Machine Shop

[Aenye]

I like this suggestion (replied in the POI thread before reading this one) and agree that such a workshop would be a strategically important facility for any faction. It would also take a faction not only to maintain it, but also to gather all the necessary and standard materials for its operation.

That said, if we were considering a workshop containing CNC-enabled (essentially, programmable, non-operated) machines, a slight shift in the product (such as different casings calibre) would require the machine to be reprogrammed with the proper schematic. While it would be virtually impossible to produce new schematics (facilities, know-how, etc.), finding existing ones (and compatible (although that’s not as big of an issue as it seems, as there are some standards) with a given machine) would be a nice quest in itself. Next up, finding a supervisor, capable of reprogramming such a machine and ensuring a proper “start up” of production and one could have some production variety. Apart from those “difficulties”, the one large pitfall would be standard resources - as Kevin said, it would require a separate installation to make use of random scrap that’s lying around (to be honest, I’m not even sure whether such machines are actually available, short of a smelter).

Sure, the required material could likely be scavenged and may serve as the “currency” for the faction holding the shop (“give us two standard sheets and you can get one sheet’s worth of casings” ?), but would likely lead the PC/faction toward looking for a source of the necessary resources - whether through trading or conquest / expansion…

As for the machines, the one thing that comes to my mind is a (sheet) metal folding machine, but I’m no gunsmith. If we’re considering higher-than-homebrew-quality weapons, the following article on building an AR15 firearm might provide some useful and relatively novice-friendly information on the parts and methods: CLICK

[Hardluck]

I’m not sure where you get the idea that producing new schematics for CNC-machines would be impossible for people who are able to operate and maintain them. Giving access to CNC-machines is essentially giving access to robotics. Group with access to them and enough power to run them, wouldn’t only be able to reproduce anything we currently have, but also continue development on them.

[Llamageddon]

Yeah, that’s true. If electronics on Earth were fried, the civilization could have a tougher time coming back to life, but as Cataclysm’s verse stands, just setting up and rebooting everything seems perfectly viable.

Personally I think that a Metro 2033 type situation, where high-grade ammunition is essentially a currency, due to its rarity and impossibility of manufacturing more. I would be perfectly okay with having to eventually settle for pneumatic, electric, or paper cartridge weapons, at worst shabby and made out of few pipes, at best assembled from parts of existing guns.

Anyway, I researched ammunition manufacture extensively, and well, unfortunately, it seems like paper cartridges are the best bet for a survivor. Reloading brass cartridges is viable few times per cartridge perhaps, and primers are a serious problem - you could make some yourself, but not the kind that is used in existing ammo. I guess we could stretch things a bit here and say “you just can”, I’m more or less fine with that.

Also, gunpowder - we should make a distinction between black powder and modern propellants - gunpowder has essentially half the power, produces tons of smoke, and soots the inside of the gun - that would almost certainly interfere with the operation of modern firearms, and likely be unusable for any gas-operated system, which means no semi-auto or full-auto guns, just revolvers, shotguns, bolt-action, etc. Note that it would be usable, it would just break fast.

Regarding the rebalance/overwork of handmade guns, I really, really want to add disassembling existing guns and converting between calibers(within some limits, it’s perfectly viable for the most part). It needs some thinking though, because as of right now it could get a bit messy. An ideal solution would be a modular system, but that would probably be a huge and unnecessary mess. Either way, I’ll research and come up with what kinds of simplified part list gun disassembly could use and report back.

[kevin.granade]

Giving access to CNC-machines is essentially giving access to robotics. Group with access to them and enough power to run them, wouldn’t only be able to reproduce anything we currently have, but also continue development on them.

This is partially true and partially misunderstanding how this kind of thing works. While a relatively basic component like a shell casing would be easy enough to whip up for an experienced CNC operator, especially given an existing item to work from, laying out an entire device, such as a gun, typically requires man-years of effort. If you ask even a highly capable designer to create an arbitrary item you need, it could take them weeks to months to get you a result, and I wouldn’t expect that result to be comparable to the current state of the art. Schematics of working devices would massively jump-start this sort of thing, enabling you to start producing things almost immediately (given tools and components).
I could easily see a system where machinists are assigned to replicate the design of various items you might need, and over time produce their own schematics based on time, skill level, and schematic difficulty level.

There’s also a side issue here, while you can use a very capable cnc machine to mill out a part, it is incredibly resource intensive to do so, since that kind of device takes a block of the material as large as the largest dimensions of the item in question and simply cuts away everything that is not part of the desired item. A more mature manufacturing process wastes a tiny fraction of the material as a prototyping system by breaking it down into a larger number of steps that produces components that compose the desired item in just the right way. Also the cnc approach ties up one massively complex/expensive machine for the entire time it takes to make an item, whereas a mature production system spreads that time across a large number of relatively simple/cheap machines that do one thing but do it very well. the throughput of the mature manufacturing process is orders of magnitude higher.

In game terms, I wouldn’t want to get into specific machines, but rather pretend they’re somewhat interchangeable and just track basic facts about them like what material they work with and how complex they are, so the basic alternatives you’d have are:
“prototyping machines” that can perform the entire process start to finish, but waste a lot of materials and have low throughput, but also low to nonexistent setup time.
“assembly line machines” that perform just one step of a process, meaning you’d need to devote a number of them to producing one product. they would use materials much more efficiently, and produce items much faster, but the whole group of machines needs some amount of time to be configured to make something.
’'machine shop production" this is craftsmen using flexible machine tools, it would be even slower than the prototyping machines, but would tend to waste less material since the manufacturing process can be more flexible. setup time would also be intermediate. You could also throw a flexible number of craftsmen and tools at various projects.
There might be other categories, but you get the picture.

If you’re trying to have a faction design an item from scratch, they need either the right prototyping machines or a generic machine shop to work on, which would tie up the machines and consume materials until the design is complete.
If you need just one of something for some reason, you might be able to get a working prototype faster by cutting corners, but have to redo part of the design process to make it work with mass manufacturing.

[kevin.granade]

Yeah, that’s true. If electronics on Earth were fried, the civilization could have a tougher time coming back to life, but as Cataclysm’s verse stands, just setting up and rebooting everything seems perfectly viable.

While you’d be able to pick up where various industries left off, that doesn’t let you bring up a car manufacturing plant and start cranking out weaponry. Even assuming the machinery is capable of it, why would they have gun schematics on hand? This is also convenient as a place for the survivor to step in and acquire schematics for factions they are supporting.

Anyway, I researched ammunition manufacture extensively, and well, unfortunately, it seems like paper cartridges are the best bet for a survivor. Reloading brass cartridges is viable few times per cartridge perhaps, and primers are a serious problem - you could make some yourself, but not the kind that is used in existing ammo. I guess we could stretch things a bit here and say “you just can”, I’m more or less fine with that.

To some extent yes, once we’re talking fully equipped machine shops, creating modern guns and ammunition is not out of the question. There will still be some things like computer and circuitry manufacture, plasma and laser technology, etc that won’t be reasonable for even a faction to manufacture, but guns, engines, etc will be within reach if the appropriate tooling, materials and expertise are assembled. Still though, scavenging will continue to be massively valuable for most hard to manufacture items.

Also, gunpowder - we should make a distinction between black powder and modern propellants - gunpowder has essentially half the power, produces tons of smoke, and soots the inside of the gun - that would almost certainly interfere with the operation of modern firearms, and likely be unusable for any gas-operated system, which means no semi-auto or full-auto guns, just revolvers, shotguns, bolt-action, etc. Note that it would be usable, it would just break fast.

There’s already a distinction between old-school gunpowder and modern propellant, or at least there should be, and if there isn’t I’ll be ripping out some crafting recipes.

Regarding the rebalance/overwork of handmade guns, I really, really want to add disassembling existing guns and converting between calibers(within some limits, it’s perfectly viable for the most part). It needs some thinking though, because as of right now it could get a bit messy. An ideal solution would be a modular system, but that would probably be a huge and unnecessary mess. Either way, I’ll research and come up with what kinds of simplified part list gun disassembly could use and report back.

This has never struck me as a particularly practical thing to do with scavenged materials, you need so much of the gun to be caliber-specific that it seems more reasonable to just make the rest of the bits (stock, handles, trigger, sights, body, etc) and attach them to those guts rather than transplanting them into a new gun. It’s not like most guns are designed to be modular in the way you’re describing, and if you want to make a group of guns that are, it’s far easier to add support for just those guns rather than a system that applies to everything.

[macrosblackd]

Why wouldn’t the majority of machining have been replaced with advanced 3d printers at this point?

[kevin.granade]

Re-read what I wrote about prototyping machines, they’re crap at manufacturing.

[Aenye]

I’m not sure where you get the idea that producing new schematics for CNC-machines would be impossible for people who are able to operate and maintain them.

I don’t have a lot of experience with those machines (usually only when they blow up or malfunction spectacularly), but what always hit me is that there always is someone from the design office of the company present (usually to claim that the operator made a mistake), hence, my assumption.

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:10, topic:8456”]In game terms, I wouldn’t want to get into specific machines, but rather pretend they’re somewhat interchangeable and just track basic facts about them like what material they work with and how complex they are, so the basic alternatives you’d have are:
“prototyping machines” that can perform the entire process start to finish, but waste a lot of materials and have low throughput, but also low to nonexistent setup time.
“assembly line machines” that perform just one step of a process, meaning you’d need to devote a number of them to producing one product. they would use materials much more efficiently, and produce items much faster, but the whole group of machines needs some amount of time to be configured to make something.
’'machine shop production" this is craftsmen using flexible machine tools, it would be even slower than the prototyping machines, but would tend to waste less material since the manufacturing process can be more flexible. setup time would also be intermediate. You could also throw a flexible number of craftsmen and tools at various projects.
There might be other categories, but you get the picture.[/quote]

One thing I would add to the above would be pre-processing machines for resources - using “roughly what is needed” and manufacturing “exactly what is needed”. While such machines wouldn’t just take scrap, they might take some sheet metal, ingots or plastic granules (the plastics industry is something of an easy-mode in terms of manufacturing, as most elements are obtained via melt-processing, so once you get the proper type of plastic, the chunks just need to fit into the feeding ramp of the extruder / injecton press).

Using the assembly line machines could also be interesting for some people, as it would give a very basic understanding of how an element (in this case, a casing) is produced - fun and educational = ++.

[kevin.granade]

I was glossing over the fact that the various kinds of machines would take specific feedstock, so for a metalworking shop, you’d need a supply of sheet metal possibly ingots. I don’t know what it should be offhand and don’t want it to be too detailed/complicated.
How I imagine it to work is you’d need to secure one facility for a particular material type (metal, plastic, wood,etc) and a second for manufacturing, and the details about what constitutes the feedstock are abstracted away.

[MormonPartyboat]

There’s also a side issue here, while you can use a very capable cnc machine to mill out a part, it is incredibly resource intensive to do so, since that kind of device takes a block of the material as large as the largest dimensions of the item in question and simply cuts away everything that is not part of the desired item. A more mature manufacturing process wastes a tiny fraction of the material as a prototyping system by breaking it down into a larger number of steps that produces components that compose the desired item in just the right way.

I could see this and the demand for a program to be decent gating mechanisms for a middle ground between player built and production line work. The program could simply not be craftable by a player (since it would need detailed engineering work and conversion to a program by someone skilled at it), but rather found in military/industrial sites on SD cards or on computers - it’d also have a side benefit of giving more purpose to computer skills until those get fleshed out. The raw material could be big blocks of metal melted down at a forge, and appropriately be ludicrously expensive for what you get, on the order of hundreds of scrap metal, a dozen scrounged component programs, and days of effort to make a pistol. On top of all that, the CNC machine would need to be found in decent condition somewhere in a machine shop.

I think that’d give the player some theoretical (if generally impractical) commercial grade machine shop capability and some more stuff to gather/horde/sell, while also putting up a giant neon arrow towards NPCs with proper industrial capability as a far better source for most items in terms of cost (you could buy a whole grip of pistols with that hundreds of scrap metal). It’d also be relatively easily tuned by just increasing/decreasing program spawn rates.

There’s already a distinction between old-school gunpowder and modern propellant, or at least there should be, and if there isn’t I’ll be ripping out some crafting recipes.

It’s kind of strange how it’s handled now - there’s only “gunpowder” and not a split between modern smokeless and black powder. Paper cartridges and modern bullets alike are filled with it, and it can be made from water, salt water, and charcoal given a powered chemistry set (and a bunch of intermediary steps). I’m honestly not sure which of the two it’s supposed to be.

[KA101]

We’ve black powder in PR stage, so once that happens we should probably knock the paper cartridges to that.

[Aenye]

t’s kind of strange how it’s handled now - there’s only “gunpowder” and not a split between modern smokeless and black powder. Paper cartridges and modern bullets alike are filled with it, and it can be made from water, salt water, and charcoal given a powered chemistry set (and a bunch of intermediary steps). I’m honestly not sure which of the two it’s supposed to be.

Once the chem system PR gets worked out (read: when I manage to fix all my mess ups), black gunpowder will be in. As for the gunpowder ammo, it would be a nice touch to add a “makes cloud of smoke when fired, while sooting up your gun” flag (well, two flags) to black gunpowder ammo, but that’s still a bit too advanced for me right now.

Going back to the subject - I’d love to see encrypted “industrial SD-cards” - some with schematics, some with bits of background, some with (maybe) locations of a facility or two and some with “faction-level recipes” (e.g. general technologcal processes).

[KA101]

[quote=“MormonPartyboat, post:16, topic:8456”]t’s kind of strange how it’s handled now - there’s only “gunpowder” and not a split between modern smokeless and black powder. Paper cartridges and modern bullets alike are filled with it, and it can be made from water, salt water, and charcoal given a powered chemistry set (and a bunch of intermediary steps). I’m honestly not sure which of the two it’s supposed to be.

Once the chem system PR gets worked out (read: when I manage to fix all my mess ups), black gunpowder will be in. As for the gunpowder ammo, it would be a nice touch to add a “makes cloud of smoke when fired, while sooting up your gun” flag (well, two flags) to black gunpowder ammo, but that’s still a bit too advanced for me right now.

Going back to the subject - I’d love to see encrypted “industrial SD-cards” - some with schematics, some with bits of background, some with (maybe) locations of a facility or two and some with “faction-level recipes” (e.g. general technologcal processes).[/quote]

Chem PR merged. SD-cards would be decent, as would be stuff one could grab to USB.

[iceball3]

As much as i like the idea, I think the relation to actual gameplay and current wordly situation may be important to consider.
For instance, will the world overall be how it is still? There is such a heavy density of unlooted salvage everywhere, that anything rare enough to be worth getting a schematic for probably has very rare schematics too, no?
Considering we can literally make a working car out of solar panels, scrap metal, wood, water, copper wires, and a seat, using only some tools and some power. Cars are about as “made from scratch” as they come.
Granted there is at least the flavor bonus for such factories.
As it is though, they do not seem like an asset.

Perhaps an occasional factory feature in car protyping facilities that, when powered, allows you to design a vehicle and have it assemble the whole thing cor you, provided you have the parts? Now that i can imagine being useful.

[Muaddib]

I’d love to see some kind of Fallout-ian/Metro-ian low-tech-meets-high-tech workshop.

People turning car wrecks into warhammers and plate armour.

[Llamageddon]

Conversion between some similar calibers is possible with only a barrel change, though only on some guns. It wouldn’t be an enormous stretch to make semi-generic conversion kits.

[kevin.granade]

The gunpowder game in the game is modern gunpowder, it requires a moderately advanced set of chemical processes to create. This is used as an ingredient in reloading ammo.
More recent (today?) is black powder, which will not be usable to craft regular ammunition, you could theoretically do it and reduce power of the shot and damage the gun and make a bunch of smoke, but it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the trouble, The just added black powder will be usable for black-powder specific guns and bombs.

Conversion between some similar calibers is possible with only a barrel change, though only on some guns. It wouldn’t be an enormous stretch to make semi-generic conversion kits.

if you want to make a group of guns that are, it’s far easier to add support for just those guns rather than a system that applies to everything.

It would in fact be an enormous stretch to apply something you can do with guns designed for it to arbitrary other guns.

[jokermatt999]

So are paper cartridges feasible with modern gunpowder? If so, for which calibers?

Also, I’ll have to add black powder to Blunderbuss ammo recipes.

As for the machine shop, let me know if I’ve generally got the idea.

NPCs
“Merchant” - handles the bartering for existing machined items, requests may require going through the foreman/supervisor. May hand out low level supply quests to gain rep required to talk to foreman.
Supervisor/foreman - oversees operations, handles logistics, negotiates requests to make specific parts not on hand. Would hand out higher level quests: specific parts, larger logistics requests (capture that scrap warehouse?), find a maintenance technician
Machinist - runs the low level machines, makes sure nothing goes egregiously wrong. Mechanically, they’re mostlyjust there for flavor, but you’d need a few to consider running jobs, and more may make it go faster.
Maintenance tech - repairs what he can when things go wrong, tries to keep things running smoothly.

Quests

Basic: Actually capture the facility from bandits/zombies/critters, recruit a few people to be machinists, find a bit of raw material
Medium: find a good foreman, locate a good supply of raw material, find a common schematic
High level: find a maintenance tech, find a rare schematic

Locations
Machine shop, warehouses for raw materials, ?

What am I missing so far?

[kevin.granade]

That sounds roughly right, there’s a large amount of infrastructure we need for it to work as well, but I honestly don’t know if that or the NPC side of it will be more work.

[Llamageddon]

Honestly, I’ve found stuff about people creating new paper cartridges for revolvers or old rifles, but nothing about loading modern firearms up with modern-gunpowder-filled paper cartridges. As for how it would work, it could be anywhere from perfectly to some sort of mechanical issue or even cartridges in the magazine catching on fire, I simply have no idea.

I think that a safe bet would be that anything that doesn’t use a magazine should be fine, which most likely is just revolvers, and older firearms, like the bolt-action sniper rifles, break-open shotguns, etc.