Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

[RyanThunder]

it's really not though
the explanation given is 'incompetent upper management', which is probably the most realistic explanation of anything in fiction

Alright man, if you can't or are unwilling to recognize that a even an unsupported rifle platoon could kill a shitload of unarmed runners without breaking a sweat, you're not worth convincing.

World War Z, the bottom of page 93 to the top of page 94:

Why didn't they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat tops. They could have put a whole company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole valley and we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment building, about twenty stories, I think... each floor had a commanding view of the freeway. Why wasn't there a rifle team in each window?

You know where they put us? Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or in fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these elaborate firing positions. Good "cover and concealment," they told us. Cover and concealment? "Cover" means physical protection, conventional protection, from small arms and artillery or air-dropped ordinance. That sound like the enemy we were about to go up against? Was Zack now calling in air strikes and fire missions? And why the hell were we worried about concealment when the whole point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us! So backasswards! All of it!

That contradicts exactly nothing that I said.

Call me crazy, but I'm getting the impression you haven't actually read the book. Or if you did, none of it stuck.

Of course I haven't read the entire book. I don't waste my time on things I neither enjoy nor derive any entertainment... from...

...You know, I don't know why I'm even arguing with you about this. Forget I said anything. Sorry.

[AniThyng]

Look, even in modern industrial war, many tactics are dependent on the enemy being made out of human beings who cower, who fear, who, once the battle swings against them, retreat or flinch.

These tend not to work when you are fighting zombies who don't care one bit. Did you think that casualty rates in WW1 were 100%? Even with modern weapons and firepower, once the ammo runs out, those zombies go to town because they don't retreat. EVER.

This reminds me of the tiresome arguments in World of Tanks where people seem to forget that it doesn't matter how thick your armor is, IN THE REAL WORLD, when a enemy shell hits your tank and causes non-fatal damage, the crew is just as likely to bail and abandon the damn thing ANYWAY.

And come on now. You can kill a shitload and then the shitload + 1 kills you anyway. Or just needs to turn one man in the squad and its all over.

[magic princess]

Actually as early as the 1870 Franco-Prussian war the casualty rates in some of the regiments making frontal assaults at the battle of Woerth were 88 - 96%, and those were elite Frenchmen with better rifles than the people they were attacking and bayonets, not unarmed zombie hordes. These regiments also dressed the ranks of the few dozen men able to move after the battle and presented themselves with colours to the aghast reviewing French general. They never broke and ran.

[Aaron]

Oh for fucks sake, if I want a AAR WWZ, I'll read it myself.

Talk about sucking the fun out of the room.

[Aaron]

Oh for fucks sake, if I want an AAR of WWZ, I'll read it myself.

Talk about sucking the fun out of the room.

[RogueIce]

Re: My earlier comments. My issue is, well, where did Zombie One in Philly even come from? How did it get there without people noticing? And so and so forth. I mean looking at the way these rage zombies work and how fast they turn, how did they even get from one continent to another without crashing whatever planes they were on? (IIRC they mentioned planes as a vector for the spread) Granted not all aircraft would have grenades thrown and brought down that way, and who knows maybe those reinforced cockpit doors added post-9/11 would even hold up. Except that it would be exceedingly obvious when the rage zombies came pouring out and it would be all over the news. There's no way the pilots could miss that, they'd declare an emergency, be escorted down by fighter jets, have their aircraft surrounded by SWAT dudes and every news camera in the region will be watching them. I know the news would be watching because I've seen it various times when planes had to land due to unruly passengers or whatever.

That's what kinda bothers me about most zombie apocalypse movies and such because they never seem to address those questions. Now to be fair to WWZ, at least they talked about trying to find Patient Zero although that plot ended up going nowhere. So props there. And as I said I was only vaguely aware this book even existed prior to the movie, so if the author managed to explain it there good on him.

I also have to admit that these kinds of hand waves are not unique to zombie fiction at all, and is probably something I might ignore in other mediums. It's just that I really dislike ZA for some reason. Probably because of the nerds who go on and on about it, I guess.

[evilsoup]

the author goes into exhaustive detail explaining the spread of the virus before the full-on apocalypse (and it takes days for people to turn in the book rather than 10 minutes). I would recommend reading WWZ in general, it's actually pretty good.

[RogueIce]

I'll say this on the Yonkers thing: I've heard it's anywhere from a reasonable attempt to explain how military forces would lose to the zombie hordes to it's a thinly veiled author tract about the Iraq War and how it made the military unable to fight anything but brushfire wars.

I think an issue I might have, personally, is if they're making the sorts of mistakes that a third year ROTC cadet would know better than to make, I would be suspicious that it's basically author fiat to make the military lose. And that's not to say that, in real life, they couldn't be that incompetent because I'm sure there are plenty of example to the contrary. I think it might be some guilt by association, though, because let's face it: most of the time it is author fiat dictating the outcome, reasonableness be damned. Or the author just doesn't know any better and has those screw-ups unintentionally.

So I can see where people would be unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt on that score. Unless the author makes a good faith attempt to explain within the narrative why those mistakes were made, and why supposedly competent and well trained people are fucking up so hard by the numbers. And then I guess it's up to the reader whether they accept it for what it is, or see author bias, handwavium, railroading or whatever as the intention.

[Djinnkitty83]

The thing about Yonkers is... well there are a few things about Yonkers.

Yes, it does strain credibility in ways. But that's no excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, the setup might have been incompetent to an unreasonable level, but given historical precedent, the exaggeration isn't really all that much in context. People want to go, "Well it goes beyond the bounds of credibility, so the whole thing is stupid!" while completely missing the fact that even if it did get a little ridiculous, the basic themes of leadership incompetence, blind ignorance, and 'fighting the last war' leading to blunders which result in losses against apparently inferior forces are entirely valid.

The other thing that is constantly missed is that the Battle of Yonkers still resulted in the zombies 'losing'. Even after every possible avenue of incompetence had been mined, giving the zombies every possible advantage, in the end the humans still just dropped a megaton device on them and wiped them all out. 'Winning' or 'Losing' on the purely strategic military front was not the point of that story. The whole point was the public, societal fallout of the battle. The message sent was, "We have no idea what we're doing up top, and if we get desperate, we'll wipe you and the zombies out in a blaze of nuclear glory." And, as much as some extreme elements of military culture want to deny it, the military is nothing without the constant support of the society they protect. Yonkers represented not a military loss, but a social loss, where the populace lost confidence in the leadership, and that was far more devastating than any individual zombie attack.

[Flagg]

it's really not though
the explanation given is 'incompetent upper management', which is probably the most realistic explanation of anything in fiction

Alright man, if you can't or are unwilling to recognize that a even an unsupported rifle platoon could kill a shitload of unarmed runners without breaking a sweat, you're not worth convincing.

World War Z, the bottom of page 93 to the top of page 94:

Why didn't they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat tops. They could have put a whole company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole valley and we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment building, about twenty stories, I think... each floor had a commanding view of the freeway. Why wasn't there a rifle team in each window?

You know where they put us? Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or in fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these elaborate firing positions. Good "cover and concealment," they told us. Cover and concealment? "Cover" means physical protection, conventional protection, from small arms and artillery or air-dropped ordinance. That sound like the enemy we were about to go up against? Was Zack now calling in air strikes and fire missions? And why the hell were we worried about concealment when the whole point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us! So backasswards! All of it!

That contradicts exactly nothing that I said.

Call me crazy, but I'm getting the impression you haven't actually read the book. Or if you did, none of it stuck.

Of course I haven't read the entire book. I don't waste my time on things I neither enjoy nor derive any entertainment... from...

...You know, I don't know why I'm even arguing with you about this. Forget I said anything. Sorry.

Yet you said you did you lying sack of shit.

[evilsoup]

I seriously don't get this focus on Yonkers that anti-WWZ guys seem to have. It didn't really come across as one of the more memorable or important bits of the book to me.

[Glass Fort MacLeod]

Oh for crying out loud. Before you start deciding on whether something is stupid or not, could you agree on some sort of benchmark by which this is judged? This is the problem with EVERY argument over whether something is stupid or not - people start off with a certain assumption about what does or does not make sense. This is the exact same problem with every 'sci fi realism' discussion or any garden-variety 'tank vs mech' discussion: People come in with a shitload of assumptions and then get into arguments because a different person's shitload of assumptions comes into conflict with the first person. You can't resolve shit if people aren't even able to agree on how the topic is to be even viewed.

Also is it a good idea to mix the book with the movie? Its my experience the two are separate entities, so that arguing about one does not neccesarily translate to the other (and things that happen or are depicted in one, may not be in the other.)

I get the feeling this is actually more about the feelings of the differnet factions involved (and their views) than it is about the goddamn book itself.

[Kryten]

I seriously don't get this focus on Yonkers that anti-WWZ guys seem to have. It didn't really come across as one of the more memorable or important bits of the book to me.

As we've already seen here, it's probably because they're simply unaware of anything else in the book.

[Glass Fort MacLeod]

And on a semi-related topic:

Generally actually writing on SB is increasingly drawing me toward the depressing conclusion that much of the userbase is ironically bad at engaging with speculative fiction.

Did you honestly expect different? Spacebattles is a huge forum and its a very open one, with very little done to restrain or suppress certain kinds of opinions. That sort of setup by nature is going to draw plenty of idiotic ones as well as intellectual ones, and since its a forum its going to be subject to the same sorts of problems of tribalism or groupthink as any sort of collective enviroment like that is. It's not a new phenomena, and Spacebattles manifests the flaws you speak of in alot of ways (I personally detest the whole 'I can't incorporate a fictional concept without making it REALISTIC, because Hard Sci fi is the only proper sci fi' that infests Tech debates, for example.) but it doesn't mean the place is irredeemable. Although I will admit there are times I start thinking and bitching along those lines. (do as I say, not as I do! Don't turn out like meeeeee....)

This isn't a criticism per se, its more an observation that you seem to be getting depressed over things outside your control - you can't *make* people think or appreciate things the way you do, and if you get upset because people are different.. well.. you're going to get disappoitned alot.

And yes, I know I bitch about SB or SDN as much as anyone, but that's largely because I've bene unable to completely kill off my 'desire to bitch about things different from what I like/think is sensible.' I never claimed to be better than anyone, only that I'm aware of how flawed I am.

tl;dr I think you need to relax some.

[evilsoup]

well I hate to blow my own trumpet*, but you know we have a fair number of people here who are interested in speculative fiction
so Jung you could post stuff here and maybe get a decent review/conversation of it


----
*: this is a lie

[Oxymoron]

tl;dr I think you need to relax some.

Maybe it is time for a good cup of tea and some cake for everyone ?

[Djinnkitty83]

You know, the conversation actually piqued my interest on just how effective carpet-bombing would be against zombies. So, armchair-research, I took a look at a few of the numbers surrounding the bombing of Dresden.

The refugee population of Dresden when the bombing started, at a low end, is estimated to be at least 100,000.

The death toll, at the high end, is probably no more than 30,000.

A majority of these deaths weren't from the bombs themselves, but rather from infection, suffocation, dehydration and the like.

Now I'll play the numbers-fetish game for sake of argument, let's take two different scenarios: One where Dresden is completely full of zombies, no survivors left. 100,000 zombies and no humans in Dresden, carpet-bombed for two straight days. Now fudging the numbers and saying that the 30,000 high end death-toll *all* were completely vaporized by bombs and shrapnel, rather than suffocation and infection, that means that giving all benefit of the doubt, two days of focused carpet-bombing will only take out about 30% of the zombies in a city. Going more realistically, that percentage will be far lower because suffocation and infection mean nothing to someone who is already dead. So now you'll have a completely demolished city with probably 20,000-30,000 completely functional zombies and 40,000-50,000 zombies in various stages of incapacitation but, being zombies, don't care and will still limp, drag, and worm their way towards any conveniently warm meat.

Now the second scenario: Dresden has been declared a lost cause. We'll keep it simple and say half the population is infected: 50,000 zombies, 50,000 humans. The military decides to do two days of bombing anyways, take out everyone for the 'greater good'. We end up with largely the same casualty numbers, 15,000 on each end being shrapneled, suffocated, infected and otherwise killfucked to death. Except the numbers are a lot lower for the zombies what with them being already dead and not caring about suffocation or bacteria. On top of that, now you have a lower number of survivors, many of which are now trapped and injured in varying degrees in the rubble, now even *more* vulnerable to the now relatively larger number of zombies. Congrats, things have just been made a whole lot worse by carpet-bombing, destroying your own city, killing far more of your own than the enemy, and leaving a lot more of your own injured, trapped, or otherwise ripe for conversion to the enemy's forces.

So yeah, unless the zombies are willing to all line up in open plains, far away from any survivors, indiscriminate application of heavy ordinance will not work nearly as well as wankers want to claim.

[RogueIce]

I'm not a numbers kind of guy generally, but if I were I'd probably point out that 'modern ordnance' is a lot different than WWII carpet bombing from B-17s.

By how much I cannot say though. But I bet someone would bring it up.

Well besides me.

Not trying to start shit, just saying. I think it'd be a valid counterpoint.

[Oxymoron]

IIRC, after a while and once things started to "settle", so to speak, the tactic that got adopted was to get into formation on open terrain, send scouts in the cities to draw out the zombies into the open terrain, and once the zombies where in range, start sniping them from a distance, and using artillery fire if necessary if the concentration of zombies became too important.


One thing to note is that the major difference between the book and the movie is that the book's zombies are of the shambler variety, whereas the movie's are more of the "28 days later" running and jumping zombies variety. So this would have a huge impact on the tactics used.

For example, in the case of the movie, one of the best tactics as shown on the epilogue would be to draw all the zombies into a relatively "closed" space so that they can't too easily escape, blow the place to kingdom come once there's enough of them and then burn the remains and blow it up some more for good measures.



@ Rogue : generally speaking and from what I gather, outside of specialized munitions "modern" ordnances are less powerful in term of their explosive power than WW2 explosives ; the thing making them modern being that you can drop a bomb 20 kilometers away from its target and it's going to guide itself through GPS toward its target with a precision of less than 5-10 meters. They also cost several orders of magnitude more to produce and to use.

[evilsoup]

aren't modern weapons more focused on penetration rather than fire-bukkake, though?

[Oxymoron]

Let's say that a WW2 500 lbs bomb might have cost around, let's say USD 500-800 of the time to be produced, as an highest guesstimate.

The GBU-12 Paveway II allegedly cost USD 19,000 per unit.

[RogueIce]

But just to have some fun I guess, are the book zombies the fast rage types like in the movie, or the typical shamble zombies that couldn't outrun an old person with a walker?

Because I could see it going to shit with the rage zombies, because you probably couldn't kill them all and once they hit your lines any ground troops are fucked pretty bad, especially with the rapid infection and turn rates. One or two may be manageable if your soldiers are willing to plug themselves/each other, which in the movie at least people seemed to figure that one out pretty quick.

But I would be less sympathetic if they're shamblers, in all honesty. I mean sure, maybe you couldn't kill all of them if you throw in enough numbers on the zombie side. But worst case you just perform a tactical withdrawal because seriously, they're not going to catch up with trained, reasonably in shape soldiers with vehicle transport. You just withdraw and keep bombing the shit out of 'em until you get to some other fallback position. As long as you don't run out of ammo or something I'm not sure how they'd lose outside of author dictated stupidity.

EDIT: Well Oxy answered that question for me before I could post. But yeah. I guess it depends on the exact nature of the shamblers.

EDIT #2: And by "lose" I mean getting overrun and your soldiers infected and that general kind of a clusterfuck. I did see mention that apparently they didn't bring the right types of ammunition in enough numbers, which seems odd to me considering they had to know they'd be up against, essentially, human waves. So I'm not sure why they would have even bothered with AP or anything that wasn't going to be useful as antipersonnel, but whatevs.

[Oxymoron]

aren't modern weapons more focused on penetration rather than fire-bukkake, though?

Depends on what they are intended for. Is it a bunker buster, a runway cratering bomb, an anti-tank bomb/missile, an anti personnel bomb/missile, etc... ?

I think one of the most important difference between modern bombs and WW2 ones are that modern ones are guided, which in theory and in the context of modern warfare, allow to produce as much effective damage to enemy war-fighting capabilities while requiring to fly far less airplanes and carry far less bombs / missiles to do the same job.

Basically, quality over quantity.

[Djinnkitty83]

I'm not a numbers kind of guy generally, but if I were I'd probably point out that 'modern ordnance' is a lot different than WWII carpet bombing from B-17s.

By how much I cannot say though. But I bet someone would bring it up.

Well besides me.

Not trying to start shit, just saying. I think it'd be a valid counterpoint.

Yeah, I debated whether I needed to include a disclaimer about WW2 being different than today, I didn't consider it that important as it was only half the message. Dresden was considered a terrible atrocity, recreating it with today's more efficient killing technology would be even more frowned upon by the most people. Even assuming the majority of the populace truly believes the things wearing the bodies and faces of their loved ones aren't, in fact, their loved ones, and would be totally cool with bombing them to all hell and back, the fact of the matter is that assuming there are going to be 100% zombie-packed cities with no survivors, or zombies conveniently clustering in open, high visibility areas for targeting, is even more ridiculous than the worst exaggerations of Yonkers.

So it's generally a given that even in the most zombie-infested areas, there are going to be a number of survivors. And the more efficient something is at killfucking people, it's going to be slightly less efficient against zombies, which means any indiscriminate bombing that leaves anything more than 0 survivors will leave more people injured and waiting to be zombified than before the bombing. Not to mention the sheer cost of destroying cities, land, infrastructure on that level is going to make most people think twice about the 'lol killemall' strategy.

[Oxymoron]

Can't you just burn them all in a fiery of napalm glory ?


Bring on the b-52, it's Vietnam turned up to 11, guys !