A bit contra @roelkonijn.bsky.social here, but ditches could still be effective here. Trace italienne fortresses feature moats whose inward-facing slopes were carefully angled so that they had to be climbed, but offered no cover against opponents firing from the wall (Roman forts do this too!) 7/
Comments
8/
1. When/where would you choose? (besides Ancient Rome!)
2. How far back do you think you would need to go for zombies to be a threat? Pre-machine gun or further?
That's not going to defeat military NBC gear (or even thick clothing with a PPE mask), so containment wouldn't actually be that hard. 9/
So, NBC gear is not enough if you already ingested the spores through your food before you knew there was a problem.
Likewise clearing a field with 155mm DPICM cluster munitions. 11/
Canister shot has been around, I think, since at least the 17th century - used to turn field artillery into enormous shotguns. Canister could reach out a few hundred yards and was horrifically lethal.
Zombies do none of that. 12/
If you shred their muscles, it's physics, not willpower, that prevents movement. 13/
But 'zombies' works thematically because of the dehumanized human enemies.
A friend who actually watched a few episodes described the threat from The Walking Dead as being like getting tetanus from stepping on a rusty nail barefoot. Just don't do that.
Wait, Steve Bannon is a zombie prepper?
In case of zombie apocalypse, become zombie and make sure the following people get bitten:
...
https://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html
Trace italienne, aside from being a beautiful phrase, is basically zombie cryptonite. A smaller number of people with muskets need to hold off a mass wave of attackers? Check.
Similarly, you're undoubtedly right about modern firepower, but these people seem to be limited to rifles
(also, Brooks at least put more thought into a lot of the stuff than many writers do. like there’s a lot of thought about industrial mobilisation, counter-zombie force design, etc, to appreciate. plus the stuff about pandemic grifting)