Escaping the Snakebot of Doom

The Snakebot of Doom - now dubbed Jormungandr by the first humans to encounter it and survive - is busy steamrolling New York into rubble, having first nuked the capitols of every member of the Nuclear Club and the continuity-of-government sites of the US, Russia and China with 80Mt fusion bombs, bombarded all larger fixed sites of military or strategic importance (military bases and nuclear weapons caches) in the continental US into rubble with heavy kinetic cluster weapons, and having eaten a 60,000 ton container ship in order to resupply its ammunition bunkerage. A subsequent counter-attack by naval aviation and the remnants of land-based fighter and bomber squadrons has been decisively defeated, with every human weapon, aircraft and most of the pilots in the attack shot down without causing Jormungandr any damage at all.

However, Jormungandr is not actually interested in exterminating humans unless they're a threat, and then will kill only those individuals who pose a threat. Now, a group of eighteen people have survived the crash-landing of their unarmed helicopter on Jormungandr's side even as it is in the process of steamrolling New York City into a gravel driveway. Jormungandr isn't going to stop, but neither is it going to try to kill these humans. Their survival is a matter of indifference to it.

Jormungandr is 446 metres in diameter, weighs 1.486 billion metric tons, has a body that is cylindrical for 7480m, and then tapers down to a point over a further 669m, the tail matching with a similarly shaped mouth. Its armour is made from Tungsten-depleted Uranium alloy plates with a smooth surface coating of Boron Carbide, at the surface appearing to be overlapping scales around five metres long and half a metre thick, much like the scales of a snake. Most importantly to this question, it is driven by shape-memory-alloy 'muscles' that have an operational temperature of around 97°C/207°F, and it has a similar surface temperature.

It is presently rolling sideways up the length of Manhattan at a speed of around 5kph / 3mph.

Of the eighteen people who have crash-landed on Jormungandr's side, one woman has a collapsed lung, one man has a broken femur, and another man has significant internal bleeding. The remainder of the survivors are not significantly injured, and range in fitness from a couple of ultra-fit military types to a few unhealthily obese individuals. Some individuals have good first-aid skills and one of the lightly injured survivors is a general-practise doctor.

It is not possible to climb directly down Jormungandr's sides, since it is large, cylindrical and rotating, however the tapering tail about 3km/1.8mi distant from the crash point is a viable escape point.

It is late January, and a large blizzard struck the previous night, but the morning, while cold enough to freeze water, is sunny with light winds. The crash survivors are mostly wearing clothing generally available to and worn by New Yorkers in such conditions, though while all are wearing some sort of footwear, some had come directly from heated buildings and had left any removable outerwear behind, and are wearing footwear that could be considered business attire.

The question:

Is it possible for the survivors of the crash to escape Jormungandr and return to land? Can they all survive, or is it likely that some will die? If so, who is most likely to survive - or die?

Please don't forget:

• Jormungandr is hot, with a skin temperature of 97°C/207°F, nearly hot enough to boil water, and is emanating vast amounts of heat.

• It is covered with smooth scales a half metre high.

• It is rolling sideways at 5kph / 3mph

• The survivors must travel a linear distance of 3km/1.8mi to the escape point, but this does not account for Jormungandr's rotation, which will make the actual distance greater, inversely proportional to the rate of travel.

• Failure to move quickly enough will result in a fall of several hundred metres, followed by being crushed by a billion and a half tons of rolling doom.

• Human nature will tempt some of the less injured survivors to try to save the more injured members of the party.

• Some members of the party may not be significantly injured but are of sufficiently low fitness that travelling the required distance at the required pace would be highly taxing.

• The environment outside Jormungandr's sauna-like microclimate is below freezing, with lots of snow but no precipitation and light winds.

posted about 7 years ago

Monty Wild‭

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