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Banned
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Originally Posted by Kostya
They die, their ammo stores are inaccessible as a result, oases of ammunition in a sea of zombies that nobody can penetrate.
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Faulty presumption there. If zombies can be killed by gunshots to the head, there's no reason why one guy can't take out hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of them if he's in a secure location.
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Same goes for the country, with the exception of bomb shelters, I can't really see the country being too much different, apart from the fact that some people might have time to construct rudimentary defenses.
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"construct rudimentary defenses"??? BWAHAHAAAA!!! I'm worried about the local crackhead population right here, right now, and have planned accordingly. There's no way zombies would stand a chance.
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The same essential problems arise: food and water, and I can't see them being solved easily. Now, as opposed to the cities however, a farmhouse is pretty accessible for a thoughtful scavenger, BUT, they also need the means to move the ammo to a more suitable place with food and water, something which would again be difficult in a bandit infested, zombie ruled dystopia.
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Why move? I've got everything here to sustain life for at least a year, even if there's no ability to hunt.
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The other major issue would be that all this ammo would be destroyed fairly quickly in the years following the outbreak. Sure, it will last for a long time if undisturbed, and undoubtedly some ammo would still be preserved indefinitely in bunkers etc. However, I think fairly quickly a lot of material destruction would occur that people don't factor in:
Fire, no fire brigades to prevent them or contain them. Zombies are clumsy and essentially I think the outbreak of a fire in or near major cities in the weeks following would be pretty high.
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Do zombies have access to fire?
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In fact, as months stretched into years, with nothing maintaining them, the cities would crumble pretty badly, wind, storms, fire, flood, rain, zombies, early looting, earthquakes, all this damage would compound, as opposed to being cleaned up. Think about how much ammo would get hosed down after the first hurricane hit Miami or Jacksonville. Think about all the ammo that would get rained on after an earthquake in LA, think about how snow build up, and presumably break down houses up in the Rockies without maintenance. Think about how vegetation would break up houses as they grew into them over the years. All this is going to expose ammo to rain, snow, fire and the rest of the elements, and wreck a hell of a lot of it.
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So you're saying that your average household would crumble in a few years without maintenance? I don't see it. My house was originally started in the 1880's. It's survived fires, storms, et cetera (we don't generally have big earthquakes here). And most bulk ammo is stored appropriately...in at least water resistant packaging on the case level.
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Other problems would be finding ammo hidden in bunkers, it would seem like a giant gamble to spend days trying to get inside a reinforced bunker, or hoping you'll stumble across a well stocked bomb shelter. I think that pretty quickly, a lot of manufactured good would be gutted by the material destruction of the elements left unchecked and untended.
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Personally, I'd head to one of the NG armories that are all over the country.
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Reloading your ammunition:
The problem I see here is essentially twofold:
Number one, collecting the materials you need. Frankly I don't think it's likely that people are going to have the vision or the capacity to consider this move for quite some time. It would be difficult, though not impossible to access sulphur and nitrate, but even so, I think it would be rare for someone to have immediate, ongoing access to all three ingredients. In addition, you obviously need a bullet, lead I presume, I'm not sure where these come from or how hard they would be to come by, but they might be difficult to find.
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You forget that there are millions of reloaders ALREADY in the US. Lead can be obtained from car junkyards (batteries, tire weights). Bullet molds last forever. And most reloaders already have plenty of powder on hand, since it's a pain in the ass to find it in small lots.
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Number two: It's not worth the effort. This seems a little stupid, but I really think that's the conclusion most people would come to. The ability of one person to produce gunpower would be rather small I presume, and the process would take some time if Clyvre's info is correct.
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Hmmm....spend time reloading ammo and survive, or don't and get eaten by zombies. Hard choice there...
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Now, this guy has to eat and drink. Now, he might be able to procure food and water AND still make gunpowder, but certainly some of his labour has to go into gunpowder production. Now, if its true that they would have to go mine sulphur out of the earth, presuming they could find it, and then synthesise nitrates as well, it would probably not be worth one man's time, since the amount of gunpowder he could produce wouldn't really be enough (I don't think, maybe I'm wrong), given he also then has to procure bullets, or bullet like objects, and construct each cartridge, individually. Sounds like an awful lot of work.
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That doesn't stop reloaders from doing it now, when they might save $.05 per produced round of ammo over store-bought... And you don't have to mine sulfur out of the ground or synthesize nitrates...it ain't like this stuff is edible, and they have lots of industrial purposes.
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I mean, how many shells could one guy make? Surely not that many. I think people would be more interested in food production, basically they're living in a subsitence situation, and there wouldn't really be much excess labour for extraneous activities like that.
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With my mid-line press, (a Dillon 550B) I can make 500-600 finished rounds of ammo in an hour. Of course, I'm pretty good at it, and a "noob" might only be able to produce 100/hour. BTW, my entire setup cost less than $500 dollars new, and I have a bunch of spares for it.
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However, maybe after they established themselves, a community of say 100 people could afford to produce gunpowder, with manual production, I don't think they'd be able to manufacture enough to make it worth their while, whereas other weapons could be used multiple times: arrows, chopping weapons, spears etc.
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yeah, I'd rather use a bow and arrow over one of my beltfeds any day. RIIIIIGHT.
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Let me break it down another way: You've got a tiny minority of humans, starving, fighting amongst themselves and hugely outnumbered by zombies. Frankly I don't see it being very likely that this tiny amount of labour could manually produce enough ammo to repel vastly superior numbers of undead, the economics of it simply don't seem right to me. However, I might be wrong, is it possible for to produce huge amounts of ammo using simplistice, non industrial methods?
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It's done in the US right now. BTW, where are all these zombie bodies going to come from? There are something like 300 million people in the US. I suppose that there are another 100 million in the ground, as a SWAG, provided they could get OUT of the ground (think about it....if you're in a coffin that's covered by a one ton hermetically sealed concrete box (which almost all coffins nowadays are), how are they going to get infected, much less get out of the box? So anyway, say 250 million of the live people become zombies, and 100 million more get out of the ground, and the US consumes billions of rounds of ammo a year NOW. Where's the problem? |