simont | Picture this (results)

Last week I posted a lateral-thinking question and promised to follow up with a list of the responses I'd got when I previously ran this question in 1998.

Here were the 1998 answers:

Become the Enemy (Amf)
Build a third fortress inside the inner one (lovelyoliver)
When the Enemy get in, show them a big bomb for which you're holding down a dead-man switch, and strongly suggest they go away again (lovelyoliver)
Call on the power of Satan (lovelyoliver)
‘I'd read that the best weapon was the element of surprise. So I started to beat myself up.’ (drswirly; originally from a Paul Merton sketch)
Perform an inversion with respect to the inner fortress, and then lay siege to them (drswirly)
Cause the inner fortress to levitate and run away to elsewhere (bjh21)
You shouldn't have built weapons that can point inwards as well as outwards in the first place (jaylett)
Fill the gap between the inner and outer walls with glue (stephdiary)
Flee through a trapdoor or tunnel (cowe and Brock, independently)
You still have the tactical advantage that you know their new weapons intimately and they don't (cowe and me, independently).

This year's responses seemed to put much more of an emphasis on telling me I shouldn't have got into the situation in the first place; there were a lot of things like ‘of course you booby-trapped the weapons before retreating’, ‘revoke the firing codes for the weapons’, ‘broadcast the self-destruct codes for the weapons’ and ‘you're doomed anyway so you might as well sit down and have some tea and cake’.

Also various people dealt with the problem by positing facts which simply made it not a problem: you might have run out of ammo, for example, or the enemy might be too stupid to use the weapons anyway. Two people independently pointed out that siege weapons and anti-siege weapons aren't the same thing (the former are anti-structure whereas the latter are anti-personnel) so the enemy might simply not have had much use for my weaponry after all. Notable in this category was damerell who suggested (as he put it) a large-corporate answer: the reason we lost the outer fortress in the first place was because none of the heavy weaponry ever actually worked or it was more dangerous to the operators than to the targets, and so if the enemy tries to use it all we have to do is sit back and have a laugh.

cowe had the new and entertaining idea of hiding all my valuables in one of the outer weapons before retreating to the inner fortress, presumably in the hope that the enemy would get into the inner fortress, ransack it, find nothing and go away again.

mooism suggested escaping by means of an enormous catapult, which I'm frankly astonished nobody thought of in 1998 given that at the time my social group had a running in-joke all about enormous catapults. He also suggested calling on the UN for help, which I suppose is a better bet than Satan. Maybe.

Picture this (results)

no subject