06-21-2018, 07:34 PM | #21 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
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06-21-2018, 07:53 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
Here is a very long prior discussion of this subject.
RPG players tend to try to justify a lack of guns/ammo mostly for setting flavor reasons. But realistically speaking, it isn't that difficult to make them. A modern HVSC round like 5.56mm would be a challenge, but short of that, not really that difficult. If you want an AtE setting with no or few guns then, frankly, you are engaging in hand waving. Which is fine- we hand wave a lot and often- but don't delude yourself. An don't try to argue the issue- it makes you look silly. If there has been a profound population collapse- which is required for the genre actually- then there will be a relatively immense amount of refined metals just laying around. So finding metals won't be much of a problem, at least regarding the needs of gun manufacture. Rifling barrels, which often gets touted by poorly informed laymen as a difficult process, is anything but. There are YouTube videos on how to make a perfectly satisfactory rifling reamer using hacksaw blade teeth. But any little bit of hardened steel can be used. It only takes one machinist to survive and train others, and there will be a heck of a lot more than just one surviving. The Khyber Pass gunsmiths reveal how straightforward it is to make even Cold War-era guns starting with scrap metal. Also, look at the Gingery Books- they are instructions on how to bootstrap an entire metal shop starting with clay (to make a crucible), some aluminum (which will be laying around everywhere) and some scrap steel to make a metal lathe. Any competent machinist can bootstrap a whole metal shop. It's hard to imagine an AtE settlement of over 100 people that couldn't support a full-time machinist. Medieval farmers managed to support a decently sized non-farming population of specialists. If you have mercury, then making mercury fulminate for primers is rather simple- it just has a disturbing tendency to kill those who manufacture it. But there are other options, too. Perchlorates are even simpler to make, much safer, and don't rely upon a mercury supply. (See that first link at the top of the post for a lot of discussion of this.) Guncotton is also pretty simple. More advanced smokeless powders might be a bit harder. But black powder is SO simple that I favor it for a lot, myself. And Victorian-era guns are just cool. I agree that shotguns might be a very common AtE arm, for the reasons others have given- they work fine with black powder, are relatively tolerant of substandard metal quality, have loose tolerances, and use easily reloadable shells. Heck, new hulls could be made with brass bases and waxed cardboard.
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 06-21-2018 at 08:07 PM. |
06-21-2018, 08:24 PM | #23 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
Waxed cardboard would be fairly rare 100 years AtE, and brass is difficult to make without zinc (though you could salvage it from antiques or musical instruments).
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06-21-2018, 08:53 PM | #24 | |||||
Join Date: Oct 2017
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
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Yeah, I'm not one of the mind that there are few to no guns post-end (I know enough about them to know otherwise). But you do make a fair point that with the right set of skills, materials and teachers, one could make a lot of weapons (of fair quality) in a short period of time. And I do agree with you. Victorian era weaponry is cool. :) Last edited by FPSlover; 06-21-2018 at 08:57 PM. |
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06-21-2018, 09:32 PM | #25 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
Per the OP its been five or six generations. People will have built the tools to build the tools.
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06-21-2018, 10:03 PM | #26 |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
Realistically, five or six generations on, it shouldn't look much like what most people think of when they think post-apocalypse. Unless there is some ongoing or recurring disaster that keeps everything down, that's a lot of time for recovery. Most projects that don't depend on microscopic precision (e.g. TL8 integrated circuits) can be done out of a decently equipped garage workshop, though not with industrial throughput... at first.
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. Last edited by RyanW; 06-21-2018 at 10:06 PM. |
06-21-2018, 10:21 PM | #27 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
The problem is population and resources. If you do not have a minimum population of 10 million people within a close trade network, you probably cannot sustain a TL 5 civilization. Without petroleum fuels, you probably cannot sustain a TL 6 civilization without inventing completely new energy technologies. You can have all of the knowledge in the world, but you are stuck at TL 4 with TL 8 artifacts without population and resources.
If you do have both, you do not have a post-apocalyptic story, you have the story of a new civilization. The ecosystem has recovered, humanity is regaining its civilization, and the mutants have been pushed beyond the edge of civilization. Raids become battles and battles become wars because war never changes. |
06-22-2018, 01:58 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
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AtE is specifically set in the parts of the setting which are wasteland not civilization. Parts of Europe and China were very civilized and lawful in 1850, that did not mean that there were not people fighting over women with matchlocks and swords in other parts of Eurasia.
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature |
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06-22-2018, 05:37 AM | #29 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
Let us imagine an AtE scenario where civilization ended due to NBC warfare. The initial nuclear exchange would have killed 20% of humanity (15,000 nuclear weapons killing an average of 100,000 people each) while the secondary effects would likely kill 80% of the survivors of the nuclear exchange within the next week (mostly from fallout, infections from burns, radiation weakened immune systems, etc). The starvation starts setting in within a month because the distribution networks for food are gone and the majority of the store shelves are empty, killing 50% of the survivors of the secondary effects. Then the nuclear winter starts getting bad...
The biological and chemical weapons just add to the misery, though the chemical weapons can poison the land for centuries and the biological weapons can survive in the population for generations. By the time that nuclear winter ends, there might be 80 million humans left alive on the Earth, the majority of whom lived in the wilderness and survived off forestry, gathering, and hunting during the nuclear winter. Of course, not every group will have survived at equal levels. The Europeans, Chinese, and Indians will have died in massive numbers because their dense populations would have made them more vulnerable to each of the consequences, so they would be reduced to 0.5% of their previous population. Conversely, the Australian Aborigines of the Outback, the San of the Kalihari Desert, and the Twa of the Congo might have only lost 50% of their population because they live far from major urban areas and have low population densities (the changing climate might actually even benefit them). The result would be that a large number of very low population ethnicities might end up being very important a century after the end. The survivors would face the longterm effects of the NBC weapons, which would hinder population growth among any group that attempted to penetrate the former urban areas. While the groups that stayed in the deep wilderness would likely have growing populations, their population growth would be limited by the lack of agricultural and medical infrastructure, meaning that overall population would likely only double in the first century AtE. The maximum population that existed would likely be 160 million a century AtE, and I doubt that the tech would exceed TL 4 with TL 8 artifacts, |
06-22-2018, 07:33 AM | #30 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Weapons 100+ years after the end?
I believe one of the conceits of most post-apoc settings and stories is that radiation or other environmental hazards prevent trade. Indeed, in many cases, they prevent economic activity for quite some time. A large number of them start with a protagonist emerging from a bunker into a world where the radiation levels are finally safe. At least, they're safe in several areas. Their are a few people who have somehow managed to stay alive despite the radiation, and that's where the original mutants come from. So its already several decades in the future before people start coming out of hiding. And I think the Genre is really focused on that moment: when people come out of the bunkers, find out what's happened in the last 30 years, and start trying to rebuild civilization. We've troped it up and added cinematics, but that's the situation the genre came from.
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