Taking down the Made Of Iron Mooks

Okay, so the concept is that the mooks are impact resistant, so the badass normal heroes need something other than the average gun. I'm looking for a reasonable alternative that doesn't break willing suspension of disbelief.

The mooks can be mowed down with more dakka, but it's not exactly practical since the heroes are on the move a lot trying to catch them.So the size limit on the weapon needs to be something from the size of a handgun to an assault rifle.

Need more context here on your setting. Is it 20 Minutes into the Future? If so, stuff like rifle-sized RailGuns are a good choice. Futuristic melee weapons like laser cutters and vibroblades could work too. Perhaps they have gaps in their armour that a well-placed regular gunshot could penetrate with ease, so it's more of a game of skill and aim than simply overpowering them. If they're robots, some kind of EMP or scrambler weapon could work, too.

Try incorporating a weak spot if you can't find a suitable weapon, or if your story is set in modern times, using strictly real world technology as far as weapons go. Fire might work too, but flamethrowers are not exactly the most practical of choices to use as a primary weapon...

EDIT: Also, what do you mean by catch? Are the heroes trying to keep the Mooks alive for something?

edited 27th May '14 4:34:58 PM by Nadir

"Resistant to bullets" is often abused to cover a lot of ground. It's one thing to be resistant to pistol rounds; it's another to be resistant to (in increasing order) deer rifle, assault rifle, or battle rifle ammunition that can punch right through cars. And that's before you get to the really mean stuff like shotgun slug ammunition, which are short-ranged but can punch straight through the engine block of a car and then the person sitting in the seat, and still exit out the back of the vehicle.

So there's a very wide range of civilian-legal ammunition; thing is, they require large obvious rifle or shotgun-type weapons to fire them from. Then there's the old standby of "ramming a truck into them", if you can arrange for an ambush to happen. But if they're resistant to shotgun slugs, then realistically a pickup truck won't do much to them.

It's a twenty minutes into the future type story I should have been more clear. I should have also specified that the mooks are genetically altered/super serumed, 7+ feet behemoths (most of them, anyways). One of the modifications is that their skin and muscles are extremely durable and that simply shooting them doesn't do much to slow them down. I was thinking that something based on something other than kinetic force could be used, preferably in something handgun size, or something else that could be easily hidden from view.

The heroes want them either alive, or to be able to follow them to find their leader and take him out. They have so far been unable to do this.

Ramming has been used with some success. It injures them, but only enough to slow them down.

If that's their goal, covert tailing is much easier than injuring them and forcing them to RTB. After all, they might just divert to a nearby hospital. Much easier to pick up on some basic tradecraft (it's hard to make yourself inconspicuous when you're seven feet tall) and tail them with a 'floating box', establishing their pattern of living and movement, and figuring out their home from there. Think classic KGB/CIA spies and counter-spies.

But if you must hurt them, again, shotgun slugs. They will tear through engine blocks with no problem so no amount of muscle or hardened hide will stop them. There is no way to reliably injure someone like that without risking killing them.

edited 28th May '14 4:27:24 AM by SabresEdge

Try inventing a poison in your setting that reacts with skin contact alone, which then can be loaded into guns. Some kind of weaponised acid might work too. Something that can rapidly deteriorate tissue.

Actually, since they're still biological, some kind of new, controllable biological weapon sounds like a decent choice of weapon. Knockout gas and tranquillisers would serve well for your "keep-them-alive" agenda. Given that you said they wanted to tail them to the leader, I agree with that stealth is a better choice, especially since it looks like they're outmatched, and killing them outright is not the primary intention.

I'm reminded of the Shadow of Mordor game when you mentioned these guys, so is brain-washing them an option? Perhaps there's some technology that can accomplish that, and these guys are less intelligent than the regular human. If not, it might be tough.

The problem with covert tailing is that they don't stay in populated areas, and they have a technopath with them that can knock out drones and tamper with info that would give away their base. Despite being big, they are notoriously slippery for this reason.

Shotgun slugs, got it :D Thank you thank you very much!

Thaaaat sounds like it has massive potential to come back to bite the heroes. it's a good idea though, I could use it as something they've tried but backfired on them (fridge horror squick)

Knockout gas and tranquilizers are perfect for catching them thank you thank you!!!

Brainwashing would probably not work, and if anyone where to accomplish it in story, it would most likely be the villain, who is actively trying to achieve this and to a small extent has succeeded. Unfortunately, while some mooks do have a more animalistic nature mentally, they started out that way, or actively wanted it, and have a very low chance of getting out of it. The others function with normal cognition and it actually makes them scarier.

Another thing to consider is that bullet immunity is not physics immunity; if you can put enough fire on target, you can severely retard their options for movement and possibly even knock them over. That's something I've done in the past.

People will stumble when hit by a sufficiently large bullet. Enough bullets will knock them down.

That is something i've taken into consideration. Thanks for pointing it out though. I mentioned in one of my previous posts that "More Dakka" can take them down, and that getting hit with say, a bus, can greatly injure them. Each of those things can be impractical.

Bullets just don't get very far through them, and tend to just piss them off. Given that many of them are animalistic, and semi feral in some cases, this can be very bad for the good guys.

Would electrical weapons like tasers work on them? I'm guessing tear gas is good for suppressing them too, if they don't wear special helmets. As pointed out before, shotguns are pretty good, seeing that even if it doesn't terribly injure them, the knockout should be really nasty. Plus in a shot-for-shot count, it's probably a more practical option than wasting all your rifle ammo just to suppress them.

Try force weapons too, like that one gun in Dead Space 2 that knocks enemies back. Fus Ro Dah in a gun, basically. Strong razor blade/buzzsaw-type weapons miiight work too, if their skin's not solid 3-inch steel or anything. Could be a little impractical though. Try looking up riot control "weapons" and see what you find.

edited 28th May '14 6:14:08 PM by Nadir

They don't wear helmets, so that is a very good idea. I'll need to look up how it works...

I have heard of dead space, but am totally unfamiliar with this. What does it do?

And the buzz saw is also a good idea. I just realized the perfect analogy for their skin/muscles is that it's like Kevlar— bullets no, knife, yes. Most people aren't stupid enough to get close enough to find that out though. That actually prevented a plot hole later in the story, so thank you very much!!!

Ah! I almost missed the electrical weapons Q! Yes, in fact electrical weapons was one of the ideas I had when i created the thread. No one mentioned it so I thought it was something that wouldn't work. Speaking of which, any ideas on how they would work?

Three words: Anti Materiel Rifle.

Well, it's a really stocky-looking, short two-handed gun (about grenade-launcher size) that just fires a concussive wave that knocks enemies down and back. Realistically though, something like that is basically a shockwave emitter so it might be pretty effective at rupturing internal organs.

The buzz saw weapon is also from Dead Space 2, and also Ratchet And Clank Up Your Arsenal. The former version can extend the blade on some sort of cord or rod about 1 or 2 feet in front of you, but the latter actually launches them at targets like shuriken. Granted, Ratchet And Clank is not one for realistic weapons... Actually scratch that. The Dead Space one could launch them too, only the Ratchet And Clank one had faster rate of fire.

I have no idea about the electrical weapons, which is why I suggested looking up actual riot control implements. Everything I suggested to you thus far has been mostly what I recalled from movies and video games. If you want some weapon ideas I suggest looking at a Ratchet And Clank wiki somewhere. They have a lot of crazy and cool ideas that can sometimes fit in a rifle size, though most of them are really huge, too.

edited 28th May '14 8:11:53 PM by Nadir

Wut? I am intrigued but wut?

Shockwave emitter eh? I like the sound of that. Potentially messy though

My face as you described the buzz saw launcher: Oo O That is terrifying and awesome. Did i mention terrifying? 1 or 2 feet is still cutting it kinda close (pun not intended)

Riot and Rachet...got it... I think.

You know, Anti Materiel Rifles.

Big ass sniper rifles you use to kill small tanks that are 2 miles away.

edited 28th May '14 10:04:34 PM by LeGarcon

Okay i've looked up videos, found a lot of people shooting one, but not anything being hit by one. Got a specific one make and model for me? Also, from what I saw, those things are freaking HUGE and might be kinda hard to cart around and time consuming to set up.

re: tailing: doesn't matter if they don't stay near populated areas. Going into open-field terrain means they're that much easier to see from far away, be it with binoculars or infrared vision (FLIR sensors are damn nearly impossible to hide from). They wouldn't even know if they're under surveillance if whatever's tailing them stays far away enough; a quiet fixed-wing plane circling at 10kft with an infrared ball can track them very, very easily, even more so if it can hover, without being detected in return. In short, in urban areas, they can be tailed. In less-populated areas, where their tails would be obvious, they themselves would be very easy to track.

The Barrett Light Fifty is the classic; anything in .338 Lapua Magnum would also work. These are designed to shred vehicles, remember.

Obvious note: as should be clear, if the targets are being engaged with this kind of firepower in prepared ambushes and the like, there is no intention that the target will survive. The line between "critically wounded", "fatally wounded", and "dying" is extremely thin. These are lethal weaponry; the threat criteria they'd be deployed against is "this guy needs to die now". Similarly, in order to completely assure that a tranquilizer or a taser will bring the guy down, the only way is overkill. The balance point between "not enough power" and "too much power" is very, very thin, and nobody wants to err on the side of "not enough" when the target can potentially rip them into little pieces—hence why police officers aren't normally issued with tranqs. And, of course, a dead body cannot directly lead you to further clues, unless you have a good and/or lucky forensics team. Hence, if the intention is to map their network of contacts and refuges, covert is the way to go until you decide to roll them up.

edited 29th May '14 12:19:07 AM by SabresEdge

Are all of those surveillance methods electrical? Because that would be a huge part of the problem for the good guys trying to tail them. I mentioned it briefly in a previous post, but they have a technopath on their side that actively looks for surveillance equipment and disables it before it even gets close to them and/or sends a false gps signal reading. The heroes don't know that (yet) and can't figure out how the villain is screwing with their drones.

Thank you for the links! They will come in handy!!!

These aren't planned ambushes. The heroes are lucky if they catch these guys in the act. One of the major kickoffs of the plot is that they finally do manage a standing battle with them, before the heroes' vehicles are disabled (aka dismantled) and the villains take off in their still functioning vehicles. They have a starting point to track them from, but still aren't sure where the base is. While the mooks are huge and powerful, their methods are more snatch and grab (which is why the body count isn't nearly as high as it could be) and the less the heroes know about them, the better. And, unfortunately, they do tend to be on the side of "not enough" (due to lack of trial and error) and end up with very angry mooks.

I'm not trying to make this harder, I'm just trying to explain why i'm having so much difficulty with them. One thing i've tried to do with the story is subvert/deconstruct a lot of mistakes the villains make on the evil overlord list — https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList . I've made it super hard on myself. I think it will eventually be worth it, I just need to hammer out the details.

It depends on your technopath's range. If all he does is remove local surveillance tools like bugs and trackers, it should still be easy to spy on them with binoculars and similar equipment from miles away. He's nowhere near enough to intercept a satellite either, provided the heroes have access to one.

It comes down to range. In the open countryside you don't need to be within two kilometers to surveil someone. Read my post more carefully: a fixed-wing aircraft orbiting at ten thousand feet. That's better than two miles straight up, not counting slant range (which could easily increase the distance to dozens of miles), and since it's on a wide, lazy circle, it's not obvious that it's tracking them. After all, it could just be circling the city. And in the countryside, standard procedure is to have one tailing car follow a fair distance behind as long it's a public road. There's nothing suspicious about that at all. If the target car turns off to a smaller side-road, the chase car doesn't follow; instead, it hands off surveillance to the aerial asset and continues going straight on, like any other car would, thereby "confirming" to the prey that it's not following them. (It can rejoin the chase later on.)

This is FLIR. Say hello to it, be familiar with what it can do. It's cheap enough to be extremely widespread on police helicopters, and it offers a package of camera options—night-vision, thermal, regular-light. Fit that onto a fixed-wing aircraft and it'd be extremely difficult to escape its notice if you're not in a city.

Also, I'd like to note. Injuring someone in the hopes that he'll lead you back to his lair is extremely optimistic. More likely he'll go to ground first in the city, lose you, and then go to where he's going. It's common sense: if you know you're likely to be tailed, you don't lead your pursuers to your home.

edited 29th May '14 2:57:20 PM by SabresEdge

That's very informative. Forgot that misdirection and stuff is very effective too, and it's not just straight up spying on them using Method A and Method B.

Well, yeah. The whole point of spying on someone is that they're unaware of it. If they're aware of the fact that they're being surveilled, they won't do anything out of the ordinary until they can break surveillance. Worse, they might put together disinformation to feed to you. Hence, it'd be actively counterproductive to tail someone in a way that'd be obvious (unless you want the tail to be noticed for some reason or another). Luckily, the art of surveillance is a very well-developed one; in the jargon of spies, it's called tradecraft.

Do you really want to see the effects of that on human/animal flesh?

The effects of it on non-human/animal targets are one of three things: 1) the thing outright crumples, breaks, explodes or is otherwise unrecognizably destroyed. 2) A nice clean hole on the outside but a very very smashed internal such as firing on a truck's engine block. The engine will be in pieces but the truck will only have one entry hole visible. 3) A simple scuff. If the target suffers this, it's too well-armored to engage.

See the effects of what? The anti material rifle? You're post confused me a bit.

And no, i don't want to see that. I think if the heroes were to use something like that it would be last resort and long distance to semi avert the gorn.

as a side note, i'm new-ish to the forums and have no idea how to link to tropes. How do i shot web?

Text-Formatting Rules are your friend here.

So I'm curious. Exactly what kind of scenario are you trying to think up? If the heroes are operating on their lonesome, engage in and lose a meeting engagement with their opponents, and their opponents make a clean getaway, well, that's that. Since it is a firefight they'll be hauled in for a lot of questioning by the police department; stray rounds = potentially dead civvies. But if the heroes have official backing, it'll naturally be escalated up the chain, potentially to the point of National Guard helicopters being used for long-ranged tracking and armored vehicles with light antitank weapons (!) to spearhead the push. In that point, technopaths and super-strength or not, the opposition is in trouble if they get found. Of course, unless the protagonists manage to have all those assets on standby/they're conducting their own hunt, it'll take a long time before they arrive.

Another thing, of course. The strength for this group lies in surprise elements. If they're forced into a public, messy firefight, even if they win they'll have been forced to reveal some of their abilities and tactics. After that, their enemies would be able to pull together responses. The Kincaid Solution would work; their technopaths get sniped at range, and then their opponents are free to leverage all kinds of heavy weaponry. No matter how "super" you are, you do not get into a head-on fight against a nation-state. It can concentrate and coordinate more forces than you can, and sustain it for longer than you can.

edited 29th May '14 9:40:09 PM by SabresEdge