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Gnoman posted:Was that the one with the ".22s bounce around in the head to liquefy the brain" idiocy? nah, it wasn't bouncing around, it was basically a small version of API - there was a tiny little incendiary charge to make sure the brain got cooked. It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember thinking that the "22" was basically just .223. The description for the new gun they designed was actually pretty interesting - it was a super simple stamped metal semi-auto with a wood stock, designed to be as simple to manufacture with the reduced industrial base they were working with. Kind of a sten idea, only a lovely little rifle. Some of the stuff they got into in that book with logistics were pretty interesting. Turning salvaging abandoned cars to get scrap for making weapons into an organized industry, for example. There was also a part where the dude in charge of un-loving government logistics during the war pointed out how many loving foreign ingredients were in a pre-war bottle of root beer by way of illustrating just how much the total breakdown in international trade hosed up everyone's ability to make new poo poo. It's a zombie book so of course there's dumb poo poo floating around in it, but as far as zombie literature goes it was pretty clever with thinking through some of the implications of a total collapse of society.
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Dec 3, 2017 22:50
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I don't really remember the world war z army thing at the beginning but it seems weird that they decided that bolt action rifles are better at causing head wounds than bombs.
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Dec 3, 2017 22:57
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Cyrano4747 posted:nah, it wasn't bouncing around, it was basically a small version of API - there was a tiny little incendiary charge to make sure the brain got cooked. It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember thinking that the "22" was basically just .223. The description for the new gun they designed was actually pretty interesting - it was a super simple stamped metal semi-auto with a wood stock, designed to be as simple to manufacture with the reduced industrial base they were working with. Kind of a sten idea, only a lovely little rifle. That’s World War Z. In The Zombie Survival Guide: quote:.22-CALIBER RIMFIRE WEAPONS
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Dec 3, 2017 23:01
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Arglebargle III posted:I don't really remember the world war z army thing at the beginning but it seems weird that they decided that bolt action rifles are better at causing head wounds than bombs. Semi autos, and it was a resource thing. You can make a poo poo ton of .223 for the same amount of resources (including workers, which are a scarce resource in their own right) that a bomb takes. There's a whole discussion about it in the book, how it was really hard for the military to sacrifice all their awesome toys designed for fighting other armies on the alter of dorky cost : benefit analysis. The USAF in particular is singled out as getting super pissy about it, as a single F-15 takes a huge loving amount of fuel, maintenance, etc to deliver a bunch of bombs that are questionably effective, when meanwhile the fuel alone would be better used ferrying supplies to cut-off communities.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:02
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mlmp08 posted:The whole zombie survival guide/ world war Z thing only got one thing moderately interesting, which was that the zombies became increasingly lovely and dumb and weak without food, but were otherwise simply not going to die unless violently killed. It meant you had weird poo poo like physically weak underwater zombies wandering onto beaches or zombies that froze and thawed with the seasons in the north. Anything that delved past that kind of stuff or personal stories and went into tactics got dumb very quickly. I think it would be really neat to do a tabletop RPG or novel or something in the post-World War Z world, with all the changes to population, borders, and culture that have been left after the end of the book. Zombies are still a threat in isolated areas and occasionally wash up on the beaches or thaw out in the frozen north, but they're just another environmental hazard in a world where Russia is an orthodox theocracy with forced breeding programs, Israel and Palestine are united in one state, convicts dropped into infected zones have turned into post-apocalypse warlords, Cuba is the world's top economy, and Iceland is a totally depopulated disaster zone full of zombies. The protagonists would just be adventuring around this new world, getting into trouble and occasionally going into the "no man's lands" full of zombies or accidentally unleashing some horde hidden in a collapsed section of the Parisian catacombs.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:03
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Platystemon posted:That’s World War Z. Ah, my bad, thought we were talking about WWZ. Yeah, ZSG has a lot more straight dumb poo poo in it, something that they make fun of in WWZ talking about how there was some really bad advice that got people killed.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:03
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Arglebargle III posted:I don't really remember the world war z army thing at the beginning but it seems weird that they decided that bolt action rifles are better at causing head wounds than bombs. The Yonkers defense was really impressively stupidly written, with a few caveats. The US military set up a live-feed victory lap type thing of showing aircraft, arty, tanks, etc* just stomping out the zombies on live air, and then predictably it turned out that USAF and Army fires folks massively overstated the lethality of fires and thus troops were overrun by hordes of zombies. *I can buy fires and air force people and senior leaders massively overstating their ability to stop hordes of humans (zombies) who violently oppose society.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:05
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^Strategic bombing can win wars on it's own.  mlmp08 posted:That works way better when the city is not US citizens, including rich people’s kids, and even then is not thorough. Depends how many rich people there are.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:23
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There are still, to this day, active strat air power people who say they can do it all. 
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Dec 3, 2017 23:29
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I feel like even if the military was wholly incompetent at stopping a city wide breakout of zombies the fact that in any given neighborhood of 20 houses probably 2 or 3 of them have ARs/AKs/SKSes etc and a decent amount of ammo. Those 2 or three would just go plinking from their roof top. Probably 5-10 more of the 20 would have handguns or shotguns. We are a really really well armed populace. I give the whole thing a couple weeks before your local neighborhood prepper runs over the zombies in his F-250
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Dec 3, 2017 23:57
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CarForumPoster posted:We are a really really well armed populace. True, but less so in cities and I’ve little faith in organized resistance, especially early on. This is getting very gay black hitler with a dose of future, though.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:59
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Why shoot zombies when you can shoot the living and take their stuff? #lifehack
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Dec 4, 2017 00:05
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Common to most zombie films is that the "real" threat is actually other survivors loving things up because humans are notably lovely.
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Dec 4, 2017 00:07
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mlmp08 posted:True, but less so in cities and I’ve little faith in organized resistance, especially early on. I lived in SF and there are lots and lots of illegal guns kept there by people who keep quiet about them unless youre over for a drink and bring up guns. I bet even in the bay area peninsula you could still arm every 4th or 5th adult male with a gun within 24 hrs. Anyway here's some ICBM airpower history: 
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Dec 4, 2017 00:16
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CarForumPoster posted:I lived in SF and there are lots and lots of illegal guns kept there by people who keep quiet about them unless youre over for a drink and bring up guns. I bet even in the bay area peninsula you could still arm every 4th or 5th adult male with a gun within 24 hrs. That doesn’t equate to effective fire, is my point.
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Dec 4, 2017 00:22
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Post post apocalypse, with the restructuring and improvisation needed to hold poo poo together is something I wish was explored more in the genre. The logistical stuff like Cyrano mentioned.
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Dec 4, 2017 00:22
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mlmp08 posted:That doesn’t equate to effective fire, is my point. All everyone has to do is kill 1 + ε zombies on average before being bitten to keep the zombies below replacement rate. As a few people have said, zombies fun as just a scary monster or an interesting way to do commentary of social issues, but they really don't bear close scrutiny at all in any kind of worldbuilding.
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Dec 4, 2017 00:31
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mlmp08 posted:That doesn’t equate to effective fire, is my point. This is something that's overlooked a lot. A human head is, what, about six inches across on average? Let's assume that 100% of that is kill zone for a zombie. Your average person who doesn't shoot recreationally is going to have difficulty hitting that at any kind of range, doubly so under stress. TFR's doing a monthly contest right now that basically boils down to semi-rapid shots on a target about that size at 50 yards and it's far from all hits, and that's a subset of people who like to talk about guns on the internet and compete against each other for bragging rights. Now consider that the target is going to be moving. Even if it's retarded slow zombies that's still a certain amount of movement and weaving even if they're just standing still and swaying back and forth. Once a target starts moving even gun nuts who go to the range all the time start having massive challenges. These have real-world implications, by the way. Everything I listed above boils down to why soldiers and police are all trained to shoot for the center of mass rather than trying for sicknasty headshots. Just because there are a lot of guns around doesn't mean that 2 or 3 college kids with SKSs are going to be able to lock the problem down. edit: the ability of joe random to grab a dead cop's gun and be Protagonist, Savior of the Apocalypse is one of those things that annoys the poo poo out of me in just about any apocalypse/disaster/whatever kind of movie where that comes into play.
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Dec 4, 2017 00:36
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CarForumPoster posted:Anyway here's some ICBM airpower history: The Russian version of this would probably be longer than the Bayeux Tapestry.
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Dec 4, 2017 00:45
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So what ya'll are saying is, F-250 with a lawnmower deck powered by a big electric motor on the front is the one true weapon?
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Dec 4, 2017 00:48
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The thing to watch out for in a zombie apocalypse is non-human zombies. You'll often see a few zombie dogs or whatever, but forget it, zombie mosquitoes, zombie fleas, zombie flies, that's where it's at.
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Dec 4, 2017 01:03
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Call monster garage
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Dec 4, 2017 01:04
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I stopped by the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas today; it's a pretty neat little museum if you're ever in the area and don't find gambling interesting. Not a whole ton of content, but very high quality. I was surprised at how small a B61 nuclear bomb is, it's only about the size of a regular external fuel tank for a fighter. On the other hand, the B53 is exactly as absurdly massive as I expected. There's also lots of neat info about how Nevada has been nuked to poo poo during the 50's and 60's, and a lot of documentation about how underground testing was conducted.
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Dec 4, 2017 01:17
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Wingnut Ninja posted:I stopped by the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas today; it's a pretty neat little museum if you're ever in the area and don't find gambling interesting. Not a whole ton of content, but very high quality. I was surprised at how small a B61 nuclear bomb is, it's only about the size of a regular external fuel tank for a fighter. On the other hand, the B53 is exactly as absurdly massive as I expected. There's also lots of neat info about how Nevada has been nuked to poo poo during the 50's and 60's, and a lot of documentation about how underground testing was conducted. The museum is Albuquerque is also very cool.
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Dec 4, 2017 01:44
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who sits in the back of e-2s? nfos?
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Dec 4, 2017 02:07
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Yep.
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Dec 4, 2017 02:12
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Godholio posted:Yep. is it like a special track? like all the nfos in school are branching off full metal jacket style and the guys in the bottom 1/6 of the class are all e-2 nfos? or is it a second/third tour kind of job?
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Dec 4, 2017 02:25
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vains posted:is it like a special track? like all the nfos in school are branching off full metal jacket style and the guys in the bottom 1/6 of the class are all e-2 nfos? or is it a second/third tour kind of job? It's a first tour job, NFOs and pilots generally stick with a single platform during their career, barring a retirement of their aircraft like the S-3 or EA-6B. Selection is more of a branching path throughout flight school rather than a single determination point; you get told you're going E-6B/P-8 or continuing on to intermediate, then you get told you're going E-2 or continuing on to advanced, then you get told if you're going FA-18 or EA-18. E-6B Mercury is usually the bottom tier, probably under the assumption that if they gently caress up their job then everyone else is already too dead to care.
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Dec 4, 2017 02:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is something that's overlooked a lot. A human head is, what, about six inches across on average? Let's assume that 100% of that is kill zone for a zombie. Your average person who doesn't shoot recreationally is going to have difficulty hitting that at any kind of range, doubly so under stress. TFR's doing a monthly contest right now that basically boils down to semi-rapid shots on a target about that size at 50 yards and it's far from all hits, and that's a subset of people who like to talk about guns on the internet and compete against each other for bragging rights. Yeah and that's why .223 is better at killing zombies than iron bombs. 
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Dec 4, 2017 02:59
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Wingnut Ninja posted:It's a first tour job, NFOs and pilots generally stick with a single platform during their career, barring a retirement of their aircraft like the S-3 or EA-6B. Selection is more of a branching path throughout flight school rather than a single determination point; you get told you're going E-6B/P-8 or continuing on to intermediate, then you get told you're going E-2 or continuing on to advanced, then you get told if you're going FA-18 or EA-18. E-6B Mercury is usually the bottom tier, probably under the assumption that if they gently caress up their job then everyone else is already too dead to care. e-6/p-8 guys are like the 'too lazy to fail' parable. never go on a ship. rack up a zillion multi-engine hours. no real career path after the squadron level.
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Dec 4, 2017 03:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:These have real-world implications, by the way. Everything I listed above boils down to why soldiers and police are all trained to shoot for the center of mass rather than trying for sicknasty headshots. idk about cops but the center mass thing isn't strictly true. regular dumb infantry cqb shooting is a lot of center mass followed by headshots at less than 50m.
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Dec 4, 2017 03:22
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Not quite Airpower, but def Cold War/Atomic Age. Life in a small Iowa city during the 1950s.   
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Dec 4, 2017 03:42
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vains posted:e-6/p-8 guys are like the 'too lazy to fail' parable. never go on a ship. rack up a zillion multi-engine hours. no real career path after the squadron level. Whatever could you do with a 737 type rating and a zillion hours PIC in type
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Dec 4, 2017 04:07
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mlmp08 posted:A very good read from the AI thread. quote:The aircraft had an auxiliary power unit (APU). Nice since the engines needed air for start. Well that APU only supplied air—no power, no hydraulics, just air. To make it worse, there wasn’t any associated plumbing. The crew had to plug a hose into the fuselage receptacle and run it to each engine in turn and plug the hose into the engine’s nacelle. Then un-plug it all roll it up and put it back in the airplane! What were they thinking!?  Remind me to reverently lay some flowers on the grave of the KC-135 systems engineer.
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Dec 4, 2017 04:14
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hobbesmaster posted:Whatever could you do with a 737 type rating and a zillion hours PIC in type E-6 would give you 737NG experience *plus* quad engine experience, so yeah, pretty much a ticket-writer even before you get to the "entrusted to kill America's enemies even after Armageddon" point on the CV.
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Dec 4, 2017 07:41
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Any recommendations for thread relevant podcasts? Need something to listen to at work and I thought I'd ask my favorite thread. Speaking of which what happened to iyaayas? He had interesting stories.
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Dec 4, 2017 10:04
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Pod Save the World is cool but super liberal. I enjoyed War on the Rocks but their update schedule is like glacially slow Arms Control Wonk
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Dec 4, 2017 14:01
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AlexanderCA posted:Speaking of which what happened to iyaayas? He had interesting stories. I was wondering this too.
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Dec 4, 2017 15:13
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Semi-related but I have not seen 50FA in like...years?
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Dec 4, 2017 15:16
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^He posted in GIP a couple of times this year. Stopped being a regular when 2 or 3 people started talking poo poo on his stories.Nebakenezzer posted:I was wondering this too. Probably got promoted.
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Dec 4, 2017 16:32
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