07-04-2009, 02:40 PM | #41 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
Seconded. Pretty much the entire business of chemical engineering revolves around the far from easy business of scaling up what you can do in a lab so that you can do it in a factory - as with rockets, the science is only a very small part of the whole process.
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07-05-2009, 05:31 AM | #42 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, uk
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
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Once the fertilizers and pesticides have started to run out, then even with these techniques yealds are going to drop noticeably and farming is rapidly start to demand more manpower. Add in restricted or intermittent fuel supplies (or even just cruder, less efficent and lower powered machinery) and this figure will again rise dramaticaly. In a lot of places even as late as the turn of the last century countries using these techniques still had beter than fifty percent of the population engaged in agriculture or suporting activities. And given a population that on paper should only just about be able to support these techniques at all this is the level of development you will see for the generations it takes for the population and infrastructure to recover. Last edited by Frost; 07-05-2009 at 06:46 AM. |
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07-05-2009, 06:08 AM | #43 | ||
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, uk
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
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There is however a very big difference between powering a small workshop requiring a few killowatts of power (or for that matter an 'essential uses only' supply for a village or small town providing intermittent power to a few outfits like the machine shop) and providing continuous power to even a small industrial town at early twenty first century levels. One is a matter of backyard tinkering by a couple of part time mechanics and electricians the other requires large generators, with large perminent staffs and vast support networks just to opperate let alone build. Quote:
Any disaster on a regional scale let a global one that can take down our society will kill a lot of the population and either wreck the infrastructure or at least shut it down for long enough that it won't be possible to restart it. It may well take generations just to build up the nessecary population let alone physicaly rebuild the infrastructure. In the intervening time material culture will fall back, not to pre-agrarian levels but certainly to a condition with many similarities to pre or early industrial levels. While our survivors will have acess to some more advanced technologies, metalic cartridge firearms, small scale electrical supplies and AM radio to give a few possible examples they will still face seriously restricted array of options due to the limitations of population and infrastructure. Large scale technical undertakings of any description (baring a few very limited examples) at greater than TL 4 or early TL 5 levels, be that power generation or chemical manufacture are simply not going to be amongst the options availible. Last edited by Frost; 07-05-2009 at 06:51 AM. |
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07-05-2009, 09:21 AM | #44 | |||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
The key to a post-apocalypse is what happens in the short run. The less you have to rebuild from scratch, the faster you move forward. A plague means you just have a demographic crisis. No direct loss of infrastructure. So don't lose it. Shut down what you can't use cleanly, and come back for it some day. And keep the lights burning.
If you're nuking the population centers, you've got a lot less left to work with, both in terms of population concentrations and intact infrastructure. If you pull a Dies the Fire, you've blown all the hardware away irreversibly and annihilated your population concentrations. But you don't have to worry about guns in that scenario anyway. If the assumption is that, for some reason, all the survivors flee to the countryside and pretend it's 1750 for a couple generations...I want all the first-generation survivors rounded up and shot for treason to the species. Then I want to start building steam locomotives and putting the railways back to work. Quote:
The island of Great Britain will have almost three million people on it. That's half of what they needed the agricultural revolution to sustain. Given the huge technological and hardware jumpstart, hey can work with that. Only tripwire is lack of coal reserves. Quote:
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Your seed drills, iron plows, and threshing machines are going to take work, but they're fairly simple machines and you don't have to make most of the parts. Making steam tractors is bad news, at least for small populations. Steam engines are a good thing to have, but they're going to take lots of heavy metalwork. Maybe you can work around it. We've certainly got plenty of agricultural tractors already, if you can manage to fuel them. That's probably not indefinitely sustainable, since you can't make the parts to maintain them, but it doesn't have to be. One generation will do wonders for your demographic problems. Especially since medicine is another technology that isn't regressing very far.
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07-05-2009, 12:46 PM | #45 | |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
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The Green Revolution brought us genetically altered crops with massive yields and reduced human labor demands for weeding with pesticides. When Monsanto is no longer producing seed stock, that's done. Seeds are hybrids, and cannot be kept as seed for the next year. That will mean virtually no food crops the year after it all goes away. It would take decades to rebuild seed stores with the few non-hybrid heirloom seeds left. If you do a search for "overshoot," Malthusian theories on population growth, etc. Any way you slice it, if for some bizarre reason the doom-and-gloomers get their fantasy come true, it will be the end. Not so much because of the infrastructure damage itself, but because people tend to act irrational when they are hungry. And hungry they will be. For a long, long time. |
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07-05-2009, 06:11 PM | #46 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
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Hybrid seed generally will produce viable offspring, I think, but lose many of the first generation's virtues. How the results compare to 19th century crops, I don't know. Seed supply could definitely be a problem if you can't get usable seed off of the readily available grain types.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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07-05-2009, 08:42 PM | #47 | ||
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
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07-05-2009, 11:22 PM | #48 | |
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Saskatchewan, a place colder than Siberia
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
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Cities, like ours, are resource users and would be the first to fall in such a scenario, as bands of starving hungry people would enter the countryside looking for food. That would lead to the destruction of many of the people who are your knowledgeable agricultural producers which would heighten the cycle. An in the northern hemisphere winter would take care of many of the rest. As for productivity, average yield for wheat here in Canada is roughly 40 to 60 bushels per acre and is not genetically modified, yet. US corn can be over 200 bushels per acre and is heavily genetically modified and would be unusable the next year for the above reasons, related to genetic modifications. The large machinery used would also quickly run down as most farms don't keep hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel on hand to get them through a year. Let us also not forget the previously mentioned social disruption. The pre-1930s non-mechanical production techniques, and the people who understood and could recreate them are now largely dead, no offense, and the literally animal power required also does not exist in sufficient quantities. Therefore agricultural production close to larger centers would collapse quickly in an apocalyptic fashion. Smaller centers would initially do much better than larger ones, the larger the center the harder the fall. NYC 10 million people, hungry, desperate, and as others have pointed out very heavily armed. Dave.
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07-06-2009, 12:01 AM | #49 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
...Yeah, if your apocalypse is 'no one dies, but suddenly there's no more food', then your problems are different, and probably worse, than if there are suddenly much fewer people.
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07-06-2009, 12:11 AM | #50 |
Join Date: Jul 2009
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Re: Guns after the fall of civerlisation
Indeed. A nuclear apocalypse that's more-or-less limited to the big cities is, perhaps ironically considering the iconic nature of it, probably one of the easiest to bounce back from. Small towns would still have their little power generators, tool shops, and food supplies, and so would bounce back a lot more easily than something like Dies The Fire or a plague that wipes out 90+% of the population indiscriminately. Heck, they might even still have the Internet.
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Tags |
economics, firearms, guns, logistics, post-apocalyptic |
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