• Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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    23 days ago

    For instance, suppressing fire; you can’t suppress zombies, because they don’t care if they get shot, and it only matters if they get shot in the head.

    This makes my teeth itch. I realize that this is NCD but…

    Without claiming outright magic damage to muscle and bone still matters. A bipedal creature absolutely requires certain muscles and bones to remain upright. If a zombie gets hit with a rifle round that blows out a 3" chunk of its spine then it can’t stand up. That kind of damage is easily done with a 30 caliber rifle round (7.76) let alone the venerable .50 caliber. Even the relatively small .223 / 5.56 that’s carried by standard infantry will remove muscle and break bones.

    Your average grunt is going to figure out real quick where and how they need to shoot in order to slow or stop these things. If head shots aren’t possible and it takes too much ammo for body shots they’ll start aiming for the knees and ankles, because again that zombie can’t run / shamble at you if it has no feet or it’s ankle or knee has been blown into a hundred pieces.

    So when Tommy Tactical or Isaac Infantry mag dumps 20 rounds of 5.56 into a zombie it may not be “dead” but it sure as shit has taken critical damage to its musculoskeletal system and will almost certainly not able to stand upright. Ol’ Mike the Mighty on the Ma Deuce will reduce a hundred zombies into a quivering pile in 60 seconds or less all by himself.

    That zombie horde will be a lot less dangerous and easy to clean up once it’s crawling on the ground with all the speed of a toddler.

    • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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      23 days ago

      Without claiming outright magic […]

      …We’re still talking about zombies, right? Animated corpses that have an overwhelming need to consume human flesh, and can only be killed with overwhelming brain damage? I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of magic right there. If you’re talking about something like the cordyceps fungi–which, to infect humans, would still need some kind of magical power–you still have a very, very finite limit on how long a ‘human’ will survive (about four weeks without food, give or take), so you should be able to just wait them out, rather than needing to proactively kill them.

      That zombie horde will be a lot less dangerous and easy to clean up once it’s crawling on the ground with all the speed of a toddler.

      Less dangerous, yes. Not not dangerous, depending on which version of zombies you’re talking about specifically.

    • nuke@sh.itjust.worksM
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      23 days ago

      This makes my teeth itch. I realize that this is NCD but

      Be non-credible, not wrong. Good post!