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#1
05-04-2017, 02:55 PM
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Machine shops require huge quantity of consumables to make product.
High speed steel to make tool bits or tungsten carbide premade bits. Those are consumed as resharpened or chipped in use. Cutting oils and kerosene for lubricating parts as these are cut and generating heat. Sand paper in strips or sheets from 80 grit to 5000 grit to polish parts for fit gets used up fast. Sandpapers think three to six feet of strips for barrel polishing. Valve grinding compound in 40 to 600 for final fitting two parts that must have below .003 tolerances like gas valves. Drill bits (especially certain preferred sizes) last from a month to a year with periodic resharpening. Same goes for reamers to be sure a hole is true to the specified diameter. Barrel reamers (cutters or buttons) are made by few specialized shops (Pacific Tool & Gauge is one) as are the specific reamers for a chosen caliber. These come in sets of three. One and Two basically open up and establish to chamber shape and size. Number three is the Final and cuts the chamber to SAAMI specs in depth, shoulder, and leed. One and Two would last about six months if you used a drill bit to hog out material. Three or Final has to be precise and would be out of spec if you were trying to cut several chambers a day for a month. A machine shop needs three phase 240 or 440 watt power at 60 cycles without interruptions. Any loss or power that fluctuates will cause imprecise cuts a trained machinists would need to assess and recut. Most of all a machine shop needs steel, iron, aluminum, copper, and lead in pure or as alloys in correct ratios. Most salvaged metals can't be trusted to make parts that must endure with out destructive testing first for hardness, ductility, etc, etc. The Republic is must build a blast furnace to be fed with coke (cooked coal) and some metallurgists that know how to add in alloys like chromium, manganese, boron, and others to make steels for various purposes. That is why I think the Republic and the KFS have a trade established about New Orleans with beef, ammonium nitrate, leather, motor oil, gear oil, lamp oil, kerosene, diesel, and plastic pellets going to the KFS. The KFS is sending back textiles, machine shop consumables, containers (55 gallon and 30 gallon drums, metal boxes with lids, and assorted tupperware or glass jars with lids), and horses for the Cavalry. 
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#2
05-04-2017, 05:37 PM
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There should be trade between the major "industrial" nations. But I don't think you have to go all the way to New Orleans. Somewhere like Vicksburg might be a "free city" that trades with Texas and KFS if you include Truckers . A minor detail I would add is that synthetic rubber should be on the list of Texas exports. Somebody has to make tyres for the Truckers and Bikers
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#3
05-04-2017, 06:51 PM
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#5
05-05-2017, 08:30 AM
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The problem with New Orleans is that the Mississippi River likely would have changed course and no longer empties near it. The Army Corp of Engineers fights a continuous battle to maintain the course of the Mississippi at no small cost. It would not take long for the Old River Control Structure (ORCS) to fail.
This was a major concern in the late 70's, since the flood of 1973 almost did undermine the ORCS. There was a paper written about the physical and economic consequences of such a failure in 1980 by two professors at Louisiana State University. An excerpt from the abstract reads: "Were a major flood to destroy the ability of the ORCS to control the distribuion of flow between the Lower Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya River, then major flooding would occur in the Atchafalaya Basin, highway and railroad bridges would be destroyed, gas pipelines severed, and industrial production along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge (BR) and New Orleans (NO) would be reduced. The dry weather period following the flood would result in reduced discharges in the river between BR and NO. This would permit salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to fill what is now the main stem of the river. The present channel would become a salt water estuary of the Gulf of Mexico." It goes on to discuss the saltwater making existing potable water supplies unusable requiring a plan to replace them. It is a good read if you want a realistic idea of what likely happens in the lower Mississippi River after the war. The paper is the "Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute, Bulletin 12, September 1980". Using that as a search term in Google will take you to a PDF of the entire paper.
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#7
05-05-2017, 03:02 PM
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The problems with the Mississippi River and its change of directions over 150 years on non-human control will almost certainly make New Orleans-Vicksburg-Baton Rouge almost useless as ports, on the other hand Mobile Bay would almost certainly be still usable, so how about a shipping route from Mobile Bay to Galveston or Port Arthur?
For Lonestar's long term plans, the Republic's efforts to recapture Galveston and reopen the trade route would be interesting.
__________________
The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#8
12-25-2017, 03:04 PM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D_V5smCaOw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_shaft Perfect alloys make equipment last a lot longer, but they aren't required. Most of the alloys you mention didn't come into general use until well after the 1903 Springfield was in production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel#History Also steel is widely recycled today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrap#...etal_recycling so getting it graded and sorted is not only possibly but commercially viable.
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#9
12-25-2017, 04:18 PM
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forget conversion. That would take more effort than it would be worth.
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#10
12-26-2017, 09:19 AM
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