Quote:
Originally Posted by ChalkLine
On top of this, I think little thought has been given to modern firearms built with little tooling. While it may seem that black powder weapons are obvious it's more likely in my mind that knowledge pertaining to firearms and ammunition would not be lost quickly. The modern metallic cartridge is the ultimate weapon humans have designed and it's not going away.
So, can you make ammo without modern manufacturing? Most definitely. This was covered in T2K with 'The Ammunition Factory'. I'm sad to say I can't find the original author but here is the article;
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After reading this article I tried to learn more. Most bioreactor use concerning TNT now is to degrade TNT contaminated soil, not to produce TNT. Going to the source of this article on a T2K Wikia, I see the original work was done by a Matt Geisler. Unfortunately the external link is broken. There is an associate professor named Matt Geisler specializing in plant biology. If this is the author, he may know more about bioreactors than me. While I did work in a lab where we did pilot studies and scale up projects using bioreactors for a wide variety of tasks, my job did not include working with the actual bacteria. But in every case, the process was quite energy intensive. Not a problem in communities that are TL-C, B or A. But those tend to be rare, so I don't think such an ammunition plant would be encountered often.
The article also mention needing 1-2 full-time chemical engineers. In 2016, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows there were 32,700 chemical engineers. Assuming a uniform distribution and leaving 5%, we get 1,635 surviving after the war. Given the number of projects these engineers could be working on (i.e. water treatment, sewage treatment, fuel production) the pool of explosive makers is even smaller adding to the rarity of such a plant.
Blackpowder is much simpler to make and would suffice in most situations. It's nice to think big, but often good enough is what wins.