Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip
I'm after something which makes large urban centres unlivable, but doesn't preclude post war limited occupation, salvaging, and scavenging.
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So why not just say that? How did that happen? Who cares? It's a setting assumption that it did somehow.
Note that vaguely realistic EMP isn't going to be enough. It is simply not all that bad. Even if you did kill everything electrical, blackouts usually don't render cities *unlivable*. They're inconvenient, sure, but cities existed fine before electrification. The transition period may be relatively unpleasant, but it's not going to kill everybody or keep some fraction of the population from living there. Several parts of Puerto Rico have been proving this yet again in these last few months
And realistically you can't kill everything electrical. If it's not plugged in and lacks an antenna, it's virtually immune - generating an EMP pulse that will kill vehicles was something people were hoping to weaponize for a while, but has apparently failed to work well enough to be worthwhile even though modern vehicles are loaded with presumably sensitive microprocessors and you get to deploy your weapon at basically point blank range. Lots of stuff that *is* plugged in but on the far side of a surge protector, or circuit breaker, or fuse, is likely to survive too, that's what this stuff is for after all, and it often works. Even getting enough of a pulse to arc across a turned off switch is pretty challenging.
Killing the electrical grid is also mostly a fantasy. Temporarily disabling it is more plausible, but electrical grids are *designed* to cope with current surges, since they happen all the time. They trip circuit breakers, which takes sections down until somebody goes and resets them all, which might conceivably take a few days, and if you were really unlucky you might have lost a generator or two when the loads vanished and something went wrong with their automatic shutdown, which may leave you somewhat short of peak capacity, but that's about it. Note that almost all electrical grids will have generators that will have *not been in use* when you hit the grid - down for maintenance, used only for peak loads etc., so even if you did somehow miraculously kill everything connected, there's still *some* generating capacity available next week.