One of the things us here at the ZPI strive to find/invent/stumble upon is the ideal anti-zombie heavy weapon. Many designs have been suggested, some brilliant, some not so brilliant, and some just bizarre. Most or all of them have common faults- slow reloads that result in breaks in the fighting, an inefficient design that results in wasted munitions, or a reliance on rare or valuable resources. I have cobbled all of these ideas and suggestions together, and, drawing off of historical weapons and plans, I have managed another step towards the ideal weapon- the Katyusha Mark II Projectile Weapon.

The original Katyusha, officially designated the Boyevaya Mashina-13 (meaning “Combat Vehicle”, usually shortened to BM-13), was an innovative rocket artillery system utilized first in the late 30’s and then through World War II in massive numbers. It was comprised of a series of rails mounted on a wide-traverse carriage that held anywhere from 18 to over 60 long-distance rockets. They could, if need be, all fired at once, although the reload was typically fairly long. The carriage itself was mounted on tank chassis (that’s the plural form, believe it or not), armoured trucks, or even tractors if they were needed in a pinch. They could pour a tremendous volume of not-so-accurate fire onto trenches and bunkers miles away- the Russkies would get hundreds of them and pummel entire cities into wastelands. Even nowadays, they’re still being used - Hezbollah is currently using modified versions to drop high-yield rocket barrages on Israeli cities.

For our purposes, the idea is not a weapon to be used to destroy cities or even people, but a way to deal with large numbers of zombies wherever they might be. While rockets are not going to be practical due to their need for dangerous propellant, the fact that we won't need to launch anything more than a few hundred feet to work effectively and the fact that rockets were meant to destroy massive areas while we only want to deal with a fairly small area. The basic idea of a mounted set of weapons like this is that it can be deployed at a moments notice to a somewhat remote location and deliver a large amount of force to the zombie horde.

First, we’re gonna want to build the basic chassis. We will utilize what we have at hand - if there’s a truck we can build this on, we will. If not, we’ll look for a car. If need be, we’ll mount it on a wagon and tow it with horses, as 19th- century artillery units did. We could even mount one of these on a base like a wheelbarrow, but that’s getting a little depraved. Let’s assume we’re building in the back of a pick-up truck, for simplicity’s sake. We want to be able to point the K2 (as I’ll now call it) in any horizontal direction, and be able to point it from at the ground to almost vertically into the sky. The easiest way to do this would be to mount an axle into the bed of the truck, and then attach a wheel to the axle So it can rotate freely in the middle of the truck bed. I’m not getting into heavy technical details, simply because you will never find all these things in one place - you will have to improvise. Me telling you where to weld and what to do is useless if you don’t have the materials to do so. Consider what I say a good suggestion, but feel free to make changes.
To that wheel, roughly in the middle of the hub/axle/whatever, weld an upright post… and to THAT, attach another axle. Yep, a wheel to that. This will allow whatever’s attached to the wheel to rotate freely and point in any direction. From that wheel, again in the centre, weld a bar, and to that a sheet of steel… how big it is is up to you, but it’s going to be the backboard for your weapons, so perhaps 2 feet high by 4 feet wide would work. If you want, weld some handholds in the form of scraps of metal along the backplate. To use the setup, you’ll need a chair or seat, or you’ll need to spend the entire time crouching - not comfortable, but it’ll let you rotate the mount more easily.

Congratulations - that was the easy part. Now we need to rig up the weapon system. Adopt these as you wish depending on your parts and mechanical availablility and ability. A good, basic start is a Potato Cannon bank. Depending on how complex you wish to get, you can have from 5 to 20 of these mounted on your K2 mount. The simplest is just a length of hollow piping with a cap on one end- drop down propellant, stick in projectile, light, watch zombie go down. However, a design like this is very slow-loading and difficult to get to work properly. Something that can be loaded, fired and re-loaded very quickly is a potato cannon with expansion chamber (an expansion chamber is a much wider section at the bottom of the cannon, where the propellant gases can expand) hooked up to a compressed air tank. The upsides of this are that the propellant/combustant is free and infinite (air, of course), provided by an air compressor fueled by gasoline, and that there are no explosions involved - more delicate projectiles can be fired. However, this system is fairly complex and prone to breaking down- it would take a complex system of valves and piping to hook it all up properly. The benefits are many-fold, though- since all it takes to fire the projectile (I forgot to mention that golf balls are brilliant for this as basic ammo, assuming you can get pipe just a little wider than the ball) is the flick of a switch, you can fire off all of your ammunition very quickly- and reloading is as simple as dropping the round down the barrel. Assuming you were to fire a projectile once every 2 or 3 seconds, with a reloader you could theoretically never stop firing (given you have enough ammo and fuel for the compressor). Another, simpler way of powering it is with a flammable gas such as propane. You could use the same setup as the compressed air bit, except you would feed it in slowly, and then use an ignitor to light the gases and fire the cannon (say, a long-necked lighter stuck through a hole cut in the expansion chamber). Or you could just spray some WD-40 or hair spray down the barrel instead of the pipe system and fire.

A rig like this is easy to use in a pinch (especially the gas-down-the-barrel trick) and visually spectacular (makes big fireballs out of the barrel) and packs quite a punch, but such gases can be difficult to find and could literally blow up in your face. As to projectiles, the aforementioned golf ball does an excellent job of cracking zombie skull - or at least bringing on permanent brain damage. I doubt a zombie is somehow impervious to whacks on the skull- Sean of the Dead certainly agrees with me. However, to achieve any sort of damage, a direct hit must be achieved- not an easy thing, especially with something this rough. Even assuming every cannon was perfectly accurate, because the cannons will be welded/secured together in a box pattern (i.e, in rows and columns), there will always be a significant spread. Another very plausible projectile, though, is the spear. A broom pole with a knitting needle pounded into it and a rag wrapped around the end to ensure a tight fit in the barrel will tear through 3 or 4 zombies, headshot or not - I don’t know how effective it would be at destroying them, but seeing a drooling, shambling zombie shish-kabob would be darn hilarious.

Of course, this is not the only sort of weapon we would utilize. Say we wanted a slightly gentler launch or we want to do away with fuel for reloading. Imagine this - we get a length of piping or wooden dowel, perhaps 5 to 8 feet long. We then find some very stiff steel wire, and wrap it around the dowel in a loose way to make a sort of spring. That’s basically the launcher - it’s fast, quick and dirty. It will work in the reverse fashion as of the previous launcher- the projectile is a length of hollow piping that goes over the launch rod, but is narrow enough to not pass the spring- so that it can be forced down and launched through the air. A weapon like this likely does not have the punch to crack open a zombie skull and always requires a big and heavy round to be fired, but it is propelled gently and without and shockwave, meaning it can be utilized in unique ways. Imagine this - on the end of a length of copper piping, we’ve mounted a Molotov Cocktail, something too fragile to risk with a traditional cannon. The range isn’t great, but if used at close range or lobbed (it’ll take a while to get your accuracy down), not only will the broken bottle tear a big wound in whatever it hits, but the gas will ignite (lit rag tied around neck) and set fire to anything within a fair radius. Or, assuming we had them on hand, we could tape a hand grenade to a spear/pipe, and tie a string to the pin of the grenade. The firer holds the other end of the string, so he can yank it loose the monent he fires. Undeniably useful. The possibilities with a weapon like this are endless- signal flares, shrapnel bombs, self-propelled missiles, delivering messages to the gun store owner across the street, et cetera. But it doesn’t pack a whole lot of conventional zombie-killing punch, so only use it to supplement your normal cannon/weapon barrage.

Those two are great ideas, but there are many more potential weapon systems. Use what you have on hand. The idea here, for the sake of getting a high volume of fire out there and being able to fire continuously without reloading, is to use lots of fairly identical weapons, in a convenient reloading and firing position. The Soviets used a grid system of rails for the Katyusha, in which there was a row of, say, 6 rails, and it was 5 columns deep- and all of the rails were the same distance apart. I’m going to assume you’re doing the same, because it makes reloading very easy and you can bring all your guns to bear on the enemy fairly quickly. For that reason, a rack of, say, mounted crossbows is very impractical because each one takes up quite a bit of space and the time to reload each is very long. You could only fit 3 or 4 on a plank of wood, and the reloader would not be able to keep up with the gunner’s rate of fire. Plus, pin-point accuracy is not required, because the idea is to put out enough projectiles to make high accuracy required. If you want that, throw a rifle in the truck to pick off lone zombies. With that in mind, let’s brainstorm some crazy possible weapons…

1. A 3-inch wide pipe, loaded with a smallish bag of black powder and a fistful of knitting needles or garden stakes, fired shotgun-style. Bloody lethal if you can get a headshot. This is a supplementary weapon, the sort of thing to fire in a pinch and reload when you get a chance.
2. A foot-wide, half-centimetre thick channel of duct metal bent into shape, hooked up to an air compressor- we can fire saw blades for Multikill-style decapitations.
3. A 4-inch wide short bit of tube, packed first with an explosive charge and then with a pack or container (a chip/crisp tube would work well) full of napalm (gasoline and polysterene). A short-range flame cannon, would take a bit to reload.

See? Although implausible, with a very open-ended setup like this it becomes easy to improvise and stretch the limits of your creativity. Remember, have fun, get creative, and for God’s sake, try not to get bitten.