Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

pharmakos said:

had a long conversation with my girlfriend about how it would make way more sense for Michonne to have a Naginata - Wikipedia

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definitely the ideal medieval Japanese zombie killing weapon anyway. keep your distance from them bites.

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I own one. A real one if not very decorated but it has a 8 inch curved razor sharp blade I have to keep wrapped due to pets. Can verify. Very dangerous.

My smaller one. I would want it against a beast such as a bear or rabid moose. Anything else gets the katana up top out of picture. Mind the cat treat crumbs on their perch in our everything room.
Course we have 3 handguns and about 1200 rounds currently so this would be backup.
I have a longer one with a narrower blade down in the garage stowed away but it isn't near as pretty or sharp.

A polearm is going to be too heavy. You'll get bogged down in zombie skull too fast. A simple spear, if all you have to do is poke the zombie melon open, should be more versatile.

And you can use it for a walking stick. And if one gets past your staabity death radius you can use it like a... stick... to push them away or fend.

iannis said:

A polearm is going to be too heavy. You'll get bogged down in zombie skull too fast. A simple spear, if all you have to do is poke the zombie melon open, should be more versatile.

And you can use it for a walking stick. And if one gets past your staabity death radius you can use it like a... stick... to push them away or fend.

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Well as the one above I would guess it's weight around 2 lbs. It weighs about half of the sword laying on the perch right above it. Things vary though. The sword hanging down on the wall on the right weighs about 20 lbs while the one going down behind the perch is a replica of Narnia over a foot longer and weighs maybe 10. Most of them are decorative but the spear/naginata and and the katana were built as weapons.

I was going to purchase a crossbow year before last mostly due to interest from TWD but when I got sick and got all the great news figured why bother. Most of the things I have now will probably be thrown away or sold for nothing when I'm gone as it is.

jihodj said:

Ah, no. If your population dips below a certain number, there is no recovering from that.

And considering that the population of survivors would be spread across the globe, with little way to contact one another or reach one another, even having that threshold value in total across the surface of the planet means nothing.

You'd have to have that minimum viable population concentrated in an area close enough that they can interbreed.

If one guy in a bunker and his family survives nuclear winter in Canada, and another guy does so in Brazil, your species is still fucked.

Minimum viable population - Wikipedia

There is a marked trend for insularity, surviving genetic bottlenecks and r-strategy to allow far lower MVPs than average. Conversely, taxa easily affected by inbreeding depression – having high MVPs – are often decidedly K-strategists, with low population densities while occurring over a wide range. An MVP of 500 to 1,000 has often been given as an average for terrestrial vertebrates when inbreeding or genetic variability is ignored.[3][4] When inbreeding effects are included, estimates of MVP for many species are in the thousands. Based on a meta-analysis of reported values in the literature for many species, Traill et al. reported a median MVP of 4,169 individuals.[5]

So you can't just assume if some preppers survive a global catastrophe that the species will survive intact.

We'd need bunkers filled with people under mountains. Thousand of them.

Then survival would be viable.

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That honestly depends on how far back you want to go, how aggressive you are with culling, and the exact nature of hostilities in the environment.

5000 would be more than sufficient to come through the bottleneck. The more women you have the fewer men you need.

The interesting question would be, from a genetic standpoint, how few males would it take? It's not 1:1, but I wonder just what the ratio is. There's actually an answer to that question provided different assumptions.

I am positive that some military doctors have answered it.

jihodj said:

The roman gladius would be a great weapon for a zombie apocalypse tbh

Short, lightweight, can slash and stab but pull out clean and quickly.

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I have a needler which looks much like a fencing weapon like the girl uses in GoT. Always thought that would be pretty cruel. You'd need a good amount of thrust to get past the bone for heart/skull hits though. Next with least resistance would be Katana. Make good thrust weapons as well. Most everything else is slash or slash with weight which is tiresome to wield given few wear armor and I'm pretty sure today's body armor laughs at edged weaponry.

Still not sure where all this fits into doomsday though. Especially if it is known to be coming. The amount of ammo laying around just in my town alone has to be in the tens of millions of rounds. Hell I think places like Gander Mtn here have over a million rounds just up and down the isles. Couple hundred thousand for sure. Virtually 2 long isles stacked top to bottom of boxes of ammo even ammo cans.

Olebass said:

Well as the one above I would guess it's weight around 2 lbs. It weighs about half of the sword laying on the perch right above it. Things vary though. The sword hanging down on the wall on the right weighs about 20 lbs while the one going down behind the perch is a replica of Narnia over a foot longer and weighs maybe 10. Most of them are decorative but the spear/naginata and and the katana were built as weapons.

I was going to purchase a crossbow year before last mostly due to interest from TWD but when I got sick and got all the great news figured why bother. Most of the things I have now will probably be thrown away or sold for nothing when I'm gone as it is.

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A neighbor of mine used to have a crossbow. It was actually kind of neat.

He was a bow Hunter, but that one was just a toy. He used to say there was no sport in the crossbow, and no need for the rifle.

Plus I think crossbow hunting is actually illegal.

iannis said:

A neighbor of mine used to have a crossbow. It was actually kind of neat.

He was a bow Hunter, but that one was just a toy. He used to say there was no sport in the crossbow, and no need for the rifle.

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The higher tech ones have like 200lb+ draw weight but only needs 10 lbs to cock and travel 1/3 1/4ish typical 9mm speed which is freaking fast considering. You'll have to wait until zombies roaming around though to snatch one unless you want to dish out $1000+ for it.

Tuco said:

Ammo has to be moved and mobility in an apocalypse scenario is probably key. Any population centers are assumed to be highly hostile in a zombie outbreak (and if they aren't, then it's good fucking game to the zombies). That 10k rounds some guy threw into his truck before bugging out would be pretty great, but isn't unlimited.

But really, the argument against live ammunition is that everyone knows hordes of zombies can hear gun shots from miles away.

I think I'll take a heavy short blade + sharpened rebar + bow/arrow anyday. All three can be repaired and replaced easily.

If zombie bones aren't soft like they are in TWD it's a totally different story and light blades make zero sense. Then it's down to axes and picks and hoping you don't get your shit stuck.

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If they pass the noise law which basically reduces the craziness to obtain silencers it'll help with noise. Still lots louder than movies though. Not sure how world destruction became zombies. More likely is rabid desperate people who move fast enough where such melee weapons can overwhelm the average man with 2 or more people.

Tuco said:

Also putting nerd weapons on a cat house is pretty much the most appropriate mounting place ever.

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Well I had to take the picture someplace. We are in the middle of moving things around to make room for the treadmill and shit we bought from Sears this week.(Status update other day-spent $900 )

This went from an interesting Extinction Level Event discussion to some stupid Walking Dead zombie kill bullshit discussion.

Take that shit to its own gay thread.

Cad said:

Question: would iridium phones continue to work without ground stations? Do the satellites talk directly to each other or do they go through ground stations and only the handsets talk to the satellites? Do the satellites also have redundant communication abilities with each other?

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That's actually a great question. I have always assumed that they're tethered to a ground station somehow, that we don't have truly autonomous communication satellites. It seems like you'd want some sort of tethering for the security of your investment. If you can be corporate espionaged out of a satellite you'll probably look for some way to prevent that. Direct control of some sort of mandatory ground hub seems like it would be an obvious hedge.

But maybe they're not actually tethered. That would impede performance. Maybe it's just something along the lines of windows in which certain communications must be recieved in order for the satellite to remain functional until the next window. Making your satellite ping home every now and then asking, "Am I still the property of so and so?" in order to continue function.

You're talking about that much money, there is going to be some control in place more direct than "It's in space, no one will ever be able to appropriate it!"

I actually think this is a thing that has evolved in our lifetimes. Remember back in the 90's? My uncle had a giant satellite dish. You -could- pirate signals off of communication satellites if you knew their orbits. You don't see those private satellite dishes anymore.

It may be nothing so direct and clumsy. It may just be that the encryption is enough. Unbreakable encryption is the holy grail of modern comp sci. Control the key, control the property.