Weapons 100+ years after the end?

[tanksoldier]

. Without access to the distribution networks we take for granted, all we have is what's in a day or two walking distance.

Global trade existed at TL3 and was commnlace by TL4.

[acrosome]

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.

[AlexanderHowl]

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).

[FPSlover]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

The best historical rifle round to shoot a PC with is probably the Winchester .44-40, which only does 3d+1 pi+ which averages 16 injury without armor. An up and coming warlord wouldn't be out of his mind to standardize on .44-40 as a relatively inexpensive, controllable round that is sufficient to cause casualties out to 300 yards. The initial guns might even be replicas of the Winchester M1873, though I'd expect a move to bolt actions based on Mauser actions and 10-15 round banana clips as soon as possible.

I'd probably go with most of the troops using Winchester M1873 clones, that are being replaced by Springfield M1903 knock-offs still in .44-40 as the factories produce them. Assault units carry a mix of .44-40 guns and Browning Auto-5s, Mossberg 500s, and/or Remington 870 clones for close range firepower. Elite troops are armed with a hodge-podge of heirloom weapons, tending toward Remington 700s (for sniper types) and AR-15s and AKMs for the warlord's bodyguards - AR-15s have more ammo in the US, but have a dirtier action that is going to cause reliability problems 80 years down the line - with an effort to keep uniform ammo types and if possible weapon types within the same formation.

PCs with heavy steel breastplates (DR7-8) are mostly safe from individual .44-40 shots, though enough fire wear them down. AR-15s and AKMs are still pretty dangerous, even with DR 8, and a sniper with a Remington 700 in .308 will blow through that armor. It gives a nice threat range.

Funny. You took the thought right out of my mouth. Especailly on the upgrade potential of the weapons used. Although they won't be meeting elite/assault units for a bit (they'll be facing conscripts, gangs and bandits for a bit yet), that is a fair point about ammo types. Which was why (as I said in the OP) I originally thought about using the .44-40. It is god to know that while they will be deadly, the .44-40 won't kill them like a .577 Martini bullet would.

Originally Posted by copeab

Worth noting that early Maxim MGs (the first modern MGs) used black powder. And there are the earlier hand-cranked machine guns like the Gatling and Nordenfeldt.

Already taking a look at the Gatling, Gardner and Nordenfeldt. My PC's will probably not be expecting them to be defending key areas. Might be a bit of a surprise for them.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

There is a whole article on this in Pyramid #3/88.

The only thing I would add is that some of the double-action revolvers and howdah pistols from GURPS Adventure Guns might be better choices than Colts in a world of crazy spray-painted, spiked-cycle-driving, die-hard road warriors. The cool kids will have TL 6+ designs with iffy ammunition though!

Taking a look through it now.

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

THIS is the reason. The apocalypse's main problem will not be loss of knowledge or skill, it will be loss of resources. Our global economy allows us access to everything. Without access to the distribution networks we take for granted, all we have is what's in a day or two walking distance. And there's only so much we can salvage.

That is a fair point. Especially with it being 100 years after everything has gone to ****. Doubt that (bar the irradiated cities) there will be much to salvage that wasen't already picked over a generation or two ago.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Now, a lucky warlord could have stumbled on a secret armory (corporate, government, or private), that was forgotten because a biological weapon killed everyone who knew about it. With proper storage, you could have enough weapons and ammunition for a modern infantry division survive for centuries before decay compromised everything. The food and medicine would be worthless, as would the tires and fuel for the vehicles, but the ammunitions, armor, weapons, etc might be functional.

Imagine a party of PCs who finds such a treasure. A recent landslide broke open the outer door, revealing a sealed but unlocked inner door. They open the inner door to the sealed armory and find tens of thousands of prestige weapons with hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition. What will they do with their discovery and who can they trust to pay them a fraction of its value?

Such an idea for how my guy rose to power is very tempting to use (even if it would mean a drastic change to his army depending on how recent the find was). As for the PC's finding such a cache, I doubt any would sell it. The smart ones (or dumb depending on your point of view) would use it to get power for themselves. Such a find would both put them on the map for as power players (or potential ones) and a target (since everyone would gun for them to get the cache). An novel scenario that I may steal for use in a smaller form.

Originally Posted by acrosome

SNIP

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. :)

[tanksoldier]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

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).

Per the OP its been five or six generations. People will have built the tools to build the tools.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

Per the OP its been five or six generations. People will have built the tools to build the tools.

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.

[AlexanderHowl]

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.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by RyanW

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.

That is an area where I differ from many people on this forum. Many gamers seem to imagine collapse as an event followed by progressive rebuilding from a low level (so we get questions about whether they have progressed from flintlocks to percussion caps or simple cartridges). The disasters and system collapses I have studied do not work like that. Instead, decline is a process, as one set of problems causes another system to fail which puts pressure on the stopgap holding a third system together, and the technologies are new ones that make sense under the circumstances. A hundred odd years seems about right for the collapse to hit bottom and for new cultures and technologies to start to emerge.

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.

[AlexanderHowl]

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,

[ericthered]

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.