Military Srip?

[Ironside]

Hi! Short-time lurker here.

First off I'd like to express my thanks to the members of this board for the quantity and quality of the threads and information here. I've spent several days going through old threads gleaning all sorts of useful stuff. Mind you I had to pick my jaw up off the floor first ;). I wish I'd found you guys earlier.

The thread on cantonments got me thinking about the economic interaction between them. In areas that are under the control of NATO forces for instance, cantonments would be trading back and forth with each other and the soldiers would want some means to enable them to purchase the goods and services available from local civilians. I imagine that soldiers would get some sort of pay.

I have thought of a mechanism to enable this via overprinting of extant currency bills with say 'MilGov' or something similar. As printing technology is no longer widespread this might well be viable. What are people's thoughts and comments?

[Canadian Army]

Here is a thread that was posted a while back, along the same track.

http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=861&highlight=Scrip

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Just some ideas...

Making a hand printing press is relatively easy, there's some details here
http://chestofbooks.com/crafts/popular-mechanics/Amateur-Work-3/A-Hand-Cylinder-Printing-Press-Suitable-for-an-Amateur-s-Ne.html
You have to scroll down past the adds. Keep in mind that even this one is probably more sophisticated than strictly necessary. You could easily create the type set and lay the paper onto it and then simply lay weights on the whole lot to ensure the paper gets printed on (anybody remember doing this sort of thing in early childhood at school, I remember carving shapes into potatoes and using paint to print the shapes onto the paper)
The webpage also briefly mentions making lead pencils which will probably be the only way to ensure some sort of writing implement when the pens run out.

Rather than overprinting whatever paper money is still available it might just be easier to pulp whatever scrap paper can be found and produce sheets of what is basically recycled paper then use the hand printing press to produce the scrip that's needed.
Otherwise you might end up with 5000 $10 notes and only 100 $50 notes if that's all you could recover (with paper money worth less than the paper it's printed on, it may very well get used to light fires or even wipe backsides so there might not be much of it around).

The print type could be hand carved wooden blocks or metal type that has been recovered from a printers. For images it's probably easier to carve the image onto a wooden block (anyone with even basic carpentry skills can carve out an image if someone has drawn it onto the block).
Alternately, images and large bodies of text could be done by the lithograph technique
Some info here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_Press
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithography

[Ironside]

Thanks for the info :D I didn't realise that printing presses could be built relatively easily, and I've never even heard of Military Payment Certificate, so I missed that thread when looking at older stuff.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

In regards to making paper, this site explains how to do it at home but it also has some extra information about recycling stuff in general that should be useful for possible Twilight use.
http://www.funsci.com/fun3_en/paper/paper.htm
Paper making and printing notices, money and so on is a good occupation for those people in a cantonment who can't do heavy work or aren't in the militia etc.