time the external supports systems have all broken down. Then morale collapses... etc. I'm not convinced positing the breakdown of the military in light of the breakdown of, well, civilization, is really portraying them to be incompetent. I'm sure they had plenty of terrifically gory victories over the dead in the initial part of the conflict.
Also, I doubt our country's level of preparedness for a serious flu pandemic... never mind a full-scale ZA.
The trouble with nerd, particularly gamer-nerd criticism, is it treats fiction like it's a game. It's all about who has the guns, napalm, and/or +3 swords of wounding. Even characters are just playing pieces to be deployed, logically, on the board. Gamer crit is based around the characters not being people, not having any emotional attachments or reactions. or worse, fallibility, as well as around decisions being made and organizations acting with perfect intelligence and efficiency, ie completely unlike the way decision get made and organizations act in the real world.
Instead, it's all about who uses the big guns with the --armor piercing/Teflon-coated/discarding-sabot/depleted uranium- ammo in the smartest way. Just like they would. You know, if it were happening to them.
/soapbox
Ahem... I've got one episode to go and I'm pretty much loving it.
re: military vs. zombie apocalypse. While it's --incredibly nerdy-- fun to talk about the efficacy of flamethrowers and fuel-air bombs versus the soft rotting flesh of the nearly mindless, shambling dead, focusing on the hardware kinda misses the point. The show is set nearly 200 days into the public declaration of the emergency (nice Andromeda strain shout-out). It's not hard to imagine even military discipline, and the broader chains of command and supply, breaking down in that period, as the dead are coming back to life and, presumably, tens of millions of your fellow citizens, and non-military relatives, are dying. Then coming back life. The military, even with their all their toys, loses because the people in the military, being people and all, break.
I see it going down like this. First, the military doesn't hunker down. They try to maintain order and help folks. Which exposes them to danger, losses. This also points one of the major themes in the genre: do the same morals/ethics/'right actions'/advantageous survival behaviors from the pre-apocalypse still apply?
At some point the military stops trying to aid the civilian population, but by this time the external supports systems have all broken down. Then morale collapses... etc. I'm not convinced positing the breakdown of the military in light of the breakdown of, well, civilization, is really portraying them to be incompetent. I'm sure they had plenty of terrifically gory victories over the dead in the initial part of the conflict.
Also, I doubt our country's level of preparedness for a serious flu pandemic... never mind a full-scale ZA.
The trouble with nerd, particularly gamer-nerd criticism, is it treats fiction like it's a game. It's all about who has the guns, napalm, and/or +3 swords of wounding. Even characters are just playing pieces to be deployed, logically, on the board. Gamer crit is based around the characters not being people, not having any emotional attachments or reactions. or worse, fallibility, as well as around decisions being made and organizations acting with perfect intelligence and efficiency, ie completely unlike the way decision get made and organizations act in the real world.
Instead, it's all about who uses the big guns with the --armor piercing/Teflon-coated/discarding-sabot/depleted uranium- ammo in the smartest way. Just like they would. You know, if it were happening to them.
/soapbox
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I think the default assumption is that because the zombies are so new & so different, the military has trouble devising new/different tactics in dealing with them.
Plus, in the early days before a lot is known, they might be worried that it can also be spread as an airborne pathogen - hence the soldiers in World War Z being dressed in full chemical warfare gear despite it being a hot summer day.
The soldiers were told to shoot the zombies in the head after being trained from Basic on up to shoot for the body, as it is a far bigger target.
Again, not excusing the military incompetence in every zombie story ever made, as I agree that it should be a lot easier than the books make it seem. Just trying to come up with some reasoning behind it. And, in World War Z...spoilers -
once the military adjusts their tactics, they move rather swiftly across the country clearing it of zombies.
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That is the kind of point I was talking about re: psychology, but the fact of the matter is, I'd be damn surprised if anything short of a bird-flu fast pandemic would disrupt a 1st world nation's military hierarchy and civil government in under a year...and zombie syndrome simply doesn't spread that fast. It can't if its sole means of transmission is via direct injury (bites, scratches, etc.).
I'll say this, though- the infrastructure to fail first in any zombpocalypse will be the medical services. They're basically unarmed, rarely are trained combatants, are trained to go towards the injured (which zombies resemble), and despite precautions will be exposed to blood, bones, and aerosolized necrotic tissue...even in the REAL world.
Zombies, if nothing else, are flammable...and because all of their liquid intake is from eating (we never see them drinking), their flesh is dehydrated. Therefore, they are more flammable than we are. Incendiaries of all kind are going to be ordered up, and not just by the military. I'm sure that molotov cocktails and aerosol flamethrowers are pretty easy to make, and not just by gamer nerds- trust me, frat boys know them too.
And, FWIW, believe me when I tell you there are a decent number of gamers & sci-fi/fantasy/horror fans in the military...someone would figure it out and pass it up the chain of command, probably right after a successful engagement.
Bird flu spreads orders of magnitude faster than ZA. ZA would spread pretty slowly, especially once it was identified.
The thing is, the military wouldn't have to develop new stuff, 99% of what they'd need is already in their stockpile and there are soldiers trained to use them.
And believe me, the military is pretty good about assessing the effectiveness of weapons vs target types. They'd figure out the machine guns and exotic rounds wouldn't be the best pretty quickly and switch to tactics that are either very accurate (snipers) or weapons that obliterate huge areas with the right kind of stuff (incendiaries, controlled demolitions).
The only holdup is the psychology of using those weapons in cities.
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Remus Lupin
Adventurer
It is a basic premise of all Zombie Horror that people are horrible, the government is corrupt, and the military is incompetent. Were these things not true, a zombie outbreak would fail quickly. Also, technology always fails.
I realize the military would not need to develop new tactics, and I agree that it seems unlikely they would lose. However, the premise of World War Z is that the Battle of Yonkers was a colossal strategic miscalculation and thousands of soldiers were killed while tens of millions of TV viewers watched on the 24/7 cable news networks. From the images on TV, the zombies seemed endless and unstoppable and the loss in battle set off a worldwide panic that led to the breakdown of society...
Crothian
First Post
Not always, I think zombie horror just ignores lots of things and places this group of people in this tough situation with little thought to how the government or military would react. It's basic horror 101; take a group of people and isolate them and then put them in mortal danger and let the fun begin.
When has any war involving a world power's defeat ever been decided by one battle?
I know that I watched the Gulf War when my Dad was deployed.
I wasn't worried- concerned, yes- but not worried. Had those initial engagements been turned around as Iraqi victories, the cry would not have been "Oh, no!" but "Oh yeah?" as things got ramped up.
And if ZA actually did get out of hand, and cities or even the nation itself were severely compromised, you KNOW that the military's last act would be to order those soldiers in safely isolated locations to let the munitions (including nukes) fly.
And that's a LOT of cities & zombies gone: between the air forces and navies of the USA & Russia alone you're talking tens if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers, ICBMs, TacNukes and so forth. That's because the vectoring of ZA would largely prevent it from reaching subs, aircraft carriers and missile silos.
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