I feel like that’d be something that falls into the category of realism butting heads with fun. Deathmobiles are an integral part of the Cataclysm experience. Sure you could convert something to run off of electric solar power exclusively but then you’d have people questioning the dedgration of solar cells… Firearms are a useful tool that require you to use your survivor wits and a bit of inventive ingenuity in order to keep on shooting once your vanilla ammunition starts to run low.
Basically, realism should enhance gameplay rather than detract from it. And breaks from reality should be for when the the realistic option makes thing worse. Given ammo is usually available to some extent, crafting smokeless powder isn’t essential unless you’re managing to make a game last quite a long while.
Noisy, and limited ammunition stock with no reliable way of sustaining that. Yep. I’ve had no regrets for not even bothering with conventional firearms in this game since I first started playing, and by the looks of it, it seems that’s not going to change anytime soon.
I do use guns at times, and again I find it easy enough to stay supplied if used carefully. Either have a huge collection of guns and use whatever you have the most ammo for, or pick one very high-power efficient weapon and break down all other ammo to feed it.
I recently used a carbine to shoot down a hulk on the friggin first day of my playthrough. it was super effective.
The weapon saved my life there.
You ll probably only need weapons like this early in the game when you are inexperienced.
And lateron i find it hard to even find a situation where id need to fire a gun.
I would like to point out, probably redundantly here, that anyone REALLY upset about the removal of smokeless powder making from the future of CDDA should just grab 0.C or an older version, use a simple .json editor (I use JSONedit) and edit it back into the recipes file. Problem solved. Heck, someone will probably have a mod available before too long reintroducing it.
And while I would LIKE to cite situations such as Fallout and Wasteland, where gunpowder manufacturing has been (at least partially) reestablished, they are also something like at least 75-100 years in the future.
As for that guy fucking up his .45-70 hand load…well there’s a reason there’s 20+ different smokeless powder compounds on the market.
I still want to reiterate the possibility of using black powder to hand load modern style ammunition. If you have a suitable primer it works just fine. It will have reduced power and does gunk up weapons much faster. In something like an older style lever gun/revolver it’s not that big a deal. I wouldn’t try it in an AR variant, or a modern hunting rifle with tight tolerances. In something like an 03A3 or K98 it would probably work as well, but the weapon would require cleaning after 10 rounds or so.
So if you were insane enough, you could load a semi-auto with blackpowder handloads?
…I might be in favor of adding this for .22 LR and other rounds that existed back before the advent of smokeless powder.
Sounds reasonable to go this direction at some point 
We actually have a biodiesel recipe in the game that AFAICT is quite plausible, so that could replace normal diesel.
Between that, solar power, other alternative fuels, and rare caches of properly stored diesel, I think it would turn out fine.
[quote=“Random_dragon, post:47, topic:10127”]So if you were insane enough, you could load a semi-auto with blackpowder handloads?
…I might be in favor of adding this for .22 LR and other rounds that existed back before the advent of smokeless powder.[/quote]
I’m led to believe that in semi-autos they’d have a problem cycling. The recoil pulse would both be really different and insufficient energy wise, enough to mess with how the springs work, plus it’ll clog up in short order. In a pinch you could “rack it for each shot” though.
But revolvers, bolt-actions, break-opens, pumpguns, leverguns and anything you cycle manually should work without issue. You’d just have to be sure to clean them quickly afterward and often.
One possible issue though: a lot of modern cartridges don’t have enough case capacity to get enough blackpowder in there to work right. Things like 9mm, 40 S&W, 45 ACP you could use with blackpowder but the power will be down. Something like 10mm has a fair amount of case capacity and wouldn’t be crippled quite as bad. Same with modern rifle rounds, the energy loss in 5.56mm would render anything firing it into a popgun by comparsion. It’d still be lethal as high velocity lead can be, but have nowhere near the same power level or armor penetration.
Big straight-wall cartridges like the .357, .44, shotgun shells and .45-70 (which was originally designed with blackpowder in mind) would work great. They’ll be down on power of course but still very effective.
I like the idea of adding another tier of ammunition, now that smokeless powder is uncraftable. Since anyone can craft it with time and effort maybe we could add a tier of blackpowder ammo. It’d be worse then even handloaded ammunition performance wise along with having a chance of damaging the weapon firing it, but if your a dedicated gunner/innawoods character it can help keep you shooting.
Yet more reason we need ammo type overlap, so semi-autos can exclude blackpowder versions.
Thers no need to go that far, just give blackpowder cartridges a penalty to weapon durability.
A line about back powder being more corrosive and rapidly fouling the action is all you need.
Hmm. I can’t remember if we even have that option at the ammo level.