- Exposure to sunlight
- Fire (lots of it)
- Beheading
- Large doses of holy water
- Wooden stake through the heart
There has to be a better way. Firearms generally do not cut it; while being shot hurts like hell to a vampire, bullets are not fatal.
Unless there is another way. And there may be.
There is a very hard and very dense wood known as lignum vitae. It is hard enough to be used, in some applications, as a striking surface. Steamships once used lignum vitae as a bearing surface for the screw shafts, especially in the strut bearing which is just in front of a ship's screw.
I don't know if a bullet could be made entirely of lignum vitae; probably not very well. It may not withstand the sudden rotational acceleration of going down a rifled bore. Such a bullet may need a half-copper jacket. It might also be too light for long-distance shooting, but that may not be an option. You would be shooting at a target that is roughly four inches in diameter and which you have to infer its location within your target; you're probably not going to be shooting at a thousand yards.
It might be possible to have a bullet which has a lead base, a copper jacket and a lignum vitae nose. Such bullets probably would not be cheap at all to manufacture. There would also have to be some testing on live (if vampires are living) subjects in order to establish the safe amount of wood to have in the round for killing effect.
Odds are, though, that small bullets will not have enough lignum vitae and they may be too difficult to manufacture. The ideal bullet might be a .45-size, or close to it, at least in diameter, so the anti-vampire rifle round might be a .45-70.
Sighting systems usable at night, of course, would be mandatory. Some sort of IR-based system would be ideal, since it would also be useful in distinguishing between warm-blooded (living humans) and cold-blooded (vampires) targets.
I might have to work on this, it could be an interesting story idea.
Update: On bullets.
8 comments:
Aren't silver bullets supposed to work?
Interesting idea. If it wasn't such a pain in the butt to ignite, I wondered how well a bullet of burning magnesium would work. Of course, there was the method used by White Wolf which was bullets that had phosphorus in them.
I thought silver bullets were for werewolves and other lycanthropes?
EB, what if you made an overlength projectile for a 12 gauge? Build one about six inches long, and fire it out of a double barrel. Give it a hollow base so that it flies truer without spin-stabilization.
Since we are in the fantasy realm, this gives you options for buckshot in the case of a zombie invasion, and silver buckshot for the werewolves. You could also use flares in an anti-monster role.
RPG with white phosphorus warhead. This already exists.
Or a lignum vitae warhead. That should be enough wood.
re: IR. If the vamp has recently fed, the image may not be any different than that of a human for a short while. And/or if the vamp is into saunas or hot baths, it may have a heat image that would make positive ID a problem. Would need to keep an eye on the target for a bit to ensure thermal spoofing is not in force. (Humans stay warm, Vamps cool down).
Umm, sometimes I'd like to be inside your head while you're pondering stuff like this.
Apparently the pointy end of a picket fence would do the job just fine, without all the chemicals and bullets n' shit.
Or I bet a guillotine would work too. Hard to bite someone's neck while one's head is rolling downhill.
A 12 gauge shotgun shooting wooden slugs might be just the ticket, but the question is whether that's enough wood even if you use Jeff's oversized projectile. My own thought: you probably want something with a bit more bite. Maybe a rocket-propelled projectile. Crap, just blow up the vampire with an HE rocket-propelled projectile perhaps wire-guided, it probably won't kill him, but he'll be in enough pieces that you can easily approach close enough with a rocket-propelled wooden projectile (think a RPG-7 with a wooden stake warhead) and nail his black evil little heart.
But ooh, now we're in the realm of military weapons, and I lust for this nifty little rocket-propelled incendiary weapon... incinerate the SOB! Yay!
As noted, silver bullets are for killing werewolves.
Part of the idea, Karen, is to not have to get into hand-to-hand range.
RPGs and incendiary rocket launchers are nice ideas, but it'd be better, I think, to have weapons that aren't going to get you thrown in prison for mere possession.
As I mentioned in the post, there will be a need for some testing to determine how much wood should be in the projectile in order to assure a kill. Killing really old vampires takes heavier projectiles; it took obliterating the heart of an ancient vampire with a sharpened 4x4 to dust it.
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