Guns in Post Apop Fantasy

What excuse would you use for there not being so many guns in a post a pop fantasy setting that would force people to use more crude and makeshift weaponry that more so mimics weapons of old?

Would it be possible for guns and ammunition to be used as a hard to come by currency and trade?

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>What excuse would you use for there not being so many guns in a post a pop fantasy
just have it set anywhere but in (remains of) the US

Of course. After the bomb, everyone got a lot dumber and can't figure out guns 100%. Plus the materials aren't there, so they're uncommon.

People use bullets as trading currency, but prefer to fight with sharp sticks and swords. Pulling out the guns is only something you do when you're really rich or desperate, as it's literally money you're pumping out of those things.

What is apop short for? Apopalyptic?

They fell apart? Guns do not last forever user, after only 1 or 2 generations the overwhelming majority of modern technology would have completely ceased to function, and even buildings would start crumbling apart. Give it 100 years and the world would be unrecognisable.

After a while, there won't be a lot of bullets to go around andsome guy in a shack pumping out bootleg bullets won't be able to keep up with demand forever. I imagine that most people would use melee weapons, with designated sharpshooters and nobles using firearms.

Yes
1999 was a dark year

A lot of time has passed since the original disaster and as such ammo is rare. Kinda like in that one show "revolution" where all the power in the world stopped working. Can't make bullets with machines so they when back to muskets.

The kind of AR-15s or baseball bats with nails in them dichotomy you see in a lot of fiction isn't exactly the end-all be-all. You can make a really shitty but functional firearm pretty easily.

Post-apopulous. There weren't a lot of people after the apocalypse but now there are again.

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>Would it be possible for guns and ammunition to be used as a hard to come by currency and trade?

NATO rounds make an excellent post-apocalypse currency precisely because they're NOT hard to come by. Useful everywhere, easily verifiable and portable.

Ever played one of the Metro games?
High quality ammunition is a currency.

If there was some time between the apocalypse and peaople looting stuff, most guns would probably have succumbed to rust or similar, so the only usable ones would be in preserved stashes and the like.

With post apocalyptic games, I prefer guns to be rare, and ammunition to be even rarer.
It makes for an interesting setting with people trying to reverse engineer guns, and maybe one up and coming trade settlement that can make rudimentary guns but not at a large scale.

Not to mention, it gives things like keeping track of your two bullets and when to use them more important, makes finding an actual functioning gun feel like finding a chest full of gold, and gives a reason for characters to use melee or things like spears and bows.

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The same logic was applied in the "1660" book series :

Modern american redneck town is teleported in the middle of the 30 years war.
Sure thing, at first, they kick asses with relative impunity because small arms of the 20th century were just so much better than muskets.

The problem ? Assault rifles eat bullets like crazy.
And while it is possible to manufacture new ammunition, a small mining town wasn't equiped to do so in large quantity.
Also, the modern guns would wear down progressively and there was only so much that could be done to make new spare parts.

The american downgraded to standard bolt-action rifles, whose rate of fire was still about 10 time greater than musket while also being a lot more accurate.

There are about 14 billion bullets made every year. Depending on where you live, bullets are very abundant and probably will be for decades, if not centuries. Bullets also don’t need maintenance or upkeep the way guns do.

Working guns are going to be more rare than bullets, especially as time goes by. The real problem those with a gun will really have is finding bullets their gun can use. Odds are, they’d have a bunch of loose bullets, but only a few that they can use.

This, if you're paying attention to counting ammunition in a setting then also pay attention to individual calibers. You might be carrying a .308 rifle and find a full box of .30-30 cartridges that you can't use, but would be very valuable in trade if you could find someone who wanted it.

the thing is that compared to most other technologies, guns are both simple, and very resilent.

Springs or pins may break, stock may get damaged - but these are parts that can be replaced by a village blacksmith and carpenter. The truly important parts, barrels, chambers, bolts? If properly cared about they can last forever.

Pic related - it was made in 1851 and its still perfectly functional weapon.

And looking how some medieval weaponry holds up if properly stored and cared about, this gun will be useable after next 150 years.


Now the real problem is the ammo. Blackpowder is easy as shit, and caps are somewhat - possible, but modern ammo, primers and smokeless powder - you won't be making those in a garage.

But here's the thing. Societies dont stay collapsed. Riding around on motorbike in assless chaps might be amusing image, but people tend to organise and rebuild.

In 150 years humanity jumped from steam trains to spaceships, and this was pure trailblazing and discovering new stuff, not rebuilding stuff we already had and knew.

Even if global war sets world back to XIXth century, people wont just simply stay there without some external factor actively blocking the progress.

After 100 years the setting will not be post-apocalyptic. It will be 50s-60s techlevel and fully functioning civilisaton.

argh, forgot the damn pic.

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nope. all surface level resources have basically been used up. now we rely on complicated processes for getting things like oil and metals. when civ collapses, those will go away. at most we will resort to 16th century level tech

Unless, you know, we can harvest all those resources still sitting around on the surface of the planet?
Sure, we'll need different methods for extracting useful iron from what will probably be giant rust deposits, and we'll need to skip fossil fuels as a stage in energy, relying on biomass, hydro, and nuclear, and eventually redeveloping solar. But there's nothing to say civilisation can't rebuild to the same level it currently is, and beyond, it'll just need to go about it in a different way.

nah, that won't happen.

Well, an apocalypse that completely and totally wipes out all higher civilisation from the planet, to such a degree where all modern mining technology is lost, I'd consider to be one of the least likely things that could happen within the next forty to fifty years. No matter how bad the apocalypse, at least one country is going to be left mostly fine, unless we're including end of fucking evangelion levels of unrealistic apocalypses.

It isn't that guns won't be possible to make. The issue is one of quality.

Modern semi-automatic firearms are heavily dependent on high tolerances and quality materials to be reliably produced and reasonably reliable in the field. When either of those factors are gone - as they would be in a post-apocalyptic scenario - suddenly they become very expensive to make or become very unreliable.

Guns would still be around, but would very quickly revert to less mechanically complex (and therefore be more reliable and easier to produce) lever action, bolt action, pump action, and revolver firearms, which typically have much smaller magazines and are more time-consuming to reload. In addition, since quality materials would be harder (though not impossible) to come by, the return of black powder and lower-end gunpowder would also make a serious comeback in the personal defense world. These are less powerful alternatives to "modern" firearms, but are cheaper and easier to maintain.

As such, most guns are weaker, shoot slower, and hold fewer rounds. This means that melee attackers have more time to get closer and are therefore more dangerous than before (not exponentially, mind you, but enough that numbers can easily turn the tide).

Much like the American Wild West, while guns would be a staple, virtually everybody and their mother would AT LEAST have a good-sized knife or hatchet, and most soldiers would possess a dedicated melee weapon in addition to their gun.

The only people who would have regular access to high-quality firearms would be the "special forces" of their societies or the extremely rich.

>suddenly they become very expensive to make or become very unreliable
Only some designs. I'm pretty sure people could still make grease guns or stens, not to mention >muh AK

Surface pulverized to dust. If you do that, I'd say you should give the game a century or so to regrow/repopulate plants and greenery, should give you a fairly virgin land free of advanced technology beyond what you bring. Unfortunately, it also means a lot of above ground ruins are completely destroyed, perhaps you could make it so a few places were somehow spared the blast though.

If you wanted to play it another way, make it so people no longer have access to the tools to cast casings, powder, and primers so that ammo is very scarce. Acquiring guns is easy, but there's just no bullets floating around to use them, so most people have regressed back to things easier to get munitions for (Bows, etc.). Maybe some blacksmiths understand the concept of firearms and are creating their own early black powder weapons, but that's still a far cry from anything more advanced, and certain techniques, such as rifling, might not be understood.

You could also have a futuristic post apoc setting where weapons are so advanced (IE laser/plasma/railgun things) that require such a intricate supply chain that 99.99% of people can't ever hope to use them on the regular. This would explain why ammo is very scarce to begin with (Factories long stopped producing them since there was little demand) and most modern firearms would be antiques in museums or heirlooms like 19th century firearms are to us today. It would also provide several quests for players to go on to complete a future weapon, such as having to figure out exactly how focus lenses work, graphine cells/batteries for energy storage, actual laser portion of the rifle, etc. so that most people just use these weapons until they break and then ditch them because they're too difficult to repair.

>Not making your own shoota

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I would say the best way to reduce progress is to simply ramp up the danger level to the point where forming large communities is exceedingly difficult. Even if they do form, you're very unlikely to have enough stability for experimentation and dreaming by even a small amount of the population, and if you need things outside of the settlement, you can basically forget about it unless you've got enough clout to put together a crack team of specialists to bring it to you.

The game takes place in a world/community/island where people have decided against building guns and tools of war, forcing everyone to resort to different improvised weapons when conflict suddenly begun.

>FUCKing Hue

People ran out of ammo.

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>I'm pretty sure people could still make grease guns or stens, not to mention

They probably would, but you have to remember that these guns were built in dedicated factories with large-scale resource networks for a total war effort by empires that had global networks to draw upon, and even then the guns were not the most physically reliable of weapons. They were also short ranged and ammo hogs, which meant they were only deployed in large numbers among specialists such as dedicated soldiers in line units or paratroopers, where their main disadvantages (range, relative lack of power, and ammo consumption) could be offset by conventional troops or the circumstances of their deployment.

These weapons also had dedicated logistics networks for ammunition and spare parts (which were machined simultaneously) and required special machinery to properly manufacture in any meaningful scale. These things are much, much more difficult to come by in a post-apocalypse world.

This is even more so with the AK. The AK was built by a continent-spanning empire on total war footing that devoted a massive amount of its resources to weapons research and manufacture. It was designed with the Soviet model of mass-production and mass-issue in mind, and an absolutely massive infrastructure and logistics investment was made in arming every troop they had with them and their allies as soon as possible. It worked well - and changed the face of warfare forever - but it could really only have been accomplished at the scale it was because of the Soviet Unions massive infrastructure and resources to devote an ungodly amount of infrastructure and time to making it a reality. This is stuff that most post-apoc civilizations simply will not have access to in order to do so without completely fucking over every other aspect of their society.

Again, that isn't to say that there won't be some that are produced - there absolutely would be. The issue is simply one of scale.

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I'm guessing production scale would go back to guild sized levels, where you might have a group of tradesmen filling orders depending on the city size. It's not like hammering them out on an assembly line with a logistics chain to draw in raw materials and produce the output, but it would certainly be able to churn out enough rifles and shot for a small scale militia, especially if the concept of replaceable parts was adhered to.

Assuming you had territories around 20k or so people under the rule of a single entity, you'd probably be able to develop at lot of the supply chain for the creation of rudimentary arms.

Why would people ever do that?

You don't uninvent the wheel.

What could a population of a few thousand humans realistically produce beyond flintlocks?

If you have someone incredibly learned from a previous age, you could do things like create clockwork "batteries" and other methods of energy storage without relying on advanced chemicals or materials. You could make some pretty neat designs powered by coiled springs to store energy, and compress the springs using either windmills, watermills, or muscle power from other humans.

Speaking of chemicals, if someone understands the process of producing ammonia or chlorine/bleach, gas becomes a possibility, which would be a huge boon during a siege of enclosed locations. Advanced medical care through drugs like penicillin would also greatly increase longevity compared to earlier eras.

In a post apocalypic setting there's no state schooling thus children only learn what their parents / community can teach them. How many of your family / neighbours could build or fix a broken gun, or make new working bullets?

Most of those parts are machine crafted, and would be difficult for a inexperienced blacksmith to craft.

I never understood why post-apocalyptic authors assume everyone will turn into a feral retard and stop maintaining civilisation.