NationStates

In total, my 101 puppets [in Hot Jambalaya, Sophia's faction where I lived for the full 25-hour duration] were:

37x Military Specialists (including Tinhampton)
9x Intel Specialists
----------------------------
29x Economic Specialists
26x Strategic Specialists

How easily could I have singlehandedly destroyed the Horsemen?

They had 10,668 nations and 1.27m (over one million) shields. Given that you now have to land 400 nukes to destroy a nation, you'll need ([10,668 x 400] + 1,271,117 + 65,507 =) 5,603,824 nukes to make sure that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse really live up to their name. It's an order that's about as tall as Nicole Trunfio's favourite pair of boots and, for understandable reasons, something that nobody achieved. Horsemen were twice as big as the next-largest faction - which is something Crabs of the Apocalypse could also say in N-Day 6 (September 2021).

Anyway, to the math now. Suppose I put all the Mil and Intel specialists to work on nukes, and all the Econ and Strat specialists to work on shields. At 750 production, Mil specs get 375 nukes; Intel specs get 250 nukes; Econ specs get 125 shields; Strat specs get 187 shields.

So, in each ideal 100-minute run, I'd get 16,125 nukes and 8,487 shields. Remember that N-Day lasts for 1,440 minutes (except for April 2017 and September 2024).

Suppose I keep going until 22h30m into the event - i.e. 9:30pm on Sunday. This should give me thirteen-and-a-half production runs. Assuming I haven't used any resources, which is unlikely given that the Deadline Dodgers of the world will notice me long before then, I will have around 217,500 nukes and 114,500 shields.

Divide as appropriate and you get:
- 5,062 nukes per Mil specialist
- 3,375 nukes per Intel specialist
- 1,688 shields per Intel specialist
- 2,524 shields per Strat specialist

However, 220k nukes and 110k shields is not nearly enough. In fact, it's fewer than the number of shields an alt-universe no-haters Hot Jambalaya would have had (we'd have had ~170k, in large part because Vaur Ausgartoprobs is an epic gamer).

5,062 and 3,375 are both nice numbers. 12.5% of 5,062 is 633; 25% of 3,375 is 844 (using N-Day math). So let's say you can destroy eight Horsemen with a Military Specialist and four with an Intel Specialist. On average, each nuker can destroy seven Horsemen.

You'd therefore need 1,524 nukers. If your faction's composition was like my puppets', you'd have around 1,830 shielders - a total of 3,354 nations. This isn't impossible: ANAL, JEFF, KHAN and the famously-disorganised Bikini Atoll all got there. (Deadline Dodgers, with their 1,250-strong membership, were a solid sixth-best.)

But nobody has enough time to run 3,000+ nations during N-Day, so let's imagine you have 120 nations run by 28 people. That makes 3,360 nations, which we'll assume is organised along similar lines (1,530 vs 1,830).

Suppose your nuke-planting starts at 9:30pm, each person targets six Horsemen a minute; and there will be two attacks on 5,334 Horsemen each. That gives you 32 minutes to plant the nukes. It also means each person has to launch around 192 nukes; assuming they can launch 32 per minute and they launch Nuke #1 as soon as they plant Nuke #192, that adds 6 minutes.

Imagine that the Horsemen order an immediate attack on your faction to retaliate. They finished this N-Day with 2.2m nukes, but given how many of them they used, let's call it 3m. Our new-look faction has something like 965 Econ specialists and 863 Strat specialists. (965 x 1688) + (865 x 2524) = 1.63m + 2.18m = 3.81m, so you should be home and dry even if you use around 20% of those shields on previous attacks.

That adds 13 minutes of uncertainty. So let's say at 10:22pm, you launch the first set of nukes and, in kind, completely wipe out the Horsemen's supply. This should get you prepared to juuuuust about pull off a second attack in the 38 minutes that follow - job done seconds before the deadline, in fact.

So it's not impossible, but it would either require a lot of organisation... or a megafaction of equal size.