Making more ammo stuck on a low tech world.

[scc]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

The rules for making stuff with the Factory are on Spaceship 1 p 16. TL6 goods are 4 times as expensive at TL4 as they are at TL6, so .30 caliber ammo that costs $0.8 is going to have an effective price of $3.2 and require $1.5 in materials - you can crack out 5000 in an hour once you get going. That seems absurdly fast to me unless you have multiple assembly lines (and implies you can make a car in few hours...) but even a more reasonable 50-500 rounds/hour means that a day's work supplies you with a reasonable load of ammunition.

Why are you applying these multipliers to the cost?

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Aren't repeating cartridge rifles TL5?

They should already have the powder mills anyway.

GURPS TL are based upon when the western world discovered or developed something, not upon any hardness to actually produce it.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by scc

Why are you applying these multipliers to the cost?

That's right out of Basic p27.

Using it to adjust production time for a higher-tech manufacturing apparatus is nonsensical, though.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by scc

GURPS TL are based upon when the western world discovered or developed something, not upon any hardness to actually produce it.

Though the order in which discoveries are made is not random; an awful lot of discoveries are in the form of "once we have X to play around with, Y probably gets discovered fairly quickly".

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Kfireblade

How hard would it be, realistically, for a high TL character thrown into a low TL world with the proper engineering and chemistry skills to make additional ammo? As I understand it primers are the hardest part of manufacturing new ammo. Assuming the character had access to a large vehicle (SM+7) with the TL 8 Mining and Factory systems from spaceships what would they need to find, and how hard would it be?

There is an issue of Pyramid for the post-apocalyptic setting which has an article on this question.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I think we are looking at a person with twenty required skills to make ammo for an M16...

There's a famous essay called "I, Pencil", that makes the point (or at least claim) that no one on earth knows how to make a pencil. The point is pretty much the same as the thread -- modern manufacturing is built on top of the existence of lots of interconnected infrastructure and global supply chains producing all sorts of intermediate products you don't know about, and that there's no one single person that even knows what all those steps and products and methods are, much less having the skills and time to personally do all the work.

This thread is basically making the same point about rifle cartridges. But you could make the same argument about literally anything produced at TL8. If you want to go into enough detail and back-tracing on all the intermediate steps, everything we make takes a functioning global economy.

While true enough, and such things make for interesting reading, it's not very helpful for the adventure genre with the high-tech pioneer. It's also not really definitive that it's _impossible_ to do without that global economy. That may be convenient and cheap when you do have that network to use, hence it's the only way it's done, but that's not the same as thing as being required. The flip side there is that the tech pioneer is likely to have to do a lot more experimentation and R&D to find ways to make things using what he does have access to, using techniques that were not in commercial use back home (and not in use for perfectly good reasons there). And that does suggest he'll need a lot broader skill set then just for the final product, ideally a polymath of industry.

Or at some point you hit your fictional wall of detail and realism, and handwave it for the sake of getting on with the point of the game. If the story is about tech uplift, then the detail is perfect. If it's about the high-tech super-spy or soldier in the American Civil War or WW I, then maybe that starts to detract from the game.

[ericthered]

How long he has to prepare matters a lot too. If he knows this is what he's going to be doing, he can be extra sure to load up all the stuff he needs into his ship and his library. Whereas if he got stuck here without warning, things will be tougher.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by scc

Why are you applying these multipliers to the cost?

As Ulzgoroth said, it's straight out of Basic. I used the cost factors to scale the production time to take into account the fact that even if you're getting brass, iron, aqua fortis, acid of vitriol, and quicksilver from your TL4 trading partners, you're not getting them in the form, purity, or concentrations that TL6+ manufacturing expects and you're going to have to do some work to refine and purity them.

But if I'm wrong, then each $0.50 5.56mm cartridge requires $0.8 in supplies and you can make 30,000/hour in a TL8, SM+7 Fabricator module.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by ericthered

How long he has to prepare matters a lot too. If he knows this is what he's going to be doing, he can be extra sure to load up all the stuff he needs into his ship and his library. Whereas if he got stuck here without warning, things will be tougher.

Yep

also if he l knows where he's going and what there is there he can further narrow what he need and what he needs to know down!

(but that's getting more into the planned travel back in time scenario and further away from the scenario in the OP)

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

While true enough, and such things make for interesting reading, it's not very helpful for the adventure genre with the high-tech pioneer. It's also not really definitive that it's _impossible_ to do without that global economy. That may be convenient and cheap when you do have that network to use, hence it's the only way it's done, but that's not the same as thing as being required.

And that's why "we can't make X" tends to be nonsense. I have no idea what goes into the paint for the shiny lettering on the side of my pencils, but if I'm making one by hand I probably don't care if I can duplicate the manufacturer's logo. A tool made by charring the point of a sharpened stick isn't very much like a commercial pencil, but it will still leave a carbon trace on a piece of paper a few times, and that may be all I needed that day.

[Kalzazz]

The notion that the limiting factor is the ability to get to materials to the machine and the products away from it, not the speed the machine runs wouldn't surprise me

I've personally dealt with a soil handling machine which stayed idle half the time because it's ability to handle said soil far exceeded the ability of men and trucks to keep up