The Fourth Horseman Came - a Post-Apocalyptic NRP

[Pepperm1nts]

Claimin' Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Maybe some of the surrounding New English states as well, but that can be worked out and negotiated.

[Dinh AaronMk]

@chayden13

Take your pick of whatever one.

[chayden13]

@chayden13

Take your pick of whatever one.

@Dinh AaronMk

So is the Free Republic of Northern New England comprised of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine acceptable?

[Pepperm1nts]

There can only be one New England Republic.

*loads musket*

[Dinh AaronMk]

<Snipped quote by Dinh AaronMk>

So is the Free Republic of Northern New England comprised of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine acceptable?

@chayden13

Figure it out with Hugs.

Give him a reason to actually be active.

[Pepperm1nts]

No one knows I go by the name Hugs, you dingalin.

And yeah, it's fine with me.

[Shyri]

haderp

[Dinh AaronMk]

[Shyri]

The hydro-dam talk made me think. How possible would it have been for any nuclear reactors to go into meltdown after the apocalypse? Or should we just assume they were all safely shut down?

[Pepperm1nts]

Aaron doesn't want them to be a point of focus so I think he's going with them being safely shutdown, or their safeguards working and preventing any kind of disaster.

[Wernher]

@Dinh AaronMk

Quebecois is the french name, we present ourselves to the anglo as quebecers, which is what they call us. I should know, I'm from quebec.

As for the dams, I wouldn't expect to run the mega ones in the north, at least not for now, but there are plenty of them in the lower regions near the St-Lawrence and I happen to know (After 10 years of mandatory history of quebec in class) that to our pride, quebec has since the 70s an expertise in hydro power and all the components for the maintenance and indeed construction of these incredible pieces of infrastructures have been built entirely and solely in the province.

Still however, I have to say regarding the ash that I used this:



So I assumed the ash in such a far away region would be minor and as well, its been quite a few generations since this happened.

As for oil, I didn't know that and I assumed the tech levels would be more close to early 20th century.

Does this tech level apply to everything? Radio, automatic weapons, artillery, cars, tanks, etc...

As a compromise I'd suggest maybe only use a few small dams in Mauricie (Between Quebec and Montreal, north coast) that don't nearly have the production volume as the big ones in the north and have that energy monopolised by the metropolitan areas, so no general electrification.

But if you say no, I'll gracefully accept your judgement.

[Shyri]

That moment where the place you live would be so fucked, they replace the state capital with your city for emphasis.

[Dinh AaronMk]

The hydro-dam talk made me think. How possible would it have been for any nuclear reactors to go into meltdown after the apocalypse? Or should we just assume they were all safely shut down?

@Shyri

I actually have a few nuclear engineer friends and I managed to corner one on Steam and quiz him. There's several things that can happen.

Primarily in the event of danger like Yellowstone erupting they could theoretically pull some components from the reactors to make them "safe" in a sense. Mostly anything that'd be reason to fear runaway thermal activity that'd melt or actually burn down the plant when left unchecked. Fuel rods would still be in place but there'd be no activity that'd create the basis for a disaster, the reactor room would just become deadly, and those are so shielded and layered in cement far in excess of what actually might be needed nothing would come of it.

Alternatively the coolant could be doused with a reactive "poison" to capture and block neutron emission thereby limiting nuclear reactivity and lessening the risk of a run-away nuclear reaction.

But today nuclear power plants have so many safeguards that if left unattended one safeguard or another will trip and the plant will go into shutdown mode and stop a runaway event from happening.

And if all else fails, or in combination with the above the coolant valves can be thrown open and the reactor room flooded with water which will by itself absorb and insulate radioactivity while preventing runaway thermal reaction.

In the end, nothing happens.

@Dinh AaronMk

Quebecois is the french name, we present ourselves to the anglo as quebecers, which is what they call us. I should know, I'm from quebec.

As for the dams, I wouldn't expect to run the mega ones in the north, at least not for now, but there are plenty of them in the lower regions near the St-Lawrence and I happen to know (After 10 years of mandatory history of quebec in class) that to our pride, quebec has since the 70s an expertise in hydro power and all the components for the maintenance and indeed construction of these incredible pieces of infrastructures have been built entirely and solely in the province.

Still however, I have to say regarding the ash that I used this:



So I assumed the ash in such a far away region would be minor and as well, its been quite a few generations since this happened.

As for oil, I didn't know that and I assumed the tech levels would be more close to early 20th century.

Does this tech level apply to everything? Radio, automatic weapons, artillery, cars, tanks, etc...

As a compromise I'd suggest maybe only use a few small dams in Mauricie (Between Quebec and Montreal, north coast) that don't nearly have the production volume as the big ones in the north and have that energy monopolised by the metropolitan areas, so no general electrification.

But if you say no, I'll gracefully accept your judgement.

@Wernher

The big thing is even with the infrastructure at home supporting the upkeep of dams is the infrastructure that ultimately keeps those around. When you get down to it in the end this is a world where all of a sudden the means of supporting the modern life-style has come to and end and kicking back several squares. With significant oil you can't really have gas and without either you can't run trucks of automobiles which means transporting entire turbines or turbine parts from factory to plant is going to be a labor intensive procedure, not to mention the other complications this throws into other seemingly simple day-to-day operations.

And even if you have the means to make the parts you'll need to get the resources to make these parts which requires further transportation, which for the scale needed is more economical with trucking and motor-vehicles than carting it in wooden carts pulled by horses.

You could argue that you can make fuel from biofuel but this comes to the paradigm of simple sealants and sealing gaskets to keep still pressurized and prevent leaks of product or heat that can make producing bio-fuel inconsistent. And that doesn't even begin to tackle that ethanol is corrosive to normal fuel-grade rubbers in gaskets and fuel lines in automotives and other machines. And including the complications of fine dust basically glass getting into the moving parts of engines and spoiling those then anything relying on moving parts and with air intake may shorten its life-span.

I'm not completely against having electricity in use but the big thing I want to emphasize is that its production is likely to be downsized from lack of industrial materials that lend to making bigger and bigger power plants, machines, and over all engineering.

You can lay under this all too that people need to eat, and if mechanized farming is dead because farmers can't get their diesel to fuel their tractors then they'll require more humans hands in the field doing labor, taking from the population more workers that'd otherwise be used for industrial applications like maintaining and working in hydro-electric dams, factories, and what not so everyone can eat. A society will need to prioritize and if food isn't prioritized the society starves. And without the luxury of the modern industrial factory farm there's far fewer people to go to work in labor intensive industry than there is now; so then even if you can get anything working specific dams will need to be prioritized cutting hydroelectric power even further.

Post-Apocalyptic isn't just carving new nations out of the bones of another; it's total system overhauling.

So what I'm trying to say is: think about what you're doing and not just what the advantages of what you're doing is. Because to do a thing you'll need specific things that might not be accessible or doable for the way things are now.

But on guns: I'm allowing those. Automatic weapons theoretically but as far as they go they'll be expensive to fire because bullets will mostly need to be hand-loaded and you can easily tear through a day worth of work in a minute on full-auto and single-shot weapons may be more favorable than full-auto because they're more conservative. But the end demands of building a gun are pretty low-tech and industrial lathes for boring out gun barrels and parts can be hooked up to water mills or pedal power or something. Building guns is ultimately an art that dates back centuries before industrial equipment.

[Vilageidiotx]

Militarily imma be doing mid nineteenth century warfare. Range and rate of fire on even basic bolt-action guns weaken the use of classical line battles, but at the same time the lack of wealth and scarcity of equipment will make long term trench warfare unsustainable. It'll be a lot of the awkward maneuver based warfare that dominated from the American Civil War to the first year of World War 1.

[Shyri]

So, rather than Ontario, I think I'll go with "The Great Lakes Commonwealth." A union of small nation states that rose from the ashes (literally, ha) out of Chicago, Fort Wayne, Detroit, and Cleveland. All in all, about the same amount of land as New York state.

Swapping BEFORE we start this time around!

Name: The Great Lakes Commonwealth

Location:



History:
WIP

[chayden13]

So I know it's been discussed but I'm not entirely sure where the technology level lies? As it's been stated, there would be some remnants of technology left over from before the collapse, but it would be difficult to find the manpower to operate a large-scale industrial movement. Not to mention the fact that this takes place a few generations after the collapse of society, so there'd probably be even less people who know how to operate advanced machinery. So would this mean that'd wed be working with a lesser technology level? I agree with Vilageidiotx and that we should probably have the technology equivalent of the 1800's and the early Industrial Revolution, so steam-power, muskets and early rifles, etc.

Also, how do I edit the map to add my location? I should post my nation sheet some time today.

[Vilageidiotx]

So I know it's been discussed but I'm not entirely sure where the technology level lies? As it's been stated, there would be some remnants of technology left over from before the collapse, but it would be difficult to find the manpower to operate a large-scale industrial movement. Not to mention the fact that this takes place a few generations after the collapse of society, so there'd probably be even less people who know how to operate advanced machinery. So would this mean that'd wed be working with a lesser technology level? I agree with Vilageidiotx and that we should probably have the technology equivalent of the 1800's and the early Industrial Revolution, so steam-power, muskets and early rifles, etc.

Also, how do I edit the map to add my location? I should post my nation sheet some time today.

@chayden13

Let Aaron edit the map. I tried to do it but it's not MSpaint friendly so that means Aaron gets to do the map. In the mean time find your own equivalent map for the area you want to cover and post that.

[Shyri]

*clears throat*

DISCLAIMER
The only reason i put other people on the map is so I could get a sense of scale, to prevent myself from blobbing too much. My map is is no way official.

[Keyguyperson]

So I know it's been discussed but I'm not entirely sure where the technology level lies? As it's been stated, there would be some remnants of technology left over from before the collapse, but it would be difficult to find the manpower to operate a large-scale industrial movement. Not to mention the fact that this takes place a few generations after the collapse of society, so there'd probably be even less people who know how to operate advanced machinery. So would this mean that'd wed be working with a lesser technology level? I agree with Vilageidiotx and that we should probably have the technology equivalent of the 1800's and the early Industrial Revolution, so steam-power, muskets and early rifles, etc.

Also, how do I edit the map to add my location? I should post my nation sheet some time today.

@chayden13

I'd like to point out that the usage of muskets makes little sense. Unless everyone forgot that rifling helps with accuracy, then nobody is going to produce a musket over a rifle unless they are in a situation where they don't have access to precision tools. If we have water mills or literally any other reliable way to harness kinetic energy and haven't lost all engineering knowledge from 1860 onwards, then it can be assumed that rifling machines are going to exist in some capacity. This is a practice that technically dates back to the 15th century (although nobody found it particularly useful in the 15th century).

I'd like to bring up the topic of naval vessels for a second here. It's been pointed out that there isn't any diesel or oil coming in for farm equipment, and when we factor in a lack of any large industry then that implies that shipbuilding has been knocked back to at very least the American Civil War. Unless some major steel-working industries remain then ironclads aren't even going to exist. If steam engines are in use (as I've seen multiple people mention as a possibility) then wooden steamers could be the new fleet mainstays. Depending on how much we're willing to accept, older ships could be refurbished to use steam propulsion. If we go that route, of course, any wooden ship would become all but useless in naval combat.

Honestly, this could be an extremely interesting setting. Definitely watching this one.

[Dinh AaronMk]

So I know it's been discussed but I'm not entirely sure where the technology level lies? As it's been stated, there would be some remnants of technology left over from before the collapse, but it would be difficult to find the manpower to operate a large-scale industrial movement. Not to mention the fact that this takes place a few generations after the collapse of society, so there'd probably be even less people who know how to operate advanced machinery. So would this mean that'd wed be working with a lesser technology level? I agree with Vilageidiotx and that we should probably have the technology equivalent of the 1800's and the early Industrial Revolution, so steam-power, muskets and early rifles, etc.

Also, how do I edit the map to add my location? I should post my nation sheet some time today.

@chayden13

Trying to cover how technology is affected is very broad and I could very well write a book on what'd happen in this worse-case scenario and provided the outside circumstances are in full play here. But the general rule of thumb is that first and foremost the interaction of volcanic ash with moving parts would mean there's a high chance of it ruining motors for something like generators, cars, airplanes, and the what not. It would or may be like what'd happen if you ran an engine on low or no oil and they'd eventually seize up and die, but this'd be concentrated more in the air intake for carburation or even air-cooling the motor and not reducing the friction heat between moving parts (though if it got inbetween those spaces it probably would do damage similar).

Destruction of cropland on the continent and the crippling of refrigeration and transporting things by air or by sea in mass also comes with the consequence that there's not a lot of food being produced, and being required for survival society would turn to emphasize more on feeding itself than it would in maintaining computer, automobiles, or any large modern infrastructure. Deaths by starvation and disease from the deterioration of hospitals and modern emergency services and medicine would contribute to a loss in population highlighting these new priorities.

It's unlikely anyone would forget how to do these things since we have a tendency to write books. People'd still know about germs and bacteria because it's been written, and technical guides to making guns would probably be in circulation. But the shift in society's focus and loosing out on important resources like oil and being set back more than a century means what can be accomplished with low-tech means would take priority over rebuilding the global supply chains required to even get back to the 20th century.

The best I can see is be aware and do some research. In order to get to steal we had to work with iron. And when it comes to synthetic rubbers we need first natural rubber which is unobtainable in North America and to even get to making the supply chains to get natural rubber again as a stepping stone towards synthetic rubber it could be said that America needs to be a nation once again.

And the rest of the world is in shit condition too. It took a hit as hard as the states minus the whole Yellowstone deal so they're not going to be coming to the former US either. We're down to dealing with the limitations of our local supply.