To be a completely annoying Newb and revive a totally dead thread:
Nice colouring Dire, however the names and borders you created almost entirely do not match those that are explained in books. and where does Wave 2 come from?
I'm going to start making some maps myself as I'm reading the books, unfortunately I don't have any graphics programs (I'm poor) so I do my maps analog (ie. by hand, paper and pen) so any scans I upload might not be that high of quality. I'm gonna try to make 5 maps based on the info I have from all three books. I'm gonna based them loosely on the era's I break up the war which are:
* Pre-Outbreak - the isolated incidents throughout history before Patient Zero
* Initial Outbreak / The Great Denial - Period between Patient Zero and the Great Panic, Major Events include: Patient Zero, the Cape Town Incident
* The Great Panic - short period where the governments have lost most of their control over the populations in panic. Major Events include: The Boat Swarms, Go North, Battle of Yonkers
* Redeker Era / Survival Era - period that the Redeker Plans were instilled and governments reformed. Major Events include: Retreat to the West, Battle of Five Colleges, Rebuilding the Government
* Offensive Era - the period that the governments put offensive onto the zombie plague. Major Events include: Battle of Hope, Road to New York, VA Day, VE Day, VC Day.
* Cleanup Era - the period between Victory in the world and total destruction of Solanum.
Heres the map concepts:
* The first would be a spread effect map, showing the locations of all prewar cases (I'm thinking up to The Great Panic) from books Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z, and Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, This map will combine blips marking where the attacks occur, and lines connecting these blips to show how the virus spread(ed?).
* The second is set IMMEDIATELY after the Redeker Plans of most major countries are established, showing Blue Safe Zones, Red Abandoned Zones and White Zones (and of course the other special zones in the US), national Borders will be for the most part removed from the map, except for those that effected the spread (for example Isreals border).
* Third Map, which I possibly won't make, demonstrates Human movements, things like the Great Panic, The Road to New York, The Indian Diaspora into Iran, the following Nuclear war, and so on.
* Fourth map shows the state of the worlds political borders and the still infested areas Immediately AFTER VC Day, which is considered the end of the war.
* Fifth and final shows the state of the world at the time of the book World War Z was written in world.
now finally I'd like to make some comments on discussions here now that I've read the whole thread:
In regards to Zombies not eating. this is definately a mistake by Mr.Brooks, but not one that could potentially be explained. For one we know that the Solanum is a highly efficient Virus, one could easily say that what the solanum does is convert minute amounts of material in the body into large amounts of energy, at the highest efficiency rate plausible. This would help explain why the instinct to eat is still present, instead of merely an instinctive urge to bite. this way they can convert the meat into energy instead of converting the host body. however if the Zombie has not processed any meat, the Virus is just gonna take energy by converting the body itself, which would speed up decay but a very slow rate as again, the Virus does it with high efficiency. the preference for Human meat is perfectly understandable as the virus has localised itself to only rewrite human DNA (if you don't know, Viruses don't have true DNA or reproductive qualities, which is why scientists cannot accurately place them as either life or non-life, instead what Viruses do is they hijack a host organisms DNA and rewrites, so that the Protein builders read "virus DNA" instead of the normal dna, and so they create more Virus organisms) as a reproductive, which is how Virus' tend to work anyway, why you generally cannot catch Swine Flu from Pigs (to use this as an example, what would've happened was, at some point a Swine Flu Virus had mutated to be able to rewrite Human DNA and came into contact with a Human.). The whole theory works with Brooks' description of Zombies, He just didn't think of it, it should be noted that the Zombie Survival Guide states that scientist do not yet understand how zombies continue to have energy to move (which I interpret as Brooks' way of saying "I couldn't come up with a reason by the deadline").... So yes you COULD try to "outlast" the Zombie. but It'll decompose instead of starve, and because of the pseudo-embalming that Solanum does to human flesh (Decomposers reject Solanum, as it is toxic to all living things) it's gonna be around 3 to 5 years give or take depending on environment. It should be noted also that the original Redeker plan was to outlast the Zombies, and they technically were able to, BUT the restructured US government decided the best thing for the spirit of humanity as a whole was to slowly exterminate and reclaim the land, otherwise we might've just killed ourselves through depression and low morale, leaving behind only nomadic people (a sort of Class 5 or 4.5 outbreak if you will).
The idea that All animals fear Zombies is somewhat realistic and somewhat not. Many animals can smell certain things. things we barely understand. Birds we think understand electromagnetic fields (which is why they can sense what direction they are flying), many other animals get nervous or spooked when big weather like Tornadoes or thunderstorms. It could be that Solanum just produces a smell that incites fear and aggression in animals. So animals with keen sense of smell would react in such a way, meaning mostly mammals and some reptiles. Birds wouldn't even really need to since they aren't effected by Zombies almost all, easily being able to fly away. insects are insects... and fish are only eaten by zombies who actually find them, otherwise Solanum doesn't habitat water.
I totally understand the debate over the US militaries efficiencies in the book. For one The actual Battle of Yonkers is literally the only incident where the Military acts stupid. from there on it's retreat, regroup, Redeker Plan.
Second you have to understand the mental state our country is in at that time. people already were war weary from the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars in the book. basically think of the US as have a culture very similar to that of the culture is had between World War I and World War II. not very patriotic, slightly anti military, broken economy. though the Iraq/Afghan conflicts aren't nearly as taxing on us as many of our other wars, it was made so by the media. already you can see it in our culture, people are sick and tired of the war, the economy sucks, and they barely trust the government.
If The Battle of Yonkers had been up against your normal enemies, it would have been a brilliantly designed battle, winning a decisive moral victory. the Citizens of the US wanted to see the military actually using their funding, big bad toys and guys in big armour crushing the enemy in massive explosions. as stupid as this sounds to military buffs, it's not that uncommon, I've heard stories of the same thing happening to many of the vets I know, particularly in Vietnam.
Finally I am reading the Battle of Yonkers section RIGHT NOW and Todd Waino even mentions that all the military leaders thought the battles set up was stupid, but they were goaded by the politicians and media into doing it. which again, HAS happened in real life. theres been many times where the military made a STUPID tactical move because the Politicians MADE them, thinking they would look good and tough and kick ass to their citizens. I think Invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan might be good examples (Iraq we kinda did a good think in there I guess, taking down a evil power but... there still wasn't any real good excuse beyond the KNOWN Hussein / Bush family fued. Afghanistan I support, not because of War on Terror, but because we cleaned up the total fucking mess we made in there trying to beat russia during the cold war, but I won't get into politics). So I can fully believe a total mess like the Battle of Yonkers would happen.
Now in regards to weapons, A) nukes are out of the picture, because like people said, nukes only kill zombies in the blast radius, and irradiate those within the cloud, plus that then makes the places you've nuked uninhabitable. Nukes in general are stupid weapons that can end the world as we know it. I feel like they are the modern day equivalent (except much worse) to WWI massive Chemical Warfare attacks. Stupid things that yeah sure kill alot of the enemy, but it's not about KILLING the enemy... it's about defeating the enemy. the US Military is not a killing Machine, it's a peacemaker, whether it has to do that by hunting down every single terrorist, or by just THREATENING to invade, it's about ending conflict and protecting the US. Preferably in a that saves the most lives on both sides.
so moving on, Missile Massing again was explained in the books, as they fired their missiles at a big group of zombies and took out three quarters of them. It works great until you run out of them, and Missiles mostly do psychological and superficial damage then direct. the reason they win battles is because they hurt people enough to make them totally fear continuing to fight against them. Zombies have no fear. and as long as they can move they do. so where as the missiles would've totally annihilated a Human group like the zombies, because you'd've hurt all of them enough to not continue fighting, the Zombies however that WERENT obliterated would still be moving any way they could. Todd even talks about heads that go flying INTO the human ranks, still trying to bite something. For those of you who said they could just keep bombing untill there was no more bits left, remember that the US Economy is in shambles, half of the bases are probably overrun, Most of the zombies are in areas that still have large human populations and FINALLY, natural resources are dwindling. Pre-Redeker Plan the Zombies were so close to Humans that it would've been genocide on their own people to open up with large payloads, and Post redeker plan they barely HAD any missiles, having evacuated with only essential equipment to the Rockies. they didn't have access to the materials or factories to make more, and they didn't have the manpower to make it, too busy trying help all the refugee's. AND like I said, Natural Resources are dwindling massively, as Zombies eat any living thing that moves, and it's written that wildfires had decimated quite a bit of forest just because of rampant uncontrolled fires during the great panic. do you really want to bomb and destroy whatever organic matter your country has left, using up now precious resources that you can't even collect anyways?
During Survival / Redeker Plan Era (before the Offensive) I feel like its safe to assume many of the equatorial parts of the world are mostly clean, since the climate would accelerate decomposition and Zombies in general would have hard times spreading through the environments. for instance Brazil. theres lots of terrain, either Jungle or Pampas. Pampas would be easy to clear out because they are so wide open. Jungle would be hard to clean out and you'd probably have alot of stragglers during the Survival days, BUT
as you can see I feel like I've come up with pretty rational explainations to all the discrepancies in the book. I even feel I've come up with one for the biggest discrepancy of them all: why do all these plot holes exist in the book. One could easily say it's because Brooks' just didn't think of them, but I feel a better explanation is this book is not written as if it was an entertaining Zombie story for people of our universe, it's written as if it was an oral history for a world where all those events ACTUALLY happened. These things don't NEED to be described, they are either knowledge that doesn't matter to the general concept of the book, or things that people of that world know.
WOOT. Long Post is Long.
