How to make a post-apocalyptic setting more 'realistic'?

I think you should look at Western Europe after the fall of Rome. I am reading the Inheritance of Rome, though that is more optimistic about the Dark Ages than I am. Also try Jack Whyte's Starstone series, which covers Britain in that era, and the political, military and economic collapse that went with it.

While a number of you have talked about making things like ammunition, etc., I suspect many of you have never done that. Making gunpowder is easy, but only if you have the ingredients. Carbon is readily available, but saltpeter and sulfur are not, and then there is the mix, and the primer, fulminate of mercury, where do you find that? One of the challenges in the post-apocalyptic world is making the things to make the things to make the things we need. We are pretty far removed from the basic making of things. Plenty of metal lying around in non-functioning cars, but who knows how to set up a forge to turn that metal into something useful? Who knows how to take a generator and some wiring out of a car, drive it from a waterwheel and make electricity to do something... like what? Make light? A fire, or candles, are far easier to make. Economy of effort is critical to survival in that world.

Archery could make a comeback, but making a functioning bow is an art, that takes months, as are arrows that will actually fly straight and hit something. Not to mention you learning how to do that. Spears are easier, but who knows how to sneak up on an animal to get close enough to make it work.

Cities are going to be untenable, because they depend on transportation and abundant food and clean water coming in from an infrastructure no longer functioning, and a political and security system. They will be quickly abandoned, with small villages clustering up around them. The cities will become a source of material, just as Roman cities were "mined" for marble, lead, iron and other things... why they became ruins. Rome went from a city of 500,000 in 400AD to 50,000 by 500AD. The aqueducts were destroyed and they couldn't drink the Tiber sewage water. The Destruction of Aquileia is contemporary lament on the destruction by Attila in 476AD of that rich and important port city near Venice by Paulinus. It followed the trajectory I just described.

 

Awesome stuff! Thanks for the tips

About seeds, the part I worry about is the GMO crops, and how viable their seeds are if stored. I thought farmers had to buy seeds because the plants didn’t produce viable ones, but maybe that’s not true.

If it is true, then the loss of the source of the seeds might be a problem because most of the food we eat comes that way.

Good tip on homemade baby formula!

 

It is true. GMO seeds are non-viable. If DuPont or whoever is not available, then you are out of luck.

 

Making a bow is easy in a world full of industrial garbage like metal tubing a fiberglass shower stalls. There is so much to salvage - there would be no reason to go back to harvesting sticks to build primitive technology.

 

GMO crops are mostly the stuff grown with giant equipment in giant fields—certain varieties of corn, soybeans, etc. But as a gardener, I couldn’t buy a GMO seed if I wanted one, and there are tons of organic farmers who won’t touch GMO seed. And all of those crops are also grown with non-GMO seed.

There is also hybrid seed, which doesn’t breed true, though it usually does still reproduce. That varies by crop—a farmer who wants to grow corn or squash is going to have to take care to get non-hybrid seed (and there’s plenty of it); one who wants to grow beans can just take his pick of seed, because it’s not going to be hybridized.

Though if communities form, someone could produce hybrid corn seed—it’s not a high tech thing, and inbreeding depression means that hybrid corn tends to be much more productive. They’d need a lot of help—they’d have to grow the male parent and the female parent and the “kids” all in widely separated fields, they’d have to tassel the male parent (people are hired to do this in our world) and all three crops would have to be as large-scale as is achievable to maintain maximum genetic diversity. And the food doesn’t start coming until the third year. (Edited to add: Or later, if you have to increase the parent seeds.) It would be a substantial community effort.

Anyway, GMO, for post-apocalypse small farmers working with hand tools or animal power, is not an issue.

 

The New Pioneer is a good magazine (and website) for this sort of research. And back in the seventies was a series of reference books called “Foxfire” that would be very useful if you could find copies. They had a little bit of everything in them.

 

You're probably thinking of hybrid seeds, not GMO seeds. The GMO seeds will reproduce (to the point that Monsanto and others have had to be quite aggressive about protecting their intellectual property from people who want to replant from harvested seeds). Hybrid seeds tend to be the ones that don't reproduce true - they'll generally revert back to one of the parent plants used to create the hybrid.

But there are lots of open-pollinated seeds available. I don't think there'd be a shortage.

 

It occurs to me that a lot of seed will be just consumed as food--if someone raids the warehouse of an organic seed seller, they'll just eat the beans and corn and soybeans and so on. Even tiny seeds like onions might just be sprouted for quick food rather than properly grown. The larger stocks of seeds might exist in the hands of a small number of people with the foresight to keep them.

Some non-organic seed will be coated with antifungals and such that are essentially poison. I don't know if those wash off, or if those seeds might survive uneaten.

I could imagine groups roaming the depopulated streets, now and then saying, "Hey! A raised bed. There might be seed packets in that house." I was going to say that home pantries might contain popcorn and dried beans and such that could be used as seeds, but they would surely be raided for food first.

 

I would think popcorn and beans might also be hybridized? Not sure, though.

 

Virtually everything we eat is a result of cross pollinated hybridization. It is normal.

 

Yeah, but then the popcorn and beans might not reproduce true, right?

 

Good point. Popcorn almost certainly. Beans almost certainly not. I'm so tempted to explain the details, but I doubt that you care that much about plant sex.

 

Actually, not really. Most plants in the wild, yes. And many cultivars were developed through planned crosses, yes.

But almost all seed-based food crops are either kept as genetically identical as possible ("open pollinated", which is a misleading term), or they're created by a known cross between parents that are as genetically identical as possible (F1 hybrids).

Actually, that last bit isn't entirely accurate--outbreeders like corn are allowed as much genetic diversity as can be permitted, because they do suffer from inbreeding depression. So they're made identical (through rogueing plants that don't comply) on characteristics that matter, and allowed some freedom on characteristics that aren't.

But inbreeders like beans will be pretty nearly genetically identical.

Edited to add: I referred to "seed-based" crops because when you take the sex out of the reproduction, you can just take the first good thing that comes. Fruit trees, garlic, potatoes, etc., etc., don't breed true from seed. If you want to duplicate that great apple tree, you have to graft, not plant a seed.

Edited again to add: I'm also leaving out the concept of a "landrace", where genetic diversity is encouraged. Now I'm thinking I should read up on that.

If anyone cares as much about the details as I do, I recommend Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe. And her The Resilient Gardener is also useful for some survival stuff.

 

Whatever use a bit of fiberglass has is set in at factory. You can't grab a canoe or shower stall and carve it into a bow. Making a fiberglass anything involves layering in a mold sheets of fiber cloth or batting of various sizes, grades and compositions in various arrangements dictated by the stresses the engineer thinks it's going to endure and then injecting (or applying during the layering process) an epoxy resin that's also been specifically chosen for the tasks ahead. The whole thing is then usually put under vacuum to draw any gas bubbles out that might cause weak or stress points.

 

For the record, a survival bow and arrows suitable for killing rabbits can be made in a day if you have the right plants growing around you and you have a nice chopping knife.

 

That is how a factory fiberglass bow is made. But I'm not talking about building a fiberglass bow in a factory, but using available junk to make a bow. And strips cut from a shower would still have considerable usable spring to them, despite being lower density and the fibers more randomly ordered. You would need more material than you would with all the fibers oriented correctly, but it would still work and not require curing a tree.

But please don't put shower fiberglass in your post apocalypse story if you don't like it. Tempered steel works, or you can build something with no arms using coil springs. Point is - better performance and easier to make than trying to emulate stone age wood carving techniques.

By the same virtue, a post apocalyptic world will never require someone to make knives. Every household has dozens of them. The repurposing and recycling of available products and scrap will go on for centuries before much in the way of paleolithic skills are required.

 

But it may require someone to make swords, axes, nails, saws, scythes, etc. Wooden arrows break and get lost all the time, so it would probably be a good idea to have someone that knows how to properly make those as well. Also, crossbows are way more practical for hunting than bows and arrows, especially if you have people that haven't been trained to use them.

 

Again, I don't think so. The number of nails that you could pull out of rotting buildings will be essentially endless. You wouldn't make wood arrows because you would use metal tubing, rod, plastic, etc. There is useful garbage everywhere, and a lot of it doesn't degrade.

This is just like how shanty towns in the third world are rarely traditional materials - because there is so much scrap sheet metal, plastic sheeting and cardboard around to ever bother using grass or mud.

Crossbows are easier to aim, but harder and slower to load and much heavier. Bows historically had more range, but that's going to depend on what you're comparing. Unless you don't have the opportunity to practice, I would choose a light and portable bow over a clunky crossbow.

 

I'm not saying you couldn't, but most of it would be of such shit calibre that it would likely be the cause of your death and take more effort to make than simply cutting down a tree and splitting it for arrows.

 

You are aware that no one uses wood arrows anymore for anything but kids bows? For higher draw weights, wood arrows are a bit dangerous.

I should say, I competed in archery for awhile and make lots of things - including forging knives.

 

They're perfectly safe for bows that are going to be in the 20-40 pound range, which is what most people will actually be able to use. Even if you bumped it up to 100 pounds, which requires pretty intense training to use and is only really useful against armoured knights, hey, that's what the British longbows were long before people started making arrows out of fiber weave. And before you say that smaller bows couldn't be used to drop large prey, Native Americans used to drop moose, elk, and buffalo with bows in the 20-40 pound range using wooden arrows.

I grew up on a reserve. I used to hunt with them, all the ones I had as a kid I made on my own, arrows included. The larger danger is actually the bowstring, which just loves to break if you're using natural fibers and seeing as it's right by you're face and eye when it happens, it can do some pretty hinky shit.

 

Most male hunters (which is most hunters in general) use 55-65 draw weights.

Wood arrows are harder to make than tube arrows because of warping. That's why I pointed out that people in a dark future would use common scrap rather hard to process wood.

 

Maybe that's what people are using now, but that's overkill for small game, meaning you're much more likely to break an arrow regardless of what it's made of, and if you're stalking large game, you can hold a 40 pound bow at draw far longer than you can a 65 pound bow. Which is really important when a you're 40 meters from a deer and it decides to stare at you for half a minute because it heard you drawing in the first place.

 

Humanity in general is pretty resistant to anything, other than a planet-wide extinction event or a complete alien genocide they will multiply and bounce back after a while. But if you're doing a planet-wide destruction of everything, fauna, flora, infrastructure, acid rain, scorched sky etc that will only get worse, there is no future, eventually there's not even talk about rebuilding anything, there's just digging up leftovers of civilization and using that, not making anything new.

Sounds like your planet will kick the bucket pretty fast, a key term is eroded soil - no more farming - so it won't be long until it's nothing but survival of smaller and smaller groups of humans in extremely primitive conditions against increasing odds. I think you'll run out of humans in a couple of decades max, one half killed, the other half starved.

 

Okay. Arrows should be made from wood.