Rob Gronkowski shot a minigun without mounting it. We should be able to do it as well

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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I hate discussing semantics anyway, it’s just distracting from what actually needs to be discussed. The fact is we have a video of a real human being firing a real M134 minigun, unmounted. You can do it, even if you need to deal with the weight and bulk of the ammo, even if you need to be at peak human condition, even if it will tire you out and break your back after more than a few bursts. No matter how stupid and impractical it is, it is an obvious fact that yes you can fire a minigun unmounted. It is no longer a question of whether or not you can do it at all, but what price the player will have to pay to do it.

For the average, unenhanced survivor, yes firing a minigun will be infeasible. They won’t be able to carry the ammo with them, they’ll have to haul it around on the ground. The M134 itself will be too heavy to hold steady, and if they manage to lift it it will immediately be knocked out of their hands as soon as they pull the trigger.

Moving up a step in usability, a very strong (let’s say 12 strength minimum), unenhanced survivor, our Mr. Gronk, will be able to carry the minigun and pull the trigger without losing control. However, they will still have very high spread, slightly reduced by higher strength, and it’s possible that firing will strain/apply pain, even use up some stamina. Strength-enhancing mutations and cybernetic enhancements would make the recoil and weight more manageable, allowing for greater sustained usage, but they used would still have to take a break within minutes. Maybe a 10 ft tall, Huge, Insanely Strong Ursine mutant could go even further beyond.

Regarding the ammo, it has been established that the ammo is very heavy, potentially outweighing the gun itself. In most cases it would be most practical for ammo to be fed from a source next to the player, rather than being carried, and someone would have to add support for this function, for belt-fed guns to feed from the environment. It might be possible to carry the ammo on your person (soldiers and firefighters are expected to carry similarly heavy loads), but it would of course be physically demanding, requiring an exceptionally strong character, slowing them down and forcing them to take breaks and/or sustain pain from the effort (things that already happen to overburdened characters in-game).

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22

Your average human being of today would be very different from the hardened survivor type. It would be similar to comparing a 90kg (borderline obese), 39-year-old male (USA average 2018) to a stone aged hunter-gatherer. One might not be able to outrun a zombie to save his live, while the other one couldn’t get overweight even if he tried and has physical capabilities that are in all respects comparable to athletes today.

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Both won’t be able to shoot a minigun. What is your point?

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That makes zero sense. If the “average survivor” is weak, they wouldn’t have been a survivor.

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I’d just carry the ammo in a shopping cart that I’d haul around with me. You can carry thousands of rounds of ammo that way.

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Yeah, strength has very little to do with survival.

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It has everything to do with survival. You need to be able to fight, run and scavenge for hours on end. Anyone who was too weak to escape the hordes died. Even the “average survivor” is likely reasonably fit. And a person who has been running, fighting, and carrying heavy shit all day every day for months on end is going to be pretty strong.

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No.

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Man, your profile picture is really appropriate. Maybe instead of acting like a little kid who isn’t getting his way you can actually contribute the conversation like an adult.

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I think the point he’s trying to make is that the day to day activities of the “average” survivor would not give them the strength required to effectively wield a minigun. Holding and firing a minigun requires a much greater degree of strength than you would achieve by running, looting, and fighting for extended periods of time. While strength is relevant to those activities, other attributes like speed, dexterity, and endurance are arguably much more relevant, and you would improve much more in those areas than in brute strength.

In response to that, I would say that that is irrelevant. A sufficiently strong survivor could wield a minigun, even if the average survivor is not sufficiently strong.

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Could a potential solution to the weight/volume problem be that the ammo belt is set up in special ammo box on the ground. Prior to using it you would have to set it up, and you would most likely be unable to pack up/take the large ammo box and minigun with you if the horde was too big and too close for you to fully kill them before you were over run.

Second Alternative rather than carrying the minigun. I could see one of the mech suits/construction suits being refitted in some way to carry the ammo, and have the gun integrated into one of the arms.

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Well doesn’t the game start a few days after the apocalypse? There should be plenty of weak characters even a year or two after the apocalypse. This might sound unreasonable, but I think its actually more realistic since it takes a long time to build muscle, and no one will be gaining muscle as fast as anyone lifting weight today because of our conceivably, unbalanced diet, sleeping/recovery schedule, exercise schedule. I feel characters in the apocalypse are more likely to build up a general farmer strength, rather than being able to build up the muscle mass of most top tier athletes or movie stars.

(if you listen to them, hugh jackman, chris hemsworth, etc. They all talk about getting as big as possible before filming because they quickly lose muscle mass throughout filming. I think most people would not be doing exercise so intense that their legs are killing them the next day, given that if you pushed yourself that hard, you’d probably die/be extremely weak for a day or two afterwards(Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) Being as strong as a top tier athlete might be possible, but I think that should be gated behind actual in game years given that it takes quite a bit of time to build up muscle, especially post cataclysm. Though I do believe most people’s strength will increase, the muscle needed to be like a top tier athlete is a whole different level.

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Yeah, I don’t disagree that you should be able to set it up to fire without sticking it on a vehicle, but that’s not

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Your login name is as comprehensible as your posts, so what?

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Actually his name is Arsenic in leetspeak.
4R53N1C = ARSENIC

Back on topic I think @Mallowdust summarizes the strength issue quite well. General survivor activity would only give you “farmer strength” at best, which is insufficient to effectively wield a minigun. Being as strong as Rob Gronkowski in order to wield a mingun would take in-game months if not years (unless you simply start that strong, I guess), as well as be resource intensive.

You can wield a minigun and fire it unmounted, and I think there should be support for it in-game when someone is willing to work on it. It’ll just be gated behind these strength (and by extension time and resource) requirements.

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Strength isn’t just determined by muscle mass but things like the strength of neural impulses and the types and density of muscle fibbers. These factors can increase without needing to gain more muscle mass.

Some people also seem to dismiss the shear amount of exercise the player character is doing. Which would be comparable to the amount of training of a athlete. But the type of exercise would be more comparable to the more generalist exercise to that that hunter-gathers did: lots of light to medium resistance exercise for the muscles, bones and joints by just moving around and doing for a survivor daily activities. A lot of cardio because you are going to be walking marathons while carrying a load on a regular basis. And this will be interspersed by short bursts of high-intensity exercise for both cardio as well as strength by fighting, sprinting, carrying heavy loads for short durations, lifting heavy objects, smashing stuff, etc.

Anyone that isn’t a trader or part of a larger community would probably have the general lifestyle described above. And given that the average survivor would probably start out unfit and untrained and anyone who starts with training get exponential improvements in the beginning. Anyone still alive after a few years would be a lot stronger and have a lot more cardio than they did before. So i don’t buy the average human of today or weak character arguments. Since the average human in the USA would go from a couch potato to doing the amount of exercise previously done by athletes.

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Surviving does not make character an athlete.

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You are right that most survivors wouldn’t reach the capabilities that athletes have do to their exercise being more general instead of being focused on one specific capability and the fact that the majority of survivors would lack the genetics required to even reach such a level (that is what mutagens are for). That said survivors that do have the genetics required to be comparable to athletes but just didn’t put in the required training to do so suddenly will put in that amount of training.

If you don’t believe me than you can look in your own game by checking the calorie and exercise tracker.

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So walking several miles a day with constant bursts of sprinting does not make you more athletic?
Carrying more than 50 lbs on your back for several miles every day does not make you more athletic?
Constantly killing things in close combat does not make you more athletic?
Constantly having to demolish corpses does not make you more athletic?
You’re telling me that if I, in real life, did all those things for a year, all day every day, that I would not gain any muscle mass at all?

Seriously. Accept the fact that you are wrong and move on.

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To play devil’s advocate, he said it wouldn’t make you an athlete, i.e. it wouldn’t make you Rob Gronkowski. He didn’t say it wouldn’t make you more athletic in general.

Do we know Rob’s workout routine? Do we know how it would compare to the daily activities of a Cataclysm survivor? How often does the survivor engage in these activities, for how long, and how intense are they? Does the survivor have a diet that can sustain a body like Rob’s? Can you quantify how strong you need to be in order to lift the minigun as well as control the recoil? How do you know the survivor meets those requirements?

Without this information we can’t conclude whether or not a survivor would be able to wield a minigun, nor whether or not a survivor would be as strong as the Gronk. We just know that it’s possible, but it’s still up for debate what level of strength makes it possible.

That said, we actually do have access to Rob’s workout routine. At a glance, I’d say it looks intense, more intense than a survivor’s daily activities. We’re not told what weights he uses, but it’s safe to assume he lifts much heavier weights than anything the average survivor could do without building up muscle mass over months/years. Not to mention the discipline and regularity required, as well as the diet.

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