The Glade 4.0

I find myself still watching this out of a lack of anything else to watch...

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Raell Kromwell

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

If the USA were decimated today, that would still leave you with over 280 million people.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Ooo, I know what words mean. Smarty pants!

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Yeah, I know. Just a pet peeve of mine.

Playing some strategy game:
"Oh man, my forces were decimated in that attack."
"Huh. that sounds like acceptable losses to me."

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Ok so steam trains and boats worked. I'll buy the rarity, they would take a lot to get working since most are in museums. However my statement about diesel still stands. They would work great, and a tractor and implements would be a closely guarded treasure to a farming community. I do realize that refined diesel would eventually run out, but a Diesel engine will run on a lot of stuff. There are a lot of people out there that know how to make bio-diesel, a skill that would spread pretty easy. I guess we'll see if they touch on that.

Maybe they did they just ran out of fuel or spare parts quickly?

Bio diesel manufacturing's only tricky element is sulfuric acid I believe, and some sort of base to get a standard measure of the amount of fatty acids you will begin with (and some lye if you want to skip the acid and remove the fatty to make soap) and you can run diesel itself on well rendered animal fat...for a while before it clogs.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Heh.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-10-dumb ... is-season/

Damn...

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Raell Kromwell

So I haven't watched this show, but I read somewhere that people have to use muskets... because there is no electricity?! ......

Please be explaining to me how packing a lead projectile, charge, primer, and black/gun powder in a brass casing requires electricity. Because the wild west (and far earlier) sure knew how to do it.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

See Mr. Sky's link...

that's one of the problems with this show...

Too much 'Check your brain at the door', and not enough 'splainin''

Actually, without electricity there are a number of things that become problematic. Although bullets can be manufactured without electricity, you would need new equipment to do it. We don't have the equipment we used to make bullets prior to electricity anymore. Diesel engines would still run, but how are you going to get them started? We use an electrical current to get the parts moving in large motors.

No electricity really would **** up our society, and return us to 1800s technology. That part isn't the problem. The problem is electricity going out in the first place. The justification for that is, "Physics went craaaaaaazy!" Well, with no electricity, chemistry stops. Ionic bonds don't hold together. Reactions cease to occur. Your body stops metabolizing food. Plants stop converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. Your brain can't send electrical signals to control your body! The premise is utterly stupid.

I'm betting it turns out this is the aftermath of the Mayan apocalypse. God took away electricity in December of 2012 to punish mankind. That's really the only way "Physics goes craaaaaaazy!" The secret to turning the lights back on is to get everybody to believe in God again.

Someone see how it goes. I wonder if I'm right, but not enough to watch the show myself.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Thousands of NRA members hand load their ammunition. Also, military marksmanship teams use hand loaded ammunition.



I would use a diesel engine small enough to be hand started to drive a series of larger diesel engines until I got the desired motor moving.

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"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." - Alice R. Longworth

"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." - Ash Williams

You can go to pretty much any sporting goods store and get everything you need to make bullets without electricity.

Making the cases would be a pain in the ***, but if you reuse them they last hundreds of firings.

You can go to pretty much any sporting goods store... and buy what? Components that you assemble into bullets. Components that are manufactured by machines that run on electricity. That's the problem.

Twelve years later, Sports Authority is out of stock. You've got to stamp bullets and casings. You have to make powder. The machines that do that run on electricity. You have to redesign and rebuild them.

As for diesel engines, where are you going to find one that's small enough for you to start by hand? Most diesel engines are large. You also have to modify the large diesel engines to allow them to be started by the smaller diesel engines.

There are vastly more large diesel engines than small diesel engines, so most diesel engines will by lying fallow because we simply can't start them. Then, you also have to have a large diesel engine and a small diesel engine in the same place. Our ability to transport large objects is crippled, and even a small diesel engine is large enough that transporting it is difficult. You also have to transport fuel.

These things are problems. They are significant barriers that can not be overcome simply by gunpowder and diesel engines existing. A substantial amount of infrastructure has to be rebuilt.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Crippled, yes. Nonexistent, no. Keep in mind that books that describe how things were done without electricity still exist.

Diesel engines probably would be pretty hard even if you can make them, because of the problems of refining diesel fuel, but wood and coal are much more easily obtained without electricity and can provide steam power, and not just for trains.

Oh, by the way, steam locomotives evidently do work. There was one on tonight. My wife had the show on briefly. It was only a little one, a 4-4-0 or 4-6-0; I didn't get a good look at the wheels. At least they didn't have it pulling some unrealistically long train, and they were firing it with wood.

It would be a lot harder to mass produce locomotives without electricity, but there's plenty of scrap metal laying around, and plenty of preserved locomotives and books that tell you how to build one. Discovery learning is not needed. If existing heavy locomotives can be returned to operating condition, or a new ones built, a lot of the "move heavy objects" problems are at least partly solved. Speed wouldn't be all that important; drag freight locomotives could be used. Tractive effort would be much more important.

Steam power can even be used to run a crane to help with loading. The biggest barrier to operating steam locomotives today is the maintenance and complexity of them

Things would never be as easy as they were with electricity, but a lot of basic problems could be overcome.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't know. 15 years after, and there's no indication that any infrastructure has been replaced? I'm thinking that the books are gone, along with every engineer and scientist.

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You guys know why we do things with electricity? Because it's more efficient! Many things that we take for granted today become cumbersome and not worth the effort without electricity. For example, needing a chain of two to three motors to get a tractor running might just be less useful than simply using a horse.

Many goods that we use these days could still be produced, but not in large quantities. Mass production uses machines that have electrical control systems.

Even something as simple as getting all of your raw materials in one place becomes a hurdle because all of our long distance communication for the past hundred years has been based on electricity.

It isn't that we don't know how to do these things without electricity, it's that all methods for doing so suck gigantic dangly balls. It's all 1800s technology.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Nobody is disagreeing with that. What's being said is that it can be done not that it can be done just as easily, efficiently, or as well as with electricity.

People are talking about what is still possible, not about it being just as easy.



Sorry, I was referring to this as a hypothetical of how the loss of the ability to harness electricity would leave the world, not specifically the situation in the actual show. I think we can chalk that lack of books, scientists, and engineers up to the fact that hot chicks with crossbows are more likely to attract viewers than the intricacies of getting a steam locomotive to run without ALCO or Baldwin to make them for us.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

10% Casualties is generally considered sufficient for a Neutralization mission with artillery fire.

A unit is considered Destroyed with artillery fire at 30% casualties.

This is not the same as those words for maneuver forces, but there is a reason for it. 10% losses is enough to degrade a units ability to carry out the mission for that type and echelon (battalion, brigade, etc.) 30% losses is generally equal to the complete destruction of one sub-unit of the echelon in question. For example, an infantry company "destroyed" by artillery fire would have suffered casualties equal to a loss of one platoon. At this point, the unit can no longer be expected to accomplish the doctrinal mission of its echelon, even in degraded fashion, even though it still retains considerable power. It essentially has been reduced to a reinforced version of the next lower echelon.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Keep in mind, I'm not talking about starting a Diesel engine on the scale of a locomotive, or diesel powered ship, I'm talking about a farm tractor. And starting one without electricity is quite easy. I guess having grown up on a farm with a dad that was too cheap to replace the battery in his tractor it just seems like second nature to me, but all you have to do is park it on the side of a hill and let gravity do the work. I've seen in done on some rather large tractors. Aside from that, they were using a team of people to move the Huey, (seriously, thats the best military heli they could come up with?), so whats stopping them from using a team of humans to pull start a tractor? Now, keep in mind, there are a lot of diesel engines out there that do use electric fuel pumps, those would be probelmatic, farm tractors tend not to, so thats why I focused on them, along with their utility in producing food. You also talk about the size of diesel engines, diesel engines can be quite large, but they also range down small enough to be found in many commercial grade lawn mowers, and all the way down to hand cranked generators. Which reminds me, there are still many fully functional tractors out there that didn't have electric starters to begin with, they were started by hand crank much like the early cars, so there you go, an easily started diesel engine.

There is no question, things get much more difficult without electricity. At least they've made the statement, that a lot of things were destroyed in wars that resulted from the ensuing chaos, that much is easily believed based off human nature. But still, we aren't that far removed from the "1800s" technology, and believe it or not that stuff while a pain in the butt compared to todays technology, is still a far cry better than what came before it. It's also human nature to find easier ways to do things, sure we are a spoiled society, but given the circumstances layed out in the show, I'd really think someone would have started recreating some of that technology other than a train someone found intact in a museum. Heck, Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO should, have quickly become a seat of power in the world presented by the show, since it houses many functional 1800s machines, and craftsmen who specialize in said technology.

I think the writers wanted/needed the timeline to be long enough that there's been this generation that's grown up without technology so much that they didn't think about "would we really have gotten absolutely nowhere in 15 years"

Also you might be able pull start a diesel engine and plow your field the first year, but what do you do when your tire goes or you blow a rotor?

Furthermore, the people most likely to be thinking up all this stuff are probably the least likely to be able to handle and survive the chaos immediately following the electron apocalypse (Electalypse? Electro-pocalypse?) Yes we have Google Guy, but he seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Here's another assumption we could make: The people staying in the Monroe Republic are just plain idiots and the rest of the regions aren't so stupidly bad off when it comes to tech.