Alcohol as Fuel
 

It's practically a given in the T2K universe that at some point the PCs are going to be fueling their vehicles through the production of an alcohol still. My question is -- how realistically practical is this? Can you really run, say, even a HMMWV effectively on moonshine? What about something heavier, such as an M113...or (more importantly from the point of view of my PCs) the M4E8 Sherman that had been sitting as a monument in a city park for a half-century and had been recently refurbished.

Think of how often a modern MBT would have to tank up. NATO must have spent the whole of 1999 stockpiling fuel (and everything else) and scrounging mobile containers to ferry said fuel from the forward supply depots to the fighting units in order to prepare for the offensive of 2000.

It's interesting that the Soviets went a different way. Of course, they apparently had Ploesti available, so why not?

Webstral

Well, lets not forget the North Sea oil rigs. That could be a major campaign idea using some form of warlord or pirate group or even one side or the other, by unofficial mutual agreement they are not destroyed since all parties want the fuel, and by same unofficial agreement they use limited small arms when they raid or assault the facilities, meaning low velocity weapons like .45s, shotguns and similiar.

Now, the next problem, how does one attack such a facility?

Anyone remember the Roger Moore film "Folks?"

That's something I've also wondered, Ed. Although I lean more towards vegetable oil as a diesel replacement. If I ever get a real game going, I'm thinking of gas fueled vehicles using a mix of at least 50/50 gas/alchohol, and diesel engines using vegetable oil.

Svo
 

many diesels could run on this - actually the inventor of the diesel engine saw plant oils as the natural choice for running this and was astounded when mineral oilactually became prevalent.

,and I guess you could get some alco/gasoline up and running too .Stills,some pumps..

But what about methane gas ?

They already have a cottage industry in places like China getting energy from the waste after keeping pigs etc .(proof of concept ) There are engine models readily conversible from gasoline to natural gas-my frind has a GMC Yukon that runs on both gas and -gas .
Possible solution -scrape the shi* of teh fan and use it for fuel production :D

I mean - the amount of fuel needed to run just a platoon of APCs is staggering if you convert it into square feet of tilled land or hours of manpower needed to produce the raw material for said fuel .Not to mention that that would tie up resources for food production as well.

This is one reason why the survivors in Nevada are completely maxxed out supporting a relatively small mobile army. Alfalfa, which was grown extensively before the war, is a superb biofuel source as well as being good for crop rotation schemes. Even so, the surplus manpower of the 220,000 survivors is completely consumed by growing fuel for the warlord and fabricating spare parts. This is also one of the reasons why the USCG forces in Maine and New Hampshire appear to have done so little to curb the UBF. It takes a LOT of sunflowers to create enough oil to fill the tank of a Coast Guard cutter.

Webstral

I agree. While biofuels of any type are possible, and probably very desirable, the raw materials aren't exactly going to be plentiful. No matter if you use petroleum based, alcohol, biodiesel, or whatever, units of even small size are definately going to have their mobility seriously constrained in a T2K environment.

Rebuilding a 50-year-old Sherman?

You might find this website interesting (especially the photos)
http://www.sandstone-estates.com/int...ank/index.html

These people found that that the original radial engine would not be repairable after 50 years, so fitting a Meredes Benz diesel engine was the best alternative. I think they used a local copy of the OM422 which is used in trucks and yachts. Maybe your players can get one from a city bus?

Bio-diesel can be made from a variety of sources (including animal fat). It might be worth using Google to do some research on this

While the technology etc certainly allows for production, I'm concerned more with capacity - there's not exactly a lot of fish & chip shops left with used vegetable oil and has been mentioned, agricultural capacity is likely to be focused squarely on food production.

With the restrictions on pure biofuel production, channelling waste materials into alcohol (as poor a fuel for heavy machinery as it may be IRL) makes a fair bit of sense.