PC How long would you survive a zombie apocalypse?
- Thread starter Fenris
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doughphunghus
Guest
I think it serves multiple purposes, all of them theatrical:
- you (the viewer) need to feel that the characters are vulnerable at all times, so tension never lifts. Characters need to be stupid (and do illogical things surely you would not do, like go into the permadark building all alone with only a screwdriver for protection, looking for a hat they lost) for you to openly shout at the TV "no! Don't do that! Don't go in there!". If they were armored it would be less of a concern for their well being.
- actors need to be seen, but also don't want to spend production time armoring up all the time, and acting in it.
- i feel if a character always has armor, it becomes part of the character. With no armor they can easily change up their clothes/etc.
- the plot might need them to "finally realize" they need to make temporary armor. And then have it fail to prove to you that "its not feasible". I think this is why military people have to have "bizarre accidents" or "amazing oversights" in movies as they are supposed to be the moat prepared,armed, and armored so as to show it was all for naught and "survival" is more than lots of ammo/guns and armor/bunker, and so this helps explain why the "ragtag group of misfits" is the main cast in these movies.
Fenris
New member
Same here, I even googled it and couldn't find anything lol
I think you are right with the actors need to be seen. It is the same reason so many shows that have fire fighters in them, have the fire fighters run into a burning building with no mask or helmet.
Also I think lazy writing is often used to move the story along:
"This house is haunted, dozens of people have died here"
Actor: "Ima spend the night here."
Normal Person: "I'm going home."
Rotor
Well-known member
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doughphunghus
Guest
Yep. If i go to a creepy abandoned place and hear or see anything out of place, im going to assume "deranged killer" if nothing else to convince everyone the threat is real, and when asked "should we stay the night for giggles?" They're going to be speaking to my shadow hanging in the air as i left so fast. They'll get a phone call seconds later, and its me in my house and ill say "no, i don't think you should"
Pernicious
New member
I kind of feel you'd be setting yourself up for a Tucker and Dale vs Evil scenario. A group of young adults on an adventure out in the wild see two harmless guys trying to help and assume the worst.
You are again lightly stepping over the phase were a single or a few zombies turn into millions. Even in a crowded city that takes time. Time to prepare in many many ways, and not everyone in power is an idiot and people learn from mistakes done by others.
And in the time it takes for the zombies to take over the city people would find out from the first failed attempts that sending in troops does not stop it. Once this information gets around the next step will be isolation, segmentation and/or establishing safe zones. But to get into detail we would need to know which type of zombie you are speaking about. Is the cause a virus or simply every death? Incubation time? Running or shambling? Iron-eating? ....
For any mass of zombies that can't breach concrete for example there are lots of buildings that can be fortified so they can't get in in any number. Put some soldiers with flame throwers and enough gasoline in such a building and let them make noise and they will be able to draw and mass kill the zombies we know from many movies.
Not wait for the large masses of people to be generated. What happened between the time this mass was generated but did not flee the city while the military was creating useless checkpoints? There is something wrong with the timing here. A checkpoint only makes sense if the military put a wall around a city, that takes months. Why would the people in the city stay there for months?
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theFlu
Well-known member
While the whole discussion is quite esoteric, I think the numbers game of a large city could be a massive issue. A relatively quickly progressing disease (couple days of incubation with high rates of transmission) will overwhelm everything at once. Officials would barely have time to issue curfews to slow the spread; but that would just cause further "gathering". You don't have the places to be transferring the sick to, so they're left "sealed" where they fester, transmitting further.
Once hungry and desperate, even the healthy ones could have the numbers to overwhelm a "first-week" military response - it's not like there are troops on standby to completely shut down domestic cities. If you happen to have outbreaks in several places, what national guard -type troops you do have, are going to be spread thin. Plus they're your people, so the military is not exactly willing to keep them in line via deadly force.
Again, unless you define exactly the circumstances of the outbreak I can't say whether and in what way your scenario is likely to happen or not. For example whether the outbreak happens in a specific place from a virus or worldwide because the dead rise makes a huge difference in how the zombification spreads and how the world would react to it and I don't want to list different objections for all the different cases. An incubation period of days with a virus means the disease would spread around worldwide but on the other hand would slow down the turnover of cities to weeks and months. What exactly happens in the mean time depends on many details.
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theFlu
Well-known member
Ye, ye, absolutely. I think I just saw you being a little optimist about the abilities of militaries and, especially given the recent experience, our leaders. Gas, flamethrowers, skilled personnel, concrete building; easy to imagine, real hard to pull off with just supply lines being borked. Not to mention that one nerdy guy interjecting that maybe aerosolizing the pathogen with a massive bonfire isn't exactly the way to go, and now no-one can even make the call.
But yeh, fun little thought experiments, not much more at this stage..
Ye, ye, absolutely. I think I just saw you being a little optimist about the abilities of militaries and, especially given the recent experience, our leaders. Gas, flamethrowers, skilled personnel, concrete building; easy to imagine, real hard to pull off with just supply lines being borked. Not to mention that one nerdy guy interjecting that maybe aerosolizing the pathogen with a massive bonfire isn't exactly the way to go, and now no-one can even make the call.
But yeh, fun little thought experiments, not much more at this stage..
I think I only assume that the military will try out many dump and some working strategies and as long as communication still works in the rest of the world the working strategies will survive together with the people enacting the working strategies. The military can be as dump as you want it to be as long as you accept that they have the ability to learn.
The more time people have to prepare the better their response to anything will be and there are practical solutions to many of the dangers of a zombie apocalypse. And the fact is that the spread of the decease depends on many factors.
A nerdy guy throwing a pathogen on a whole city for example would definitely doom that city for sure, but the interesting question is how much time the rest of the world, especially on other continents, have after that to devise counter measures. The incubation period of many days means the desease will be transmitted to other countries and continents by travellers but in those other cities and continents the zombie polulation starts at a very small number! While the news about the origin city and neighboring cities makes the rounds and people hear a lot about what works and what not.
An incubation period of zero on the other hand would doom that city immediately, but would almost surely prevent the disease to spread fast or go abroad as zombies don't fly planes or drive vehicles.
I guarantee you that a few days after such an outbreak people will not present easy targets for zombies anymore. They will be barricaded in their houses, walk around with two leather jackets and football helmets on, a weapon in hand. And I seriously doubt that many of the movie conditions allow for zombies to be more numerous than humans after a few days. Then the question becomes two-fold: Do the zombies run around single or group up? In the first case they can be picked off even by civilians, in the latter case air strikes of such groups become possible and effective (or simply driving through that mass with a tank for an hour). Sure, it will be a bloody and difficult "war", but a realistic spread of the disease is not fast enough to immediately create the situation of a few survivors against millions of zombies.
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Covid is highly contagious over the air and almost impossible to contain. But it also was not out to eradicate civilization, just a danger to overwhelm healthcare systems. Whether you agree with the measures taken or not, we came through with our economy and society largely intact. The response was appropriate to the danger presented. one could say. Initial response was slow but so was the spread, it took months for the disease to really take off and it was easily confusable with any number of other diseases like flu.
I would imagine a zombie outbreak would have much more in common with a terrorist attack than Covid, if you look at the speed of response and the attention given to it.
A zombie desease that would transmit over the air AND make people mindless biters as well would be almost impossible to stop and (again depending on other circumstances) only survivable after much of the population went away and the rest is segregated into small units, if at all. One necessary condition would be that there is a way to avoid contagion over air (gas mask, filter masks, only fresh air...). But that wasn't what you asked and would make make boring movies anyway.
Deadfordays
Member
Oh yeah, totally agree on all accounts! It's that "realist" in you that takes over and says, "c'mon, what the hell!", out loud while watching it. Still love the series tho!
Ramethzer0
Well-known member
I would scarcely consider wearing heavy riot armour and just walk through crowds of zeds. Even if it protected you 100% from bites, you better hope you have amazing cardio or you're gunna run outta energy fast. I did combat sports when I was younger and those 3 minute rounds of full contact can be devastating for some folks, and that's with just the basic protective gear. But, for biting zombies - keeping pace - and using your body for quick escapes, I bet cardboard and duct tape could go a long way.
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Maharin
Well-known member
This couldn't be like a standard flu variant. In order for it to have a chance of producing an apocalypse it would have to act very differently. But I'll digress on that for a moment.
Assuming this thing doesn't immediately immobilize people and that it is infections before harsh symptoms appear then it could spread before people even recognize it as dangerous. This is actually a very likely scenario. We are a global population and people travel all the time so things will most certainly spread across political borders.
Containment will still involve hospitals and the like. It will be misdiagnosed and people will be sent on their merry way with antibiotics or even less ("drink lots of liquids and get plenty of sleep" comes to mind). It will spread and have a strong potential of significantly burdening our health care system once the numbers grow significantly. If there are several epicenters within the US then it would be more of a problem, obviously. If those epicenters were in cities (likely, considering the location of most airports and seaports) then the impact would be even greater.
While the health care community is figuring out what it is and how to mitigate symptoms, and the CDC or whomever was figuring out how bad it is and trying to figure out if it is one disease or several, there would be some additional spreading events. Overburdened health clinics would send some people home and others might not even be let in. Everyone standing around trying to check into clinics would be infecting each other. Some clinical staff would also get it and pass it along. This would all happen before any military or other executive involvement, most likely, since this kind of thing literally happens all the time (localized flue variants and the like). At this point there would be thousands infected, again assuming there are multiple outbreak locations due to traveling infected people.
But, so much ultimately depends on on how the zombie nature of the disease expresses itself. If people turn right away then it is not likely to ever reach apocalyptic proportions. There are obviously many ways it could eventually reach apocalyptic status, though. A really long incubation time before it becomes infectious, for instance, or super-fast mutation rate that drastically changes the initial symptoms of the disease. It could go dormant and be triggered by a later auto-immune response. All it has to do is spread fast enough to break through containment protocols or otherwise be devious enough to get past the requirement for containment. If people get sick, get "better", and then go full zombie days later... yeah, lots of ways this could go bad in a hurry. You get the idea.
I agree with most of what you said, though saying "long incubation" period and then saying "go bad in a hurry" does not gel. Essentially the more we stay in traditional zombie lore the less likely the spread is. Most zombie movies have a very short incubation interval (you get bitten, you turn in seconds to overnight. Definitely most zombie movies (except maybe the atypical "The girl with all the talents") have no virus transmission over air, unless you get bitten you don't turn. Transmission over air is fundamentally different and easier for transmission than getting bitten by a raving lunatic.
Whatever you say clinic personel is not THAT dumb that they won't notice people going mad, biting other people and those other people getting mad after some time. Practically one or two of such events might be misinterpreted but not 20 and not the following generations of infected, at which time the zombie population would be still very very far from masses of zombies running through the streets. And then the news would immediately travel around the world, mass panic included, but everyone would know and the zombies and infected combined would still be a few 100 (with any incubation period that would allow world wide distribution at the same time).
And that is my central point: In most conditions that conform to zombie lore as seen in movies everyone in the world will know everything important about zombies before the zombies reach a significant percentage of the population. Either because they turn so fast that they stay localized to few cities or because their incubation time is too long and they need weeks and months to get to apocalyptic numbers. As you say a long incubation makes it possible for the disease to distribute and maybe even get confused with rabies at the first few incidents, but it also means that increasing zombie population takes longer and gives humanity weeks or even months to notice and react and most importantly slow down the infection rate before it reaches the steep part of the hyperbolic curve.
Lunatic people that bite other people are very conspicuous and not even 1 in 100 clinic personel will confuse zombieness with rabies when the zombie is eating the brains of his victim on the hospital floor.
You talk about mutation, but look at Covid. It mutates to get around the auto-imun system, but it still makes you cough, it doesn't suddenly transfer itself to the liver or makes your stomach hurt. Covid has a mass of symptoms but they essentially stayed the same over all mutations. The incubation period as well did not change fundamentally.
You could invent a new zombie virus that makes new zombies not act differently or just compel them to recite Shakespeare, but how would it transmit itself then from those normal acting people that don't bite?
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Melange
Active member
My take on this: the infected do no have to bite. Merely exhale in your general area. We inhale the active virus, then its us that become the infected. The first wave of SARS...we were lucky. Don't know much about the the transmission of it, but if you managed to keep people from close contact, it went away. Or did it? SARS version 2 (Oh, its more soft now...change the wording, we'll call it COVID) is with us today. It's been attributed to more than a million deaths in the USA alone. Its a virus. Whether it makes one apparently rabid isn't the real issue. It's if its going to kill you.
Zombie movies are great, 7DtD is great. But it isn't the real world. We're living a viral attack on our health, our existence now.
But yeah, biting, brain-eating 'zombies' are a nice diversion to reality.
Survival of the least affected.
Bring out your dead.
Zombie movies are great, 7DtD is great. But it isn't the real world. We're living a viral attack on our health, our existence now.
But yeah, biting, brain-eating 'zombies' are a nice diversion to reality.
Survival of the least affected.
Bring out your dead.
Ramethzer0
Well-known member
Now, imagine if this was a Prion outbreak!
EXTRA WILD
EXTRA WILD