spartan231490 said:
The Heik said:
spartan231490 said:
Bullets are easier and faster to make than arrows
No they're not. As I've said before, you need to know how to forge and do chemistry just to make a basic bullet (a la the civil war), and so much can go wrong with that if you're not aware of it. If you mix the components of the gunpowder wrong it could either make the bullet barely slide out the barrel or blow up the gun in your face. If the bullet or casing have a dent or errant edge the gun can jam or (again) blow up the gun in your face. Unless you have a lot of very specific and technical knowledge in regards to making a bullet (and hopefully a weapons factory that can make ammunition to the exacting standards of today's more refined weapons) it is completely inadvisable to do so.
spartan231490 said:
As to the paint-ball masks, you must use a very different mask from me, I've never gotten so much as a fleck inside my mask. yes they are designed so you can breath but those gaps are small and if the incoming liquid is larger than the gap it will usually stick to the mask instead of landing on your face. Also remember, the paint from a paint-ball is moving with much more force than any blood from a zombie would, I doubt blood would get even into your mask. Also, any protection is better than no protection, I'm still advocating long range firearms as a primary weapon of choice.
Actually there is a psychological thing that occurs when a person has partial protection in that they think that they're fine. When you know that you have no defence against something you do anything possible to avoid such a situation, but when you have something that *might* work against it, the human brain sometimes assumes that it'll be alright against the threat, thereby increasing the actual likelihood of them getting into such situations and getting hurt anyways.
Also you need to remember that blood is not paintball paint. Paintball paint is designed to be heavy and viscous so that when it connects with something the full force of the ball hits and it leaves a nice consistent splat for easy identification in a game. Blood however needs to be fluid enough to move through a constantly shifting human body. That means when it comes out of the body, it tends to mist, so the splatter is far more fine and spread out. And given half a chance it will get through any hole in whatever face protection you have. The only way to ensure it doesn't get into your system is to ensure there's no direct way in ,so something that's waterproof is the way to go (and considering how many people can usually find something like that, it's the far more likely option)
Firstly, if you try to fire a modern rifle using black powder, it won't work, and you can't mis-mix black powder in a way that would make it blow the gun up in your face, if you had a muzzel loader to use black powder.
I meant civil war in terms of general quality of firearms. At that point weapons and ammunition were still being made by your average human being (automated manufacturing had yet to be invented), so the designs were pretty rudimentary in terms of exact specifications in order to compensate for human error. Modern firearms though are made to exacting standards (it's why their quality is much better, exact weapon design notwithstanding). Trying to use basic metalwork to make a bullet would result in very poor ammunition indeed as what you make would not match what a modern weapon is expected to have
Also making gunpowder from scratch (which I was implying in my previous post) is not an easy thing to do. You have to know what the proper mix of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate is for the weapons you're using, else it'll either be not enough actual force and too much flash (a firework) or too much force and not enough control (resulting in damage to the weapon or even the user)
spartan231490 said:
You don't need a forge, where are you getting that?
When did I say that you needed a forge to make bullets? I said that you need
to forge, a general term used in reference to metalworking. I know that may seem like a small distinction, but one word can mean a world of difference in language.
spartan231490 said:
You can melt lead over a camp fire, and brass is reusable several times. You can also scavenge bullets from any caliber to get gunpowder and a similar caliber will provide you with primers. I have already admitted that once you run out of materials such as those arrows are easier, that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
But the issue I am discussing here is not that you'll run out of materials (though that is certainly true). It is that anyone who isn't a trained and experienced weapons and ammo manufacturer isn't going to effectively make a working round of ammunition.
Sure you can melt lead bullets at a campfire, but where are you going to cast them? Sticking a spare bullet into the sand isn't going to cut it, as I mentioned before the quality of the slug would not match the quality of the casing it's supposedly going into. And sure you can use gunpowder from other guns, but how can you be sure it's the right grade or amount? Ballparking it isn't going to solve your problem, as too much can cause the aforementioned face blowing off, and too little can throw the trajectory off or even prevent the slug from leaving the gun. There's simply too many variables to make a bullet capable of being properly fired by your average modern firearm.
Also good luck with finding brass casings in your average wilderness environment. To put that into perspective, the last time I saw my little cousins we had a nerf fight with guns that had darts with bright orange cartridges (Winchester style) the size of my entire thumb, and we still managed to lose half of them without leaving the house. Brass casings not even the size of couple of finger digits in a place overgrown with plants (especially when you aren't completely sure where they've landed) is going to be a herculean task to say the least, especially when compared with the fluorescently fletched 30inch long modern arrow which one tends to follow on trajectory to make sure it hit its target.
spartan231490 said:
Also, blood is very viscous, several times more so in a body that is no longer living(like a zombie), as blood coagulates it becomes much much more viscous, almost like paste, a paint ball mask would provide decent protection in a form that is designed to stay on your head, instead of something that was cobbled together that might come untied or slide off your face once you start swinging a weapon around and getting all sweaty.
If blood is getting that viscous from coagulation, then that means that the zombies are decaying, as such why worry about the zombie apocalypse? The whole ordeal is going to be over in a month, as no dead body can survive in open atmosphere for 4 weeks without either freezing, desiccating, or just plain rotting away (depending on the climate, but the first two would happen in a matter of days
at most in respectively cold or hot environments).
Hell, seeing as most dead bodies (even underground) usually are too rotted or dried after one year underground to function, the total zombie forces on planet earth would number at less than 50 million (as 56 million is the total amount of deaths per year, and I'm assuming that any body getting close to a year isn't going to last one day in open atmosphere, as such it's not a realistic threat), as opposed to the 6.7 BILLION of the living. At that point the only advantage zombies had ever had in your standard Z-apocalypse setting (numbers) is completely non-existent, and against the combined firepower of the world's military (which includes tanks, airstrikes and flamethrowers) the undead hordes wouldn't even scratch the proverbial paint of humanity before being curbed-stomped into oblivion. So why even bother with dealing with weapons? Just fill the bathtub with water, board up your windows and doors, and you can literally wait out the end of days!
So yeah, either zombie apocalypse is going to be a short one indeed, or the dead have some way of ensuring that the body is capable of functioning long after death, in which case basic blood splatter will still be in effect, as such a paintball mask isn't going to be a reliable defense against potentially ingesting whatever is doing the zombifying.
