In a lot of post-apocalyptic media you see people fighting each other with guns and swords and shit like that. But what do you think, realistically, combat after the fall of modern society would look like?
I mean clearly, for a while, you'd have guns being pretty prevalent. And certain popular guns have large supplies of surplus ammo and parts, so they would continue to exist for a while. But without manufacturing and industrial gathering of raw materials, the supplies would dwindle.
Would humanity be fighting with left over machetes or re-curve bows and hand made arrows? Would we manage to get enough manufacturing power back together to make bullets before our supplies ran out? Would we be fighting off raiders with spears made of sharpened pipe?
We'd likely revert to flintlock weapons, as the ammunition is just simple lead balls in paper cartridges. Repeating firearms aren't really practical without percussion-sensitive primers like mercury fulminate, which are almost certainly outside of an average Joe's ability to synthesize. A fairly organized faction with access to books and lab supplies might be able to, though.
Asher Wright
Would black powder be easy enough to manufacture for any fire arms? I would think it would require some sort of access to materials that aren't easily acquired.
Aaron Murphy
Black powder I super easy to make lad.
Caleb Watson
>manure >charcoal >sulphur if you can get your hands on that you can make gunpowder, basically, any community with a garden centre has everything they need
Alexander Sanchez
Just make sure you set down the rule that all piss is never wasted and collected in the community you setup. Sulfur would be about the hardest thing to find and it is not really rare.
Nolan King
sulphur's also the ingredient you need the least of, about 11% by weight if memory serves
Nathan Howard
Things you need to make black powder: 1) excrement 2) sulfer 3) charcoal
You use the excrement to make potassium nitrate, mix with sulfur and charcoal, and you've got black powder
Charles Howard
You can make primers from match sticks dude.
And there is enough ammo around for a long time.
Nathan Sanchez
You've got about the worst black powder you can possibly make, something that wouldn't propel the lid off a five gallon bucket assuming you could get it to light in the first place. Your best bet for finding KNO3 is from a hardware store. It's called stump remover.
Andrew Gomez
What process would you use to achieve air float particle size of charcoal without flash igniting it and blowing yourself up?
Ayden Barnes
Guns. Post-apocalypses where everyone falls apart into roving bandit gangs are implausible. Realistically people will band together and make new societies, and the existing supply of weapons will last long enough for them to get their infrastructure back together and make new ammo and spare parts.
Jacob Young
>I mean clearly, for a while, you'd have guns being pretty prevalent. And certain popular guns have large supplies of surplus ammo and parts, so they would continue to exist for a while. But without manufacturing and industrial gathering of raw materials, the supplies would dwindle. Given the stockpiles of ammo in military armouries, warehouses, and the prevalence of reloading (at least in America) you would most likely see people get to the level where they can produce new (if subpar) ammunition before they run out.
Julian Murphy
you add water before grinding the mixture together and dry it afterwards
Ian Collins
So close, yet so far.
James Ward
Match heads, not match sticks. They have to be strike anywhere matches
Caleb Carter
>sharpened pipe? Car parts, the steel on them is superior to a lot of medieval weapons.
youtu.be/aElI3Doa8mE youtu.be/X-I5RjodS80 Can't stress how easy to make and practical slings are. They are very cost-effective and can launch many kinds of projectiles. This includes staff slings.
The other projectile coming back could be the javelin. Against an unarmored human, a fire-hardened wooden javelin is enough.
youtube.com/watch?v=MpzrIL5p16U This shows some level of firearm artesanal production is viable, but mining raw materials and making metal parts out of them is another thing that I can't really say. It probably would be half crafting new stuff, half recycling pre-apocalyptic objects. The end results would very wildly in looks, quality, mechanism and century. Some would be made of pipes.
I guess crossbows would be more common than bows because they are easier to learn, can be kept cocked and if there is no local archery tradition to derive from. Even a common bow fixed to a wooden stock already helps, like chinese did with nomad composite bows for their troops to use. Bolts are also easier to craft than arrows.
Parker Perry
I imagine it depends on the apocalypse. That said, I can easily see descendents of the AK being used for a long ass time as the core mechanisms for a weapon. Primer can be made though its a notch and likely not seen outside some serious powers.this all said muzzle loading weapons likely will be the most common at the end of th day.
Jace Stewart
youtube.com/watch?v=sIhGCRIQnCA Guns are really, really not hard to make, and even then, the hardest part is a good magazine. Reloading spent cases is also already a hobby that a lot of people take part in, and humanity wouldn't run out of bullets, powders, and primers for a long time. Sure, it might be fun to try to make a setting where technology exists but is rare mixed with old fashioned medieval fighting, but it just isn't realistic. You can't get rid of knowledge that easily.
Adam Lopez
Ak's will not function with black powder. Low peak pressure, lots of smoke, and lots of fouling will all contribute to auto loading weapons dying a quick death once the industrial processes necessary to producing smokeless go away. You are much more likely to see a Henry lever action or a mossberg pump shotgun going strong after the apocalypse than an AK. There are a few auto loading pistols that can handle black powder, namely ones chambered in .45 acp. Good luck with anything else, and I pray for your sake you went with stainless.
Gabriel Butler
You over estimate the availability of powders and primers and don't take into account the level of manufacturing that churn out ammunition by the millions of rounds daily. Ammunition manufacturers do not waste money by making more ammo than they can sell. Stores do not stock more product than they can move. The only people stockpiling ammo are preppers and militaries. In a world ending calamity, that ammunition is going to be expended quickly. This is likely a world war event that manages to drag every nation into a simultaneous ground war. An event large enough to kill industry will absolutely kill knowledge. How do you think the dark ages happened? Gun powder and primers will be some of the first expendables depleted as they require specialized manufacturing to produce. Home mode alternatives are possible, but not of the quality required to function modern automatics.
Cooper Butler
>An event large enough to kill industry will absolutely kill knowledge Not a chance, these days. We have these wonderful things called 'printed textbooks' which I am told contain this 'knowledge' of which you speak.
John Kelly
As long as you have 5.56x45mm and stamping presses you're good to go
Chase Bennett
There were books before the dark ages, friendo. When 90% of the population is exterminated and humanity is facing an existential threat, knowledge will be lost. When survival means foraging, hunting, and forming tribal societies, we will be lucky if literacy rates don't drop to less than 1 percent of the surviving population. Imagine the number of orphans whose parents have been killed due to what ever event. Imagine the number of people who will grow up having never opened a book because why would their guardian take the time out of fighting for their lives to open one up? There are parents RIGHT NOW who don't read to their children and society is perfectly fine.
This is all disregarding the fact that outside of large cities, libraries are failing. Hard copy books have been on the decline for years, especially reference material. There will be entire populations whose only access to books will be a 1200 square foot building with more children's picture books than detailed instructions on how to cold forge, harden, ream, and rifle a barrel. I challenge you to go to any city or suburb with less than 50,000 people and find a single book on manufacturing ANYTHING with enough detail to create a complete product within 10 miles.
Asher Smith
You forgot the bolt, trigger group, springs, and barrel. None of those can be stamped. Good luck with any accuracy past ten yards sending 5.56 down a smooth bore, a round already known for being incredibly under stable and requiring an extremely fast twist rate. Also, have fun blowing your hand off when your out of spec cast bolt shears a locking lug and the 62,000 psi peak pressure of a 5.56 round detonates essential in your hand.
Jason Ortiz
between groups of survivors? whatever weapons they were lucky enough to find. they'll straggle around with a pipe and maybe a gun if they have one. if you start with bullets, improvising a gun wouldn't be too hard (pipe shotguns, zips, the like), but manufacturing ammo would be the harder issue, and a bad round will ruin your gun. if you really had to make a ranged weapon, a crossbow would probably be the first one that comes to mind if you don't have ammo
at the scale of factions once you have your food/shelter situation sorted out you have more time to focus on other things,like defense/medicine. i'd say it's safe to assume that an organized faction has attracted somewhat skilled people inside it that could assist in such (chemists, survivalists, machinists, paramedics, carpenters, anyone that can tell the less skilled people what they need to do)
Bentley Hernandez
10% of the population is over 700 million people. And what apocalypse? You're making assumptions on the outcome of something that has not happened yet and automatically assuming everyone is going to end up a mindless brain-dead savage just because you don't like how other people do things >We will be lucky if literacy rates don't drop to less than 1 percent of the surviving population According to whom? You? You're making up the specifics of this so called apocalypse as you go along and all you're gonna end up doing is moving the goalpost to try to counter whatever someone says. >outside of large cities, libraries are failing. >[citation needed] And even then, I can find something even better- people who already know how to do those things, because they're not Starbucks employees, office drones, or the type who wears pants around the ankles. The majority of your post is you bitching about people because you think you should be able to dictate whether they read to their children, or because you think that they're just dumb inbred hicks for whatever reason.
Kayden Wood
Gunpowder is easy to make, but isn't as high yield as modern chemical cocktails needed for proper bullets. That isn't the bottleneck. Bottleneck in bullet production isn't chemicals, but casings. Casings require a lot of work to make, and once you got em, the work to assemble them with the explosive charge is a lot of work.
You would think so. But then you realize that 1000 men, with 6 shot weapons, would spend at the least 1.200.000 bullets for a year of active gun shooting. Gunpowder storages will run dry for any larger mass mobilization, so unless the civilization breaker is nuclear war decimating infrastructure, population is high enough to spend billions of bullets within just a few short years.
>Printed textbooks >Textbook has schematics, but is designed for use with CNC machines >Finding CNC machines post global civilization Plz
Juan Ortiz
Yeah, solid high carbon steel just turns to dust when people don't touch it often, right?
Levi Parker
High quality weaponry would dissapear in ten years, durable guns would last for a half of a century, and I'd imagine that in the event of some supervirus killing a high proportion of people--we'd stay at a wild-west level of weapon tech for quite a while since it doesn't require a power grid
Cameron Sullivan
The lake city missouri plant can produce over 4M rounds of small arms per day, with a yearly output of over a billion rounds. I wouldn;t put it past the US military to have at least 5 billion rounds stored "just in case" around the country at bases and such. That's not even counting state police forces, militias, private producers, etc.
Lucas Torres
Funfact people, rifled weapons have existed since the 1400s, if an apocalypse occurs and mankind no longer can rely on factories, it's going to be become a valuable skill to understand how to manufacture things we take for granted, firearms included. We also have all sorts of fancy machines and tools to help people make shit these tools, like lathes, presses and CNC machines. People will manufacture rifled barrels, sears, bolts, everything you need for a firearm, you just won't get the crazy high quality ultra precise sub 0.5 MOA barrels like we have these days.
Henry Hill
Metal suffers fatigue and rust. Simple parts can be manifactured so long you can salvage and recycle existing metal. So you get to the point where there is a difference between the durable good, the guns with the good ammo, and post war reproductions that is a lot worse in every single way. Its also why roving bandit bands are unlikely to exist: They will run out of ammo at some point,
What you mention is a yield of 4m rounds per day. Of different calibers. With a material storage of maybe a week, so once the apocalyptic event happens: Maybe at best, the plant will be able to produce 30 million rounds, and then run out of supplies. But there is a even bigger issue: Scarcity doesn't hit until there is sign of scarcity, which means storages of ammo will be severely dented before scarcity is recognized, and rationing or training is changed to deal with the issue. So effective ammo storages might be 1/4 of what the actual numbers are. Thats also assuming things like Suppressive Fire has to go, to have ammo scarcity.
Levi Davis
>Metal suffers fatigue and rust So you mean your apocalypse scenario you keep throwing around as truth is well over 200 years in the future then? Because functioning antique weapons from the 1800s and before are still around and work quite well. Modern firearms would last just as long, if not longer thanks to our wonderful metallurgical processes. Just look at all the surplus Mosin Nagants we have, rifles that have been sitting in storage for the better part of 60-70 years at this point and function perfectly. Firearms don't magically decay unless they're in adverse conditions, and there are massive, massive stock piles of guns all around the world controlled by the military and sometimes private collectors.
Carter Sanchez
Unless the collapse is brought about by some magical nonsense bullshit that kills 99% of people and only leaves retards alive, like your standard zombie apocalypse, society isn't going to utterly collapse to a point where you only have wandering scavengers left. At worst, it'll collapse to town communities and city states. And having a bigger community means you can have specialized workers and a lot more knowledge retained. Specialized workers mean that there'll absolutely be gunsmiths and people making ammo. It'll be a a slower process and you'll probably see barely any half or fully automatic guns, but the concept of the gun is too good and too easy to replicate to ever go away again.
Nicholas Hill
Fully automatic firearms are actually easier to make than semi-automatic weapons. You'll definitely see a lot of full auto only machine guns, just like you'll see plenty of manual action weapons. Self loading select fire weapons will be rare, and probably highly prized.
Kayden Bennett
I think, depending on how hard we fall, we may want to keep in mind how we will lead our descendants to not just the answers, but the process of how we came to those answers. That way they aren't just empirically copying what we left behind, but they learn why and it works. That way they can advance without being held back by the idea "This is the only way to do it" and will be able to advance and adapt with new knowledge.
Jaxon Hernandez
I don't think you'd see them for difficulty of manifacture, but because of ammo scarcity. If a dude is making your ammo by hand, you don't want to go and blow through a few hundred rounds in a minute.
Ethan Evans
global stockpiles of firearms and ammunition are ridiculously huge
and it's not like a cartridge is some kind of advanced technology either
Jose Ortiz
That's only true with cased ammunition. Brass WILL wear out and fuck steel case. Black powder is stupid easy to produce though, we'd probly fall back to somewhere near civil-war era levels if infrastructure never recovers.
Joshua Martin
Well I mean, depends so much on the type of apocalypse that it's hard to say why. But even with scarcity I can see people doing it anyways, because people can be dumb and because of the scare factor and CQB capabilities of a weapon. In a likely apocalypse scenario, there will probably be some form of production line to manufacture cartridges if not outright semi automated machinery. So the bottle neck would probably be non-fouling powder and primers, both of which would probably be manufactured in similarly large amounts.
Christopher Brown
Stuff will endure, if: 1. Parts are replaced 2. Maintenance is lacquer is applied properly 3. They aren't used until they are broken
So what will happen is the crossroad between durable and non durable designs, as spare parts get scarce or the quality degrades from lack of Industrial Mass Refined Steel. But that isn't the kicker. Maintenance is not the kicker either.
The kicker is that there is a finite amount of bullets, that requires Industrial Scale Production to have its quality and power. And bullets are spent on a massive scale, and most nations doesn't have a years supply of the needed tools for war. So ideally, you recycle the casings, because their quality would be superior. But that brings us to the next bottleneck: Gunpowder isn't complex, but high power gunpowder IS complex. So you suddenly go from 500J bullets, to 400J, maybe even with backsides such as gunpowder fog. But once the casings can't be recycled anymore, you run into another issue: You might not be able to make high power larger rounds, because the casings are no longer of the quality needed to withstand use.
But remember: The idea is "guns are scarce in post apocalyptica". City states allows that to some lesser degree, because it limits trade and industrial scale expanse. So you can't field impressive guns due limited access to metals, chemicals and scale of industry. And every population decimation makes the problem worse. I get that underestimating how insane Industrialization is, is a good normal meme, but seriously, there is many things that are not possible without industrialization and scale of production.
Jackson Thompson
Well yeah, but the likelihood of such a massively damaged and non recovering infrastructure is really low, and as much as you say "Fuck steel case" now, in a desperate scenario like the apocalypse you know people are gonna use the fuck out of it anyways. Not to mention it's not like the tools to manufacture new brass would suddenly up and vanish.
Kevin Wilson
>parts are replaced >maintenance and "lacquer" You're straight up fucking wrong here, parts only need to be replaced if they're broken, which is a moot point, and any weapon in storage is already prepped for long term storage. Even then, weapons without much preparation for long term storage can last, since they're built to be resistant to wear thanks to processes like bluing. In normal use, yes, you need to maintain your firearm every so often, but that's not gonna stop thanks to apocalypse. And why do you act like nobody is gonna make small scale factories to help produce shit, infrastructure doesn't straight up disappear or become unsalvagable if it's busted, people will build it back up and you know damn well if some thing's important they're going to ease the process for making it.
Levi Perry
Brass metal stock would though, as would most means to transport it. Also I'd say that simpler actions are roughly equal in difficulty to produce. Pump/lever/etc mechanisms might be easier to produce than a sturdy automatic with decreased metallurgy and precision milling options. Big heavy hand-operated block vs. roller or something is obvious but blowback.... well thats simple but still depends on reliable standardized ammo which depends on reliable standardized powder AND metals and that's gonna be tough to make NEW.
I think most of these things would end up together though, not like replacing it. Obviously there's going to be stockpiles that could last centuries but anyone could shit out a working single-shot gun in a garage with scrap metal and some stuff like breech guns are an obvious minimal improvement.
Dylan Davis
>printed textbooks >There were books before the dark ages, friendo. You mean there were incunabulae literally five hundred years before the western invention of movable type? Holy shit, alert the historians!
David Gutierrez
Metallurgy might go away, but we'd still have precision milling. Lathes and CNC machines also don't disappear. I can agree on the brass being difficult to source, which is probably why we'd move to steel case. The biggest problem with making repeaters wasn't really metallurgy, but rather the manufacturing of the more intricate parts and the lack of cased ammunition.
Jaxon Turner
Yeah I guess you could even pot metal one off recycled cases. Not sure what's available for primers but I'm sure there's something if you've got the powder. Hell even electric ignition isn't out of the question in post-apoc. Repurposed piezo-lighter/oven-starter sparkers are always plentiful.
As for intricate parts they're not all heavy load bearing shit and you can always just make everything heavier & bulkier.
Dominic Collins
Realistically post-apocalypse wouldn't kill off industrial production. It would just set it back to pre-computer less automated time for a while. Then again not all CNC machines and the like would just disappear, so communities having electricity and those would be still manufacturing modern quality firearms. Then again whole breakdown of society and everything reverting to barbarism in post-apoc settings is inherently unrealistic itself, but it's fun, so there's nothing wrong with that. In fact realistic post-apoc would be quite boring (would be more akin to 1984 dystopias and/or rural 19th century living depending on setting) compared to fantasies of Mad Max barbarians on wheels and the likd.
Wyatt Thomas
Good luck finding matches 10+ years after a total societal collapse. Particular enough of them to manufacture a reasonable amount of ammunition with.
Maybe if large societies survive, but if it's your Walking Dead style apocalypse where no groups over 100 people survived, matches are going to be gone rapidly, both from people using them because your average first worlder has zero idea how to make a fire without them and due to warehouses and stores being busted open and looted, even if the looters somehow left behind whole pallets of matches, being in an unsealed warehouse for a couple of winters will pretty much guarantee they'll be worthless.
I agree it'd mainly be black powder with pre-collapse centrefire shit being restricted to prestige weapons for warlords and their bodyguards. Average Joe will have a shitty flintlock/matchlock knocked up in a improvised forge.
Blake Morris
>parts only need to be replaced if they're broken Or exposed to rust. Or metal fatigue. > And why do you act like nobody is gonna make small scale factories to help produce shit My point, which is the core point: Scale and quality decreases without access to industrial production.
I.E Modern ammo was invented in the early 1800s. But without industrial production, it couldn't be produced of a significant scale, and was mostly a dead beat until industrial scale was applied to it. So once Industrial Production goes, you don't have a effective manner to replicate Percussion Cap Bullets. So: 1. Lower quantity 2. Weaker gunpowder 3. Weaker casings Sure, pre industrial gunpowder is impressive, but its no WW1 permanent artillery fire.
Matthew Gray
>1000 man standing army. >During an apocalypse.
The amount of people who will be regularly using guns will be a much smaller percentage of the population, and the overall population of any community will be much smaller than it is now. A standing army of 1000 riflemen would be an unimaginable luxury until significant re-industrialization has occurred.
War in this society would probably be a handful of assholes with guns, fighting on behalf of feudal lords who have horded more guns and ammo than they know what to do with. The vast majority of the population will be farmers.
Anybody who tries to turn too many of those farmers into riflemen too quickly will have a famine on their hands, more devastating than any enemy invasion. And anybody who tries to train these men part time as reservists will quickly run out of ammo. Gun hoarders will be sitting on their hordes, protecting the local farmers from other gun hoarders in exchange for food, and sending their most aggressive sons to die in a vain attempt to steal somebody else's ammo horde. Stockpiles of Semi automatic weapons can sustain feudalism for much longer than homemade black powder.
Nathan Price
>rust >fatigue It's a real good thing they're extremely resistant to those sort of things. You know that an antique weapon is worth the most if it's got 100% original parts correct? Even then, fatigue doesn't make a gun worthless, just a little bit less reliable if it's something like recoil spring or the sear. And fine, I'll conceded without industrial production, it'd be extremely difficult, but not impossible to manufacture cased ammo. But it's difficult to justify that all industrialization is completely gone in the apocalypse. Maybe immediately after the apocalypse, but in that case ammo and weapon stockpiles are gonna be full to the brim.
Jason Ortiz
>A standing army of 1000 riflemen would be an unimaginable luxury In what manner? If premodern armies is to go by, they are going to be segregated by quality. So maybe 100 pre war rifles. 200-300 worn/repaired pre war rifles And the rest is using post war rifles, with all the reduction in quality you get from not industrialization. And thats for 10.000, thats not a big army for a host of city states.
Noah King
Zombie (or viruses in general) post-apoc is a whole different beast than your usual post-apoc because there's active apocalypse going on killing people and preventing rebuilding. In a normal (nuclear, meteorite, supervolcano etc.) you wouldn't have that problem and large societies are likely to survive. Hell, in such cases there's likely entire countries who only got after effects (radiation, climate change) of the apocalypse rather than being directly affected.
Aaron King
I should add, that this is what most (judging by land area) of post-apocalyptic america would look like. Results may vary by country and state. American gun hoarders are planning on becoming Feudal lords. Not all of them will succeed, but I expect the political situation to stabilize around them before they run out of ammo and get stabbed to death with pitchforks by angry farmers.
Premodern armies are limited by food. Those city states will be dependent on agricultural techniques that might not survive the apocalypse, particularly if it includes some sort of environmental catastrophe as well. Assuming any form of agriculture is still possible, it's probably going to be a LOT less efficient than we are used to. 10,000 might be very large for a post apocalyptic city state. And such a city state would probably have less than 100 full time warriors, each of which would probably have the pick of the litter when it comes to pre-collapse weapons, and the combined ammo hordes of thousands of idiots who thought bullets were more important than canned food.
If the farmers have any weapons for self defense at all, it's because 100 of the most aggressive men (and maybe some really butch women) with the best guns still in existence allow them to keep them. They probably also don't have much time to practice using them very well, and if they leave their homes for longer than a single season, everybody starves to death. That's feudalism. Fewer men doing more fighting while everyone else is more concerned with making more food until the population gets large enough to support other forms of specialization.
Owen Smith
I personally own a shotgun from 1905 and it still shoots modern ammo just fine. I also own couple of 1890s revolvers that still shoot fine too with black powder ammo. Guns are pretty durable stuff really.
Nathan Walker
>If the farmers have any weapons for self defense at all Please don't confuse laborses, farmlords, and farmers. And please don't think that "firearms are the great equalizer", because thats also a stupid meme. Every "estate" basically where forced to have a few firearms in common law, as early as 1500. > And such a city state would probably have less than 100 full time warriors 100? Try like 10-15 at most. Even USA today doesn't really have that many "full time warriors", since there is only so so many generals you can have. Segregation by class/heritage is also a good topic, since no mass production means no standardization for quality firearms. The lower class of a fielded army might not even use chemically fueled guns, but Air Rifles, but they will still use guns.
You also don't showcase that you understand what training is, or the mentality that fosters training via conscription. Or how training via Air Guns. Or how waging wars work, since they are a permanent facet of feudalism. You understand that farming is stupidly manpower intensive, but not how mortality rates forces that into stable no export of manpower.
Jeremiah Martin
...
Jaxon Moore
>casings The current world supply of casings would last a fucking long time with reloading. They're also hardly magic to make.
Jaxon Garcia
>le fredumb murica xD boy I'm glad redditors know this joke never got stale after almost a decade
Easton Ortiz
>durable guns would last for a half of a century I have two firearms that are over 100 years old that I shoot regularly. Steel frame guns last a very, very long time.
Brody Martin
>The current world supply of casings would last a fucking long time with reloading. No recycle? Maybe 2 and a half year of Global Warfare. Not a long time. You underestimate how insane Mass Production is, for a war drug.
Owen Morris
If the apocalypse only involves people shooting each other, it's not an apocalypse. Supply won't even be interrupted.
The kind of thing that leads to a "post-apocalypse" scenario most likely won't leave lots of people around to use the monster stockpiles of bullets. The survivors will have everything they need for quite a while.
Joshua Robinson
>American gun hoarders are planning on becoming Feudal lords. That's a big ol' generalization there pal.
James Smith
>not having the ar/k/ive on a laptop in a watertight lead box
Easton Allen
You raise a lot of good points, but I'm not sure you understand the point I was making. I was saying wars would be common, but waged by a very small minority of the population, who would therefore have access to the best weapons. I'm not here to showcase anything, only make a very specific point.
When I say full time warriors, I mean people who train more intensively than marksmanship practice every Sunday, and who can afford to be away from home for longer than a season without causing a famine. When i said 100 out of 10,000 I was making a very sloppy estimate because I really have no idea how efficient agriculture will be after an unspecified Apocalypse. I do however know that this kind of (Sociopath who is mostly good with weapons and not much else) person makes up less than 10% of almost any society that has developed some form of agriculture. These people are almost always dependent on the other roughly 90% of society in order to not starve.
Now, the "Guy who doesn't want to fight but can if he has to" is also important. But I don't think they will have access to semi-automatic weapons post Apocalypse, nor do I think there is much strategic value in sending them on offensive wars. It's mostly industrial society that puts them on the front lines.
This is one of the points i have been trying to make. America has a lot of guns and bullets, and an Apocalypse would destroy humans faster than it would destroy guns. The Limiting factor of any gun war will be manpower not firepower.
The ones who don't might not live long enough to say otherwise. An apocalypse is a great generalizer, or in this case feudelizer. Same diff really.
Xavier Rogers
Without talk of firearms, let's say that that knowledge has been lost, and we have to revert back to more primitive ways: how many people in the world would be able to blacksmith well enough to make swords, chainmail, spears, etc.?
Jason Robinson
an extremely small number of people. though acting as if the knowledge to make firearms is lost some how, it's extremely likely that the knowledge for blacksmithing is lost along with it as well.
Nathan Carter
??? You might field 1% or 1 permille or your population as a army. A even smaller number of that, is going to be actual 100% full time soldiers. The rest will basically be war conscripts, using it as a chance to climb the social ladder.
So basically: Weapons usually get divided into 3 qualities: 1. Higher quality, which in this case is pre war or higher end special made copies 2. Normal quality, which would be partial armor set, stuff like what was found in Mass Graves at Wisby. Since this setting is gunsentric, that might include pre war ammo(using sparsly for special occasions), personal rifles, or anything 3. Army issues gear. The sign of a strong state, is being able to field a army, supplying it with gear. One of Feudalisms core selling point, is moving the burden of supply from State to Knight(and his gigantic retinue of pages), generally boosting quality. And city states is really different from Feudal state, in the former the idea is often that overclass has to buy their entire warchest to enter the army, except for things like shields. Where conscripts doesn't get that. And City States ability to field better masses of higher quality gear, is the reason states like Rome was able to expand massively, outside of a political goal of expansion.
Once the cat is out of the bag, it can't go back in. Worst case, if supplies of bullets dwindle, it might not be feasible to field a army with guns. Maybe you have to settle for one regiment with it. But the cat isn't the gun, its smaller scale artillery. Which do more damage than guns ever can do.
Elijah Butler
Guns would still be in use, even if current ammo stores are used up and infrastructure for modern manufacturing can't be maintained you don't really need that much tech to make bullets. Anyone with the power and resources will still use guns, though maybe more conservatively, while bows and crossbows will be more common with those that get edged out in the race to consolidate remaining resources and tech. For some time there will probably be hoards of larpers and edge-meisters with shitty replica or antique melee weapons that they have no idea how to use and once they're weeded out the weapons that aren't destroyed from misuse might stay in circulation for awhile as weapons of opportunity alongside improvised weapons for those with nothing better. Anyone with the organization will probably just make cheap and effective weapons like spears though. I could also imagine slings making a resurgence to equip some who might otherwise not be capable combatants but again anyone with the organization will equip their best with the fruits of our technological progress.
Andrew Butler
bows and crossbows wouldn't even be used, because with modern tooling it'd be way easier to make blackpowder muzzle loaders, you can even make them rifled a lot easier than you could back in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Owen Cook
Its not really theoretically or mechanically difficult to rifle barrels. It's always going to be labor/machinery intensive though.
Christian Bennett
Even without air rifles, I expect guns to be shootable for much longer than cars will be derivable. The really unrealistic part of post-apoc is it's car centrism. Where is the oil coming from? People can horde bullets, but oil dosn't really store well. Stockpiles will be gone almost overnight if production ends, even after mass dieoffs. Mad max was an allegory for the 1970s energy crisis, not a completely accurate depiction of an actual apocalypse.
Kayden Robinson
i dunno man, cars will run on lots of things besides oil. they'll run like shit and be flimsy but so will everything else. Even electrics aren't completely unreasonable.
Logan Gray
Make a set of this and you're good to go
Oliver Miller
Most modern cars are super dependent on maintenance from specific companies which would not survive an apocalypse.
Although, it would be really interesting to see Musk suddenly making his cars EMP proof and including a "nuclear warfare defense mode." where the car can function without ever having to phone home to any of musk's companies. The mode could even be activated by the car losing contact with cell networks. That's a feature people might pay for, and only slightly more absurd than the "bio-weapon defense mode" (which makes a lot of sense if you have to drive around in china, where musk wants to sell his cars)
Dylan Brooks
OK just because I'm responding to OP doesn't mean I didn't read the thread. As several people have noted, it depends in large part on the nature of the apocalyptic event. How much infrastructure is destroyed? How many people? Which people? How much warning do we get? A total collapse back to savagery is going to require some serious assumptions.
I think it's more fruitful to say, "OK, here's the setting I *want*. So what kind of apocalypse leads to that?" There are scenarios that lead to pretty much any kind of world you want. Obviously fantastic/magical stuff requires fantasy to be injected, but I think even then you can have something that feels right.
I think guns are the least of your problems. Within a couple years, gasoline runs out not just because it's used but because it has a very poor shelf life. Alcohol, bio-diesel and other fuels will be ok. But cars w/that are pretty rare and conversion may not be available in time.
Good batteries have a shelf-life as well. Wind turbines will be degraded by storms, solar by time. Electonics and especially IT equipment has a shelf-life, too, and I guarantee you that most of that stuff can't be re-manufactured.
Literacy might last much longer than you think. We have very widespread literacy now, and there will be time to pass it on. Eventually it will decline, but it will take several generations. STEM will go away sooner, especially engineering types seen as having no immediate use. Books will be preserved, but the techniques they teach will become very hard to use without a teacher.
So you can imagine a scenario playing out in phases. There's the immediate catastrophe and attempts to survive that. Then there's a few years of aftermath as people try to build survival infrastructure before they starve or are murdered. Warlordism. Then finally things stabilize on a long slow decline as things are lost but survival is no longer in doubt. Then eventually things reverse and you have a renaissance.
Colton Young
Aren't bullets reasonably easy make? I know for a fact that there are pakistani smiths who make bullets out of their small home-industry furnaces. In terms of having acess to guns I would presume that there would still be a large enough amount left after the apocalypse to make it possible for local warlords to field armies. As long as you take reasonable care of the weapon it should be useable for decades if not centuries.
Bows will probably not be used in any meaningful way as bowmaking is actually a quite complex/skillfull skill whereas the mechanics and material necessities for making a rifle are much easier to come by. Spears would definitly be made however as they are incredibly versatile things.
Camden Parker
>We also have all sorts of fancy machines and tools to help people make shit these tools, like lathes, presses and CNC machines.
Where the fuck will you get replacement parts or even electricity for those machines you dumb fuck? One tiny part breaks or fries, and you're done
Best thing I can think of is going to a museum and pick up some flint lock rifles
Jackson Lee
They certainly wouldn't survive in their current form but a lot of that bullshit can be stripped out once you don't have a federal highway authority or EPA to answer to. >have shitty lead-waste and toxic acid battery >have electric motor on wheels >car goes when you give it electrics Yes it would still run like shit but it's emp proof.
Blake Green
>his is likely a world war event that manages to drag every nation into a simultaneous ground war.
Dude if they don't go full nuclear you just described a world FLOATING in ammo and well stocked production facilities. After WW2 weapons were around for decades. My grandmas brother was often catched playing with guns.
Benjamin Howard
This nigga right here. There's a reason why slings were used for thousands of years.
Grayson Robinson
This. Guns and ammo will be around the last things produced on an industrial level.
That shit is super easy produce and a barebone rail network isn't that hard to maintain either.
You will need this guns for when the modern agricultural system collapses...
Ian Jackson
it would probably be mostly like mad max for a while with most people having guns of some kind or another...guns would slowly become rarer until you had 1800s type shit going on...a mix of sword and arrow combat with black powder weapons...only groups with the means to make/maintain modern guns and those able to buy would have them eventually...say about...100/150 years
Alexander King
Checked and "bullets" are the simplest shit ever. Lead will melt over a campfire and you pour it into a mold and maybe polish off some sprue and you're done. CASINGS are a little tougher with some stamping and brazing. PRIMERS are incredibly delicate snowflake chemicals that explode when you hit them hard enough. They're probly going to be harder to recreate from dirt farmers than powder. POWDER is really easy since you can make it out of human waste in its worst form and in higher forms still pretty easy with nitric acid and cellulose being really really really common on earth.
Keeping all of that exactly the same for every shot is probably where you'll have the most trouble. Also >pakistani gunsmith pic related
Jason Lee
>Stockpiles of Semi automatic weapons can sustain feudalism for much longer than homemade black powder.
This tbqh. I once answered in a thread here about a realistic emergence of feudalism.
Take your scenario, add in old military ranks developing into a hereditary noble rank system and boom you have 300-400 years of neo-feudalism.
Than a friggin plague hits. the vlaue of labour increases and the commoners start getting uppity and more innovative and the whole cycle starts again.
Daniel Martin
I mean literally the outcasts of the new order. Whoever establishes local organisation first will try to consolidate arms and ammo and gun shortages will most practically affect those who are outsiders. People will still hold on to guns and find storages that others didn't for quite some time but those against prevailing power might have to abandon resources and equipment in the face of overwhelming force and can suffer the loss less.
Not everyone has the knowledge to make guns especially with less than modern ideal equipment and those people with be targets for conversion/capture or elimination.
Matthew Fisher
Well in a Z-apoc you have to assume that the government would take measures to assure a continued production of ammo for as long as possible with huge stockpiling efforts.
The military would be able to keep a few selected factories running for a while.
They even have fucking gun smiths in Afghanistan under really harsh and poor circumstances. They would develop shit like bren guns and keep on going for years.
Nathaniel Gomez
Electricity is simple, it's called a generator, it's also not unfeasible for some larger community to get some form of powergrid back up and running. Even then you can smith a barrel with some metal. Then you'll be able to scavenge replacement parts from the places that have them right now or use the exact same machine to manufacture your own replacement part.
Camden Morris
It's actually really really bad in the US. They don't have a force enough to project halfway across their own country. You'd have to keep your rail lines and your factory towns (including some which have already been shut down by EPA) completely manned. Bridges across even the tiniest rivers would be massively vulnerable.
Shit does not look good for the government in those prolonged power struggley situations.
Charles Wilson
checked
Ayden Ramirez
>implying you have to do that intentionally
Thats just how things would work after a decade or two. People would flock to preppers/military/police for protection in exchange for food. Close your eyes skip a few hundred years and suddenly you have dudes singing about how they want to bang their lieges wife but are to pious for that.
This. If we are talking real post-apoc and not desperate total war starvation and scarcity of guns won't be issues for a few decades.
A real post apoc like in the movies would need a ridiculous deadly virus for example. If even 5% survive you still have a shitton of people. Probably enough to maintain a decent early industrial standard that quickly rises again.
This. You would have weird coal/wood driven cargo trucks for example.
>I think guns are the least of your problems. Within a couple years, gasoline runs out not just because it's used but because it has a very poor shelf life. Alcohol, bio-diesel and other fuels will be ok. But cars w/that are pretty rare and conversion may not be available in time.
If you don't have people knowing how to make a car run on wood/coal/bio-ethanol you have an apocalypse type where scarcity isn't an issue because so many people are dead and the few survivors have more stuff than they could ever use. Even without cars. They would drive around a year or two and then just walk.
Cameron Martinez
>especially engineering types seen as having no immediate use I completely disagree, engineers are vital for warfare throughout history from siege engineers to logistics and would be even more important in the post-apocalypse to survey and salvage infrastructure and dangerous ruins.
The prospect of engineering being abandoned is especially silly given its role in modern militaries who will also be some of those most in a position to establish a new order.
Aiden Martinez
I agree. Engineers are pretty much an elite in modern day military, or at the very least valued specialists.
That's like saying doctors don't have an immediate value.
Well if we don't have a completely space bats unrealistic Z-apoc scenario the government has some time to prepare and some time where the country isn't fully overrun.
So they would probably quickly establish a safe communication central for the POTUS and the JCS and other measures to keep the Army, Navy, National Guards and Intelligence agencies running.
Then they would start taking the nuclear power plants of the grid and they would start securing the nuclear weapons.
After that they would start stockpiling military ammunition and they would start securing that stockpiles.
Then they would declare certain industries vital to national security (nationalizing them, when the crisis worsens further). In the process they would start stockpiling raw materials near the factories (with short supply routes). The national guard would be called in and a state of emergency would be declared.
If the situation deteriorates even further militias would be raised as auxiliary forces and they would start stockpiling weapons of civilians for the military and the militias.
With that you have an awful lot of guns and ammo, at least enough to keep them going for a few years. At some point they would start using Ammo in a very conservative fashion. Probably preferred use of civilian models etc.
Noah Wilson
They'd certainly try. Engineers and artillery though are what's going to settle any of it. If you're going back to feudal shit then it's all about the territory you can hold with whatever limited means you have. You don't have massive mobile armies to just throw around and conquer shit but without a reserve or resupply you can get seiged out super fast anyway.
Thomas Turner
That's fucking nonsense and you know it.
Given that it's impossible to turn your head without seeing printed text, there's no reason scavengers in the apocalypse would forget how to read.
Justin Myers
>including some which have already been shut down by EPA Oh come on, especially factories have largely shut down because of changing economics, not the epa.
Austin Barnes
>changing economics Why is it cheaper to run a factory in China than in the United States?
Michael Clark
Really they'd be better off just creating the exact scenario they want with some sort of "transported to another world" shit combined with mass amnesia, probably with plot convenient recalled memories of exactly whatever tech he wants.
