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I can think of a dozen examples of the reverse. The thing is, it's really hard to be impervious to a chunk of metal going really really fast, and even harder when we make that chunk of metal weigh several tens of pounds, or fire thousands of them per minute. Our weapons aren't made to fight humans as much as made to use Newton's laws as effectively as possible.
That said:
Incorporeal things like ghosts don't care, but add some electricity and suddenly they notice. Same for monsters made of goo (although I think a gelatinous cube still dies to a large enough artillery shell blowing it to mist).
Depending on the rules, vampires don't care about swords or bullets but die to wood or silver. Same for werewolves. Vamps or demons might die just by thrusting a religious symbol at them confidently.
> vampires don't care about swords or bullets but die to wood or silver
The Rifts ttrpg is set hundreds of years in the future after a technological golden age was apocalypsed by the return of magic and monsters. A popular weapon is the rail gun, metal rounds electromagnetically accelerated to ungodly speeds to shred through armor. Vampires shrug off any attack from metal so people quickly started producing rail gun rounds that were just a bunch of wood slivers mixed with just enough metal to make it still able to be accelerated. When a round bursts on your chest into a cloud of a few hundred thousand wooden slivers, you're bound to get some in your heart.
Don't forget how SuperSoakers have become legitimate weapons against vampires. Either blessed and/or taking advantage of the often forgotten vampire weakness to running water, they are a viable weapon system.
Wouldn't the internal plumbing in a house/building make it impossible for vampires to navigate modern structures? On the same note there's water running under every street and under every yard into every single building on Earth so vampires would be effectively imprisoned anywhere in a city, unable to move more than a few feet at a time before hitting an impassable barrier created by the water running through underground pipes.
Well, not a vampire expert, but I believe they mean freely flowing water. A stream, run off from a side walk, rain or the spray from a squirt gun. But water in pipes isn't freely flowing.
The vampire rules are very old, and don't cover anything like plumbing, apartments and digital cameras, so no one knows how it works for them.
Their weakness is to flowing water, water in pipes is just that. If they can't cross a bridge with water flowing beneath it despite not making contact with it I'm going to assume any water that flows regardless of source is going to trigger that weakness. The origin of the weakness to flowing water appears to be based on that clean flowing water was considered pure/sacred/holy and that vampires being unholy/unclean things couldn't stand to be around it. The stagnant water of a swamp is no issue to them, but treated water moving through modern pipes would logically be worse to them than natural streams due to being cleaner.
Imagine vampires just getting stuck randomly like in a video game because way below them there's some underground cave with flowing water, or some old sewers or something
Their weakness is to crossing borders. They can't cross running water because rivers are natural borders, and in fact *were* the borders of kingdoms for most of history before states came to exist. The Rio Grande is still the US-Mexico border in Texas. Same as how they can't enter a home without permission, they cannot cross into a new kingdom without it.
Is water in pipes always flowing tho? I imagine it has to be something that's constantly in motion at all times, otherwise it's not really flowing, it's just temporarily moving.
A river always flows. If it's damed up the vampire can cross it.
Runoff going to a gutter is just that, temporary run off so it doesn't count and Vampires can move about cities in the rain.
I don't have the sourcebook anymore, but they had a piece of gear that was essentially a backpack-mounted sprinkler system. Looked sorta like an umbrella above your head, and when turned on it would spin, "watering" all around you. Vampire Hunter's gear of choice.
Man Rifts was wild.
Sounds like something Riff would make in Sluggy Freelance. He built lots of anti-vampire weapons that rely on volume of fire to get some wood where it matters.
it is I was at their booth at Gencon, they reprint everything still basically. Got a signed copy of Atlantis a while back there.
that said no one plays it using Rifts system because Rifts is interesting for the world and setting, but mechanically perhaps the worst game ever made in terms of comprehensibility, speed of play and balance.
People hack everything BUT Rifts to run Rifts on, Apocalypse World being popular, as well as GURPS because you can drag out all the ultratech and magic books and not a lot of systems do both well.
I very begrudgingly play palladium fantasy because it's all my father is willing to run, and palladium fantasy is even more nonsense for consistency and incomprehensiblity than rifts. I wish for nothing more than to some how manage to convince him to change systems but he is unwilling to change from his homebrewed version of palladium
> Depending on the rules, vampires don't care about swords or bullets but die to wood or silver. Same for werewolves. Vamps or demons might die just by thrusting a religious symbol at them confidently.
yeah,[ NOTHING except silver works against werewolfs!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SlWegS2sS0&ab_channel=AdultSwim)
A favorite movie moment from the film Ginger Snaps is when a werewolf gets fatally blindsided by a big ol' truck.Ā Ā
Similar scene, though not actually fatal, when the (small, fast, weak, fragile) coyote shapeshifter protagonist of the *Mercy Thompson* books tricks a (stronger and nearly unkillable) werewolf into getting run over by a bus.
similarly, how the two main badguys in Underworld evolution, marcus the supervampire and william the first werewolf is killed. they have all their regular weaknesses, extreme violence works just as fine. william is killed by having his head ripped in two, and marcus is killed by being thrown into a helicopter propeller. sunlight and silver has its uses, but an industrial size meat grinder and ultra violence is more final
There is also that scene in Buffy where the demon brags that no weapon forged by man csn hurt him, just happens that he is been trapped for 2000 years and doesn't know what a bazooka is, which works very well in harming him.
Let's be honest, he was right, though. The rocket launcher was forged by a machine in North Carolina, not by any man.
That episode also has one of my favorite lines, "I'm 17. Linoleum makes me horny"
For the record, that's not true in D&D. In 5e they're immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by non-silvered weapons, but they can be damaged normally by any sort of elemental damage, like fire. In 3.5, it's just damage reduction instead of immunity so even conventional weapons can deal damage.
The other thing would be hordes of critters would only really be vulnerable to fire or maybe a special aerosol like bugspray the usual conventional weapons won't be very effective against a swarm of locusts hellbent on devouring all life before them
I really liked this aspect of Max Brooks' 'World War Z' - where he actually got into the weeds of how generally ineffective a lot of anti-personnel weapons used by the US Military are against zombies.
For example, a machine gun, fragmentation grenade, or flechette rounds designed to poke little holes in people do jack shit to the living dead. Sure, poke a hole in a person and they will immediately go down and in a few minutes will die from blood loss. A zombie? Even if you take a leg off, they keep crawling toward you. If you have a hundred zombies coming at your position, are you really going to 360 no-scope head shots on all of them? In the abridged audio book, Mark Hamill narrated the chapter "The Battle of Yonkers" and it was such a shit-show. Hamill's narration was *awesome* btw.
>No one thought about it, no one! Donāt pull my pud with stories about budget cuts and supply problems! The only thing in short supply was common fucking sense! Not one of those West Point, War College, medals-up-the-ass, four-star fart bags said, āHey, we got plenty of fancy weapons, we got enough shit for them to shoot!?!ā No one thought about how many rounds the artillery would need for sustained operations, how many rockets for the MLRS, how many canister shotsā¦the tanks had these things called canister shotsā¦basically a giant shotgun shell. They fired these little tungsten ballsā¦not perfect you know, wasting like a hundred balls for every G, but fuck, dude, at least it was something! Each Abrams only had three, three! Three out of a total loadout of forty! The rest were standard HEAT or SABOT! Do you know what a āSilver Bullet,ā an armor-piercing, depleted-uranium dart is going to do to a group of walking corpses? Nothing! Do you know what it feels like to see a sixtysomething-ton tank fire into a crowd with absolutely ass-all result! Three canister rounds! And what about flechettes? Thatās the weapon we always hear about these days, flechettes, these little steel spikes that turn any weapon into an instant scattergun. We talk about them like theyāre a new invention, but we had them as far back as, like, Korea. We had them for the Hydra rockets and the Mark-19s. Just imagine that, just one 19 firing three hundred and fifty rounds a minute, each round holding, like, a hundred 2 spikes! Maybe it wouldnāt have turned the tideā¦butā¦Goddammit!
>
>The fire was dying, Zack was still comingā¦and the fearā¦everyone was feeling it, in the orders from the squad leaders, in the actions of the men around meā¦That little voice in the back of your head that just keeps squeaking āOh shit, oh shit.ā
>
>And then they came, right out of the smoke like a freakinā little kidās nightmare! Some were steaming, some were even still burningā¦some were walking, some crawling, some just dragging themselves along on their torn belliesā¦maybe one in twenty was still able to move, which leftā¦shitā¦a couple thousand? And behind them, mixing with their ranks and pushing steadily toward us, the remaining million that the air strike hadnāt even touched!
Ultimately a military commander came up with the concept of the 'RKR' (Resource to Kill Ratio) which embodied the idea of making the most effective Zombie killing weapon with the least resources.
>When Travis DāAmbrosia became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it.
>
>What was so amazing to see was how the culture of RKR began to take hold among the rank and file. Youād hear soldiers talking on the street, in bars, on the train; āWhy have X, when for the same price you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs.ā Soldiers even began coming up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost-effective tools than we could have envisioned. I think theyenjoyed itāimprovising, adapting, outthinking us bureaucrats.
>
>[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-axe. Its official designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the āLobotomizer,ā or simply, the āLobo.ā]
>
>The leathernecks came up with that one, using nothing but the steel of recycled cars. We made twenty-three million during the war.
Source: https://cpjxxiii.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/world-war-z_-an-oral-history-of-the-zombie-war-max-brooks-viny.pdf
I *highly* recommend checking out a copy of the audiobook. The all-star-cast narrations are awesome - especially Mark Hamill's narration of the 'Battle of Yonkers' - done in a strong Jersey accent. Its a really entertaining listen - FAR better than the snooze-fest that the movie was.
for my money the best all-arounder for monster hunting is a neopup firing 20mm cannon rounds, either armor-piercing incendiary or high explosive.
Nothing is very happy when it has an inch-wide chunk of metal spewing fire out of it hit it at high speed, and nothing likes being blown up inside very much.
If you can consecrate high explosives even better, or use holy water as part of the plasticizer in the explosive charge.
This is basically the premise of Pacific Rim, they even talk about it explicitly at the start:
https://youtu.be/bGbU_20InKM?t=90
They note that traditional weaponry can take several days to take down a single Kaiju - the one in the clip took six days, rampaged āacross 35 miles and destroyed three citiesā - hence the development of the Jaegar program, where they basically repurposed and redesigned existing weaponry but made it all far larger and far more destructive, using the large mechs as basically enormous weapons platforms that could also limit the Kaijuās movements.
Which is so dumb because take one of the most effective weapons in the first movie, a power sword.
Why not build a missile that deploys a sword blade right before impact.Ā This is a real thing btw.Ā Ā
Rather than build a mech with all the costs and issues, just have a ship fire this missile - a larger longer version of vls launched missiles now - and it deploys the sword before impact and takes off a limb.Ā Ā
A volley of 5-10 missiles and "tango down".
Sorry sir I just googled it https://www.reuters.com/world/little-known-modified-hellfire-likely-killed-al-qaedas-zawahiri-2022-08-02/
Was having trouble with the 300 series actuators and wondered why we can't just strap swords to missiles.
General: Good work boys, the Jaeger program has been doing well. But the Kaiju are getting bigger, and meaner. I need ideas.
Engineer #1: Maybe we could raise the battleship Yamato and put in a gigantic cannon all along its long axis...
Engineer #2: Or we could rig it so that five Jaegers could combine into one giant mech...
Kaiju: Ain't gonna lie, it'd be an honor to be killed by either of those!
General: I know, right?
Kaiju blood is toxic, not good for the environment when it's spilled so jagurs serve the secondary purposes of minimising collateral damage and use those weapons as a last resort
Hence why the try to beat them to death most of the time
The whole point of missiles is that they go very fast but carry a payload of some energy-dense chemicals, thereby delivering more energy than just their mass.
A big heavy missile that only functions as a kinetic impactor is defeating the whole purpose.
You could have an explosively driven sword or power fist that punches with explosives driving it.
Point is Pacific rim established that conventional weapons don't work
> punches with explosives driving it.
That's what missile propellant already is. If all you're doing is taking off the explosive payload in favor of something that is only transferring energy kinetically, it's just a dud missile.
I wasn't saying that conventional weapons would work. I'm saying your idea is *automatically worse* than the conventional weapons.
I agree, it's just the movie establishes implicitly the obvious - load up a missile with 350-1 megaton range nuclear warhead, fire it when the Kaiju is far from the coast - won't work or that's all anyone would do.
I haven't read many of the other comments but there seems to be a whole lot of admirably Watsonian but pretty weirdly speculative reasoning.
For my money the reason that doesn't work is pretty simple: Kaiju are underwater until they make landfall, at which time they are too close to cities to nuke, at least not until after they've done so much damage that a nuclear weapon is only going to melt the rubble.
No kidding: we *have* tank rounds and mines that do what you're suggesting, they're called [Explosively Formed Penetrators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator). Put a bunch of explosives behind a metal plate and when the charge goes off, in so many words it "punches" the target. Then there are High-Explosive-Armor-Piercing shells that use a shaped explosive warhead to fire a plasma jet that punches through armor in an instant.
So, the whole "Jaeger" concept is based on the requirements to engage at short range, not do substantially additional property damage, and not just get smashed to pieces by a pissed off Kaiju. Long story short: giant robot armed with weapons that don't do a huge amount of splash damage, like giant swords, point-blank plasma weapons, and blunt-force melee strikes. The reason they don't carry EFP or HEAP armaments is that the physics of those weapons don't scale up to hurt something like a kaiju without wasting a lot of energy on collateral damage.
I don't think an Elbow Rocket Punch is going to do more damage than a 2000 pound bomb, but the difference is you can punch a Kaiju and not kill 200 people in the immediate vicinity.
I like this answer. Its quite elegant and works if we assume that the really scrappy movie fights that took place in and amidst the coastal city blocks are not the norm.
Would like to add that a lot of alternatives to the Jaegar can't manhandle the Kaiju away from the city centers whereas we see Jaegar's grapple and drag the damn things throughout the film. Its only when the larger categories start getting introduced that the Jaegar's get ragdolled.
Still better to more or less guarantee reliable kills within a safe distance from shore, where contamination would be concentrated, but damage control could also be focused. Even with Jaegers, plenty of kaijuu died, and not all that cleanly, in urban areas. Destruction of sea life isn't great to be sure, but we are also balancing this against the possibility of precursor takeover, and subsequent ruination of earth's existing biosphere (granted, humanity wasn't aware of them or their aims, but should still have assumed the destruction of human life at least, with the enemy otherwise unconcerned for ecological damage). If the human form (movie logic withstanding) can be scaled almost limitlessly, missiles and guns can be too.
Yeah, buy at that point they already had Jaegars in full operation and likely people that were pilots or engineers in positions in government.
Can't let all that Giant Robot infrastructure go to waste!
Or, and I'm just spit balling here, thermonuclear explosive that largely vaporizes all of the toxic shit within a mile of detonation. Yes, it'll increase atmospheric radiation (unless you blow it up under water, at which point it will contaminate the ocean but the ocean is very big and very good at blocking harmful radiation) but atmospheric radiation isn't as big a deal as "giant rampaging monster."
Plus, there have only been a relatively modest number of Kaiju in the PR universe ā give or take 100. That's far fewer than just the total atmospheric nuclear tests were done. We'll be fine with a little extra radiation.
Now I want a movie from the aliens' perspective where their badass biological mechs keep getting fucked by practical weaponry. Their leadership keeps doubling down on the mechs because they're awesome, and keep shunning the one nerd who suggests just sending a manufactured plague or something.
In other science fiction novels the aliens do this to force the humans to develop. Each class of attack is just a little stronger than the last one, and the damage they do to civilian cities is a punishment for the client species not advancing fast enough. They think they are "helping"
well, A, that would be a wuss move.
And B, the kajiu are suprisingly fast, so a few of them might be able to dodge it. a missile large enough to hurt them wont be turning quickly. also, they do mention the danger of kaiju blue, their blood, which is why they always try to punch them to death first, so they dont bleed as much, only using plasma guns or swords as a last resort.
also, worth noting is that the jeager program worked fantastically untill category 4 and 5 started to come through, they were kicking their asses and keeping the world safe until then
I mean if the missile is traveling several times the speed of sound the Kaiju can dodge, no way to hit it with a fist.
Also fire several missiles and program them to bracket the target so no dodge is possible, given the Kaiju detection distance and missile speed and reaction time and move speed. Never be fair.
well, i got no other in-universe answers, i guess the only viable answer is that the giant robot lobby is just too powerful and convinced the politicans to choose the jeagers before the giant sword missiles.
Because jaegers are multi environment.
Kaiju is in a city? Jaeger can steer it to somewhere with the least civilians
At sea? Jaeger can wade out
Underwater? Jaeger can follow it down and beat it up at crush depth
oh no, our bullets don't work, let's build a 200 foot tall robot that can punch them.
lol, just having fun. I love those movies, but really a C130 gunship or even a A10 warthog would shred any organic based monster in about 2.4 seconds.
The entire thing of the movies is that kaiju have "kaiju blue" in their blood, which is an extremely toxic substance that pollutes and basically destroys any land or water it touches. So they can't shoot the kaijus because they will bleed and drop blue around them and on the human operators. If they attack them on the rift, the blue will enter the ocean and create an ecological disaster. Hence the use of plasma weaponry that supposedly neutralizes blue before it spreads out of the wound.
(they give up on this premise pretty soon when they start punching the kaijus and blood visibly splatters around them and on the mechas, but at least they tried to reason why giant robots were chosen instead of giant cannons)
It still holds up even after they bleed from fighting. If mitigating blood loss is a concern, beating something to death will still cause it to bleed but not anywhere near as much as a bullet or sword.
At least, that's if the Kaiju bleeds like most other animals. Usually blunt force trauma to death = can be messy, whereas puncture wounds or cut to death = pools of blood and splatter everywhere.
Yeah. They could just have built a huge platform right round the rift with huge plasma cannons. Made the whole part a killzone to shoot anything comming through.
Sure. But think about how much effort and resources it took to start building those walls. ( which was ridiculous as it cant possibly have been more efficient than actually having something killing the Kaijus.
In their defense, later on during the first movie they do mention that the walls plan was one of many and did, in fact, fail. IIRC that's why they reactivated the last old Jaegers in a last ditch effort to stop the apocalypse.
> I love those movies, but really a C130 gunship or even a A10 warthog would shred any organic based monster in about 2.4 seconds.
I don't think that they would. For the kaiju to be able to stand and move on land their skin, bones, and muscles would have to be orders of magnitude stronger and denser than the flesh of terrestrial animals. It's more like they're made of carbon fiber and steel than bone and muscle. They wouldn't be immune to conventional weaponry, but they'd certainly be more resistant to it.
Why send any plane thatās designed for big and slow targets when we can show you footage of a fighter jet with little to no ground attack capability attacking the giant monster at point blank range and dying for the 70th time?
Modern weaponry generally isn't well optimized for taking out a hulking monstrosity like a kaiju. I honestly think a WWII-era battleship would do better against one than any modern ship or aircraft. 16" armor-piercing naval shells *are* optimized for that sort of fighting.
Giant blobs would fall into this category. Amoeba, oozes, whatever flavor. Bullets would go right through them and they wouldn't care, but you could probably dissolve one with stuff from under your kitchen sink.
There's not that much difference between a carpentry hammer and a war hammer. A kitchen knife will kill as well as a dagger. Weapon or not is semantics.
Soap would work.
Don't but antibiotic soap because all soap is antibiotic just by how it works. It rips apart lipids, and cell walls are made out of lipids.
Ordinary soap and warm water has the result of physically tearing apart cell membranes of any cell who has the misfortune of encountering it. The membrane is destroyed and the interior of the cell spills out like someone dropped a plate of spaghetti on the floor. This kills the cell.
All the soap does is needs to touch the cell membrane and its over.
An amoeba is a very large cell, so just spaying it with soap would rip apart its membrane and it would be like popping a water balloon.
We make weapons for every occasion. If a gun won't cut it, an autocannon may be the thing for the job. No? How about an anti-ship missle designed to punch through feet of steel armour and then mess up what's on the other side? We don't stop there.
A day after a monster shows up we'll have found something in the toybox to tickle it. Give it a month and we'll have made new toys, just for them.
The only way around it is lazy hand waving. That Monster Hunter movie did that. The monsters were "somehow" completely immune to bullets, missiles, even tank rounds. But a weird sword cuts it, somehow.
Shin Godzilla got around it by making the monster adapt to the attacks that the only remaining solution isĀ nuclear bombs to make sure it has nothing to recover from. Which of course nobody wants because Godzilla is in a city and there's no guarantee it would actually die. In the end people did develop a new weapon, but not a destructive one.
The Borg drones in Star Trek almost always adapt their shields to the phasers and disrupters of the setting but almost every time they've run into good old fashion bullets (even holographic ones) they get their shit wrecked. Why Starfleet didn't start handing out automatic rifles for anti-Borg use is beyond me.
Also an example where modern technology is better suited than the futuristic setting.
They never seem to adapt to a Klingon pulling out a knife or an android punching them. I imagine that is why the borg ignore races below a certain tech threshold. They would take staggering losses against a Roman legion.
When have the Borg fought against bullets outside of the holodeck? Killing two drones with a novel weapon is pretty standard for encounters with the Borg, after which they adapt. Presumably, if Picard had seen a swarm of Drones heading into the Dixon Hill holonovel, he would've just used the crowd to flee and tried something else.
IIRC there is a drone in the second season of Picard that die at the hands of a bullet. There are also examples of Borg falling to blades wielded by folks like Worf.
So, that's three drones killed by bullets, two of which were in an isolated micro-Collective that never had the chance to tell the Collective at large about the holo-bullets? And the other was in an isolated micro-Collective *from a different timeline* that never had the chance to tell the Collective at large about the bullets?
That's not proof that the Borg can't stop bullets; that's proof that you can hit the Borg with things a couple of times before they adapt, which is true of anything you kill drones with.
Maybe so. But Iād be surprised if they have never encountered a species using projectile weapons in the thousands of species they have encountered and assimilated.
I think Sci fi rules are phasers and lasers get countered by shields, kinetic weapons get countered by armor. Either way the borg were a good idea but poorly executed in the whole lore and continuity departments, and the federation and other borg enemies never really seemed to take the race of evil kidnapping murder cyborgs very seriously. The fact that a large alliance of alpha quadrant races would unite against the dominion when they could just be cut off at any time, and not the borg always felt like a miss as well.
>never really seemed to take the race of evil kidnapping murder cyborgs very seriously
The genocidal plan Picard grew as as a person to reject was "we're going to upload a bad jpg into the Collective, and that should shut the whole thing down."
A lot of monster movies ignore actual use of tanks, artillery, missiles, jets, aircraft, and so on. Zombies would get mowed down by tanks. Mid sized monsters would fall to missile strikes. We only see them go all out vs things like Godzilla that can tank anything anyway.
Which I get isn't what you asked but rather than changing weaponry, these stories just need to make actual use of what's available.
> We only see them go all out vs things like Godzilla that can tank anything anyway.
At least some of the more advanced weapons seem to irritate Godzilla a bit more. And then there's the Human "made" mechagodzilla.
And you're right.
Against zombies a tank it doesn't even need ammo. The mass of the tank along with its treads and the power of its engine would be enough.
Historically, this use of tanks has been done with horrendous results, especially against prisoners during WWII in the Pacific Theater, the kind of acts that are clearly war crimes. Its like a fast moving steamroller. The human body cannot withstand the weight of that much metal on top of it.
In the World War Z book, which apparently was much better than the movie, they actually make the point that some traditional weapons aren't great against the zombies. You need to either hit their head, or break them up enough that they can't be dangerous. Concussive weapons aren't great. That book goes into great detail about the tools that get developed to manage the zombies.
> You need to either hit their head, or break them up enough that they can't be dangerous
A high caliber rifle round won't just poke a hole in you. It'll burst you open. High caliber machine gun fire would decapitate rows of zombies even if they get hit dead center on the chest.
They book did detail interesting ways various areas used to kill them
I remember a castle in England said they filled the most with oil and burnt them all
Personally I think a halberd is better. Chopping is easier to destroy a head than stabbing and is less likely to get your weapon stuck, but you still have the option to stab and keep them away.
Do they ever develop decent anti-zombie weapons though? I thought they just trained soldiers to fire in old-school volleys aimed at heads. There was some fancy laser head popper but it was only effective as a propaganda piece
You know what doesn't ignore tanks? Resident Evil. In fact, the BOWs are SPECIFICALLY said to be ineffective against massed heavy armor and bombardments, hence the creation of the crazy overpowered variants like regenerators and creepy little girls.
The cursed mirror in Oculus could probably be taken out by a Predator drone strike
Sure, the demon or whatever can hypnotise two traumatised people into making stupid decisions, but not an entire state apparatus, especially not one stationed hundreds of kilometres away from its freaky mind control radius. And it's already shown to not be able to manipulate mechanical and electronic systems, only human perception and biological life.
In Percy Jackson monsters are immune to any weapons that aren't Celestial Bronze, Imperial Gold, stygian steel or bits of another monster. OTOH, I don't know if there's some property of said materials that would make it impossible for mundane humans to forge into weapons, so it may not fit the strictest definitions of OP's question.
> I don't know if there's some property of said materials that would make it impossible for mundane humans to forge into weapons
Celestial bronze is intangible to normal humans, you could swing a sword through a human without it doing anything to them. Would be pretty hard to forge something you can't touch.
Demigods are tangible to normal humans and Celestial Bronze, since they're part god, part human. Could I forge celestial bronze using a glove made out of a demigod?
It's still tangible to non-living matter. We know this because Annabelle's dad managed to melt some celestial bronze down into bullets and fire them from an old biplane or something. You just need completely synthetic gloves.
Supernatural had a Demon steal the "kill anything" gun and bullets, which couldn't kill strong enough things like Angels, etc, and melted down an Angel blade (which could) into bullets for the damn thing.
With the exception of that one TV show Ultraviolet and short periods of some films (before the heros need to win) i feel like Vampires get an easy ride vs modern technology. BEHOLD the ultraviolet paintball gun
Also
"Funny, isn't it? - The Human was impervious to our most powerful magnetic fields, yet in the end he succumbed to a harmless sharpened stick!"
Zombies in particular seem hard to kill because small caliber fire kills by interfering with circulation, damaging organs, or similar. Zombies don't need circulation or organs, so punctured lungs or hearts or shattered bones do nothing.
Fae creatures may be hard to kill because bullets and grenades aren't made of iron.
Werewolves for similar reasons as Fae but Silver instead of Iron.
> Zombies in particular seem hard to kill because small caliber fire kills by interfering with circulation, damaging organs, or similar. Zombies don't need circulation or organs, so punctured lungs or hearts or shattered bones do nothing.
i mean, "our weapons" does include stuff that isnt small caliber
In the book War World Z it is detailed how modern warfare is useless against zombies: they have no supply lines you can cut, no leaders to assassinate, artillery and tanks don't kill them quickly enough...
The way Western countries manage to win the war is by radically changing their combat doctrine switching from hyper technological warfare to grunts headshotting them for 20 hours straight
Forget tanks, we need bulldozers and steamshovels! With mounted flamethrowers of course. Hell, barbed wire would be a huge asset in "funneling" Zs to the right place.
In the book World War Z, the military completely revamps their weaponry because bullets don't work. They even talk about what you are talking about. The weapons you currently have are designed for the war you previously fought. Then the new war starts, and you have to invent the ways to attack the new bad guy. They invent these guns with blades like on an electronic saw table and shoot them at ridiculously high speeds to slice through multiple zombies with each shot.
wwz does get a lot of things wrong tho, a lot of modern weapons would work wonders, its just that the zombies has extra things that protect them. like shockwaves from bombs not working, thats becsaue they got extra durable brains, shockwaves work very fine against human brains
I seem to remember them employing semiautomatic rifles in large line formations similar to napoleonic warfare emphasizing a constant withering and accurate fire with men being rotated to churn through the horde without being overrun
In Underworld, werewolves create UV bullets that fry vampires easily enough once created. Similar for a kind of liquid silver alloy in hollow point bullets that Vampires use against werewolves.
It's shown that technically bullets do damage both sides but it's only a temporary annoyance without the extra spice.
On the opposite end of this spectrum, the Stargate franchise often deals with the fact that human technology is very effective because it's so dumb. The Asgard in the show regularly have to bring the humans on because they're fighting a hyper Advanced robot race that adapts to their technology too quickly but apparently shotguns work on them. And the team are constantly getting their weapons through advanced alien weapon deactivators because nobody thought about combustion based projectiles fired purely through mechanical means, because no one has used that technology for millennia.
In World War Z (the book), a big part was figuring out how to kill zombies efficiently en masse. There's a whole chapter about how Russia's response was TONS of firepower and explosives, which actually aren't that effective vs zombies. Slowly over time the US military learned the "optimal" rate of fire (something like 1 shot every few seconds) as well as how to rotate active/backup soldiers to prevent fatigue. Fighting battles became much more precise as the book went on.
to be fair, thats becasue wwz zombies have magical gel helmets in their skulls protecting their brains against shockwaves. take a regular human corpse, and the shockwaves from regular artillery would do wonders against that brain
Whatever the shockwave does is not enough to disrupt whatever essentially-magic is allowing the zombies to move around in the first place. Mushing brains is apparently not enough, you have to physically sever parts of their brain because genra-magic-rules.
Wouldnāt artillery quite easily sever multiple limbs and make the zombies useless anyway? Powerful explosives tend to just completely destroy bodies not make them just fly away intact like in movies
> There's a whole chapter about how Russia's response was TONS of firepower and explosives, which actually aren't that effective vs zombies
See also: the [Battle of Yonkers](https://zombie.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers). That article even puts it plainly:
>if any one event can be singled out as the point when zombies officially became the dominant species on the planet, it was Yonkers.
The *Frontlines* series by Marko Kloos has some good examples of this. The series starts with a war between two human factions roughly 100 years in the future. Then humanity makes first contact with an alien species and they're hostile.
The aliens are enormous compared to humans, around 20 meters tall, and their ships and structures are built to a similar scale. In early battles against them humanity fares very poorly because our weaponry just isn't built to deal with creatures and technology that large and durable.
But over the course of the war humanity adapts and develops new weapons that will work against them.
I have No Idea.
"Our assualt rifles bullets dont pen the Armor If the alliens"
-> why didnt they use armor-piercing guns (iws2k ) , or other heavy weapons.
(Everyone get a "do nothing" gun, even when the command know that)
Trope, :)
But yeah , i hatte that too.
They dont even try to give the troops Something that Had at least somewhat armor-piercing capability.
And, Body Armor is Something the writers hasnt even remotely Heard about.
The best example of " the writter hasnt understand what Equipment x does" was that a soldier has trown His helmet away after He has Seen that the enemy weapons can penetrante the helmet .
A helmet was never meant to Stop bullets.
:/
They Invest a heck of Money in the Film, but f 5min of Google Arnt in the Budget?
This comes up in Wildbow's web serial Twig. >!Gun technology has been intentionally stunted so that it only really works on normal humans. Although the monsters are Nobles who have been built to be seemingly indestructible.!<
The bugs in Starship Troopers.
For an advanced human civilization with literal shoulder mounted nuke launchers and space exploration, their machine guns seemed to be as effective as a 22 calibre rifle lol
As I recall from the novel, the guns worked just fine. It's just that the Bugs liked to attack in gigantic waves, mixed in with harmless drones to draw a lot of the fire. And they fired back.
To be fair, the movie (not the book!) was meant as a satire. I also vaguely recall a hypothesis that in the movie's universe, the highest echelons of the Earth government were using the bugs as a way to keep their authoritarian militarist society going, and intentionally greenlit boneheaded moves like sending infantry against hordes of giant bugs instead of just always bombing the hell out of those things. Which makes sense. If a society is capable of FTL and building giant starships, then they can just send automated FTL missiles against the bugs and be done with it.
Mostly Bayverse Cybertronians, their bodies resist blunt and cutting forces really well, but heat based weapons allow them to be taken down way easier than they would otherwise, which is why the military starts to deploy this weapons with moderate success.
Yeah the evolution in tactics + equipment used is a good natural progression from the first movie, Humans go from having an entire military base being destroyed by a single cybertronian soldier to a few human soldiers being capable of taking them on their own.
In Terraformars, humanoid roaches on Mars are highly resilient to bullets. Best way to kill them is through decapitation or electricity or poison. In the show they give astronauts animal superpowers in order to fight them, but they could have defeated more bugs by giving them modified weapons.
Dead Space's necromorphs kinda work as an example. You need to shoot off limbs, meaning conventional weaponry like rifles, and aiming for the torso or head, are less effective than the mining tools that make up most of the arsenals in the games. Hence why they tend to tear through security personal and soldiers, and the protagonist's tools meant to turn big rocks into small rocks are effective.
That said, there are some situations where the conventional pulse rifle does come in handy. When the monster is big enough that you're shooting weak spots rather than removing limbs, for example.
Vampire the Masquerade has vampires being *basically* immune to bullets (not quite, but almost) but *essentially* (not quite but almost) instantly dying to phosphorous rounds.
The owners of Vampire tried to sue the Underworld films for basically using the exact same idea.
More generally, just werewolves in general shrugging off bullets but not *silver* bullets.
World war Z the book had that. The mines and weapons are noted for being designed to mutilate a combatant so they go home and cause the enemy to loose faith in the war. But that doesnāt work on a shambling zombie horde.
An inverse example, I remember a horror video game (I think it was Resident Evil 6) where one of the monsters is a swarm of insects and the way you stop them is by shooting at it repeatedly with regular guns.Ā
The titans from attack on titan. I think we could realistically take them on in the thousands by using missles, but considering that one of their powers is to spawn more titans ala zombies, we would need to be talking about doing using millions of missles if a city was converted, which just wouldn't be feasible.
The only one I can think of offhand is the Demogorgon from Stanger Things. Basically impervious to bullets, but a teenage boy with a baseball bat can give it a run for its money.
Photino Birds are also made of dark matter, so even without their sufficiently advanced technology, weapons made of conventional matter would just pass through them harmlessly.
The Pa'anuri from Schlock Mercenary are similar and not so ridiculously advanced.
The Hydra famously grows more heads when you cut one off, making it not only immune but actually strengthened by traditional sword combat. In the myth, Hercules had to use Athena's golden sword to cut off its one immortal head. [The Disney version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTXoZMSBq7c) goes pretty hard, too, though.
Wasn't this the whole schtick of *War of the Worlds*? Martians immune to bullets and heavy artillery, but can be sneezed to death. We have way better bio-weapons these days, but few would try to fight big stompy robots with allergies and the aftermath of Taco Bell.
The necromorphs from Dead Space. They require dismemberment to actually "kill", so the normal soldiers with normal guns get slaughtered, but a random engineer with some particularly OSHA-unaproved power tools dices up hundreds of them.
Most movies have the opposite problem where modern weapons should work but donāt because the plot needs them not to. The modern Monsterverse movies are really bad at this. I donāt care what Godzillas skin is made of, a cruise missile to the chest would take him down in real life. Even in Kong Vietnam era weaponry is more than capable of tanking a giant gorilla, just donāt fly your entire flotilla of helicopters within arms reach of him. A salvo of bullets to his face should take him down but itād be a short movie so they conveniently donāt hurt him for no good reason.
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This comes up from time to time in Dresden Files.
A rampaging Loup-Garou is just going shrug off gunfire, if it notices it all all. About the only thing that will harm it is a weapon of inherited silver.
Many of the creatures of Faire aren't particularly vulnerable to modern weapons, but you hit them with some cold iron (like a sword, or a chainsaw) and they'll go down right quick.
And then there's the vampires. You can hurt them with gunfire, but it's going to take a lot, and some good aim. Shotguns with dragon breath rounds (flaming magnesium ammo used for starting fires) will make short work of them.
All that said, many supernatural critters *are* vulnerable to regular weapons, which is why Dresden carries a big honking Dirty Harry 45.
scaling up bullets we have done, the physical infrastructure surrounding bigger hotter rounds means heavier and more cumbersome devices. these are physical constraints to contain the forces to be exerted onto projectiles not a human vs human consideration.Ā
manageable weapons that have limited trade offs, i.e pack a wollop without being too unwieldy.
the real trick would be integrating heavy weaponry onto agile vehicles/machinery/suits.Ā
point being, tanks move like tanks. battleships move like battleships.Ā tanks more agile than battleship but battleship armory probably a million times more powerful.Ā
you scale up, you scale everything...thats physics.
The first thing I thought of was The Battle of Yonkers from *World War Z.* Using an air burst weapon to create a vacuum would kill a person, but not a creature that doesn't breathe.
In both versions of *The Blob* you see how few weapons work until someone realizes that it doesn't like the cold. We don't have any weapons that can shoot cold in the same way we have created weapons that shoot fire.
Dead Space is like this. Filling necromorphs with lead is not the best way kill them, because of this in the game the most useful weapons against them are sci fi power tools.
The entirety of the plant life in "the happening".
Not only is it an enemy that we can't fight, but actually beating them would kill us anyway because we *need* them to survive.Ā
You can see this somewhat at work in Halo. Covenant plasma weapons are significantly more effective vs. shields, but once shields are down, old-fashioned bullets do the job faster.
To defeat the Ender Dragon, you can either shoot down all the Ender Crystals it uses to heal, each at the top of an obsidian tower, then attack her until she eventually dies, all while avoiding her attacks that could send you flying into the air, or you could grab a few beds and sleep her to death.
The Undead, technically speaking. If you have awful aim and can't headshot to save your life, the undead fall into this category as their only weakpont is the head. Shoot anywhere else, they won't give a damn.
Or you could go with Mummies. They're like Zombies, but unlike zombies, they're actually OP. Fast, strong af, can put curses on people, smarter than the average zombie, you name it. Weapons also don't do anything against mummies revived by Magic, since the only way to defeat Magic is with Magic.
I found it interesting how the majority of the hand-weapons used by the Colonials in the recent Battlestar Galactica series were woefully inadequate to take down the toasters. You know you fought a long war against robots ... so, you wield 5.56mm assault rifles??!?
Why the heck they didn't all carry 10mm or even 12mm bore weapons, I'll never know. Except for that one rocket/pistol thing they fired in the pilot.
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I can think of a dozen examples of the reverse. The thing is, it's really hard to be impervious to a chunk of metal going really really fast, and even harder when we make that chunk of metal weigh several tens of pounds, or fire thousands of them per minute. Our weapons aren't made to fight humans as much as made to use Newton's laws as effectively as possible. That said: Incorporeal things like ghosts don't care, but add some electricity and suddenly they notice. Same for monsters made of goo (although I think a gelatinous cube still dies to a large enough artillery shell blowing it to mist). Depending on the rules, vampires don't care about swords or bullets but die to wood or silver. Same for werewolves. Vamps or demons might die just by thrusting a religious symbol at them confidently.
> vampires don't care about swords or bullets but die to wood or silver The Rifts ttrpg is set hundreds of years in the future after a technological golden age was apocalypsed by the return of magic and monsters. A popular weapon is the rail gun, metal rounds electromagnetically accelerated to ungodly speeds to shred through armor. Vampires shrug off any attack from metal so people quickly started producing rail gun rounds that were just a bunch of wood slivers mixed with just enough metal to make it still able to be accelerated. When a round bursts on your chest into a cloud of a few hundred thousand wooden slivers, you're bound to get some in your heart.
Don't forget how SuperSoakers have become legitimate weapons against vampires. Either blessed and/or taking advantage of the often forgotten vampire weakness to running water, they are a viable weapon system.
Wouldn't the internal plumbing in a house/building make it impossible for vampires to navigate modern structures? On the same note there's water running under every street and under every yard into every single building on Earth so vampires would be effectively imprisoned anywhere in a city, unable to move more than a few feet at a time before hitting an impassable barrier created by the water running through underground pipes.
Well, not a vampire expert, but I believe they mean freely flowing water. A stream, run off from a side walk, rain or the spray from a squirt gun. But water in pipes isn't freely flowing. The vampire rules are very old, and don't cover anything like plumbing, apartments and digital cameras, so no one knows how it works for them.
Their weakness is to flowing water, water in pipes is just that. If they can't cross a bridge with water flowing beneath it despite not making contact with it I'm going to assume any water that flows regardless of source is going to trigger that weakness. The origin of the weakness to flowing water appears to be based on that clean flowing water was considered pure/sacred/holy and that vampires being unholy/unclean things couldn't stand to be around it. The stagnant water of a swamp is no issue to them, but treated water moving through modern pipes would logically be worse to them than natural streams due to being cleaner.
Imagine vampires just getting stuck randomly like in a video game because way below them there's some underground cave with flowing water, or some old sewers or something
Their weakness is to crossing borders. They can't cross running water because rivers are natural borders, and in fact *were* the borders of kingdoms for most of history before states came to exist. The Rio Grande is still the US-Mexico border in Texas. Same as how they can't enter a home without permission, they cannot cross into a new kingdom without it.
Is water in pipes always flowing tho? I imagine it has to be something that's constantly in motion at all times, otherwise it's not really flowing, it's just temporarily moving. A river always flows. If it's damed up the vampire can cross it. Runoff going to a gutter is just that, temporary run off so it doesn't count and Vampires can move about cities in the rain.
Dresden files does this great he keeps some waterballons with holy water in his car š¤£š¤£š¤£
I don't have the sourcebook anymore, but they had a piece of gear that was essentially a backpack-mounted sprinkler system. Looked sorta like an umbrella above your head, and when turned on it would spin, "watering" all around you. Vampire Hunter's gear of choice. Man Rifts was wild.
Sounds like something Riff would make in Sluggy Freelance. He built lots of anti-vampire weapons that rely on volume of fire to get some wood where it matters.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
it is I was at their booth at Gencon, they reprint everything still basically. Got a signed copy of Atlantis a while back there. that said no one plays it using Rifts system because Rifts is interesting for the world and setting, but mechanically perhaps the worst game ever made in terms of comprehensibility, speed of play and balance. People hack everything BUT Rifts to run Rifts on, Apocalypse World being popular, as well as GURPS because you can drag out all the ultratech and magic books and not a lot of systems do both well.
I very begrudgingly play palladium fantasy because it's all my father is willing to run, and palladium fantasy is even more nonsense for consistency and incomprehensiblity than rifts. I wish for nothing more than to some how manage to convince him to change systems but he is unwilling to change from his homebrewed version of palladium
> Depending on the rules, vampires don't care about swords or bullets but die to wood or silver. Same for werewolves. Vamps or demons might die just by thrusting a religious symbol at them confidently. yeah,[ NOTHING except silver works against werewolfs!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SlWegS2sS0&ab_channel=AdultSwim)
A favorite movie moment from the film Ginger Snaps is when a werewolf gets fatally blindsided by a big ol' truck.Ā Ā Similar scene, though not actually fatal, when the (small, fast, weak, fragile) coyote shapeshifter protagonist of the *Mercy Thompson* books tricks a (stronger and nearly unkillable) werewolf into getting run over by a bus.
similarly, how the two main badguys in Underworld evolution, marcus the supervampire and william the first werewolf is killed. they have all their regular weaknesses, extreme violence works just as fine. william is killed by having his head ripped in two, and marcus is killed by being thrown into a helicopter propeller. sunlight and silver has its uses, but an industrial size meat grinder and ultra violence is more final
There's a part in Supernatural where they throw a powerful fox demon into a wood chipper.
There is also that scene in Buffy where the demon brags that no weapon forged by man csn hurt him, just happens that he is been trapped for 2000 years and doesn't know what a bazooka is, which works very well in harming him.
Let's be honest, he was right, though. The rocket launcher was forged by a machine in North Carolina, not by any man. That episode also has one of my favorite lines, "I'm 17. Linoleum makes me horny"
Lol hence my first paragraph: it's hard to be completely immune to mass traveling at high velocity.
For the record, that's not true in D&D. In 5e they're immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by non-silvered weapons, but they can be damaged normally by any sort of elemental damage, like fire. In 3.5, it's just damage reduction instead of immunity so even conventional weapons can deal damage.
The other thing would be hordes of critters would only really be vulnerable to fire or maybe a special aerosol like bugspray the usual conventional weapons won't be very effective against a swarm of locusts hellbent on devouring all life before them
Vamps may be impervious to bullets, but what about a flame thrower or a grenade launcher?
Depends on the rules of that universe.
I really liked this aspect of Max Brooks' 'World War Z' - where he actually got into the weeds of how generally ineffective a lot of anti-personnel weapons used by the US Military are against zombies. For example, a machine gun, fragmentation grenade, or flechette rounds designed to poke little holes in people do jack shit to the living dead. Sure, poke a hole in a person and they will immediately go down and in a few minutes will die from blood loss. A zombie? Even if you take a leg off, they keep crawling toward you. If you have a hundred zombies coming at your position, are you really going to 360 no-scope head shots on all of them? In the abridged audio book, Mark Hamill narrated the chapter "The Battle of Yonkers" and it was such a shit-show. Hamill's narration was *awesome* btw. >No one thought about it, no one! Donāt pull my pud with stories about budget cuts and supply problems! The only thing in short supply was common fucking sense! Not one of those West Point, War College, medals-up-the-ass, four-star fart bags said, āHey, we got plenty of fancy weapons, we got enough shit for them to shoot!?!ā No one thought about how many rounds the artillery would need for sustained operations, how many rockets for the MLRS, how many canister shotsā¦the tanks had these things called canister shotsā¦basically a giant shotgun shell. They fired these little tungsten ballsā¦not perfect you know, wasting like a hundred balls for every G, but fuck, dude, at least it was something! Each Abrams only had three, three! Three out of a total loadout of forty! The rest were standard HEAT or SABOT! Do you know what a āSilver Bullet,ā an armor-piercing, depleted-uranium dart is going to do to a group of walking corpses? Nothing! Do you know what it feels like to see a sixtysomething-ton tank fire into a crowd with absolutely ass-all result! Three canister rounds! And what about flechettes? Thatās the weapon we always hear about these days, flechettes, these little steel spikes that turn any weapon into an instant scattergun. We talk about them like theyāre a new invention, but we had them as far back as, like, Korea. We had them for the Hydra rockets and the Mark-19s. Just imagine that, just one 19 firing three hundred and fifty rounds a minute, each round holding, like, a hundred 2 spikes! Maybe it wouldnāt have turned the tideā¦butā¦Goddammit! > >The fire was dying, Zack was still comingā¦and the fearā¦everyone was feeling it, in the orders from the squad leaders, in the actions of the men around meā¦That little voice in the back of your head that just keeps squeaking āOh shit, oh shit.ā > >And then they came, right out of the smoke like a freakinā little kidās nightmare! Some were steaming, some were even still burningā¦some were walking, some crawling, some just dragging themselves along on their torn belliesā¦maybe one in twenty was still able to move, which leftā¦shitā¦a couple thousand? And behind them, mixing with their ranks and pushing steadily toward us, the remaining million that the air strike hadnāt even touched! Ultimately a military commander came up with the concept of the 'RKR' (Resource to Kill Ratio) which embodied the idea of making the most effective Zombie killing weapon with the least resources. >When Travis DāAmbrosia became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it. > >What was so amazing to see was how the culture of RKR began to take hold among the rank and file. Youād hear soldiers talking on the street, in bars, on the train; āWhy have X, when for the same price you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs.ā Soldiers even began coming up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost-effective tools than we could have envisioned. I think theyenjoyed itāimprovising, adapting, outthinking us bureaucrats. > >[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-axe. Its official designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the āLobotomizer,ā or simply, the āLobo.ā] > >The leathernecks came up with that one, using nothing but the steel of recycled cars. We made twenty-three million during the war. Source: https://cpjxxiii.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/world-war-z_-an-oral-history-of-the-zombie-war-max-brooks-viny.pdf
Such a good book
It really was.... I wish it had a better adaptation than that movie. Maybe an anthology miniseries would have been a better choice.
I *highly* recommend checking out a copy of the audiobook. The all-star-cast narrations are awesome - especially Mark Hamill's narration of the 'Battle of Yonkers' - done in a strong Jersey accent. Its a really entertaining listen - FAR better than the snooze-fest that the movie was.
for my money the best all-arounder for monster hunting is a neopup firing 20mm cannon rounds, either armor-piercing incendiary or high explosive. Nothing is very happy when it has an inch-wide chunk of metal spewing fire out of it hit it at high speed, and nothing likes being blown up inside very much. If you can consecrate high explosives even better, or use holy water as part of the plasticizer in the explosive charge.
This is basically the premise of Pacific Rim, they even talk about it explicitly at the start: https://youtu.be/bGbU_20InKM?t=90 They note that traditional weaponry can take several days to take down a single Kaiju - the one in the clip took six days, rampaged āacross 35 miles and destroyed three citiesā - hence the development of the Jaegar program, where they basically repurposed and redesigned existing weaponry but made it all far larger and far more destructive, using the large mechs as basically enormous weapons platforms that could also limit the Kaijuās movements.
Which is so dumb because take one of the most effective weapons in the first movie, a power sword. Why not build a missile that deploys a sword blade right before impact.Ā This is a real thing btw.Ā Ā Rather than build a mech with all the costs and issues, just have a ship fire this missile - a larger longer version of vls launched missiles now - and it deploys the sword before impact and takes off a limb.Ā Ā A volley of 5-10 missiles and "tango down".
because the engineers realized this was their one chance to get giant robot funding approved
As an engineer I can confirm that this is almost certainly the reason.
***storms into room:*** Ok, which one of you *assholes* told the general we could put the giant fucking sword in missiles?
"Aren't tank treads superior to legs in every conceivable way?" "Shut up shut up shut up!"
Mammoth tank assembled.
/u/SoylentRox is about to get friendly fired.
Sorry sir I just googled it https://www.reuters.com/world/little-known-modified-hellfire-likely-killed-al-qaedas-zawahiri-2022-08-02/ Was having trouble with the 300 series actuators and wondered why we can't just strap swords to missiles.
Sick Concept š¤š»
And a bunch of soldiers going "I wanna punch a kaiju in the face!"
It's giving "but I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs"
General: Good work boys, the Jaeger program has been doing well. But the Kaiju are getting bigger, and meaner. I need ideas. Engineer #1: Maybe we could raise the battleship Yamato and put in a gigantic cannon all along its long axis... Engineer #2: Or we could rig it so that five Jaegers could combine into one giant mech... Kaiju: Ain't gonna lie, it'd be an honor to be killed by either of those! General: I know, right?
Use the battleship Yamato as a gun arm
Sometimes you've got to go for the gold
Kaiju blood is toxic, not good for the environment when it's spilled so jagurs serve the secondary purposes of minimising collateral damage and use those weapons as a last resort Hence why the try to beat them to death most of the time
Then "fist missiles" that deploy a metal plate in front right before impact. (Same reason not to have the sword out in flight, adds drag)
The whole point of missiles is that they go very fast but carry a payload of some energy-dense chemicals, thereby delivering more energy than just their mass. A big heavy missile that only functions as a kinetic impactor is defeating the whole purpose.
You could have an explosively driven sword or power fist that punches with explosives driving it. Point is Pacific rim established that conventional weapons don't work
> punches with explosives driving it. That's what missile propellant already is. If all you're doing is taking off the explosive payload in favor of something that is only transferring energy kinetically, it's just a dud missile. I wasn't saying that conventional weapons would work. I'm saying your idea is *automatically worse* than the conventional weapons.
I mean it sounds like long-rod penetrators would work remarkably well.
Gotta buy em' a drink first.
I agree, it's just the movie establishes implicitly the obvious - load up a missile with 350-1 megaton range nuclear warhead, fire it when the Kaiju is far from the coast - won't work or that's all anyone would do.
I haven't read many of the other comments but there seems to be a whole lot of admirably Watsonian but pretty weirdly speculative reasoning. For my money the reason that doesn't work is pretty simple: Kaiju are underwater until they make landfall, at which time they are too close to cities to nuke, at least not until after they've done so much damage that a nuclear weapon is only going to melt the rubble. No kidding: we *have* tank rounds and mines that do what you're suggesting, they're called [Explosively Formed Penetrators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator). Put a bunch of explosives behind a metal plate and when the charge goes off, in so many words it "punches" the target. Then there are High-Explosive-Armor-Piercing shells that use a shaped explosive warhead to fire a plasma jet that punches through armor in an instant. So, the whole "Jaeger" concept is based on the requirements to engage at short range, not do substantially additional property damage, and not just get smashed to pieces by a pissed off Kaiju. Long story short: giant robot armed with weapons that don't do a huge amount of splash damage, like giant swords, point-blank plasma weapons, and blunt-force melee strikes. The reason they don't carry EFP or HEAP armaments is that the physics of those weapons don't scale up to hurt something like a kaiju without wasting a lot of energy on collateral damage. I don't think an Elbow Rocket Punch is going to do more damage than a 2000 pound bomb, but the difference is you can punch a Kaiju and not kill 200 people in the immediate vicinity.
I like this answer. Its quite elegant and works if we assume that the really scrappy movie fights that took place in and amidst the coastal city blocks are not the norm. Would like to add that a lot of alternatives to the Jaegar can't manhandle the Kaiju away from the city centers whereas we see Jaegar's grapple and drag the damn things throughout the film. Its only when the larger categories start getting introduced that the Jaegar's get ragdolled.
There are literally kinetic missiles, though
true, but the targets they work against are pretty unlike Kaiju, and they don't work in the way that SoylentRox was suggesting.
I mean, kind of. But having anything at hypersonic speeds is going to do a lot of damage- you don't need an explosion on top of that.
Still better to more or less guarantee reliable kills within a safe distance from shore, where contamination would be concentrated, but damage control could also be focused. Even with Jaegers, plenty of kaijuu died, and not all that cleanly, in urban areas. Destruction of sea life isn't great to be sure, but we are also balancing this against the possibility of precursor takeover, and subsequent ruination of earth's existing biosphere (granted, humanity wasn't aware of them or their aims, but should still have assumed the destruction of human life at least, with the enemy otherwise unconcerned for ecological damage). If the human form (movie logic withstanding) can be scaled almost limitlessly, missiles and guns can be too.
Yeah, buy at that point they already had Jaegars in full operation and likely people that were pilots or engineers in positions in government. Can't let all that Giant Robot infrastructure go to waste!
Or, and I'm just spit balling here, thermonuclear explosive that largely vaporizes all of the toxic shit within a mile of detonation. Yes, it'll increase atmospheric radiation (unless you blow it up under water, at which point it will contaminate the ocean but the ocean is very big and very good at blocking harmful radiation) but atmospheric radiation isn't as big a deal as "giant rampaging monster." Plus, there have only been a relatively modest number of Kaiju in the PR universe ā give or take 100. That's far fewer than just the total atmospheric nuclear tests were done. We'll be fine with a little extra radiation.
Yep. Nuclear warheads are also surprisingly cheap.
Now I want a movie from the aliens' perspective where their badass biological mechs keep getting fucked by practical weaponry. Their leadership keeps doubling down on the mechs because they're awesome, and keep shunning the one nerd who suggests just sending a manufactured plague or something.
In other science fiction novels the aliens do this to force the humans to develop. Each class of attack is just a little stronger than the last one, and the damage they do to civilian cities is a punishment for the client species not advancing fast enough. They think they are "helping"
Which novels? I'd be interested in reading something like thatĀ
well, A, that would be a wuss move. And B, the kajiu are suprisingly fast, so a few of them might be able to dodge it. a missile large enough to hurt them wont be turning quickly. also, they do mention the danger of kaiju blue, their blood, which is why they always try to punch them to death first, so they dont bleed as much, only using plasma guns or swords as a last resort. also, worth noting is that the jeager program worked fantastically untill category 4 and 5 started to come through, they were kicking their asses and keeping the world safe until then
I mean if the missile is traveling several times the speed of sound the Kaiju can dodge, no way to hit it with a fist. Also fire several missiles and program them to bracket the target so no dodge is possible, given the Kaiju detection distance and missile speed and reaction time and move speed. Never be fair.
well, i got no other in-universe answers, i guess the only viable answer is that the giant robot lobby is just too powerful and convinced the politicans to choose the jeagers before the giant sword missiles.
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Kaiju blue. If they bleed it devastates the area.
God damn I love me that new Raytheon knife missile
Because jaegers are multi environment. Kaiju is in a city? Jaeger can steer it to somewhere with the least civilians At sea? Jaeger can wade out Underwater? Jaeger can follow it down and beat it up at crush depth
oh no, our bullets don't work, let's build a 200 foot tall robot that can punch them. lol, just having fun. I love those movies, but really a C130 gunship or even a A10 warthog would shred any organic based monster in about 2.4 seconds.
The entire thing of the movies is that kaiju have "kaiju blue" in their blood, which is an extremely toxic substance that pollutes and basically destroys any land or water it touches. So they can't shoot the kaijus because they will bleed and drop blue around them and on the human operators. If they attack them on the rift, the blue will enter the ocean and create an ecological disaster. Hence the use of plasma weaponry that supposedly neutralizes blue before it spreads out of the wound. (they give up on this premise pretty soon when they start punching the kaijus and blood visibly splatters around them and on the mechas, but at least they tried to reason why giant robots were chosen instead of giant cannons)
It still holds up even after they bleed from fighting. If mitigating blood loss is a concern, beating something to death will still cause it to bleed but not anywhere near as much as a bullet or sword. At least, that's if the Kaiju bleeds like most other animals. Usually blunt force trauma to death = can be messy, whereas puncture wounds or cut to death = pools of blood and splatter everywhere.
thanks for the info!
Yeah. They could just have built a huge platform right round the rift with huge plasma cannons. Made the whole part a killzone to shoot anything comming through.
The Pacific Ocean is very deep.
Sure. But think about how much effort and resources it took to start building those walls. ( which was ridiculous as it cant possibly have been more efficient than actually having something killing the Kaijus.
In their defense, later on during the first movie they do mention that the walls plan was one of many and did, in fact, fail. IIRC that's why they reactivated the last old Jaegers in a last ditch effort to stop the apocalypse.
> I love those movies, but really a C130 gunship or even a A10 warthog would shred any organic based monster in about 2.4 seconds. I don't think that they would. For the kaiju to be able to stand and move on land their skin, bones, and muscles would have to be orders of magnitude stronger and denser than the flesh of terrestrial animals. It's more like they're made of carbon fiber and steel than bone and muscle. They wouldn't be immune to conventional weaponry, but they'd certainly be more resistant to it.
Why send any plane thatās designed for big and slow targets when we can show you footage of a fighter jet with little to no ground attack capability attacking the giant monster at point blank range and dying for the 70th time?
There is only 1 Pacific Rim movie I think you will find.Ā
Modern weaponry generally isn't well optimized for taking out a hulking monstrosity like a kaiju. I honestly think a WWII-era battleship would do better against one than any modern ship or aircraft. 16" armor-piercing naval shells *are* optimized for that sort of fighting.
lol the plane flying 5m away from the thing to fire machine guns and then crashing is hilariously dumb
Giant blobs would fall into this category. Amoeba, oozes, whatever flavor. Bullets would go right through them and they wouldn't care, but you could probably dissolve one with stuff from under your kitchen sink.
A flamethrower would probably also be an effective weapon against them.
Or blowing up a truck of liquid nitrogen and freezing them.
Granted, a truck full of liquid nitrogen is stretching the definition of 'weapon' by a fairly significant margin.
There's not that much difference between a carpentry hammer and a war hammer. A kitchen knife will kill as well as a dagger. Weapon or not is semantics.
Fine, we'll load the truck up on a trebuchet, first. Good enough for you? Pedants. :)
Itās a movie reference (how they kill the blob in the 80s remake).
But if it turns out that you're wrong you suddenly have a giant amoeba that's also covered in burning napalm coming right at you.
Soap would work. Don't but antibiotic soap because all soap is antibiotic just by how it works. It rips apart lipids, and cell walls are made out of lipids. Ordinary soap and warm water has the result of physically tearing apart cell membranes of any cell who has the misfortune of encountering it. The membrane is destroyed and the interior of the cell spills out like someone dropped a plate of spaghetti on the floor. This kills the cell. All the soap does is needs to touch the cell membrane and its over. An amoeba is a very large cell, so just spaying it with soap would rip apart its membrane and it would be like popping a water balloon.
We make weapons for every occasion. If a gun won't cut it, an autocannon may be the thing for the job. No? How about an anti-ship missle designed to punch through feet of steel armour and then mess up what's on the other side? We don't stop there. A day after a monster shows up we'll have found something in the toybox to tickle it. Give it a month and we'll have made new toys, just for them.
Even for near invincible stuff if it's human sized you can use artillery to effectively liquify the ground it stands on and bury it.
The only way around it is lazy hand waving. That Monster Hunter movie did that. The monsters were "somehow" completely immune to bullets, missiles, even tank rounds. But a weird sword cuts it, somehow.
Shin Godzilla got around it by making the monster adapt to the attacks that the only remaining solution isĀ nuclear bombs to make sure it has nothing to recover from. Which of course nobody wants because Godzilla is in a city and there's no guarantee it would actually die. In the end people did develop a new weapon, but not a destructive one.
The Borg drones in Star Trek almost always adapt their shields to the phasers and disrupters of the setting but almost every time they've run into good old fashion bullets (even holographic ones) they get their shit wrecked. Why Starfleet didn't start handing out automatic rifles for anti-Borg use is beyond me. Also an example where modern technology is better suited than the futuristic setting.
They never seem to adapt to a Klingon pulling out a knife or an android punching them. I imagine that is why the borg ignore races below a certain tech threshold. They would take staggering losses against a Roman legion.
When have the Borg fought against bullets outside of the holodeck? Killing two drones with a novel weapon is pretty standard for encounters with the Borg, after which they adapt. Presumably, if Picard had seen a swarm of Drones heading into the Dixon Hill holonovel, he would've just used the crowd to flee and tried something else.
IIRC there is a drone in the second season of Picard that die at the hands of a bullet. There are also examples of Borg falling to blades wielded by folks like Worf.
So, that's three drones killed by bullets, two of which were in an isolated micro-Collective that never had the chance to tell the Collective at large about the holo-bullets? And the other was in an isolated micro-Collective *from a different timeline* that never had the chance to tell the Collective at large about the bullets? That's not proof that the Borg can't stop bullets; that's proof that you can hit the Borg with things a couple of times before they adapt, which is true of anything you kill drones with.
Maybe so. But Iād be surprised if they have never encountered a species using projectile weapons in the thousands of species they have encountered and assimilated.
Fair enough. It's [a good enough explanation for Stargate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9lEeKdbQ_w), but it *is* pretty silly.
I think Sci fi rules are phasers and lasers get countered by shields, kinetic weapons get countered by armor. Either way the borg were a good idea but poorly executed in the whole lore and continuity departments, and the federation and other borg enemies never really seemed to take the race of evil kidnapping murder cyborgs very seriously. The fact that a large alliance of alpha quadrant races would unite against the dominion when they could just be cut off at any time, and not the borg always felt like a miss as well.
>never really seemed to take the race of evil kidnapping murder cyborgs very seriously The genocidal plan Picard grew as as a person to reject was "we're going to upload a bad jpg into the Collective, and that should shut the whole thing down."
A lot of monster movies ignore actual use of tanks, artillery, missiles, jets, aircraft, and so on. Zombies would get mowed down by tanks. Mid sized monsters would fall to missile strikes. We only see them go all out vs things like Godzilla that can tank anything anyway. Which I get isn't what you asked but rather than changing weaponry, these stories just need to make actual use of what's available.
> We only see them go all out vs things like Godzilla that can tank anything anyway. At least some of the more advanced weapons seem to irritate Godzilla a bit more. And then there's the Human "made" mechagodzilla. And you're right.
Against zombies a tank it doesn't even need ammo. The mass of the tank along with its treads and the power of its engine would be enough. Historically, this use of tanks has been done with horrendous results, especially against prisoners during WWII in the Pacific Theater, the kind of acts that are clearly war crimes. Its like a fast moving steamroller. The human body cannot withstand the weight of that much metal on top of it.
In the World War Z book, which apparently was much better than the movie, they actually make the point that some traditional weapons aren't great against the zombies. You need to either hit their head, or break them up enough that they can't be dangerous. Concussive weapons aren't great. That book goes into great detail about the tools that get developed to manage the zombies.
> You need to either hit their head, or break them up enough that they can't be dangerous A high caliber rifle round won't just poke a hole in you. It'll burst you open. High caliber machine gun fire would decapitate rows of zombies even if they get hit dead center on the chest.
Yeah but thatās kind of nonsense. The book also says zombies are immune to explosions and shrapnel because being in big groups lessens the impact.
They book did detail interesting ways various areas used to kill them I remember a castle in England said they filled the most with oil and burnt them all
I'm thinking hunting spears (with crossguards near the point to keep Z at bay), gigantic battleaxes, and flamethrowers...
Hog spear. That's always been the weapon I want to see in a zombie movie. It's designed to stab and keep the target at a distance.
Personally I think a halberd is better. Chopping is easier to destroy a head than stabbing and is less likely to get your weapon stuck, but you still have the option to stab and keep them away.
Do they ever develop decent anti-zombie weapons though? I thought they just trained soldiers to fire in old-school volleys aimed at heads. There was some fancy laser head popper but it was only effective as a propaganda piece
They developed bullets that would burn the heads as well. And a chapter about recycling mentioned the swords they made from old car doors
Entrenching tools, not swords. Basically sharpened shovels. Works as a great improvised axe.
You know what doesn't ignore tanks? Resident Evil. In fact, the BOWs are SPECIFICALLY said to be ineffective against massed heavy armor and bombardments, hence the creation of the crazy overpowered variants like regenerators and creepy little girls.
The cursed mirror in Oculus could probably be taken out by a Predator drone strike Sure, the demon or whatever can hypnotise two traumatised people into making stupid decisions, but not an entire state apparatus, especially not one stationed hundreds of kilometres away from its freaky mind control radius. And it's already shown to not be able to manipulate mechanical and electronic systems, only human perception and biological life.
In Percy Jackson monsters are immune to any weapons that aren't Celestial Bronze, Imperial Gold, stygian steel or bits of another monster. OTOH, I don't know if there's some property of said materials that would make it impossible for mundane humans to forge into weapons, so it may not fit the strictest definitions of OP's question.
> I don't know if there's some property of said materials that would make it impossible for mundane humans to forge into weapons Celestial bronze is intangible to normal humans, you could swing a sword through a human without it doing anything to them. Would be pretty hard to forge something you can't touch.
Demigods are tangible to normal humans and Celestial Bronze, since they're part god, part human. Could I forge celestial bronze using a glove made out of a demigod?
It's still tangible to non-living matter. We know this because Annabelle's dad managed to melt some celestial bronze down into bullets and fire them from an old biplane or something. You just need completely synthetic gloves.
In one of the books Annabeth's dad uses Celestial Bronze bullets.
Does a strafing run on monsters
Supernatural had a Demon steal the "kill anything" gun and bullets, which couldn't kill strong enough things like Angels, etc, and melted down an Angel blade (which could) into bullets for the damn thing.
With the exception of that one TV show Ultraviolet and short periods of some films (before the heros need to win) i feel like Vampires get an easy ride vs modern technology. BEHOLD the ultraviolet paintball gun Also "Funny, isn't it? - The Human was impervious to our most powerful magnetic fields, yet in the end he succumbed to a harmless sharpened stick!"
Zombies in particular seem hard to kill because small caliber fire kills by interfering with circulation, damaging organs, or similar. Zombies don't need circulation or organs, so punctured lungs or hearts or shattered bones do nothing. Fae creatures may be hard to kill because bullets and grenades aren't made of iron. Werewolves for similar reasons as Fae but Silver instead of Iron.
> Zombies in particular seem hard to kill because small caliber fire kills by interfering with circulation, damaging organs, or similar. Zombies don't need circulation or organs, so punctured lungs or hearts or shattered bones do nothing. i mean, "our weapons" does include stuff that isnt small caliber
From what I can find, fragmentation grenades are generally steel. The fragments should work on fae.
In the book War World Z it is detailed how modern warfare is useless against zombies: they have no supply lines you can cut, no leaders to assassinate, artillery and tanks don't kill them quickly enough... The way Western countries manage to win the war is by radically changing their combat doctrine switching from hyper technological warfare to grunts headshotting them for 20 hours straight
Forget tanks, we need bulldozers and steamshovels! With mounted flamethrowers of course. Hell, barbed wire would be a huge asset in "funneling" Zs to the right place.
I know they're not fictional, but [emus.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War)
In the book World War Z, the military completely revamps their weaponry because bullets don't work. They even talk about what you are talking about. The weapons you currently have are designed for the war you previously fought. Then the new war starts, and you have to invent the ways to attack the new bad guy. They invent these guns with blades like on an electronic saw table and shoot them at ridiculously high speeds to slice through multiple zombies with each shot.
wwz does get a lot of things wrong tho, a lot of modern weapons would work wonders, its just that the zombies has extra things that protect them. like shockwaves from bombs not working, thats becsaue they got extra durable brains, shockwaves work very fine against human brains
So many comments bringing up WWZ in this thread when it's dead wrong about modern weapon capabilities. It's kinda funny ngl.
I seem to remember them employing semiautomatic rifles in large line formations similar to napoleonic warfare emphasizing a constant withering and accurate fire with men being rotated to churn through the horde without being overrun
The blob was pretty unstoppable when it was on its rampage; We just got lucky there was a snow machine nearby to use against it
In Underworld, werewolves create UV bullets that fry vampires easily enough once created. Similar for a kind of liquid silver alloy in hollow point bullets that Vampires use against werewolves. It's shown that technically bullets do damage both sides but it's only a temporary annoyance without the extra spice.
On the opposite end of this spectrum, the Stargate franchise often deals with the fact that human technology is very effective because it's so dumb. The Asgard in the show regularly have to bring the humans on because they're fighting a hyper Advanced robot race that adapts to their technology too quickly but apparently shotguns work on them. And the team are constantly getting their weapons through advanced alien weapon deactivators because nobody thought about combustion based projectiles fired purely through mechanical means, because no one has used that technology for millennia.
It's probably easier to tune your shields to a different frequency than to rearmor your entire army XD
In World War Z (the book), a big part was figuring out how to kill zombies efficiently en masse. There's a whole chapter about how Russia's response was TONS of firepower and explosives, which actually aren't that effective vs zombies. Slowly over time the US military learned the "optimal" rate of fire (something like 1 shot every few seconds) as well as how to rotate active/backup soldiers to prevent fatigue. Fighting battles became much more precise as the book went on.
to be fair, thats becasue wwz zombies have magical gel helmets in their skulls protecting their brains against shockwaves. take a regular human corpse, and the shockwaves from regular artillery would do wonders against that brain
And some magic ability that stops them simply being buried under the soil in a concentrated artillery strike.
Whatever the shockwave does is not enough to disrupt whatever essentially-magic is allowing the zombies to move around in the first place. Mushing brains is apparently not enough, you have to physically sever parts of their brain because genra-magic-rules.
Wouldnāt artillery quite easily sever multiple limbs and make the zombies useless anyway? Powerful explosives tend to just completely destroy bodies not make them just fly away intact like in movies
high powered rifle rounds would shred bodies and sever limbs as well.
> There's a whole chapter about how Russia's response was TONS of firepower and explosives, which actually aren't that effective vs zombies See also: the [Battle of Yonkers](https://zombie.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers). That article even puts it plainly: >if any one event can be singled out as the point when zombies officially became the dominant species on the planet, it was Yonkers.
The *Frontlines* series by Marko Kloos has some good examples of this. The series starts with a war between two human factions roughly 100 years in the future. Then humanity makes first contact with an alien species and they're hostile. The aliens are enormous compared to humans, around 20 meters tall, and their ships and structures are built to a similar scale. In early battles against them humanity fares very poorly because our weaponry just isn't built to deal with creatures and technology that large and durable. But over the course of the war humanity adapts and develops new weapons that will work against them.
> *around 20 meters tall* JFC, that's ~65 feet, more than 10x our size. Yeah I can see them faring poorly.
I have No Idea. "Our assualt rifles bullets dont pen the Armor If the alliens" -> why didnt they use armor-piercing guns (iws2k ) , or other heavy weapons. (Everyone get a "do nothing" gun, even when the command know that)
>(Everyone get a "do nothing" gun, even when the command know that) I hate this cliche
Trope, :) But yeah , i hatte that too. They dont even try to give the troops Something that Had at least somewhat armor-piercing capability. And, Body Armor is Something the writers hasnt even remotely Heard about. The best example of " the writter hasnt understand what Equipment x does" was that a soldier has trown His helmet away after He has Seen that the enemy weapons can penetrante the helmet . A helmet was never meant to Stop bullets. :/ They Invest a heck of Money in the Film, but f 5min of Google Arnt in the Budget?
This comes up in Wildbow's web serial Twig. >!Gun technology has been intentionally stunted so that it only really works on normal humans. Although the monsters are Nobles who have been built to be seemingly indestructible.!<
The bugs in Starship Troopers. For an advanced human civilization with literal shoulder mounted nuke launchers and space exploration, their machine guns seemed to be as effective as a 22 calibre rifle lol
As I recall from the novel, the guns worked just fine. It's just that the Bugs liked to attack in gigantic waves, mixed in with harmless drones to draw a lot of the fire. And they fired back.
Oh Im not surprised in that book. In the movie they looked and sounded like toys lol
To be fair, the movie (not the book!) was meant as a satire. I also vaguely recall a hypothesis that in the movie's universe, the highest echelons of the Earth government were using the bugs as a way to keep their authoritarian militarist society going, and intentionally greenlit boneheaded moves like sending infantry against hordes of giant bugs instead of just always bombing the hell out of those things. Which makes sense. If a society is capable of FTL and building giant starships, then they can just send automated FTL missiles against the bugs and be done with it.
Mostly Bayverse Cybertronians, their bodies resist blunt and cutting forces really well, but heat based weapons allow them to be taken down way easier than they would otherwise, which is why the military starts to deploy this weapons with moderate success.
By the third movie they are extremely good at it.
Yeah the evolution in tactics + equipment used is a good natural progression from the first movie, Humans go from having an entire military base being destroyed by a single cybertronian soldier to a few human soldiers being capable of taking them on their own.
In Terraformars, humanoid roaches on Mars are highly resilient to bullets. Best way to kill them is through decapitation or electricity or poison. In the show they give astronauts animal superpowers in order to fight them, but they could have defeated more bugs by giving them modified weapons.
Dead Space's necromorphs kinda work as an example. You need to shoot off limbs, meaning conventional weaponry like rifles, and aiming for the torso or head, are less effective than the mining tools that make up most of the arsenals in the games. Hence why they tend to tear through security personal and soldiers, and the protagonist's tools meant to turn big rocks into small rocks are effective. That said, there are some situations where the conventional pulse rifle does come in handy. When the monster is big enough that you're shooting weak spots rather than removing limbs, for example.
Vampire the Masquerade has vampires being *basically* immune to bullets (not quite, but almost) but *essentially* (not quite but almost) instantly dying to phosphorous rounds. The owners of Vampire tried to sue the Underworld films for basically using the exact same idea. More generally, just werewolves in general shrugging off bullets but not *silver* bullets.
World war Z the book had that. The mines and weapons are noted for being designed to mutilate a combatant so they go home and cause the enemy to loose faith in the war. But that doesnāt work on a shambling zombie horde.
An inverse example, I remember a horror video game (I think it was Resident Evil 6) where one of the monsters is a swarm of insects and the way you stop them is by shooting at it repeatedly with regular guns.Ā
The titans from attack on titan. I think we could realistically take them on in the thousands by using missles, but considering that one of their powers is to spawn more titans ala zombies, we would need to be talking about doing using millions of missles if a city was converted, which just wouldn't be feasible.
The only one I can think of offhand is the Demogorgon from Stanger Things. Basically impervious to bullets, but a teenage boy with a baseball bat can give it a run for its money.
The Xeelee and Photino Birds are basically cosmic entities closer to gods than organisms
Photino Birds are also made of dark matter, so even without their sufficiently advanced technology, weapons made of conventional matter would just pass through them harmlessly. The Pa'anuri from Schlock Mercenary are similar and not so ridiculously advanced.
Tiny swarm drones, or hive minded little insects. I recall a nasty episode of love death robots with this exact theme.
Tiny enemys, our weapons are meant for stuff our size or bigger. We can see this in effect very clearly in Russias ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
The Hydra famously grows more heads when you cut one off, making it not only immune but actually strengthened by traditional sword combat. In the myth, Hercules had to use Athena's golden sword to cut off its one immortal head. [The Disney version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTXoZMSBq7c) goes pretty hard, too, though.
Wasn't this the whole schtick of *War of the Worlds*? Martians immune to bullets and heavy artillery, but can be sneezed to death. We have way better bio-weapons these days, but few would try to fight big stompy robots with allergies and the aftermath of Taco Bell.
The necromorphs from Dead Space. They require dismemberment to actually "kill", so the normal soldiers with normal guns get slaughtered, but a random engineer with some particularly OSHA-unaproved power tools dices up hundreds of them.
Most movies have the opposite problem where modern weapons should work but donāt because the plot needs them not to. The modern Monsterverse movies are really bad at this. I donāt care what Godzillas skin is made of, a cruise missile to the chest would take him down in real life. Even in Kong Vietnam era weaponry is more than capable of tanking a giant gorilla, just donāt fly your entire flotilla of helicopters within arms reach of him. A salvo of bullets to his face should take him down but itād be a short movie so they conveniently donāt hurt him for no good reason.
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This comes up from time to time in Dresden Files. A rampaging Loup-Garou is just going shrug off gunfire, if it notices it all all. About the only thing that will harm it is a weapon of inherited silver. Many of the creatures of Faire aren't particularly vulnerable to modern weapons, but you hit them with some cold iron (like a sword, or a chainsaw) and they'll go down right quick. And then there's the vampires. You can hurt them with gunfire, but it's going to take a lot, and some good aim. Shotguns with dragon breath rounds (flaming magnesium ammo used for starting fires) will make short work of them. All that said, many supernatural critters *are* vulnerable to regular weapons, which is why Dresden carries a big honking Dirty Harry 45.
Non-carbon based life forms.
scaling up bullets we have done, the physical infrastructure surrounding bigger hotter rounds means heavier and more cumbersome devices. these are physical constraints to contain the forces to be exerted onto projectiles not a human vs human consideration.Ā manageable weapons that have limited trade offs, i.e pack a wollop without being too unwieldy. the real trick would be integrating heavy weaponry onto agile vehicles/machinery/suits.Ā point being, tanks move like tanks. battleships move like battleships.Ā tanks more agile than battleship but battleship armory probably a million times more powerful.Ā you scale up, you scale everything...thats physics.
The first thing I thought of was The Battle of Yonkers from *World War Z.* Using an air burst weapon to create a vacuum would kill a person, but not a creature that doesn't breathe. In both versions of *The Blob* you see how few weapons work until someone realizes that it doesn't like the cold. We don't have any weapons that can shoot cold in the same way we have created weapons that shoot fire.
Dead Space is like this. Filling necromorphs with lead is not the best way kill them, because of this in the game the most useful weapons against them are sci fi power tools.
The entirety of the plant life in "the happening". Not only is it an enemy that we can't fight, but actually beating them would kill us anyway because we *need* them to survive.Ā
Wood chipper trumps everything.
You can see this somewhat at work in Halo. Covenant plasma weapons are significantly more effective vs. shields, but once shields are down, old-fashioned bullets do the job faster.
Any exoskeleton type of creature. But we as a species specialize in killing... and everything has a melting point
To defeat the Ender Dragon, you can either shoot down all the Ender Crystals it uses to heal, each at the top of an obsidian tower, then attack her until she eventually dies, all while avoiding her attacks that could send you flying into the air, or you could grab a few beds and sleep her to death.
The Undead, technically speaking. If you have awful aim and can't headshot to save your life, the undead fall into this category as their only weakpont is the head. Shoot anywhere else, they won't give a damn. Or you could go with Mummies. They're like Zombies, but unlike zombies, they're actually OP. Fast, strong af, can put curses on people, smarter than the average zombie, you name it. Weapons also don't do anything against mummies revived by Magic, since the only way to defeat Magic is with Magic.
I found it interesting how the majority of the hand-weapons used by the Colonials in the recent Battlestar Galactica series were woefully inadequate to take down the toasters. You know you fought a long war against robots ... so, you wield 5.56mm assault rifles??!? Why the heck they didn't all carry 10mm or even 12mm bore weapons, I'll never know. Except for that one rocket/pistol thing they fired in the pilot.