Unrealistic Conflicts

[FalloutJack]

Okay, I got one.

Many are the mighty fine works of Isaac Asimov, but I have a small problem with the book he wrote called Nemesis. Basically, there is alot of conflict around one space-born girl in semi-contact with a form of alien life found on a planetoid who is apparently calling the shots. Now, there are reasons behind this, of course, and she's apparently more or less the heroin of the story except she's a completely obnoxious child and nobody apparently can do anything about her, ever.

Sorry, Isaac, but that's just stupid.

 

[Talshere]

snip

Im guna go out on a limb and say your from the US, and are a bit upset that someone actually wrote about you in a made up war you didnt win for a change. I admit it almost never happens or is even hinted at, so here I understand your difficulties believing such a time.

However.

There is a big difference between not bringing enough and not bringing enough.

In one you thought you had enough, but ran out when your assumed tactics failed, eating through even your reserve, an just not bringing enough.

Every modern army in the world is trained on the principle of "dont aim for the head". There are 2 ways of thinking for this. Firstly heads are small and easy to miss, chests relativly are not. Second, a man with 2 in the chest is injured and bleeding and requires two men to drag him from the field, removing 3 instead of 1. If I remember correctly the SA80, the mainstay of British infanty is actually callibrated to fire bullets slightly off centre to reduce the chance of an outright kill (I might be making things up there).

This is drilled into soilders from day one. Its not beyond belief that this training would be hard to overcome should it become necessary. Which in the book it did.

Also, In the book the US army piled rockets into the hordes for HOURS. Assuming you fire 1 per launcher every min for 4 hours. You fire 240 rockets in 4 hours. If you have 50 of these machines, you use, in 4 hours TWELVE THOUSAND ROCKETS!!!! 12000!!!!

Your seriously telling me you find it hard to believe the US army "only" brought 12k rockets to this fight.....Seriously?

As for standard artillery. You can see from battle injuries that artillary does NOT blow people up. They blow limbs off and throw shrapnel/debries. In WWI AND WWII men advanced into these and walked out the other side, if a little shaken for their experiances. If we are talking about being that ignore everyhting but a direct and shattering blow to the head do you REALLY find it so hard to believe that a few million of these things couldnt just walk through?

Even if we move onto incendiary weaponray, people dont burn. Its REALLY painful, and the cooking of our muscles caused them to die because of the heat. Stopping our internal functions thus killing us. If these things are already dead, and dont NEED internal functions, then burning then will just make them move more rigidlly. People stop moving when burnt because it BLOODY painful. They dont feel pain. So why would they stop? You would need to chargrill the body, so literally no momvment is physically possible, or heat the body sufficient to cook the brain. Which is fairly hard.


I would not find it so beyond belief that a modern milatary will be unequiped to deal with a zombie invasion.


My spelling is bad because Im moving house and using a libaray computer which doesnt have a spell checker. Deal with it.

 

[Talshere]

Im guna go out on a limb and say your from the US, and are a bit upset that someone actually wrote about you in a made up war you didnt win for a change.

Wrong guess. Nice try, though.

Shame, it was worth a shot.

No, my problem with

Spoiler

the Battle of Yonkers

isn't that the US Army loses or that I'm a US Army booster. Far from it, I'm one of those lefty kooks that even opposed the Afghan War before the Iraq War; but that doesn't mean I cling to an unrealistic assessment of what American troops can and can't do. Brooks simply comes up with a very improbable way for the US Army to lose that essentially magics away what are its traditional strengths: logistics, conventional combat and the deployment of explosives and firepower.

Every modern army in the world is trained on the principle of "dont aim for the head".

Which would work perfectly fine against zombies, since they're still made of meat and tendons and, "undead" or not, need functioning muscles to move. (This is the first big problem with Brooks' zombies: they're improbably indestructible.) The idea that you would need to "aim for the head" is false. What you'd need to do first is simply cut them down -- muscles stop functioning when severed or badly damaged whether or not their owners feel pain -- which since they're rushing or shambling at you in a mass with no tactics would be far easier to do than with human enemies that dodge, seek cover and shoot back at you. At that point you could experiment with napalming them, rolling over them with armor, or various other things pretty much at leisure.

While I don't deny that US army excels above all else in overkill, it still assumes the body functioning as a unit. You put enough bullets in the Pectoralis muscles and its game over. Ok yeah, the mobility in the corresponding arm will be severely affected, but the entity as a whole is still more than capable of functioning. I can easily see that unless your using explosive rounds you could put a full mag in 1 zombie and it would keep going. You can put several holes in muscles and they will keep working providing they are still grounded to something at both ends. The only thing that stops them normally is pain. If it doesnt spasmium, lock up, or alike, which it cant, it should keep working.

I notice you keep coming back to the muscles will die and stop functioning, but is assuming normal human tolerance. You have to remember the muscles are dead and being animated by the virus, meaning to stop the muscles you have to kill the notoriously resistant virus, or physically prevent the muscle from doing its job.

It just isn't plausible that the US military would not be competent enough to figure this out. Or for that matter that it would be surprised at the number of zombies or what it would take to kill them. This is an army with more destructive power at its beck and call than any other force in human history; deploying appalling amounts of firepower is what this force is designed above all else to do -- the more so in this instances where there wouldn't even be any ticklish questions about restraint and civilian versus military targets -- and it has dozens of different available ways to do it. There is just no way that killing a mass of unthinking enemies that march mindlessly at you would be anything other than its dream job, and the same would have to be said for less powerful armies, too.

See I dont have trouble understanding how you could underestimate. The speed of which the virus spread, and the complete information blackout from within the affected zone could have you with 3 or 4 day old information when the virus spreads exponentially, you could potentially have millions more combatants then even the original pessimistic estimates gave. We assume the US would know but realistically, all standard forms of intelligence gathering would go out the window. In a built up area satellites would be useless, areal sweeps would reveal identical amounts of nothing, and sending in a ground recon team would be suicide. Granted the moment they started filing out of the cities towards the battle you would have cleaner estimate, but the US is a big place, its not like the UK where you could load a plane up in Scotland and have it in London what....45 mins. It could take DAYS to move any significant amount of ordinance to another location. At that point even if you overkill it in the prep stage on ammo I can see you could still run out.

(The other part of that particular episode in World War Z that made no sense was that it involved

Spoiler

American troops folding on direct contact with the enemy because of some fancy-schmancy new communications rig they'd been hooked up with for media purposes.

Again, you don't have to be a booster of the US military to find this whole scenario a tad improbable.)

You would need to chargrill the body, so literally no momvment is physically possible, or heat the body sufficient to cook the brain. Which is fairly hard.

Not at all, not from a military perspective. Seventy-five percent of wounds inflicted by regular napalm are fourth-degree burns and up, the point at which muscle starts to break down and become physically nonfunctional. (EDIT: Of course for Brooks' zombies, napalm burns would reach sixth-degree severity one hundred percent of the time. There's only a variance in human targets because humans thrash, try to put out the clinging fire and escape the pain. Zombies would have no such reactions.) The brain is far easier to cook than this; the proteins that make it work start to break down at temperatures of 108 degrees Fahrenheit.

I actually would not be amazingly surprised to discover the US would conceive such a system. We already get TV programs filmed with the marines while/after dropping into an active war zone. Its really not that big a step tbh. I seem to remember making a post after I read World War Z and was told that US military actually did have a very similar prototype system. I dont know how much I would rely on that though. You cant put a level on how seeing that would break moral, not in the least because modern army are mostly not trained to fight in melee. They never get there. I could easily believe that regular army would break under that, as from what I understand they are very TA like in their roles, while the marines are the actual standing army you send to fight. But if the condition for a tactical retreat was not planned, because it was never conceived it would fail, I can see how with that much hardware to move, leaving it to late, any attempt to retreat could easily become a route without absolute iron discipline.

As to the chargrilling again I come back to you are not chargrilling the brain but the virus, something which had proven to be highly resilient. Im not sure how this might vary however as youd have to go into the technical Biochemical changes that virus actually made, which I have neither the expertise or patience to know/learn. So Ill have to drop that one.

 

[Talshere]

While I don't deny that US army excels above all else in overkill, it still assumes the body functioning as a unit. You put enough bullets in the Pectoralis muscles and its game over. Ok yeah, the mobility in the corresponding arm will be severely affected, but the entity as a whole is still more than capable of functioning.

Now put another fifty or a hundred bullets into it. Given the cumulative damage to the muscle tissue -- even assuming that by some miracle some key muscles aren't just straight-up severed from their moorings -- and the snapping or disintegration of the bones underneath, is it still able to run around and bite anything? I think that's vanishingly unlikely. Being immune to pain confers no immunity to structural damage. I simply don't think there's any possible way for a bunch of unarmed targets to walk in a close-packed mass into machine gun fire -- or massed rifle fire, or artillery fire -- and still be walking after absorbing a certain amount of punishment.

Cutting out the parts that are pointless to argue further.


While I agree they are not immune to structural damage, even the outright severing of a muscle wouldn't stop them. As long as they could move themselves forward, they would do so, even if by dragging along with 1 hand. If they are still upright, they become a meat-shield for those behind. It is potentially possible for them to take those 50 or 100 bullets, and yes some may get lucky and sever thespinal column or hit them in the head. However by and far the vast majority will take at least, at the very minimum 10-20 bullets to take them sufficiently out of the line of fire. Not removing them from the combat mind, as they could still be moving forward, even the ones with spinal column's would continue to crawl forward, and these would still give partial cover from shelling as were a shell to land next to them, and they were sufficiently close enough, it would prevent most of the force of the blast on that side from doing lethal damage to another.

Granted these cripple zombies would likely never make it to the fight before its over, but they would soak a LOT of fire.

At that point its just tallying the numbers. 30 bullets per zombie, some miss. 5 million zombies, 150 000 000 bullets, assuming a 25 round mag that's 6 000 000. Est pop of NY city itself.....8 million. Total pop of NY state est 20 million.

Thats a LOT of bullets. Given that your average grunt wont carry more than 10-20 mags at the outside I should think. (Just googled it, apparently standard US loadout is 6 mags plus one in the gun).

Even with artillery thats a lot of fire-power and no guarantees.

 

[guntotingtomcat]

I'm wondering, I just heard about how in the Harry Potter series, the evil wizards begin attacking the muggles. Fundamentally this seems like a bad idea, given that going to open war with a group that has spent the last century building a stockpile of weapons that could sterilize every continent ten times over with wands that take several seconds to cast something that will kill 1 human. After thinking on this, I figured to make this thread. So my question is this:

Has there ever been a conflict in fiction that was one sided in a way that didn't make sense?

Yeah... but magic is like really, as in if you have, modern conventional weapons do about as much as cotton balls.

BUt that brings up my point. Why (in any media: games, movies, books, etc.) do holy beings in a war with other holying beings (angels and demons fighting lets say), do each side die? I mean... you figure the side with god could just have him walk out and say fuck you i'm god while giving the holy middle finger and blasting everyone he doesnt like straight into nothingness. Besides that... if your a demon you're going straight back to hell for re-enlistment and the same for angels and going ot heaven. it seems like a never ending game of tag between two people who stand beside each other and say tag then tap the person and wait for the next to tag them.

Again, tactical nuclear strike, and the fact that guns take half a second to go off, as opposed to spells which must be cast verbally.

As for the angels verses demons thing, I think it's because of god's whole "I don't meddle with free will" thing. Of course, I'm an atheist, you should probably ask a religious person about it.

But its not even about free will. this is God and angels fighitng against Satan and demons. Tehy're damning themsevles. And like i isaid, you kill one, it just goes back, so its just a constant stalemate really, especially since it doesnt matter in the end how many numbers you have since in the bible it says jesus walks onto the field with a sword then just starts talking and all the demons of hell explode or soemthing because tehy appearantly "cant take the truth yo" or something like that.

Besides, I've seen the magic they use in HP and while its sucky magic, there's better magic that would completely destroy the nuclear weapon before it did damage. magic = god when it deals with mortals. UNless your Gandolf where appearantly your magic makes you god or something like that.

And there;s another thing. How does an all powerful character like gandolf not just destroy the ring himself. he's God from what i've been told and then thats the argument of why he cant do anyhting.

Satan actually works for god, not against him so they wouldn't ever fight.

 

[Polock]

This is something that bugs the shit out of me. In everything, because it happens in everything.

To boil this idea down to the basics, it's plot convenience. Why don't the Covenant just glass every single planet with humans on it? Why don't (good) wizards just use the (immobilization) killing spell and be done with it? Why doesn't Jon from Garfield just kill himself? Well... because.

That'd be boring.

I tried to find the specific TVTropes article for it, but it's impossible to find the one thing you are looking for on that site, so... well, nevermind that point, I guess.

There was a scene in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (don't worry, not a spoiler), where you are fighting crazy wolf things while racing through a forest. During this section, you are riding on top of a... horse (I don't remember), and attacking these wolves, traveling at like 70 miles an hour. To kill one, you have to JUMP OFF OF YOUR HORSE AT 70 MILES AN HOUR, on to one of them. Then you have to kill it, causing it to --obviously-- fall over dead. Then, within a split second, you jump off of a no longer moving carcass, back on to your speeding stallion, and keep riding.

All with out missing a beat, all with scary instantaneous reflexes.

But then.

The section ends, you kill all the wolves, and a little cinematic starts playing. You, on your horse, running down the very wide forest path. You look around, to see what's up with the wolves. They say "not much", you say "okay, cool", and you face ahead. You gasp, see a tree branch straight in your path (at just the right height to hit your body and not your horses, causing you to be knocked off of it). You see it coming.

You see it coming, and then you see it coming.

And with lightning quick reaction time,

You get smashed in the face.

This made me have to keep in my laughter so as to not get strange looks in the library. Bravo.

 

[Bob_Marley42]

Russia vs USA. Happens so much in fiction, yet it's so unrealistic.

Well, it has happened before (not in the way its presented in fiction, of course ).

Anyway, theres a very good reason for this. The Cold War stayed cold. Which was dull. Everyone was promised a battle in the Fulda Gap that would make Kursk look like a 3 year old's tea party. This is an important point - the setting. Europe or North America. Somewhere with trees. See, during the Cold war we got all this cool hardware, like M1 tanks, TOW missiles and Mk.19 grenade launchers. And every time there was a promotional image or video, its in a pine forest, probably somewhere in West Germany, with the new weapon nailing a Warsaw Pact convoy (or, if it was a Warsaw Pact weapon, doing a number on a NATO position).

But that never happend. We only got to see the hardware in action in the desert and never against its true equivelent. Which was pretty dull. So people cook up an excuse to see an M1A1 go head to head with a T-80U, both crewed by highly trained soldiers and equipped with the (for the time) latest upgrades and ammunition and see how things pan out.

Hell, they were even doing that when the Cold War was still on, look at examples like The Third World War: The Untold Story. Now, the Book by Sir John Hackett is obviously rather more realistic than, say, Modern Warfare 2, but serves the same purpose.

 

[emeraldrafael]

SNip

If thats true, then why int he back of the bibly does it say God will Smite satan and kill him, after he launches a war against god when the time of revelations comes.

 

[guntotingtomcat]

SNip

If thats true, then why int he back of the bibly does it say God will Smite satan and kill him, after he launches a war against god when the time of revelations comes.

In the book of Job, god commands satan to test Job's faith. In most books in the Bible he's one of God's angels who tests mankind with temptation, but usually he isn't viewed as God's enemy. That is a very late catholic idea.

 

[Talshere]

While I agree they are not immune to structural damage, even the outright severing of a muscle wouldn't stop them.

It doesn't have to. Simply disable them to the point where they're an easy target to roll over with a tank, or cook with a flamethrower, or smash into oblivion with a rifle butt. Crawling and determined zombies are still mindless, easy targets; even easier targets than they were standing up. Even in the (again vanishingly unlikely) event that such mindless wrecks could manage to infect a population the size of New York City, yes, between armor, artillery, air and infantry the outcome of this confrontation is guaranteed. Almost absolutely guaranteed. That's why Brooks had to jury-rig the contest with improbable behavior on the part of the Army and its soldiers.

It think we are going to have to agree to disagree. I can see your points, but on the other hand I can see how standard weapons could be sufficiently ineffective to prevent just being swarmed by overwhelming numbers.

In the unlikely event of a zombie apocalypse, Ill meet you back here for the final round