More on TerrorWerks

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Getting ready to go into Terrorwerks at Origins with a life spent learning to be a soldier meant that a lot of things were going through my mind. Too many things in the limited time I had to try to get them all done. My "security team" showed up, and all there was time to do was run a fast evaluation (look at them and decide how I thought they would work), divide the three "unknowns" into teams with my two knowns (SVC and myself), assign the them missions (forward security-room clearing, rear-security mob-herding), and then begin explaining to the advance team how I wanted that handled.

There were concerns. SVC had told me about his experience the previous year, but nothing about this year, so I had to improvise based on what I knew about the previous year from his stories, and a reasonable assumption that things might have changed. For example, just because SVC did not encounter booby traps the previous year did not mean that they would not be employed this year (it would not be hard to do), and my own training says in a MOUT operation to watch out for these. So, yes, I wasted some time (ultimately) in taking a brief few seconds to warn the security teams to be on the watch for such things and not to just grab things that looked useful without looking them over carefully.

I was really worried about ammo supply and rate of fire. We were briefed on the number of rounds the pistols had, but then four of the five pistols were found to be inoperative and were replaced by "shotguns" (much, much lower rate of fire compared to the pistols) and no one would tell me how many shots the shotguns had. I had the remaining pistol, and that meant that I was the "rapid fire" weapon in the group (and yes, there were two occasions when I moved that pistol forward and cleared out Zombie nests that were blocking our movement). But I was concerned about the shotgun ammo supply until we could discard them (a concern that was probably wasted, but I could not know that going in).

Much of the success was do to the three unknowns actually taking direction quite well. They all stayed with their teams and held their ground when it was necessary to do so, and none of them wandered off on their own. That was why the Zombies were held off.

Getting to the Sheriff's office did require literally using one of the non-combatants to hold a door so that the Zombies could not get in that room to hit us as we crossed the open area to the Sheriff's office. Once the main body had moved I could throw the executive at the Sheriff's office (start him dashing to it) and keep the rear security myself for a little bit. We got there with no casualties.

It was hard avoiding trying to take the offensive when we got the PS90s (where you could see there was plenty of ammo to start with), but I had non-combatants that had to be protected and gotten out, and it would have been too risky to divide the force to a small guard unit and search and destroy unit.

While I figured out pretty quickly that there were only two teams of Zombies, there were also obviously an infinite number of Zombies. If we "killed" a team, it would simply re-appear, and if both teams attacked the Sheriff's Office at once while I was off with the other team, they might have managed to break in.

The Zombies clearly had some coordination going, i.e., one team would attack from one direction, and after a bit the second team would attack from another direction, hoping that the first attack had distracted the defenders and allowing them to "break in". That is why you have to keep security in all directions as best you can. And also why I thought of the pistol as my reserve of rapid firepower if I needed it.