A post-apocalyptic vision

[soggie]

Why are post-apocalyptic worlds always run down, gritty, dirty and always involve a desert of some sort?

When a city in ancient times is sacked by a conquering army, it is rebuilt, and sometimes better than before. When a house is burnt down, it is demolished and a new one (and most of the time, one that is better) is built on top of its ashes.

In Fallout's world, the bomb dropped half a decade before the protagonist emerged from the vault. 50+ years is more than enough for society to rebuild, especially with our current knowledge and technology (even more so with Fallout universe's technologies). This is taking into account the effects of radiation too.

Nagasaki was rebuilt in 5 years, and re-population took approximately half the time (shoot me if I got this one wrong). So unless if the game is set directly after the apocalypse, I don't see why towns and cities need to exist in a run-down state, with people fighting "just to survive".

One more thing that I keep having problem with is the value of firearms in a post-apocalyptic world. Guns, especially well manufactured ones, would be extremely precious in that kind of a setting. Manufacturing and maintenance of ammunition and guns would be a lucrative business, and gunsmiths would be highly respected (and protected) people in towns and villages.

In Fallout, and in fact most post-apocalyptic settings, firearms are treated as common commodities. Why are there no "family guns" passed down from generations to generations (well maintained guns can last for a very long time), which you can only acquire either by stealing (which would make bounty hunters come after you to retrieve the gun) or killing the owner? In such a world I would imagine "new" guns would be hard to come by, and good ones are almost never surrendered or sold.

Wouldn't that make interesting quests too, with real moral dilemmas? Imagine a person sending you out in a quest to track down his stolen rifle, and you begin the quest by talking to underworld fences, tracking it from buyer to buyer, only to discover that it is sold (or retrieved) by its original owner, and that your quest giver is just a thief (at least, according to the current owner).

It is then left to the player's own judgement on who is telling the truth, which required the player to make a decision that is neither good or bad - it is merely a decision that the player makes according to his own judgement.

 

[roll-a-die]

Contrary to popular belief, guns are actually rather simple to make. 10 people with relatively little training can pump out 15 AK/47s a day given a decently stocked/equipped machine shop.

 

[soggie]

Contrary to popular belief, guns are actually rather simple to make. 10 people with relatively little training can pump out 15 AK/47s a day given a decently stocked/equipped machine shop.

But well made guns are difficult to make without the right tools and knowledge. And amatuer home-made weapons are far less effective in a firefight (same level of lethality, world's difference in efficiency) due to reduced range and accuracy.

I'm drawing parallels to the medieval weaponsmiths where anybody can make a spear with a rod and a stone (and kill somebody with it) but a specialist (and for certain weapons like the katana, a grandmaster) is needed for reliable weapons that can vastly improve the survival chances of the wielder (balanced sword with sharp edge that is light and durable at the same time vs shoddily made sword with a dull edge that shatters easily).

 

[denizsi]

I'm drawing parallels to the medieval weaponsmiths where anybody can make a spear with a rod and a stone

LOL, are you sure you don't mean Stone Age?

 

[Sonic The Hedgehog]

Why are post-apocalyptic worlds always run down, gritty, dirty and always involve a desert of some sort?

When a city in ancient times is sacked by a conquering army, it is rebuilt, and sometimes better than before. When a house is burnt down, it is demolished and a new one (and most of the time, one that is better) is built on top of its ashes.

In Fallout's world, the bomb dropped half a decade before the protagonist emerged from the vault. 50+ years is more than enough for society to rebuild, especially with our current knowledge and technology (even more so with Fallout universe's technologies). This is taking into account the effects of radiation too.

Nagasaki was rebuilt in 5 years, and re-population took approximately half the time (shoot me if I got this one wrong). So unless if the game is set directly after the apocalypse, I don't see why towns and cities need to exist in a run-down state, with people fighting "just to survive".

This is a poor analysis. Nagasaki was destroyed by the bomb, but about two weeks afterwords money and supplies came flowing in from a heavily industrialized economy. A majority of the Japanese were not dead, and they were given many opportunities to rebuild their country under the watchful guidance of the west.

Wars, destruction of cities, is not the same thing as a nuclear holocaust or biological disaster wiping out a majority of the planet. Not the same at all. A post apocalyptic world is one in which a majority of the population died and a majority of the available resources and supplies are also wiped out. Including most notably power, which right fucks up the whole business of rebuilding "bigger and better."

One more thing that I keep having problem with is the value of firearms in a post-apocalyptic world. Guns, especially well manufactured ones, would be extremely precious in that kind of a setting. Manufacturing and maintenance of ammunition and guns would be a lucrative business, and gunsmiths would be highly respected (and protected) people in towns and villages.

In Fallout, and in fact most post-apocalyptic settings, firearms are treated as common commodities. Why are there no "family guns" passed down from generations to generations (well maintained guns can last for a very long time), which you can only acquire either by stealing (which would make bounty hunters come after you to retrieve the gun) or killing the owner? In such a world I would imagine "new" guns would be hard to come by, and good ones are almost never surrendered or sold.

Wouldn't that make interesting quests too, with real moral dilemmas? Imagine a person sending you out in a quest to track down his stolen rifle, and you begin the quest by talking to underworld fences, tracking it from buyer to buyer, only to discover that it is sold (or retrieved) by its original owner, and that your quest giver is just a thief (at least, according to the current owner).

It is then left to the player's own judgement on who is telling the truth, which required the player to make a decision that is neither good or bad - it is merely a decision that the player makes according to his own judgement.

This point requires you to abandon your first point, which is a good start. The only problem is that even in Fallout guns and ammunition are relatively rare and expensive. Many of the weak have no weapons at all.

Moreover, given that your first point is ridiculous and utopian games don't sell, the darwinist nightmare that would be created after such a horrific event would mean that guns, the production of guns, and the maintenance of guns, and therefore the market for guns would be one of the first things nurtured along with some sort of energy. Post apocalyptic games reflect this well.

Also, your daddy's guns are destroyed by huge fucking explosions.

 

[Phelot]

Well, not only would the human toll and destruction of infrastructure be terrible, imagine what would happen if the entire internet, the entire banking system, most vehicles were all destroyed. Maybe you survive the bombs, but you'd have no assets other then what you might have IF your home survived. Suddenly, you'd have no cell phone to call for help, no TV to check on what's going on. Rather then depending on technology you'd have to depend on yourself and other survivors.

So I can see how it could be as bad as Fallout. Immediately after the bombs drop, I'd imagine people were trying to work together, but slowly turned more brutal as resources dried up and people's loyalties begin shifting from country to individual tribes and families.

I used to think about a post-apoc. world based on most major cities in the US being destroyed along with the federal government. It takes place in northern New Jersey and is based on wars fought between the various counties over resources and dominance. There is a glimpse of civilization and most of the counties strive to reform the state government. Most of the state was intact after the bombs, but massive EMP has fried most communication devices so the entire state went black and most authority at a state level diminished leaving only town and county municipalities functioning.

 

[Fez]

Not all PA scenarios have to look run-down everywhere. Logan's Run featured a city which looked utopian on the face of it.

 

[soggie]

LOL, are you sure you don't mean Stone Age?

Nope. I'm pointing out that it doesn't take a genius to make a weapon that can kill a person.

This is a poor analysis. Nagasaki was destroyed by the bomb, but about two weeks afterwords money and supplies came flowing in from a heavily industrialized economy. A majority of the Japanese were not dead, and they were given many opportunities to rebuild their country under the watchful guidance of the west.

Wars, destruction of cities, is not the same thing as a nuclear holocaust or biological disaster wiping out a majority of the planet. Not the same at all. A post apocalyptic world is one in which a majority of the population died and a majority of the available resources and supplies are also wiped out. Including most notably power, which right fucks up the whole business of rebuilding "bigger and better."

Alright, I admin that Nagasaki is a poor choice. However, it is still a valid comparison, not for the scale of destruction but for the speed of recovery. I mentioned that it took 5 years for Nagasaki to rebuild - a timeline that is accelerated from help from the civilized world. Now without any government to speak of, and little to no resources left, it is still hard to imagine that society cannot rebuild itself in 50 years. Let's talk about the basic necessities - water, food and shelter. It's impossible not to be able to find water. If that is the case, all survivors of the apocalypse would have perished in the following weeks.

Food factories and supermarkets might be wiped out but the knowledge of growing food and hunting for them would have survived. And unlike the progression of technology from hunters to gatherers to agriculture, in a PA world the survivors would already have the knowledge. The only thing lacking would be tools, which is not that big of a problem.

How hard is it to start planting and farming again? It takes less than a year to grow rice and corn, to set up irrigation and such. And coming from an industrialized background, somebody must have thought of streamlining these agricultural processes and turn it into a manufacturing business. Heck, any business man would see the PA world as a goldmine of opportunities!

Humans, if anything, are resistant to change. If apocalypse strikes, and there are survivors, it's hard to imagine that nobody would take up the task of rallying the survivors into forming a unified community (strength in numbers), and then strive to rebuild the ruins around them.

My point here is simple. Humans are creatures of comfort. While there are many humans that are complacent and lazy, there are always those that emerge in such situations to show extraordinary leadership in the face of despair.

So 50 years and still living in a shack (especially in a post-apocalyptic United States of America) is simply unimaginable. Had it been 10 years only, it would have been realistic. But 50 years? That's only plausible if the nuclear bombs fell during the bronze age, and that by itself is impossible.

No arguments against your view on weapons though.

Well, not only would the human toll and destruction of infrastructure be terrible, imagine what would happen if the entire internet, the entire banking system, most vehicles were all destroyed. Maybe you survive the bombs, but you'd have no assets other then what you might have IF your home survived. Suddenly, you'd have no cell phone to call for help, no TV to check on what's going on. Rather then depending on technology you'd have to depend on yourself and other survivors.

So I can see how it could be as bad as Fallout. Immediately after the bombs drop, I'd imagine people were trying to work together, but slowly turned more brutal as resources dried up and people's loyalties begin shifting from country to individual tribes and families.

I used to think about a post-apoc. world based on most major cities in the US being destroyed along with the federal government. It takes place in northern New Jersey and is based on wars fought between the various counties over resources and dominance. There is a glimpse of civilization and most of the counties strive to reform the state government. Most of the state was intact after the bombs, but massive EMP has fried most communication devices so the entire state went black and most authority at a state level diminished leaving only town and county municipalities functioning.

I highlighted that section of your post because that is a very good point. Yes, there will be people rising up to take the helm of leadership and there's always danger of the lack of resources turning one against each other.

However, survival takes precedence here. Communities that cannot work together in a resource thin location and circumstances will NEVER survive, and will eventually collapse. Or until they realize that simple fact and learn to work in a team.

As an analogy, imagine a village that has been razed by a passing army with a scorched earth policy. Survivors of that village will definitely band together, and in normal circumstances they will leave the village and move to somewhere else, abandoning the village. However, when there is no where to go, what would they do?

They wouldn't just sit down and do nothing. Somebody would definitely assume leadership one way or another, and what how the community reacts in the following days will determine its survival. And the only way to survive in such an environment would be to work together, assuming if we're talking about survival in the long term.

 

[denizsi]

Original subject is interesting and worth discussing I guess, but OP is so boring.

 

[spectre]

Original subject is interesting and worth discussing I guess, but OP is so boring.

Yeah, kinda. I think the OP misses out on one important issue, that is population. Most of PA scenarios assume the majority of people died from fallout / famine/ gangrape / nukular winter / biological weapons.

This is the main obstacle to to actually rebuilding, why bother rebuilding Chicago, when there's, say, 20,000 people alive left in the whole state.

But, the OP has one point, a lot of people underestimate the time span of, say, 50 people. That means 2 new generation are born, and it is a fuckload of time to do things.
Now, don't just get me started on Phallus 3 and its 200 years...

One more thing to chew on, though. Finding people who know how to do shit. You can say that it's actually quite easy to make an AK, easy to smelt iron, easy to construct a building. Now, the point is, if 80% of the people are dead, what are the odds that the remaining 20% have actual skills of value.

Like, try figuring shit out without the internets? What are all your doctorates in medicine without all the machines that go 'ping,' how many people actually know how to make concrete... etc. etc.

 

[Phelot]

One more thing to chew on, though. Finding people who know how to do shit. You can say that it's actually quite easy to make an AK, easy to smelt iron, easy to construct a building. Now, the point is, if 80% of the people are dead, what are the odds that the remaining 20% have actual skills of value.

Like, try figuring shit out without the internets? What are all your doctorates in medicine without all the machines that go 'ping,' how many people actually know how to make concrete... etc. etc.

That's true. Once the generation that survived the bomb dies out, any info that they didn't pass on to children would be lost especially considering that most books would be destroyed or would be decaying VERY fast. Not to mention that most information would be stored ONLY on computers. How much can you learn about the internet from a book at the library? Since most computers would be fried and most power would be lost, there's little hope of getting anything useful from a computer.

Plus, consider how specialized everyone is now. No one knows how to build an entire car even if they happened to work the machinery that put some of the car parts in place!

I would also imagine that radiation, while maybe not causing weird The Master mutations, would still kill most people off through cancer by the time they reach 40 or so. Most children born would have major birth defects though that's just speculation.

 

[crufty]

i always liked appleseed's take, where world is somewhat like ancient rome

pockets of extreme high tech, civilization, education...surrounded by barren lands of war.

 

[GarfunkeL]

You cannot really pick a disaster from human history and use it as a fully accurate meter for gauging out a whole-sale PA scenario. For there has never been an event which would scale large enough for what original Fallout postulates - California with under 10k people.

If nuclear holocaust would really happen, especially in the early 80s when the stockpiles were largest, it wouldn't be far off to say that population of US would've dropped by dozens of millions immediately in the strikes. Then dozens and dozens of millions more from radiation sickness, civil disturbances, diseases and finally starvation.

Consider that US agriculture is completely mechanized (except for few religious/survivalist groups) and cannot function without fuel, lubricants, pesticides and fertilizers. There probably are not enough horses on the whole continent to replace tractors and harvesters and certainly not enough people who know how to utilize them. Even if you raid every farm and community museum you wouldn't have enough ploughs and tools, though that doesn't really matter since without fertilizers and pesticides production will never be enough to feed population masses over late 18th century numbers - not that you'll even reach those numbers.

Plus, of course you have the issue that majority of US nuclear missile silos are based inside Midwest, meaning that a large part of fertile soil is covered with irradiated dust, meaning you have to gather and haul away a good portion of the topsoil before any plants grown in it would be safe to eat.

UK government agencies calculated that within two years, population level in UK would fall to medieval levels. Draw parallels from that.

Most of the fictional PA-stuff I've read or watched is actually far too optimistic in regarding human survival and "rebound". In reality, western nations would have been completely fucked and the new civilization would probably emerge from central Africa, since that area would not get many nukes at all and the majority of population still get their subsidence from herding and farming.

There's the future for Cleve to froth about

 

[Arcanoix]

Nagasaki was rebuilt in 5 years, and re-population took approximately half the time (shoot me if I got this one wrong). So unless if the game is set directly after the apocalypse, I don't see why towns and cities need to exist in a run-down state, with people fighting "just to survive"

Nagasaki is still being paid for to this day, you just don't hear that. :wink:

 

[soggie]

Yeah, kinda. I think the OP misses out on one important issue, that is population. Most of PA scenarios assume the majority of people died from fallout / famine/ gangrape / nukular winter / biological weapons.

Which is my problem with most PA scenarios. If a timeline is provided, and the setting is set too far into the future from the day the world went to the shitters, then it is unrealistic to assume that civilization would stay stagnant for that many years, even with minimal resources and a harsh circumstances.

Given, there are many different PA scenarios. But if there ARE some humans still alive after 50 years, with towns and cities of their own, then it is really hard to imagine why couldn't they have done better. Resource problems is only prominent in the first decade - beyond that, if communities did not adapt and innovate, they'd perish through starvation already.

This is the main obstacle to to actually rebuilding, why bother rebuilding Chicago, when there's, say, 20,000 people alive left in the whole state.

Nobody wants to be alone. Sooner or later some form of a community would be created, and then it will grow as more survivors join in. Isn't this a central theme of most PA stories? Living alone for most of the movie only to hear news of a pocket of humanity surviving somewhere, and then making their way across whatever danger the writers deem necessary to reach "the last haven of humanity" or something to that effect?

But, the OP has one point, a lot of people underestimate the time span of, say, 50 people. That means 2 new generation are born, and it is a fuckload of time to do things.
Now, don't just get me started on Phallus 3 and its 200 years...

One more thing to chew on, though. Finding people who know how to do shit. You can say that it's actually quite easy to make an AK, easy to smelt iron, easy to construct a building. Now, the point is, if 80% of the people are dead, what are the odds that the remaining 20% have actual skills of value.

Like, try figuring shit out without the internets? What are all your doctorates in medicine without all the machines that go 'ping,' how many people actually know how to make concrete... etc. etc.

I think the skills that we lost are basic ones like how to light a campfire wishing for a flamethrower and how to trap a rabbit, let alone skin and cook it. And what to do with the remains afterwards.

It's not easy to make a wheel when you know how one looks like and why you need it in the first place.

As for firearms, I'd expect lots of reverse engineering. There will be tools and machines left behind after doom's day, unless you're talking about Earth getting scorched from space (which would leave no survivors at all, thus negating the need for a PA setting).

 

[soggie]

You cannot really pick a disaster from human history and use it as a fully accurate meter for gauging out a whole-sale PA scenario. For there has never been an event which would scale large enough for what original Fallout postulates - California with under 10k people.

True. I'm using those scenarios to figure out the speed of recovery, rather than using it as a basis for a PA scenario.

If nuclear holocaust would really happen, especially in the early 80s when the stockpiles were largest, it wouldn't be far off to say that population of US would've dropped by dozens of millions immediately in the strikes. Then dozens and dozens of millions more from radiation sickness, civil disturbances, diseases and finally starvation.

Consider that US agriculture is completely mechanized (except for few religious/survivalist groups) and cannot function without fuel, lubricants, pesticides and fertilizers. There probably are not enough horses on the whole continent to replace tractors and harvesters and certainly not enough people who know how to utilize them. Even if you raid every farm and community museum you wouldn't have enough ploughs and tools, though that doesn't really matter since without fertilizers and pesticides production will never be enough to feed population masses over late 18th century numbers - not that you'll even reach those numbers.

That's the United States. Would things be different in other areas of the world too, especially those that are naturally rich with resources and have lesser reliance on technology?

Plus, of course you have the issue that majority of US nuclear missile silos are based inside Midwest, meaning that a large part of fertile soil is covered with irradiated dust, meaning you have to gather and haul away a good portion of the topsoil before any plants grown in it would be safe to eat.

UK government agencies calculated that within two years, population level in UK would fall to medieval levels. Draw parallels from that.

Most of the fictional PA-stuff I've read or watched is actually far too optimistic in regarding human survival and "rebound". In reality, western nations would have been completely fucked and the new civilization would probably emerge from central Africa, since that area would not get many nukes at all and the majority of population still get their subsidence from herding and farming.

There's the future for Cleve to froth about

Modern civilizations would crumble while developing nations would survive (the irony...). But then this would also mean technology would be set back by centuries due to lost knowledge.

 

[GarfunkeL]

That's the United States. Would things be different in other areas of the world too, especially those that are naturally rich with resources and have lesser reliance on technology?

Modern civilizations would crumble while developing nations would survive (the irony...). But then this would also mean technology would be set back by centuries due to lost knowledge.

Depends on when you want to make it happen. 1960s, thanks to Cuban Missile Crisis? US, Canada, Soviet Union and Europe would be fucked. Rest of the world wasn't yet using mechanized agriculture fully. Early 1980s, thanks to Reagan and the close-calls then? You can add big parts of South-America to the list.

And yes, technology would be set back by centuries largely because to successfully thrive in modern society, we specialize. The top scientists are "top" because they are so heavily specialized on their own, often extremely narrow field. You could get two molecular biologists on the table and they might understand very little what the other does. Kill those specialists, wreck their computers and all you might have left are the printed books - though there's a good chance that hardly anyone understands those books since they always build on top of foundations laid earlier.

How does our manufacturing work? Depending on factory, its either robots doing all the work or robots doing the heavy work while humans do rest. But thanks to Henry Ford, it's all on conveyor-belts where you do you own, small & specialized part, since that's better for the factory in whole, instead of utilizing craftsmen who would understand the whole process.

Take your cellphone for an example. Just the raw materials for it probably include gold from South-Africa, platinum from Brazil, copper from Russia, zinc from Canada and plenty of plastic, made from oil drilled in Saudi-Arabia, refined in Finland and distilled in another manufacturing plant in Sweden. Those raw materials are all carted to the actual factory in Romania where humans and machines put the together, though only the plant engineer team knows the whole process because they designed it.

And of course, there's a different factory which makes the battery for those phones...

This sort of inter-connected web goes across all of our modern societies, cosmetics, luxury goods, electronics, weapons, medicine, food, communications - everything. If you cut those threads violently, then society goes p00f and results are damn ugly. Which is why I said that the more primitive society is now, the better its chances to live through nuclear holocaust and especially to survive in a PA-setting.

What would be easier this time around, is that survivors know that all these nifty things are possible - hopefully you wouldn't have to fight against windmills, superstition and religious extremism, the way many pioneers during the Early Modern period had to.

 

[Unradscorpion]

I'm sure you'd get lots of superstition/religious extremism.

We would have to reinvent cellphones and such, but we wouldn't need them until much later when a new civilization is wholly built.

 

[GarfunkeL]

This sort of inter-connected web goes across all of our modern societies, cosmetics, luxury goods, electronics, weapons, medicine, food, communications - everything.

How many people in Europe know how to hunt with traps, bow+arrow or spears? How many know how to re-fill spent bullet casings with gunpowder if you want to keep using firearms? How many doctors know how to operate without electrical tools? How many pharmacists know how to grow penicillin from ground up? It's not that far back when the common cold killed people, thanks to poor health care and nutrition.

I was just reminded of this since I watched the awful Book of Eli recently and while the world had been destroyed ~30 years before the events of the movie, there was no shortage of working modern firearms and especially bullets, nor hip-hugging slim jeans, the bad guys had FOUR working cars and gas for them plus the motorcycles that the scouts used - and all this in a world where people have forgotten things and concepts like TV, literature and far-range trading is apparently non-existent based on the initial hostility of the local shopkeeper and the lack of other people on the roads except for bad guys for the hero to kill.