ElPatron said:
The Heik said:
Gunsmiths and Gun manufacturers are only different in the quantity of their work.
Not exactly. Depends on the gunsmith you are dealing with. Some might not have a lot of knowledge on engineering. Some drill scope mounts, tune triggers, custom fit parts for reliability, make wooden stocks and some ornamental features.
Others design guns from scratch.
Gun manufacturers can be engineers or technicians in charge of production managing, design, quality control, R&D, etc.
Then their skill is even less useful, as then they only know certain parts of making and maintaining guns and their ammunition, rather then the full complement needed for the entire process.
And again, you're assuming that everything goes right for you. We don't know how many of the gunsmiths and gun manufacturers on the planet died in the initial infection, or how well spaced they are or how many materials, sources, and skills for materials they have handily available. There's simply too much that can go wrong.
ElPatron said:
The Heik said:
they are still rare in comparison to all the other occupations that exist on this planet
Professionally speaking. A lot of people do it as an hobby and fix their own guns.
Yes, but I rarely consider hobbyists to be the same class as people who do it as a career. Remember, doing something as a hobby means usually to simply tinker with it. Most gun-hobbyists just don't have the consistent experience to fill up the requirement of all the parts and materials needed to keep a post-Apocalypse group running at decent capability. Gunsmith isn't just something you can do in an hour with a wrench and a drill, you need an actual workshop (or at very least the tools from it) to do it properly, and that's just not a practical thing to carry around all day long.
ElPatron said:
The Heik said:
And if the larger scale manufacturers are indeed taken away by the military, then it is also safe to assume that they will take the lions share of the resources too.
Somehow I think the 270 million guns in the US will suffice.
For the 6.7 billion people on the planet? I don't think so muchacho, especially when you consider that we don't know their exact location within the country, and scouring every home and building in America for the potential weapons sounds like a very good way to waste time and draw the Zombie hordes to oneself.
And if you think you'll get to all those stockpiles, think about all the other people scrambling to do the same. Not everyone is going to get a gun, and those who do are going to hoard it like it's gold bullion, as for all contextual purposes it is in terms of value.
Also, you gotta remember, not all that ammo is going to necessarily match the gun you use, so potentially you could use up half your rifle's ammo fighting the zombies or other survivors just to find out that there's only pistol and shotgun ammo at the location
ElPatron said:
The Heik said:
And even with gunsmiths everywhere in the US, they do not have the stockpiles to supply all the people who suddenly need guns and ammo in large quantities (again, something like 1 gunsmith/gun manufacturer for every 100 or more people)
All the firearms needed are in production right now. If more are needed, then not a lot of gunsmiths are needed:
- the Sten SMG is fairly simple, any machinist can do it
- in 2004 an Australian gang was building Owen SMGs
- in the reloading aspect, a lot of people are already doing it to save money and you don't need to be a gunsmith to reload
Yes, and how many of those are within walking distance of where you live right now? Doesn't matter how many guns there are, it's a matter of how accessible they are. Traveling through a whole city/province/country full of the undead just to get a gun is suicide. You'd be dead long before you got to any sufficient stockpile without weapons already at hand.
ElPatron said:
Ammunition wise, lead can be recycled and casings can survive more than 5 firings. Some can handle 20.
That's if you can find it. Remember, most people don't usually keep track of where their casings fly (seeing as they're looking at their target to make sure they hit) and in your average forest conditions you'll have one helluva time finding them all. To put this into perspective me and my little cousins had a nerf gun fight a while back with Repeater style guns that had neon orange dart casings the size of .50 cal shells, and we couldn't find half of them in a house not much bigger than your average suburban building. Doing that for something far smaller and potentially hidden by a whole ecosystem's worth of foliage is going to be a ***** to say the least.
As for the actual slugs, it depends on the penetrating power of the ammunition. If it's a .22 or buckshot, then you can probably find it inside the zombie, so long as you hit their head (though rummaging around in the innards of an infected is putting a lot of risk of getting infected yourself without the proper gear). But if the round is something bigger like a 7.62, 5.56 or shotgun slugs those suckers can blast right through and suddenly you have to find a slug smaller than your finger in potentially hundreds of feet of terrain.
Now if it's just a small pack of the undead, recycling your shots is feasible, if time-consuming. But if it's the undead horde you're facing, then it's unlikely that you'll have the time or desire to go back and retrieve what you've lost, as you'd probably get eaten if you did. And if even if you managed to get back to the combat location without doing it all over again, remembering where each shot and casing went is going to be even more difficult due to the passing of time.
ElPatron said:
The Heik said:
guns would very quickly become useless due to the sheer lack of parts and supplies.
Nein. Unless you can prove that statement I will disagree.
Mil-spec weapons will keep going with few wear parts requiring replacement. And there are loads of those parts.
An AR-15 went on for longer than 50,000 rounds only requiring the replacement of wear parts such as the springs.
Yes, but that's the AR, a mil-spec weapon, and even then those tests rarely take into account all the possible weather conditions that the weapon could face. If it's too cold or hot, too wet of dusty, the wear and tear threshold of a weapon can drop considerably, especially if the weapon was designed for a different climate that what it could possibly face (eg a cold weather gun is going to suffer horribly in a desert). And unlike your average civilian weapon, mil-spec parts are usually only carried by military suppliers and operating bases, which will be kept by any military personnel still in possession of such location. They're going to be rare, so you'll have to mostly stick with civilian quality parts that may not be designed for the weapon you're using, increasing the chance of the weapon failing.
The Heik said:
And remember, America is the best possible example of weapon stockpiles and crafters. Most of the rest of the planet is going to be WAY worse off.
I am European and I disagree with that statement.[/quote]
So you disagree with the known statistic that if it weren't for America, there would only be one gun for every 10 people on this planet, rather than 1 in 7? That's kinda ballsy, considering you're trying to fight against fact.
To conclude (because I'm honestly getting tired of running over the same ground again and again on this thread), ultimately there are far too many factors, variables, materials and specific skill sets for the majority of small groups to realistically run and maintain sufficient gun and ammo construction and stores.
You are simply better off hightailing it away from any population centers to a defensible location and using traps and pitfalls to kill the zombies, as the materials needed from those are incredibly simple to gather and make (seriously, a pitfall is a hole with sharpened sticks at the bottom) and come from renewable or effectively limitless sources (mother nature), thereby covering the long-term needs for the group.
