Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

And somehow this still makes more sense than the movie versions of RE.

I still find it hilarious that Umbrella wasn't taken out by elite crack commando teams and fighting their horrific monsters, but instead just by a bunch of legal that got brought against them that crashed their stock and forced them to close.

Another aspect of using zombies as weapons, would be the moral-based damage they can inflict on the enemy.

It's one thing to fight an enemy at a distance.

It's another to be up close with the hostile and recognize the face that's about to bite one's jugular out.

Soldiers might lose the courage to fight and retreat instead, or end up as casualties, if forced to fight their own who got turned against them.

Seems like that should only have a very limited effectiveness window. It's not like you'd be able to personally arrange for every soldier to look at their grandma through a rifle scope.

Morale would be an issue, certainly, but I feel like that would be more about fear of infection and turning on one's friends. Soldiers might refuse to go into combat without NBC gear if the "virus" is airborne.

In the end, zombies are melee fighters. Guns win every time. Their success as front-line troops depends on shock, surprise, and the ability to convert their victims into more zombies, but an organized military response would quickly adapt.

The degree of disruption they would cause would be highly proportional to how many people get infected before an organized response can be started. If it's one percent of the population, that's bad but not catastrophic. If it's ten or twenty percent, civilization is in serious trouble. If it's fifty percent, there may be no uncompromised units available. We're all going down.

Edited by Fighteer on May 1st 2024 at 9:41:38 AM

I was more thinking in the lines of "Send in Vanguard. Vanguard gets caught off guard and turned. Z-vanguard now returns to the first platoon within reach. Element of surprise taken. The soldiers have difficulty to kill their own up close."

Not close relatives in an active battlefield.

This all sounds like a training issue. Many armies and military units throughout history treated hand to hand fighting as either desirable compared to being picked off by artillery or archers or just another thing to do in the midst of battle.

For some, seeing the face of the enemy up close was refreshing and encouraging because you stood a chance to win. For others it was less dangerous than seeing if your trench or bunker or fort would withstand the next artillery barrage.

Also it had a camaraderie effect. If you were hand to hand alongside those of your side it tended to be a motivator since you could help and be helped by them. Also you knew them.

In the context of zombies, the first military unit against them to remember the order “Fix bayonets!” and form proper lines would have little to fear from the shambling zombies. Those zombies that survive the fusillades of rifle and machine gun fire would be easily repelled by troops trained in bayonet fighting, especially if whole formations of guys are covering each other.

Sheer weight of numbers only goes so far against things like that. It’s one of the reasons why weaponry particularly artillery advanced and changed so much over the 19th century. Infantry squares and firing lines created formations of men that became incredibly expensive and difficult to break simply through weight of numbers. Horse cavalry for example became obsolete in the face of such things especially as infantry weapons evolved from flintlock muskets to breech loading rifles to repeating arms. To break up those advantages required either faster firing rifles, longer ranged rifles, more destructive artillery or faster firing or longer ranged artillery eventually culminating in the beginnings of modern warfare like armored vehicles replacing field cannon and horse cavalry.

The only way zombies would win against those kinds of things without resorting to the writer saying so is sudden surprise of large numbers and maybe an advantage of they can convert people into more zombies by simply getting close enough. Biologically this means pheromone or pathological transmission like how colds and flu spread. Even if the zombies are not biological in reason for existence. Even a magical horde of them would fail without something like that.

Unless the zombies are truly different however. Mutated to have superhuman speed, agility, reflexes, strength and durability (relatively speaking) or something more like the ability to sprout Combat Tentacles or something to further spread their numbers or reduce their opposition. Then I think they’d be more classical monster stories than zombies though.

Edited by MajorTom on May 1st 2024 at 7:32:13 AM

You'll need some kind of mechanism of controlling the Zombies. Not necessarily a remote control but something to keep zombies from attacking eachother. Pheremones, perhaps.

In nearly every zombie apocalypse story, the zombies don't attack each other. This is built into the premise. If they did, the problem would solve itself without anyone else intervening.

Maybe we could spray them with something that blocks this recognition system.

Again, though, what Tom says is correct. Classical zombies are slow melee combatants that can't use tactics. Any modern military should grind them into dirt.

Edited by Fighteer on May 1st 2024 at 10:38:06 AM

They would make be quickly slaughtered by the military, but if released into a city, they would probably make for pretty good terror weapons. This could also have the benefit of pulling the opposing military's infrastructure out from under them. This does run into the issue of control. Perhaps some kind of vaccine? I'd hope any group that sends diseased monsters against their enemies would have the sense to have a way to protect themselves from infection.

If an entire city is converted, you don't send squads in to get ambushed by zombies hiding under stairwells. You isolate and gas the place.

Another classic zombie trope is the people who created them getting eaten themselves. That's so prevalent that it would almost be refreshing for them to have developed some kind of immunity. But if they did that, it could be seized and used to stop the apocalypse.

Assuming the zombies aren't serving the same purpose as the corpses flung by catapults over castle walls in medieval times that is.

Kill them, and you may end up releasing a horrid set of diseases into the air that turns the area into a biohazard, creating even more zombies in the process.

Even more so if the "Z-factor" have a long incubation time and no symptoms before the zombification sets in, allowing the carriers to spread it further in the process.

Though as I said, even if you eliminate all the zombies in a city, it would still be a blow since all that important infrastructure would now be abandoned, and it would have a cascade effect on all surrounding areas and possibly beyond depending on how important it was.

Well, sure, the civilization might be fucked. That's what happens when a few million people just up and die.

Which could be a story in and of itself. Zombies happened, millions in an area (billions around the world?) die off, zombies are destroyed ultimately and the story is how do people handle the sudden void in population, economics, politics, power sharing arrangements, and more.

Would almost be more interesting than regular zombie fare in terms of story because it has real world applicability for what happens after major disaster or war or some other form of sudden depopulation.

On the whole zombies not needing to eat thing, I always operated under the assumption that its more they break themself s down for energy.... that's why they tend to be rotten so fast.

After all unlike a normal living organism they don't seem to be concerned with long-term survival to the point that they breed and create multiple offspring... just long enough to infect others... if the host is compleatly destroyed in a month, but it has already infected multiple others, at that point its a strategy sucess.

It also means that the metabolism is down to the bare minimum. Which explains why most zombies are slow and lethargic.

Granted, that would be one really only be most successful in densely populated areas like cities. Once they have to travel long distances to reach the next host, then their accelerated decomposition would work against them. Especially if they're in a place that would negatively affect their physiology, like a swamp, desert or tundra.

Edited by Kaiseror on May 1st 2024 at 12:39:55 PM

Just like a virus. Those have very little if any metabolic longevity. One of the reasons they die off of surfaces in a matter of hours even without disinfectants.

Which also explains the behavior of zombies. Infect a host, turn the host into a container for whatever causes zombies, multiply that within the host and then pass it on to new hosts, the more it does the more successful it is.

Just like a virus. No wonder viral zombies have become popular in the last 25 years.

The body decomposing might become a function if secondary carriers, non-human carriers, gets involved in the process.

Like insects starting to gather and nest on and inside the body. Then leaving maggots. Birds and other small animals, other predatory insects perhaps, eats the maggots and from there, end up spreading out over a larger area as the circle of life takes place.

However, the "Z-factor" turns active in human beings. Remains dormant in any other species in order to extend its lifespan by going into hibernation.

So the "Z-factor" would spread and lurk in an area, until it reaches the places where food supplies are being made and sold to the stores, like chicken farms, bovine meat production, pig farms, and the like.

Starting the mess all over again in a bigger area of the enemy country.

Secondary carriers is something to take into account and consideration.

Edited by Trainbarrel on May 1st 2024 at 7:52:45 PM

Incidentally, the aforementioned downsides of the persistence/contagiousness of zombies making them impractical as a weapon are also why bioweapons are generally seen as impractical in Real Life. Radiological and Chemical weapons typically settle wherever they are and stay put, while biological weapons are spread further by their own victims.

All things considered, if you plan to occupy an area after you get rid of the occupants, good ol' HE or Kinetic weapons are usually far more practical options, as they don't tend to have bonus surprises for the attacker to deal with later.

Edited by AFP on May 1st 2024 at 6:48:27 AM

The T-Virus outbreak in RE 2 was caused by rats carrying the virus after William Birkin got shot by Umbrella corp and the T/G-Virus got released in Raccoon City sewers. So the virus having a vector that doesn't cause the Zombification of the subject but can be used to spread to humans isn't without precedent.

Militarily, the T-Virus would be an area denial and disruptive WMD that falls under biological warfare. But any state actor using it would invite being nuked into oblivion under most countries WMD use doctrines.

The other use would be by terrorists groups that don't care about civilian casualties and the whole plots from the RE games have been on non-state actors using their viruses for terrorism and eugenics.

Edited by AngelusNox on May 1st 2024 at 10:53:45 AM

Eugenics is actually what Umbrella was up to, they were trying to make the perfect human being to be their next stage. They succeeded actually... mostly, until he went crazy and decided global genocide was good. Sure his plans would kill off most of humanity, like 80%, but the survivors would be like him now.

Not only that, but such weapons are indiscriminate. They affect your guys upwards of every bit as much as they do the enemy.

What would be the point of taking out an area with a zombie virus if said virus then rebounded into your men via rats or contaminated surfaces?

I know a nebula is a big cloud of gas that can be light years across, but is there a smaller gas cloud that could potentially exist within a solar system?

Yes, the zodiacal cloud. Note that cloud-like thingies tend to be unstable, especially in systems with a corona and/or orbiting bodies, so a molecular cloud cannot coexist with the Solar System for long.