Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
"Cheap to manufacture" is a slippery target.
Historically the flintlock rifle displaced most everything else because it could be repaired (and copied!) by village blacksmiths, so I think that's the lowest level target - a tolerably accurate firearm that can be manufactured by craftsmen who probably aren't skilled enough to make a sword or other fancy pre-gunpowder weapons.
The issue with bolt action rifles isn't so much the gun - they need tighter tolerances than the flintlocks, but if your society has machine shops at all it can make useful numbers of them easily enough - it's the supply of cartridges which are rather intricate chemical and metallurgical machines themselves.
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I agree with this completely for manufacturing new firearms. However, remember that AtE assumes that the vast majority of the population died. This means, depending on the setting (such as North America or any other area where there are a relatively high number of guns per capita) and reason for the "end", there might be a LOT of guns and ammo left lying around that would take a long time for the surviving population to deplete. This point was made in a thread I started back in April
here where I asked a fairly similar question. That said, if in your setting ammo was depleted or not particularly widely available in your area, flintlocks might be your warlord's best bet. If this were not the case, then you would probably have a fairly large supply of "standard" caliber ammunition and weapons such as 9mm, .45, 556/.223, 7.62x51/.308 or 7.62x39, possibly 30-06, etc. Shotguns, both shot and slugs, could also be very popular given the fact that shotgun shells would be fairly easy to manufacture and tolerances on shotguns are typically less strict than other firearms.