"Fantasy" Question For Gunsmiths

If there is a demand, there will be plenty of suppliers.

Guns are Power. There will always be a demand for Power.

Basic firearms technology hasn't changed in over 100 years. It's ALL simple 19th century technology.

Guns are very easy to make. The easiest is a single shot zip gun, I guess, but the second easiest is a STEN type submachine gun, like the Luty submachine guns shown in the previous post.

Guns are easily produced in tiny little workshops using hand tools and no electricity. Google Khyber Pass guns. Many decent quality guns are made in little shacks hidden out in the forest in the Phillipines.

There will always be suppliers. Guns are power.

As for ammunition, those same little workshops can easily produce brass cartridges: cases, primers, propellant, and projectiles. It's all no more than 19th century technology.

Primers are based on fulminate of mercury. A Scottish parson, Alexander Forsyth made his own fulminate when he invented percussion ignition in 1807. He was working in a squalid hovel with no electricity or running water.

1807.

If people can make methamphetamine, they can make fulminate and cordite.

Guns are Power. There will always be a demand for power. If something is in demand, a supplier will appear.

It is impossible to make guns go away.


People who don't work with their hands, who don't use tools daily, who don't make things... in other words, huge numbers of modern office workers, "journalists," academics, and politicians... such people tend to be oblivious to how readily other people can do and make and produce seemingly complex things.

Look around You Tube for videos on how to make fulminate of mercury, how to make a working AR 15 from a plastic cutting board, how to make a working AK 47 from an old shovel, how to make submachine guns from odd scrap found lying around the house...

There will always be plenty of guns and plenty of quality center fire ammo, though you should assume any black market ammo is corrosive and clean your home made machine gun thoroughly after each use.

Black powder is simple. Basic machine tools are 500 yr old . Smokeless powders require serious chemical engineering. Old school percussion caps are a lot more forgiving to mfg than Boxer or Berdan primers .

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Firearms themselves will last a long time, particularly if reserved for serious purposes . Loaded ammo will last for reasonably long time with decent storage conditions .

It is a staple of firearms lore for people to discover great grandad's 1911/ loaded magazines that have been in the dresser since WW I . In recent years , such reports have increasingly mentioned inconsistencies and sluggish cycling . So as overgeneralization , figure up to 100yr life for proper milspec ammo to be mostly usable, most of the time .

Threeband said:

If there is a demand, there will be plenty of suppliers.

Guns are Power. There will always be a demand for Power.

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As Mao Tse Tung said; "Political power flows from the barrel of a gun. Unless that gun is a Taurus. In which case political power might need to be sent back to the factory under warranty three or four times."

Power flows from the gun. If the People are to have power, they must jave gins.

Primers can be easily mass produced on a small cottage using 19th century technology.

Making 100 primers would be difficult. Far, far eadier to make 100,000.

Threeband said:

Power flows from the gun. If the People are to have power, they must jave gins.

Primers can be easily mass produced on a small cottage using 19th century technology.

Making 100 primers would be difficult. Far, far eadier to make 100,000.

Click to expand...

You OK? Not stroking out on us are you? Any numbness or droopiness in the face? Blurred vision?

Biggfoot44 said:

Black powder is simple. Basic machine tools are 500 yr old . Smokeless powders require serious chemical engineering. Old school percussion caps are a lot more forgiving to mfg than Boxer or Berdan primers .

*************

Firearms themselves will last a long time, particularly if reserved for serious purposes . Loaded ammo will last for reasonably long time with decent storage conditions .

It is a staple of firearms lore for people to discover great grandad's 1911/ loaded magazines that have been in the dresser since WW I . In recent years , such reports have increasingly mentioned inconsistencies and sluggish cycling . So as overgeneralization , figure up to 100yr life for proper milspec ammo to be mostly usable, most of the time .

Click to expand...

Smokeless powder is pretty easy to make too—you just need cotton, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid. You would also need solvent: acetone would be difficult, but ethanol would be fairly easy and diethyl ether could be made from the ethanol and sulfuric acid.

Threeband said:

Power flows from the gun. If the People are to have power, they must jave gins.

Primers can be easily mass produced on a small cottage using 19th century technology.

Making 100 primers would be difficult. Far, far eadier to make 100,000.

Click to expand...

Modern primers are lead styphnate and barium nitrate. You’d need styphnic acid, made from nitrating resorcinol. That would be tough—you’d have to know which plants to distill resorcinol from.

If you went the old school route with mercury fulminate you’d still need fulminic acid.

Primary explosives are a pain in the butt to work with. They tend to go off even when you do everything right. Small arms primers are a modern safety miracle.

bpm32 said:

Smokeless powder is pretty easy to make too—you just need cotton, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid. You would also need solvent: acetone would be difficult, but ethanol would be fairly easy and diethyl ether could be made from the ethanol and sulfuric acid.

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Not if one uses the ABE process

Mark75H said:

Not if one uses the ABE process

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Well there you go! I was thinking of the industrial process where they make acetone from cumene. In that case you get a molecule of phenol for every molecule of acetone.

Of course if you manage to get to acetone you might be able to get to TATP. That would be a better use of acetone.

In reality though, you don’t need acetone for NC—the ether and ethanol will do.

Sorry---I have no substantial input...I'm just here with my popcorn...reading this awesome freakin' thread!

Like the genie that can't be put back in the bottle, the Frankenstein monster that can't be killed, the politcal ideas that won't disappear and incorporated businesses without fixed ownership - firearms are here to stay.

bpm32 said:

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Primary explosives are a pain in the butt to work with. They tend to go off even when you do everything right. Small arms primers are a modern safety miracle.

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So what? Meth labs blow up every day.



Drug Lords, Drug Cartels supply drugs. They do whatever it takes to produce and distribute them. If they need to spend $1,000,000 for lab equipment, supplies, airplanes, bribes, tunnels, etc., that's just the cost of business.

In the scenario envisioned by the OP, there will be Gun Lords and Gun Cartels supplying guns and ammunition.

They will spend whatever it takes to set up production and distribution facilities. If a few low level people get blown up now and then, there will be plenty to replace them.


If there is a Demand, there will be a Supplier.

There will always be a demand for guns and ammunition.

There will always be guns and ammunition available, for a price, if customers are motivated to find a source.

Just like drugs.

But will more power ( and utility value ) flow from one centerfire repeater, or 100 rifle muskets, or 200 smoothbore muskets ?

JTC3400 said:

...3) 200 years have passed and people have built new (although much smaller than we have today) power stations and grids...

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The world isn't static. After 200 years, some regions are recreating Industrial Technology, including power plants and grids.

What is unattainable here may be accomplished somewhere else. What no one can manage after 150 years, some are doing after 200 years. More people will have recreated more of the old technology after 250 years.

Whoever recreates Technology will have security and wealth, Power. Whoever combines Capital and Knowledge under Leadership will have no serious problems recreating 19th, 20th, 21st century technology. If this group doesn't, that group will. If they don't do it in this generation, they will do it in the next. The world isn't static.

Machine guns and center fire ammunition are 19th Century technology. Motivated people will eventually combine resources and knowledge, the new dark age will run its course (as more than one already has), and there will be another Renaissance.

If they want to, they may even colonize Mars eventually.

But first, someone will crank out a bunch of Luty submachine guns somewhere.

Take a weapon and ammo from a fallen warior.

Take a weapon and ammo from a fallen warrior.

Look at these guys making guns with hand tools in a hut. Granted their QC is probably not top notch, but they are functional. But if they had a way to reliably make modern ammo, they'd be quite a force to reckon with.

Link is a bit from the show Underworld Inc.

"This family handcrafts replica firearms deep in the Philippine jungle as their source of income. "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq1TXEE_QK4

AND ... a homemade BP pistol only needs to wok ONE time to become a much better weapon. Just like a Liberator pistol.

The scenario is 200 years after the collapse. Some regions have power stations and power grids operating. A lot of supplies and technology was hidden away in safe storage.

The scenario is about 180 years PAST the point of dazed refugees groveling in the mud with homemade flintlocks.

After 200 years, any region that can operate a regional or local power grid should be able to produce small arms and ammunition.

Now, can they get a petroleum refinery going?

It sems like i am always seeing ads for, "Civilization starter kits." , plus Macgyver and hanibal could make these with shoestrings and bubble gum, and still walk away after... Though i wonder how mwny stunt doubles did not....

My favorite theme of all book of eli style scenarios is they universally say the people of society had a lot but did not recognize or fully appreciate what they had.... Makes me appreciate primers now...