Modern monster hunter weapons

Hey all, so in my recent setting monsters from mythology and cryptids are very much real and are no secret to people acroos tje globe. These monsters act like regular animals and have niches in their respective ecosystem. In addition to this unless they are widely spread enough (werewolves,dragons,vampires, etc.) they are only located in the country of their origin. My question I have for everyone is when they become a problem and need killed what types of weapons would be used and why?

Edit:I want to know what weapons someone could get realistically and legally in countries with popular monsters like Greece or Norway.

Edited by sifsand on Jun 2nd 2019 at 11:35:11 AM

Big-bore hunting rifle. Legal basically everywhere and will kill most things dead.

Shotgun. Large bore, variable ammunition, effective at short ranges where most monsters are dangerous.

It worked in the first Quake.

And if we're considering smaller game? Say something the size of a squirrel, I imagine hunters wouldn't want to blast their game to bloody giblets, that'd be straight overkill.

Use a fast action .22 bolt like the Volsquarten Summit.

And also traps, maybe, if there's something that attracts these monsters specifically and not actual squirrels or raccoons or whatnot. They don't even need to necessarily be deadly bear trap-type things, either; just net or basket traps, and then they can be easily killed or transported as one chooses.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jun 2nd 2019 at 7:48:33 AM

I am actually curious if a werewolf is rational enough to escape a bear trap.

If not, then putting a sign up next to a treated goat carcass saying "Warning, Werewolf poison" ought to do the trick.

In this setting werewolves are victims of a disease that robs them of their human instincts over time.

Human instincts or human faculties?

Think rabies up to 11, going feral to the point they don't even remember being human

Are any of the monsters sapient in this setting?

Some of them yes, but they aren't treated like animals like the ones that are hunted are. This does not mean however that predjudice and racism aren't around.

If I was heading into the bush to hunt a rabid wolf-shaped human, the weapon I would want is a very powerful shotgun (loaded with some sort of anti-werewolf ammunition, of course).

I’d take an AR. Get it in .450 Bushmaster or .458 SOCOM, both of which are known to stop multi-hundred pound animals dead in their tracks. It’s going to be more consistent and controllable than a shotgun with a significantly greater volume of fire. Take a hard-hitting semi-auto pistol to back that up like a G20 and you should be set.

For big, angry animals volume of fire is the number one thing you need.

That's an interesting choice- A big bore hunting cartridge in a semi-automatic rifle. I think which of our choices is better will depend on how heavy the cover is. According to the OP, these werewolves are basically berserkers- a creature with near-human level intelligence which nevertheless doesnt use weapons and therefore must close to grappling and biting range to kill it's prey. I'm assuming that most of these things will head immediately to the heaviest cover they can find- thick brush where the visibility is down to near zero feet (here I'm assuming that they cant possibly survive for any length of time in built up, inhabited areas, so it's wilderness). To kill this thing, the hunter has to go into the brush and flush it out.

Under those circumstances, you only get one shot anyway, so the type of action is irrelevant. I think a .450 Bushmaster will overpenetrate a human-skinned animal at that range (ie, I'm assuming werewolves don't have abnormally thick hides, like a rhino or a crocodile).

Of course, if you can catch it in the open, then your weapon would be preferable. Perhaps a mixed arms team to cover all the bases? I'll lug the shotgun if you'll back me up with an scoped AR ('course, I think a bolt action would be even better). Were I you, I would go with a Ruger or a Savage.

.450 Bushmaster will pretty much pass straight through brush. I was able to see it in action during a boar hunt, even thick brush doesn’t pose much of an obstacle and it does some seriously nasty things to flesh, especially with expanding bullets. .458 SOCOM is a pretty prodigious manstopper, it was developed after Mogadishu to take on combatants high enough off Khat to shrug off the pain of 5.56 overpenetrating and keep fighting. It still sees use as a vehicle stopper similar to .50 Beowulf since it doesn’t deflect noticeably through glass and can even blow through engine blocks. I’ve heard interesting things about the .500 Automax AR as well, it was designed with bear defense in mind.

There’s no such thing as one shot and done in this scenario, and with an AR a skilled shooter will be able to put several rounds into a target very easily. There’s a reason semi-autos are the weapon of choice for wild hog and boar, hunting in brush against a resilient animal you need quick follow up shots. An autoloading shotgun might not be a bad choice, though the controllability of the AR still gives it an edge.

Savage is a popular entry-level rifle, but if I had my pick I’d take a Tikka. Those things are tack drivers.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jun 3rd 2019 at 5:09:58 AM

You gotta see it to shoot it. The advantage of heavy brush isn't as cover, it's concealment. If I'm visualizing this correctly, someone has to go in there and flush it out, and that person isn't getting any follow-up shots (except as a coup-de-grace).

Really, it all depends on how intelligent these things are. Are they just animals, like a boar, who will panic and reveal themselves in predictable ways? Or is it more like hunting a person, who will predict your behavior and act on it? As described, the scenario is a weird hybrid of hunting and combat, that doesn't seem to have an exact analogy in the real world. Sort of like hunting a Neanderthal, or maybe a Homo heidelbergensis, depending on how tough and smart the Werewolves are.

Don't underestimate the firepower of a shotgun at close range. They can put out a lot of lead in a short timeframe, and wont overpenetrate (which wastes energy, while endangering bystanders). I know boar hunters use 20 gauge slugs, and 20 is considered light compared to a 12 or a 10. A 12 gauge slug is rated at roughly the same kinetic energy at the muzzle as your .450, and a 12 gauge firing 00 buck puts out somewhat more energy than an M-16. It just doesn't have the same range as these weapons. But by the same token, it doesn't overpenetrate either, and it's easier to aim and hit a target, at close range, with shot.

'Course, if you see the werewolf at 200 meters then the shotgun is screwed, unless you can close range. Fortunately, werewolves don't use ranged weapons, and to attack you, it has to get close.

That SOCOM round sounds like a beast, but I wonder about it's ballistics, and the recoil. In terms of it's design and intended purpose, it isn't unlike some of the rifled slugs available these days.

Based on my experiences brush hunting my guess is you’d be shooting in the 50yd range, or maybe a little less than that. You don’t necessarily have to get right on top of something to shoot it in the brush, though you have to get pretty damn close. Though I’ll point out that even in spitting range, which is the one place you don’t want to be, you’d still be taking multiple shots. You really don’t want to be caught racking your shotgun, you’d need a semi-auto. You don’t want the animal anywhere near you, trust me. Boar like to charge when they’re wounded and they can cover ground shockingly fast, when that happens you want every round you can get. Even back before semi-autos became popular for this kind of hunting people typically used lever rifles in brush due to how quickly they could be cycled. I’d also take slugs over buckshot.

Overpenetration really isn’t as significant an issue as you’re describing here, unless you’re worried about damaging the hide. In this situation I don’t think that’s as big a concern.

A large-caliber AR is going to be the best of both worlds here. It’ll do significant damage to flesh even at an extended range, can follow up very quickly and is going to be massively easier to shoot. I’d personally chose .450 Bushmaster because it has a flatter trajectory and retains energy better than the .458 SOCOM, but they’re about equivalent at very short range.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jun 4th 2019 at 9:53:17 AM

I haven't gone brush hunting, so I cant speak to that. One thing I would point out, though, is that while you can walk away from a wounded boar, you cant walk away from a werewolf, because its going to go on and kill someone. That would be like a cop walking away from a serial killer. So regardless of the risk, the hunter will have to do whatever is required to bring the thing down. If that means getting within spitting distance, then that is what that means. Under those circumstances, I'll stick with the shotgun.

The penetration issue is a matter of wasted energy. Very likely anything that large which passes through someone's body is going to kill them, but the engineer in me doesn't like wasting energy. Then again, I don't know what effect a werewolf transformation will have on wound mechanics. Do they even have vital areas?

I wont give you an argument about pump vs. autoloading, though. I'm fairly old school, and I remember a friend who owned an Ithaca, he could pump that thing faster than your eye could follow, but your average Joe Werewolf hunter might not be able to do that.

Werewolves in most fiction have a Healing Factor and a vulnerability to silver, does that apply to this world as well?

While they ARE vulnerable to silver, it is not required to kill them. In the first instance of a werewolf in my work the main character kills it with a whole clip of a Browning Hi-Power to the head. Granted he was inexperienced and terrified so I made it vague on purpose whether or not that was overkill.

There’s really no reason to ever get that close to a wounded animal, though. A shotgun with slugs is effective out to around 100yds. The .450 Bushmaster holds most of its energy out to 250yds. There really isn’t any hunting scenario, barring maybe surprise bear defense or something, where you have any reason to get that close up. Even at that range, the shotgun isn’t going to have a significant advantage, and a pump will put you at a significant disadvantage if you don’t make the kill instantly. For a small and highly mobile animal like fowl or certain kinds of deer a shotgun rules the day, but here you want a rifle.

Wasting energy really isn’t a huge concern either. Straight energy transfer to a target isn’t the only mechanism of damage, blowout from the exit of a large-caliber round causes significant blood loss and can be lethal very quickly even if the wound track isn’t. Hunters don’t really like damaging the animal that much in most cases, but I can’t imagine that’s the case here.

If you look up the most popular brush guns it’s going to be all large-caliber tactical rifles and lever actions. Shotguns are great, but it’s really hard to beat the all round utility and lethality of something like a large caliber AR.

I mean, if you emptied a handgun into a 900lb grizzly’s head it would die too, but under ordinary circumstances a handgun wouldn’t be a particularly effective weapon against them. Vicious animals don’t usually sit still and let you unload. If werewolves are essentially as resilient as a person to gunfire then there’s a lot of weapons that would be just fine against them.

A Hi-Power is a pretty average handgun, 9mm and .40S&W are both combat-proven but aren’t exactly heavy hitters. They’re definitely not hunting rounds. Also it’s called a magazine, not a clip.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jun 5th 2019 at 8:07:43 AM

Of course there was the little detail of those bullets being silver-tipped and the werewolf had been recently tossed against the ground. Would normal bullets work in the same circumstance?