the zombies in the zoo.
Tactics and planning. That's always the key.
Monday,
March 19, 2012
Stone
Dust
Posted
by Josh
Guess I
may have mentioned this once or twice (or a dozen times) but it's
worth repeating: Becky is a fucking genius. She's come up with a
means to produce truly stupid amounts of Thermite, which is going to
be really useful against the New Breed. I'm
not huge on chemistry, but as Becky and I were talking yesterday I
realized how easy it is to miss really important things. She has
managed to create explosives and other difficult to manufacture
substances where the rest of us scratch our heads like the
comparative cavemen we are. I was talking with her about our plans to
hunt down and assault the New Breed before they could gather enough
numbers to become a serious threat to New Haven. I was frustrated
because we have all these stocks of supplies and materials sitting
around, but a lot of it isn't that useful.
I mentioned the
huge storehouse we've loaded with various sundries--the old hotel
where we liberated some captives not long after The Fall--and started
naming off the random items that had no particular use. Keep in mind
that we've been making Thermite in small amounts for a while, but the
stuff requires metal dust and that's not easy to make in large
amounts. The process is time and labor intensive.
I told her
about the huge case of hematite rings we left in the hotel after
clearing out the marauders. What use could we have for those things,
you know? I'd taken a couple of them just because I liked the shiny
black rings, and they brought back pleasant memories of the various
ones I'd bought from flea markets and renaissance fairs over the
years.
That was when she stopped me. The look on her face was
priceless. You'd have thought I'd told her casually about a store of
hidden treasure.
She explained to me that Hematite is the
stuff that goes into a particular blend of thermite intended to cut
through steel. We've had some of it before, even. We just didn't know
exactly what was in it. Turns out we've been sitting on enough raw
materials to make a few hundred pounds of the stuff. Of course, the
rings aren't enough on their own. We need powdered aluminum in large
quantities. If only we knew a manufacturing center that had such a
supply...
So, yeah. North Jackson is sending their next trade
caravan to us early. We're doing a bit of separate trading with them,
direct instead of utilizing the network we've set up, exactly for
situations like this.
Becky, Will, Dodger, Patrick, Jess, and
I are all working today on how to weaponize this stuff. It's going to
need some fine tuning and testing. It's not a complex problem to work
out. All we really need to manage is a way to deliver the dust to the
bodies of the New Breed, and to ignite it without having to be too
close. Granted, it's really dangerous stuff and tricky to set on
fire, but we've faced this problem before.
Now that we have a
viable way to use heat against the New Breed (and I feel like an
idiot for not giving Becky a list of all our supplies earlier. All
those hours people have spent filing metals down...) there's a strong
feeling of hope around New Haven. In a worst case scenario, the swarm
in Shelby county has hidden themselves away and we can't find them.
So they attack here.
That's bad, but we're going to have a
large supply of an incredibly effective weapon on hand very shortly.
If the New Breed hits us here, we'll be better off a few days from
now than we are right now. I'm curious to see what the effects of
direct and indirect heat will be on the New Breed physiology. I don't
know how much of a weakness the heat will turn out to be. So far we
know it weakens their skin and underlying armored layers, but that
just means it's easier to fight them. To cut them.
Becky has
prepared a small amount of the new mixture for me to use on two of
our test subjects. One is going to get the direct heat treatment, the
other indirect. It should be
Tactics and planning. That's always the key.
Monday,
March 19, 2012
Stone
Dust
Posted
by Josh
Guess I
may have mentioned this once or twice (or a dozen times) but it's
worth repeating: Becky is a fucking genius. She's come up with a
means to produce truly stupid amounts of Thermite, which is going to
be really useful against the New Breed. I'm
not huge on chemistry, but as Becky and I were talking yesterday I
realized how easy it is to miss really important things. She has
managed to create explosives and other difficult to manufacture
substances where the rest of us scratch our heads like the
comparative cavemen we are. I was talking with her about our plans to
hunt down and assault the New Breed before they could gather enough
numbers to become a serious threat to New Haven. I was frustrated
because we have all these stocks of supplies and materials sitting
around, but a lot of it isn't that useful.
I mentioned the
huge storehouse we've loaded with various sundries--the old hotel
where we liberated some captives not long after The Fall--and started
naming off the random items that had no particular use. Keep in mind
that we've been making Thermite in small amounts for a while, but the
stuff requires metal dust and that's not easy to make in large
amounts. The process is time and labor intensive.
I told her
about the huge case of hematite rings we left in the hotel after
clearing out the marauders. What use could we have for those things,
you know? I'd taken a couple of them just because I liked the shiny
black rings, and they brought back pleasant memories of the various
ones I'd bought from flea markets and renaissance fairs over the
years.
That was when she stopped me. The look on her face was
priceless. You'd have thought I'd told her casually about a store of
hidden treasure.
She explained to me that Hematite is the
stuff that goes into a particular blend of thermite intended to cut
through steel. We've had some of it before, even. We just didn't know
exactly what was in it. Turns out we've been sitting on enough raw
materials to make a few hundred pounds of the stuff. Of course, the
rings aren't enough on their own. We need powdered aluminum in large
quantities. If only we knew a manufacturing center that had such a
supply...
So, yeah. North Jackson is sending their next trade
caravan to us early. We're doing a bit of separate trading with them,
direct instead of utilizing the network we've set up, exactly for
situations like this.
Becky, Will, Dodger, Patrick, Jess, and
I are all working today on how to weaponize this stuff. It's going to
need some fine tuning and testing. It's not a complex problem to work
out. All we really need to manage is a way to deliver the dust to the
bodies of the New Breed, and to ignite it without having to be too
close. Granted, it's really dangerous stuff and tricky to set on
fire, but we've faced this problem before.
Now that we have a
viable way to use heat against the New Breed (and I feel like an
idiot for not giving Becky a list of all our supplies earlier. All
those hours people have spent filing metals down...) there's a strong
feeling of hope around New Haven. In a worst case scenario, the swarm
in Shelby county has hidden themselves away and we can't find them.
So they attack here.
That's bad, but we're going to have a
large supply of an incredibly effective weapon on hand very shortly.
If the New Breed hits us here, we'll be better off a few days from
now than we are right now. I'm curious to see what the effects of
direct and indirect heat will be on the New Breed physiology. I don't
know how much of a weakness the heat will turn out to be. So far we
know it weakens their skin and underlying armored layers, but that
just means it's easier to fight them. To cut them.
Becky has
prepared a small amount of the new mixture for me to use on two of
our test subjects. One is going to get the direct heat treatment, the
other indirect. It should be
Similar Books
