Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
Quite. But the poorer and more backward the part that you live in is, the harder it is to get supplies and components and the harder it is to deliver your hand-mades to local elites, who are fewer, less monied, and harder to reach.
Obviously there is an extreme at which the intelligent, handy, resourceful craftsman struggles to make and sell even steel swords — if the people are true nomads following semi-domesticated herds on foot across a season semi-arid grassland, and families when they meet deal with great caution for immediate exchanges of genetic material, polished stones, and surplus leather. Equally obviously there is a condition of order, prosperity, and wide exchange in which a bloke with a CNC mill can't compete with imports for padlocks and car parts, but faced no such competition turning out excellent P7s and AR-15s, and his neighbour is knowing on his door for parts for a machine to make standard primers and good brass cases.
It seems to me that there is a continuum between those extremes, probably involving an economy that is in general less sophisticated than Sheffield and Manchester about 1800, in which the best and least conspicuous sidearm a shady effective could obtain without deep contacts would be a brace of double-barrelled rifled caplock pistols and a bag of Minié bullets.
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The same continuum bears fairly directly on the relevance of a "shady effective". If the elites are too few, poor, and isolated, they will have very little demand for agents to wield against one another - especially agents who don't have strong personal connections that make them (relatively) known and trustworthy to the prospective employer.