What kind of gun?

[H222G981]

So when it comes to defense against a zoanoid or zoanoids. What kind of weaponry would be most useful against a zoanoid for someone that is human? 

So, I'm sure shot guns and small arms is out of the question. Something that uses armor piercing rounds? 

[Guyver1]

Perhaps... also maybe a laser weapon of some type? Or a concussion type blast? One thing is for sure, we would all be pretty bad on luck.

[Matt Bellamy]

As we have seen from the few instances of Zeus Thunderbolt, High calibre arms, like 50 .cal, armor piercing rounds or high powered explosives work ok against regular Zoanoids... But anything armored in the Hyper level are practically immune unless you get absolutely lucky.

I mean, even if you put a normal shotgun to a Ramotith's face, it would do some damage.

It's safe to say that small arms fire would not be very effective (unless really lucky) 

[*zeo]

It depends on the Zoaform, different types have different level of durability and there's multiple classes...

 

The lowest is the Scout Class, made more for stealth they are fairly lightly armored.  So heavy small arms may be effective enough...

The standard Zoanoid Class varies as some are more armored than others but unless heavily armored then anti-personnel class weaponry that are effective against armored targets should be effective.  Caveat being the brain or heart have to be destroyed to provide a one shot kill as Zoanoids can withstand more physical damage than a regular human and even when penetrating their armored skin their bodies are generally much more durable than a regular human's.

 

They're also hard to kill with radiation, so if you tried to nuke a large number of them that those not killed outright by the blast will still be able to fight afterwards...

 

Hypers take durability to the level that you'd need weapons that normally would be used to take out tanks but upper range Hypers and Neo Hypers are even more durable and could put even a heavy tank to shame... Especially, those capable of generating barrier shields like the Zoalords have...

 

Though, any Zoaform may also have a weakness that could maybe be exploited... Like Zoanoids with liquid explosive weapons could be triggered to blow them up with their own weapon, but you probably wouldn't want to be very close to them when that happened ;-p

 

But means certain weapons may be effective against specific Zoaforms more than other weapons... So some variance on how effective any specific weapon would be...

[McAvoy]

.50 cal weapons would be the bare minimum. Larger weapons like 20mm would be more effective. 

 

Zoanoids are basically walking tanks. You can look up the effects of larger weapons than the .50 cal does and what it requires for a single human to fire it. Basically very few handheld weapons exist that could kill a zoanoid. It has to be mounted.

Which is why Murakami partially transformed his hand and arm to fire his gun. 

[Salkafar]

He didn't in the manga, I don't think, and why would he? Zoalords are super-strong even in human form.

How about teflon rounds? They would reduce reflection off of hard armor plating and increase penetration potential (Because the teflon deforms on impact, reducing the probability of grazing and giving the hard bullet core more opportunity to impact on the armor).

...Actually, it is here I have to cut in with considerations regarding organic armor. Zoanoids are organic beings. Large tetrapods with an endoskeleton, usually like large mammals or reptiles, occasionally birds. Some have arthropod-like qualities, but still move like tetrapods do. What kind of armor could they have?

Crocodiles, the largest armored animals, have a combination of bony scutes and horny scales as armor. Needless to say, it is not bulletproof.

Arthropods and many other animals, even fish, have chitin and/or sclerotin armor; in the larger crustaceans incorporating calcium carbonate to create a much tougher material. But, again, it is not close to bullet proof.

...Recent developments in body armor research have yielded a material similar to - of all things - protein deposits in the brains of alzheimer patients, which is said to be far stronger than Kevlar. We know carbon-based nanomaterials that are very strong can be produced by organisms. Are Zoanoids actually armored with nanotube-like structures?

In any case, materials have limits. Even the strongest materials. A large-caliber projectile made of, say, tungsten carbide - heavier than lead and stronger than steel - encased in teflon to counteract deflection and grazing is very difficult to stop. What thickness of armor could? Can we make a graph?

[McAvoy]

In the anime he did. Off hand I do think he was able to hold off Darzero in his human form. But at the time I think he was actively using his telepathy so Darzerb could have not used his full 60 man strength. 

Murakami was a prototype, he may not have close to the strength of what Guyot demonstrated when he grappled Guyver 3.

I am trying to remember if he used that gun on Darzerb too.

Zoanoids and Hyper Zoanoids are different than real life animals. However, there are animals who do shrug off small arms fire like Elephants and Rhinos. 

Edited June 12, 2016 by McAvoy

[*zeo]

8 hours ago, Salkafar said:

Zoanoids are organic beings...

 

Many organic structures are stronger than man made ones... Spider Silk, for example, is stronger than Kevlar (at least the version enhanced by Graphene) and that's not even the strongest organic material as it only has a tensile strength of about 1.3 GPa, but Lampets teeth are 3 to 6.5 GPa and it's just a combination of iron and protein structures...

 

Organic beings are also not limited to just organic materials, even if they were the organic matter is carbon based and carbon structures can be one of the strongest known... Like diamonds, etc.

 

Keep in mind that the actual cellular and molecular structure of the material is key to how strong it can be... Human bone's, for example, aren't composed of any material known to be very tough on its own but because of the way our bones are structures that they are up to 5x stronger than steel of equal weight. 

 

Calcium, on its own, is barely harder than lead just to put that into perspective... 

 

So couple strong materials with strong designs and the resulting product can be incredibly hard to damage...

 

The anime, for example, shows the standard Zoanoids absorbing the impact of bullets... So it's likely not just a matter of how tough but how much energy the Zoa-Armor can absorb...  Armor piercing only works if the round has enough energy to actually push through the target... Reactive armor, that can alter density and flexibility, can be very light and still stop heavy rounds by essentially spreading the impact energy over the entire surface of the armor... Same reason you can sleep on a bed of nails...

To put this in perspective, note that even non-bullet proof animals like a bear are hard to kill with standard firearms... Thick skin, with thick layers of fat act as natural protection that may not stop the bullet from penetrating but prevents it from reaching vital organs and doing enough damage...  Thick bones also gives a chance for small rounds to ricochet off parts like the skull... and that's all from a animal that isn't designed to withstand bullets, just showing how tough normal flesh and blood can be for a large animal, let alone a Zoanoid engineered to be a weapon...

 

And that's not even going into angles, etc. that can effect whether the round transfers its energy directly to target or gets deflected... For example, last year there was a incident where a 9mm bullet ricocheted off a armadillo and hit another person...

 

 

Btw, a interesting real world research project is being conducted by some Dutch scientists that involves replacing keratin, the protein responsible for the toughness of the human skin, with this spider silk protein by using the same kind of genetic engineering that gave us a goat that can produce spider silk in its milk... The scientist estimate that they could do this and then apply treated skin graphs with the end result of a human who can withstand up to .22 cal rifle rounds... and that's with no other enhancements like making the skin more armor like...

[McAvoy]

A 9mm bullet has the energy of 500 joules. A bullet to wound or kill an elephant is ten times that. It's not the bullet itself but the amount of energy behind that bullet. Of course larger bullets will carry more energy.