Guns after the fall of civerlisation

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Presumably they did it at the laboratory level, but that's not quite the same thing. If the process can be economically useful at the workshop level, that's very interesting. Can you give a better link? I'm not getting anything useful out of that one.

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.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I think pre-existing ammo stocks would be good for a couple generations. And where's this largely agrarian population deal springing from? We're never going back to before the agricultural revolution. That gives you good enough productivity to support industry.

If we assume a 95% population die back in the apocalpse and the years that immediately follow, which while it may be high is not impossible for say a plague. Then populations in the western world are going to rainge between hundreds of thousands and the low millions and will be thinly spread at that. In addition transport networks will break down, further agrivating the problem. Agricultural revolution techniques are going to be the only way that a society like that will be able to maintain high technology at all.

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.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by LargePrime

I would like to note that "A machine shop" does not function without 440 AC. If ones post 'civerlisation' world has 440 three phase (Again, not that hard) then it really is not a "post 'civerlisation'" world.

Actualy it probably dosen't even need that. I have seen fairly respectible machine shops that run off a household supply (c220V, 13 amp AC in this case) and didn't see anything baring the welder that you couldn't have been run using water power or even a treddle.

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.

Originally Posted by LargePrime

Again, I question the premise. We are not going back to preagrarian, and we are not going back to preindustrial. We are not going back period. It is simply too easy to go forward again IMHO.

While questioning is fair enough the result is simple. Any significant loss of population will have a negitive impact upon infrastructure and this in turn will limit the availibility of technology.

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.

[Ulzgoroth]

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.

Originally Posted by Frost

If we assume a 95% population die back in the apocalpse and the years that immediately follow, which while it may be high is not impossible for say a plague. Then populations in the western world are going to rainge between hundreds of thousands and the low millions and will be thinly spread at that. In addition transport networks will break down, further agrivating the problem. Agricultural revolution techniques are going to be the only way that a society like that will be able to maintain high technology at all.

NYC will still have almost a million people in the metropolitan area, and more nearby. That's a big, powerful seed population. And initially, transportation is easy, so you can juggle population if you need to.

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.

Originally Posted by Frost

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.

Uh, by 'drop' I presume you mean toward their historical yields, since you're talking about losing what the mid-1800s farmers never had.

Originally Posted by Frost

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.

Many of these techniques take no support. We already have the improved crops and livestock. Crop rotation is well known and adds no labor. The open-field system just isn't coming back. Nor I would say is subsistence farming itself, in general.

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.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Many of these techniques take no support. We already have the improved crops and livestock. Crop rotation is well known and adds no labor. The open-field system just isn't coming back. Nor I would say is subsistence farming itself, in general.

The "improved livestock" benefits from modern veterinary skills, biochemical processes for drugs and supplements, and plentiful food. Plus, we can assume 95% of these animals die off, too. End result is a severe lack of edible livestock.

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.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by safisher

The "improved livestock" benefits from modern veterinary skills, biochemical processes for drugs and supplements, and plentiful food. Plus, we can assume 95% of these animals die off, too. End result is a severe lack of edible livestock.

Most apocalypses go a lot easier on the animals than the humans. If you have one that doesn't, worry about ecological catastrophe before you worry about whether you've got enough livestock. Also, see below.

Originally Posted by safisher

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.

Not the agricultural revolution I'm talking about by a good 2 centuries. That stuff we will probably lose most of, despite biotech having potential to be extremely resilient.

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.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Most apocalypses go a lot easier on the animals than the humans. If you have one that doesn't, worry about ecological catastrophe before you worry about whether you've got enough livestock. Also, see below.

Livestock will be eaten in a food shortage--which is the inevitable result of many PA disasters, since food is not produced in quantities everywhere. Without transportation, no re-stocked Wal-Mart. Most of your livestock will be killed and eaten in even rural areas, leaving precious few breeding animals.

Seed supply could definitely be a problem if you can't get usable seed off of the readily available grain types.

It will be a severe problem. Many types of commercial grains are non-viable as seeds, others produce a much reduced yield, lose their resistance, etc. The end result is that your crops are taking a hit on production beyond the problems of man-power and mechanization. That's if the locals don't eat the seed the first winter . . .

[rogersd]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

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.

Most of the hybrids include a terminator gene to prevent viable offspring. That way the farmers can not save seed from year to year and hurt Monsanto's bottom line. The vast majority of seed stocks is unusable and therefore leads to greater chances of famine. This is especially true in the developed world and most grocery stores have at most a three day supply of goods. After day four the food is nearly gone and the people are getting hungry and restless. This likely means wide spread social breakdown rioting, etc.. If food is still not available things turn really nasty.

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.

[Ulzgoroth]

...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.

[nick012000]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

...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.

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.