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I just finished a Walking Dead marathon and both
reading and watching World War Z and came up with a
reasonably simple solution to any future Zombie issues:
take a large solar panel and place it on a pole in the
center of a small hill. Use the power from the panel to
power a small electric
motor which spins a large (~10-
20' diameter) metal bar/mower blade which is
suspended at approximately 5' off the ground at its tip
and due to the hill dropping to only a few feet at the
pole. Add on a siren that sounds when the blade has
reached a specified speed and leave a sign warning of
danger to living beings and leave to set up many more
of such arrangements.
This simple and reasonably cheap arrangement should
each eliminate dozens of zombies of various heights
without endangering anyone. If an sufficiently steep
hill is used, the system should be self cleaning and
might take out hundreds.
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Could an engine powered by a solar panel generate enough torque? Especially when the panel must also power a looped recording of shreiks and feeding sounds to attract the dead. I worry such a device will slow too much with each chop. Plus if the zombie falls across the blade that will be it for the device. |
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21q I was dissatisfied with the explanation of what N Korea did about the zombies. My recollection is that there were no zombies but no north koreans either. I thought they were teeing themselves up for a sequel. |
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There was a weapon very similar to this in part of Half-Life
2 (in the Ravenholm section, where the idea is to use
environmental traps as much as possible to kill the alien
zombies). It was basically an old helicopter blade on a
motor that you could spin up and duck under, and the
zombies would stupidly walk into it (and their doom) as
they chased you. |
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//Could an engine powered by a solar panel
generate enough torque? Especially when the panel
must also power a looped recording of shreiks and
feeding sounds to attract the dead.// Yes, it is all
about energy storage. The mower blade is a giant
flywheel storing the energy of the solar panel. The
electric motor just has to have more torque than
the drag of the bearing supporting the blade and
the air drag on the blade. It will start slow and just
keep getting faster until it reaches a sufficient
speed where is effective. At that point it will
hopefully easily slice through a skull or two without
loosing too much momentum, at which point the
cycle starts again or if the blade is slowed too much
then the siren stops and the zombies will be drawn
to the sound of one of the other machines like this. |
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I think a blade is likely to get caught in the skull of a victim of the device. Ought to be a pole or rod I think. Smash the skulls instead of cutting into the skulls. |
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It always bugs me in zombie films that when the ravening crowd is milling around outside they don't just cull the bulk of them with some sort of repeating expedient trap. |
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I mean, if you're in a secure shopping mall with access to the second floor roof - why not use a brick on a string to safely take them down one at a time? That'll even work on those new-fangled turbo-zombies. |
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At least in "The Walking Dead" series they've finally discovered the efficient "slot them through wire-mesh fence" approach. |
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//a brick on a string// [marked-for-tagline] |
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//I think a blade is likely to get caught in the skull
of a victim of the device. Ought to be a pole or rod
I think. Smash the skulls instead of cutting into the
skulls.// No, the idea blade should be sharp, so that
it cuts through the skull easily and doesn't slow the
blade too much. The sharper the better as long as
it stays that way. Think Samari swords. The
sharper the blade the lower the lost inertia. I'm
not too worried about the blade getting caught as
the mass of a 10 or 20' spinning blade would have to
be significant. |
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//It always bugs me in zombie films that when the
ravening crowd is milling around outside they don't
just cull the bulk of them with some sort of
repeating expedient trap.// The seed of the idea
is taken from the pit trap used in the last year of
the walking dead to catch zombies to be used as
weapons. They use a wind powered noise maker to
draw the zombies to a 8' deep pit. |
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I am curious about the brick on a string approach. I wonder if you would hang it down as though fishing and time your drop, or flywheel it around and around? If the latter would you hold the string in hands, or around your waist and use pelvic motions like a hula hoop? Or are you throwing the brick at zombies and using the string to retrieve your brick, because of brick scarcity? These are important distinctions. |
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A linked video will serve nicely as an answer, esp if of the hula hoop technique. |
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//I am curious about the brick on a string approach. I wonder if you would hang it down as though fishing and time your drop, or flywheel it around and around? If the latter would you hold the string in hands, or around your waist and use pelvic motions like a hula hoop? Or are you throwing the brick at zombies and using the string to retrieve your brick, because of brick scarcity? These are important distinctions.// |
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The way I see it, when dealing with zombies the most important thing is for your process not to go disastrously wrong[1]. So you don't want to be tied on to anything within reach of zombies.
My approach would be to drop the brick on a zombie then pull it back up. The string is most definitely not wrapped around your hand. Perhaps you've tied it on to something bolted down just so you don't lose it too easily, but you do need to have a knife handy to cut the string, just in case. We can also assume that the entire team[2] knows their role and is paying attention. |
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If you have a surfeit of bricks within easy access of the drop point you might want to forgo the string, but even then you might have other uses for them later. |
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[1] Rule 1 : don't do anything stupid.
[2] Rule 2 : don't be alone unless unavoidable; you need someone to watch your back. |
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I believe the hard to stop zombies are usually of the
"only a head shot" or "only complete dismemberment"
types. In the former case, careful aimed fire would
be needed to disable a zombie, in the latter, even an
assault weapon on full auto won't do the trick, since
you'd spend more than a full clip to take one down. |
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//What annoys me about zombie films is the
assumption that a mass of running bodies is either
unrealistically difficult to stop with a fully
automatic rifle// Yes, this is covered in World War
Z, the book, the problem is that the effective
target is so small, i.e. only head shots count. The
book claims that there is a training issue with re-
training people to aim for the head when they have
been trained to aim for the body. I'm dubious on
that, but I've never had the training so my opinion
is also of dubious worth.
The book makes good points on the other
differences in fighting against zombies as they are
completely committed unlike any normal soldier.
The numbers are also very different than we have
ever faced as no normal country can mobilize 100%
of it's population for war, but I like you fail to have
much fear of an unthinking enemy, thus the reason
for posting this idea. It is a simple trap, which
wouldn't work on any normal enemy, but would
work on the popular flavor of zombie popular in
today's fiction. |
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It you're depending on geographical features anyway
can't you just put a spring loaded platform on the edge
of a cliff, with a (solar powered if you like) siren
above it such that the weight of a zombie will push
down the platform and make it fall? If your zombies
can survive the fall add any number of lethal traps at
the bottom from molten rock to a huge lye pit to a
trash compactor. You can even use suspended human
volunteers ("volunteers" if you like) as bait. |
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I think a machine gun would stop a wave of zombies. Bullets kill and hurt but they also pack a wallop. Bullets would knock zombies down. |
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I think really, zombies would not be so hard to deal with. But the whole zombie armageddon thing is a metaphor. |
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I should also note that in WWZ decapitation was specifically found to be less than ideal by the blind samurai gardener because "the living heads" can still bite. Probably a blind guy is feeling around on the ground more than most so that would be an issue. Also the heads are probably pretty quiet and would not give themselves away by sputtering etc. Maybe you could hear some gnashing. |
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//What annoys me about zombie films is the assumption that a mass of running bodies is either unrealistically difficult to stop with a fully automatic rifle,// |
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The problem here is that most human-wave attacks consist of sentient beings with a sense of self-preservation, such that at some point, they "break" off the attack (which is counter-productive in most cases, what with having to run all the way back to cover, they tend to get shot in the back a fair bit). A zombie horde doesn't lose their nerve, and just keeps coming until killed or sufficiently disabled as to not be able to move. |
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I think fire would be similarly inneffective, as without pain receptors, or at least response, there is no shock for them to go into. It actually takes a lot of fire to destroy enough muscle or connective tissues to render the human frame unable to move - what fire does is hurts so bad that you become innefective, something zombies don't have to worry about. The only counterargument here is if the zombies still need to respire, as fire does a really good job of destroying lung tissue. The issue of how zombies actually continue to function isn't well addressed anywhere I've come across. |
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// In places like Norfolk the zombie infestation is almost total already // |
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You should include Linconshire, Suffolk and large parts of Cambridgeshire in that. |
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// Think Samari swords // |
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// The issue of how zombies actually continue to function isn't well addressed anywhere I've come across. // |
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Much is being learned from the study of local politicians. They look superficially alive, but with no meaningful intellectual activity. |
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Yes, a machine gun at leg level would do some
good, but to some extent it depends on what your
using, and to a large extent how much reserve
ammunition you have. |
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Figure maybe one bullet in twenty (and I suspect
that's very optimistic) manages to completely
shatter bone or sever muscle/tendon. That means
a full minute of fire of a minigun could take out
200 zombies. But it also uses up over 40 kg of
ammo. If you've got a wave of a couple of
thousand coming at you and they literally will not
stop and retreat, a single individual or small squad
quite simply isn't going to have enough firepower
to take them down. An organized force might. |
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And don't forget, if they make it into hand to hand
combat range, you lose people and they get
reinforcements. |
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Aimed fire from a well trained squad is definitely
going to be more effective from a logistics
standpoint, and possible from an actual rate of kill
standpoint, depending on how optimistic my
bullet/mission kill numbers were. |
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//I should also note that in WWZ decapitation was
specifically found to be less than ideal by the blind
samurai gardener because "the living heads" can
still bite.// Maybe my title is misleading, this
device is not designed to truly decapitate, but to
horizontally split the skull. Humans come in various
heights from 3' to 7' mostly. The 5' height of the
outer tip really should be raised 5'4" in countries
with taller average humans or lowered as necessary
as it is designed to split the skulls of most average
height adults. The slight dirt embanking around
the center is designed to raise up the shorter
zombies to reach the blade. Any extra ground
angle is just designed to allow bodies to fall away
from the circle of destruction. No hill or major
ground feature is necessary, just a bit of shoveling. |
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Guys, guys, I think we've lost sight of where we are. This is the *halfbakery* and these unstoppable untiring ravening beings represent an untapped resource. |
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I think it's obvious that the best thing to do is to collect a few and put them on a treadmill. |
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On reading WWZ (the zombies there very different from those I am told are in the movie) my suspension of disbelief broke when they used nerve gas on fleeing citizens, but then those infected with zombie rose back up as zombies and kept going. "How do their muscles receive impulses, then?" I scoffed. I realized I had gotten too close. |
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Zombie physiology does not bear close scrutiny. |
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This sounds better than the wind turbine project. |
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// The 5' height of the outer tip really should be raised 5'4" in countries with taller average humans or lowered as necessary as it is designed to split the skulls of most average height adults. // |
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Contrarotating discs of blades of different lengths, longest on top. Tall zombies lurch into the top blades and get their skulls sliced. Shorter zombies pass under the first set of blades but get chopped by the next lower set. |
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Think if it as a huge sharp metal upside-down Chritmas tree made of long blades smeared in gore, all whirring round at high speed making a WipWipWipWip noise. |
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