Machine Shop

[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.

[jokermatt999]

Yeah, I’d found notes about paper shotgun casings. Revolvers/bolt actions also make sense. I’m not sure how we would disallow ammo from being used in some guns. I’ll look into the reloading code. I’ll probably just do it based on “does this gun have no magazine mod slot?” and then make paper cartridges for a few sensible calibers.

As for the infrastructure on the original topic, I think I’ll start with jsoning out a bandit controlled machine shop that can be captured for a waistline (gotta see how bandit camp/cabins are handled), and that’ll be a decent staying point at least.

[KA101]

IIRC paper cartridges are more an aid to muzzleloading: bite it open, powder in the breech, ram the ball in. I wouldn’t expect 'em to do well in shotguns, but not surprised someone’s tried.

[Hardluck]

[quote=“Hardluck, post:8, topic:8456”]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.[/quote]
The amount of time design takes is not completely dependent on the manufacturing process, although some thing are impossible in some processes. What CNC gives you is the ability to produce small parts, or otherwise difficult shapes, accurately and rapidly. That means that you can abandon design choices you had to previously live with, because you could only salvage the parts, and develop new solutions that are better for you in your situation.

[quote=“Hardluck, post:8, topic:8456”]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]
Making programs for the CNC-machines is pretty much basic engineering these days. There are also several programs that allow blueprints to be automatically converted to CNC-programs. I’m not finding it plausible that all of that would be wiped out, while the machines and the people who know how to build/maintain CNC-machines are not, given that a lot of them are engineers themselves.

[kevin.granade]

I don’t follow you, of course there would be designs still in existence, but you’re not going to just find a CNC workshop that has every design imaginable, or even a large selection of them. All we’re saying is you’d need to go out and find them.
As for making your own, it’s not inputting the design into the system that’s hard, it’s specifying the design itself that’s hard. Sure laying out a design is a known quantity, it’s just that the design for a complete item is MASSIVE, requiring a huge amount of detail to be input, and then you get to the hard part, which is the resulting item being fit for purpose.

As for paper cartridges, can you point me to sources talking about using them in modern firearms? There were certainly a number of guns using them in the past, but I’m not sure how likely they are to work in a gun not designed for their use. As I understand it, modern casings are an integral part of the firing system, sealing against the breech, which means the receiver isn’t going to seal otherwise.

[Hardluck]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:30, topic:8456”]I don’t follow you, of course there would be designs still in existence, but you’re not going to just find a CNC workshop that has every design imaginable, or even a large selection of them. All we’re saying is you’d need to go out and find them.
As for making your own, it’s not inputting the design into the system that’s hard, it’s specifying the design itself that’s hard. Sure laying out a design is a known quantity, it’s just that the design for a complete item is MASSIVE, requiring a huge amount of detail to be input, and then you get to the hard part, which is the resulting item being fit for purpose.

As for paper cartridges, can you point me to sources talking about using them in modern firearms? There were certainly a number of guns using them in the past, but I’m not sure how likely they are to work in a gun not designed for their use. As I understand it, modern casings are an integral part of the firing system, sealing against the breech, which means the receiver isn’t going to seal otherwise.[/quote]

It’s pretty clear that we’re on a different page in this matter and while trying to get our perceptions of how manufacturing would work in a fictional semi-futuristic zombie apocalypse aligned might be entertaining, it’s most likely going to end up being a frustrating waste of time. While it is beyond me why a group of people would absolutely need to hunt for the design schematics for every part they make, I have to admit that it does make for an excellent gameplay element.

My suggestion would be to not to include CNC-machines in the machine shop, but instead have them consist of older non-automated machining tools. You’d still need the design schematics to make the parts for any device you’d want to manufacture, but the lower skill and effort required in getting those machines to work helps to explain the reliance on old world designs.

[kevin.granade]

One point that you might be missing, I’m not saying you’d need to find every schematic, just that you’d have to either find them or spend time doing the design, and with complex items the time spent would be significant.

Back to the shell casing example, for a machine capable of making one, given an example and appropriate tools (calipers and such for getting the precise dimensions of the item), I wouldn’t expect it to take more than an hour for a skilled CNC operator to do the layout needed to make one.
On the other hand, for a decent gun, I’d expect an operator to spend a week or more just inputting the schematics for an existing gun they can use as a template.
To produce an original design for a decent gun, I’d expect a month or more of effort. (this would include some prototypes and testing)

As for your suggestion, since I don’t agree with your position that CNC machines don’t need schematics or they’re trivially easy to make, it’s nonsensical for me to adjust how things would work to take your point of view into account.

[Hardluck]

We appear have different ideas on what a CNC machine is, how they are used in manufacture and what would constitute as a schematic. I don’t, however, disagree with your estimation on the design timetable. I fail to see, though, how this would be considered an obstacle for a faction. A month, in a 14 day season, would translate to about five days and it’s in line with what it would take for a player character learn enough about mechanics to make a pneumatic assault rifle from scratch.

Ultimately, it is “a rose by any other name”-type of a situation: What we see as its counterpart in reality is dependent of its function in the game and our own opinion about how the device works.

[vache]

I have experience operating a CNC machine (albeit for woodworking and not metalworking) and it was fairly simple to generate a small quick program, but for more complicated things (particularly things with a lot of curved edges), we had to import them from CAD drawings. For the large majority of our work though, we had a series of programs already built that covered 95% of cases, and the operator just had to insert a set of parameters to the premade programs. I think, given any premade piece and measuring equipment, any reasonably experienced operator could re-engineer a program for any part in short order. The big thing there would be making sure you have the right tool, but again, an experienced engineer should be able to work it out. Making some design from scratch would be impossible for most operators as that takes a completely separate set of skills.

I’m seeing three ways to get CNC programs: acquire program directly either from machine or created through soft copy CAD drawing, reverse engineer program from completed part or from hard copy CAD drawing, creating your own program from scratch. First one is immediate, reverse engineer would take a day or two for an operator or engineer, from scratch would be weeks from a trained engineer.

The big trouble with all this I think is going to be powering it all, especially if you have more than one machine. A gas generator probably wouldn’t cut it for a lot of this.

[iceball3]

How about… twenty gas generators, a solar farm, or minireactor?