Guns need ammo. You don't have unlimited ammo. One round lasts 2 secounds fully automatic and pistols aren't very better. With guns you die. nuff said.
Poll: What weapons will you use in a zombie apocalypse?
- Thread starter Erttheking
- Start date
you are an actual idiot if you go full auto without good reason. and what are you going to use a coffee muck?Living_Brain said:
Of course I wouldn't. Just proving a point.exessmirror said:
Two things to have handy:
Club
Crowbar
I plan on joining the undead asap!
Early on in the Zombie Apocalypse delicious brains and fatties who can't run will still be plenty, by joining the zombies at the earliest possible I will get several weeks of delicious nomming before the brain-supply starts to run dangerously low.
All you tough survivors will join the undead when there's nearly no food left (and you will eventually join the undead, it wouldn't be an apocalypse if you eventually rebuild). All there's left will be even tougher survivors who'll just head-shot you when you get close, thus you'll never get to experience delicious nomming on brains!
So my weapon in the zombie apocalypse: teeth and nails! I shall nom on most of you here because I doubt even half of you are as tough as you claim to be!
Early on in the Zombie Apocalypse delicious brains and fatties who can't run will still be plenty, by joining the zombies at the earliest possible I will get several weeks of delicious nomming before the brain-supply starts to run dangerously low.
All you tough survivors will join the undead when there's nearly no food left (and you will eventually join the undead, it wouldn't be an apocalypse if you eventually rebuild). All there's left will be even tougher survivors who'll just head-shot you when you get close, thus you'll never get to experience delicious nomming on brains!
So my weapon in the zombie apocalypse: teeth and nails! I shall nom on most of you here because I doubt even half of you are as tough as you claim to be!
see my earlier post on crowbar. and you know how hard it is to bash someones brain in properly?Living_Brain said:
Captcha: who are you
i am the guy who is going to survive by thinking outside the box
Guns. Ideally ones which can be used reliably and accurately from a different continent.
Anything to reduce the risk of being bitten.
Anything to reduce the risk of being bitten.
>reloading supplies are available in sporting goods stores and decent gunshops.Living_Brain said:
>the military has huge ammunition stockpiles
>one round is one round. I have never seen a round being fired more than once for 2 seconds
>Full auto is heavily restricted or outright banned in some states - and why the hell would anyone switch the selector to Full Retard? Not even the military uses FA in their standard rifles.
i.e. you have no idea what you are talking about. Handguns are lighter than any melee weapon and today have very ammunition high capacity unless you live in Cali.
And let's not mention the ammunition production factories. They have tons of ammunition that will be left behind.
Gunsmith =/= gun manufacturer.The Heik said:
During SHTF the engineers will be needed by the military, not the surviving populace. What t is needed is people who know how to weld, how to tune and fix firearms.
There are gunsmiths everywhere in the US. Gun manufacturers are nearly worthless unless you have enough manpower and electricity to keep a factory running.
People have fixed their firearms and lived by themselves for almost a century in the US.
>I live many long miles from any gun shop, and even if I did get there it would be completely raided by then.ElPatron said:
>FAAAAAAAAAAAR from a military base. Also, raiding.
>How many rounds can you carry along with food and water?
>If it's banned now, following a zombie outbreak it won't be. No law anymore, remember? And I didn't say I'd use full auto, or recommend anyone to do so. Just proving a point: Ammo goes quicker than you think.
i.e. are you sure you know what you're talking about?
Also, not everyone can make bullets. In fact, not everyone has the tools to even melt metal. You'd be extremely lucky to find someone who could. You are grossly overestimating the amount of ammunition available after an outbreak.
Tools to melt metal? Lead is easy to melt. Don't tell me that in SHTF nobody will have wood and steel pans. How would someone be "lucky" to find tools to melt lead if they exist in almost any household?Living_Brain said:
Plus, molds and presses are easy to find. It wouldn't be "luck" helping me to find people with those tools.
Specially if I own them already.
Gunsmiths and Gun manufacturers are only different in the quantity of their work. Otherwise they're the same. They are still limited by the resources they have available to them, and they are still rare in comparison to all the other occupations that exist on this planet. And if the larger scale manufacturers are indeed taken away by the military, then it is also safe to assume that they will take the lions share of the resources too. And even with gunsmiths everywhere in the US, they do not have the stockpiles to supply all the people who suddenly need guns and ammo in large quantities (again, something like 1 gunsmith/gun manufacturer for every 100 or more people). They'd run out fast, and with the aforementioned economic collapse preventing the sufficient supplies from coming in with the regularity that the planet is used to, guns would very quickly become useless due to the sheer lack of parts and supplies.ElPatron said:
And remember, America is the best possible example of weapon stockpiles and crafters. Most of the rest of the planet is going to be WAY worse off.
Not exactly. Depends on the gunsmith you are dealing with. Some might not have a lot of knowledge on engineering. Some drill scope mounts, tune triggers, custom fit parts for reliability, make wooden stocks and some ornamental features.The Heik said:
Others design guns from scratch.
Gun manufacturers can be engineers or technicians in charge of production managing, design, quality control, R&D, etc.
Professionally speaking. A lot of people do it as an hobby and fix their own guns.The Heik said:
Somehow I think the 270 million guns in the US will suffice.The Heik said:
All the firearms needed are in production right now. If more are needed, then not a lot of gunsmiths are needed:The Heik said:
- the Sten SMG is fairly simple, any machinist can do it
- in 2004 an Australian gang was building Owen SMGs
- in the reloading aspect, a lot of people are already doing it to save money and you don't need to be a gunsmith to reload
Ammunition wise, lead can be recycled and casings can survive more than 5 firings. Some can handle 20.
Nein. Unless you can prove that statement I will disagree.The Heik said:
Mil-spec weapons will keep going with few wear parts requiring replacement. And there are loads of those parts.
An AR-15 went on for longer than 50,000 rounds only requiring the replacement of wear parts such as the springs. It was Filty-14 or something. It wasn't even cleaned, just lubed.
I am European and I disagree with that statement.The Heik said:
A load of baked beans, a can opener, in a tree house on a raging river island.
In other words: Time.
Zombies eventually starve from a lack of others to eat or infect.
Unless it's via magic. Then it doesn't matter, because there will always be more zombies than a man can have have bullets (yes, even thousands of bullets).
Ideally, I'd use both anyway, because even the cost of 1000 bullets is worth another minute of life.
So, I guess I'd use a metallic/durable lumber polearm weapon since I know how to fight with those reasonably well, and something short and stocky for in-close fighting (I have a WW2 Kukri, which should work pretty good assuming the curse isn't spread via blood-contact).
In other words: Time.
Zombies eventually starve from a lack of others to eat or infect.
Unless it's via magic. Then it doesn't matter, because there will always be more zombies than a man can have have bullets (yes, even thousands of bullets).
Ideally, I'd use both anyway, because even the cost of 1000 bullets is worth another minute of life.
So, I guess I'd use a metallic/durable lumber polearm weapon since I know how to fight with those reasonably well, and something short and stocky for in-close fighting (I have a WW2 Kukri, which should work pretty good assuming the curse isn't spread via blood-contact).
Then their skill is even less useful, as then they only know certain parts of making and maintaining guns and their ammunition, rather then the full complement needed for the entire process.ElPatron said:
And again, you're assuming that everything goes right for you. We don't know how many of the gunsmiths and gun manufacturers on the planet died in the initial infection, or how well spaced they are or how many materials, sources, and skills for materials they have handily available. There's simply too much that can go wrong.
Yes, but I rarely consider hobbyists to be the same class as people who do it as a career. Remember, doing something as a hobby means usually to simply tinker with it. Most gun-hobbyists just don't have the consistent experience to fill up the requirement of all the parts and materials needed to keep a post-Apocalypse group running at decent capability. Gunsmith isn't just something you can do in an hour with a wrench and a drill, you need an actual workshop (or at very least the tools from it) to do it properly, and that's just not a practical thing to carry around all day long.ElPatron said:
For the 6.7 billion people on the planet? I don't think so muchacho, especially when you consider that we don't know their exact location within the country, and scouring every home and building in America for the potential weapons sounds like a very good way to waste time and draw the Zombie hordes to oneself.ElPatron said:
And if you think you'll get to all those stockpiles, think about all the other people scrambling to do the same. Not everyone is going to get a gun, and those who do are going to hoard it like it's gold bullion, as for all contextual purposes it is in terms of value.
Also, you gotta remember, not all that ammo is going to necessarily match the gun you use, so potentially you could use up half your rifle's ammo fighting the zombies or other survivors just to find out that there's only pistol and shotgun ammo at the location
Yes, and how many of those are within walking distance of where you live right now? Doesn't matter how many guns there are, it's a matter of how accessible they are. Traveling through a whole city/province/country full of the undead just to get a gun is suicide. You'd be dead long before you got to any sufficient stockpile without weapons already at hand.ElPatron said:
That's if you can find it. Remember, most people don't usually keep track of where their casings fly (seeing as they're looking at their target to make sure they hit) and in your average forest conditions you'll have one helluva time finding them all. To put this into perspective me and my little cousins had a nerf gun fight a while back with Repeater style guns that had neon orange dart casings the size of .50 cal shells, and we couldn't find half of them in a house not much bigger than your average suburban building. Doing that for something far smaller and potentially hidden by a whole ecosystem's worth of foliage is going to be a ***** to say the least.ElPatron said:
As for the actual slugs, it depends on the penetrating power of the ammunition. If it's a .22 or buckshot, then you can probably find it inside the zombie, so long as you hit their head (though rummaging around in the innards of an infected is putting a lot of risk of getting infected yourself without the proper gear). But if the round is something bigger like a 7.62, 5.56 or shotgun slugs those suckers can blast right through and suddenly you have to find a slug smaller than your finger in potentially hundreds of feet of terrain.
Now if it's just a small pack of the undead, recycling your shots is feasible, if time-consuming. But if it's the undead horde you're facing, then it's unlikely that you'll have the time or desire to go back and retrieve what you've lost, as you'd probably get eaten if you did. And if even if you managed to get back to the combat location without doing it all over again, remembering where each shot and casing went is going to be even more difficult due to the passing of time.
Yes, but that's the AR, a mil-spec weapon, and even then those tests rarely take into account all the possible weather conditions that the weapon could face. If it's too cold or hot, too wet of dusty, the wear and tear threshold of a weapon can drop considerably, especially if the weapon was designed for a different climate that what it could possibly face (eg a cold weather gun is going to suffer horribly in a desert). And unlike your average civilian weapon, mil-spec parts are usually only carried by military suppliers and operating bases, which will be kept by any military personnel still in possession of such location. They're going to be rare, so you'll have to mostly stick with civilian quality parts that may not be designed for the weapon you're using, increasing the chance of the weapon failing.ElPatron said:
I am European and I disagree with that statement.[/quote]The Heik said:
So you disagree with the known statistic that if it weren't for America, there would only be one gun for every 10 people on this planet, rather than 1 in 7? That's kinda ballsy, considering you're trying to fight against fact.
To conclude (because I'm honestly getting tired of running over the same ground again and again on this thread), ultimately there are far too many factors, variables, materials and specific skill sets for the majority of small groups to realistically run and maintain sufficient gun and ammo construction and stores.
You are simply better off hightailing it away from any population centers to a defensible location and using traps and pitfalls to kill the zombies, as the materials needed from those are incredibly simple to gather and make (seriously, a pitfall is a hole with sharpened sticks at the bottom) and come from renewable or effectively limitless sources (mother nature), thereby covering the long-term needs for the group.
a sharp machete period. they can chop of a limp and do not tend to get stuck. whole wars where fought out with rusty machetes.Living_Brain said:
if such an event where to happen, i know enough places in my city where me and my friends(one of them i learning to be a gunsmith) to manufacture bullets and firearms. also why hightail it out the city where most of the supplies are. also when lead runs out you could use steel and iron. heck even copper could be use to make bullets. did i already say that bullets are really really easy to make?The Heik said:
A boat.
"Whats the problem zed? Can't swim? Well, we'll be out here, waiting, eating fish, and generally chilling until this all cools down."
Just a fishing boat (one of them old sail-driven ones, or better, a viking-ship! (yes, i know of a couple)), make sure there is a freshwater river you can run up for supplies, and live the good life. Where i live, there is even a lot of uninhabited islands one can settle on temporarily, in case of storms.
"Whats the problem zed? Can't swim? Well, we'll be out here, waiting, eating fish, and generally chilling until this all cools down."
Just a fishing boat (one of them old sail-driven ones, or better, a viking-ship! (yes, i know of a couple)), make sure there is a freshwater river you can run up for supplies, and live the good life. Where i live, there is even a lot of uninhabited islands one can settle on temporarily, in case of storms.
It's ultimately not a matter of how easy, it's about the limit in materials. Sure, you can find stuff in a city but there with likely be thousands of others searching for the exact same stuff, and as previously mentioned those supplies and raw materials will not be replenished due to likely economic collapse. It WILL run out, and I doubt your group will have the mining tools need to get more from a mine (as that will be the only reliable source of itexessmirror said:
As for why to avoid cities, it's due to the principle of "the best way to survive a fight is to avoid one". Cities are likely to have the largest concentrations of the undead, so every time you walk out the door of where ever your safehouse is, you're taking a massive risk of dying whilst out, or even drawing the undead to your safehouse. That's the second major problem: Entrapment. You could run into the situation where the hordes have found out your location and trapped you inside, and unless your group already has a weapons stockpile capable of starting a decent sized ground war, you are going to starve and die. By being out of the city, you reduce the chances of running into zombies, as well as the odds being the groups are smaller so you can deal with them piece meal as well as give yourself more room to maneuver (or escape).
Also you need to take into account morale, as that's the real killer here. For every person you lose (and with taking that many risks inside a city, you will lose people) the morale of the group will drop like a stone, decreasing their combat effectiveness and making it more likely that you will lose more. It's a vicious cycle, and one that no group can escape when they are in the Apocalypse.
I'm just going to make a bit of an assumption here from what I've read of yours and ElPatron's posts. From what I've gathered from our posts, you guys seem to think that most of what you try is going to succeed, and that's a fatal mistake. Any military individual will tell you that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and in a situation where there are so many unknowable factors (such as the zombie apocalypse), you'll be lucky if half of what you plan goes right, and that's an inexcusable percentage when you have so little resources and manpower to begin with. For example, what if your gunsmith friend dies in the initial infection? Suddenly your entire plan of maintaining a weapons stockpile crashes around your ears, and I doubt that your ideal group knows off-hand (that is without checking youtube or any other resource for information, as those will swiftly become inpoerative) how to make and maintain guns and their ammo.
I however assume that things will go wrong at the worst possible moments, so I cover for that by trying to avoid as many confrontations with the undead as possible. That's why I endorse moving out of the city, that is why I endorse trying to use materials from renewable sources for weapons and traps that are so easy to make a child out unaided could construct them. I'm trying to cut down my odds of fighting and resulting failure every chance I get, which raises my odds of survival, even if only by a minor margin. And it is those minor margins that can mean the difference between life and death and undeath.
Oh and I'm going to leave you with a question: If headshots are so easy, why is it that in most combat situations they are so rare? Food for thought....
