-What tools would be needed (implemented or need to be implemented).
-Acquisition of the tools.
-Crafting Furniture for specific step in the gun making process (Rifling bench for example).
-Materials needed.
-The process itself.
-Acquisition of the recipes.
-The recipes themselves.
Anyone with documentation on the process post here.
To start I will quote Kevin himself on tools needed:
*Off the top of my head, for manufacture of a serious gun from scratch, you want table grinders, a lathe, a drill press, a barrel borer (it might be reasonable to make the lathe do this), metal files, a tap set, a chemistry set for finishing the gun, and possibly most importantly, a source of different kinds of metal stock. The last could be satisfied by either findable metal stock of a few kinds, or a casting process if you want to really do it "from scratch". Of course if you *really* want "from scratch" that implies smelting your metal as well. Any infrastructure like this would of course be retroactively applied to the existing hand-made guns.
Additional, reliable sources of alternative tools and processes would be useful as well.
The few manuals we’ve been able to dig up haven’t been useful. Most either rely on parts/tools that aren’t feasible for a post-Cataclysm survivor, or they’re dubious sources.
I don’t have the time at the moment to write up a long response, but I uploaded a lot more literature that’s relevant (whether directly or tangentially) to this topic. I’m gonna leave it up for a couple days, but it’s taking up a third of my Dropbox space, so it’s going down shortly. I recommend saving anything in particular you like. It’s somewhere around 1/3-1/2 reliable, the rest dubious, but no one said that survivor-manufactured weapons have to be 100% reliable or work every single time…
Worth noting, the MAC11 entry has a fairly robust list of necessary tools that I’d imagine cover most cases in this.
I got…The M-11 conversion, the assorted gun (Sten, MP40, etc) blueprint file, and the Sten magazine lips. These three look the most promising.
EDIT: Hah. 0.4% of 2 GB, I could probably backup the whole archive if need be. I should dump some of these old screenshots off on Photobucket sometime, if I could find where I was using them all.
Random find while clearing out a couple old things on my Dropbox:
It’s about a quarter of what I’ve got that’s relevant to gunsmithing specifically. If I had the materials and the money, I’d test some of these things IRL, but I’m a broke college student so no such luck. Can’t vouch for anything actually working.
Anything ATF-related is a crock of shit. They’ll bust you for putting an arm brace against your shoulder, because that’s illegally converting a pistol into a rifle, but it’s not illegal until it contacts your shoulder.
Anyway, we’re off topic a bit. As far as materials go, the hardest parts to obtain are DEFINITELY going to be barrel materials. Can’t just use iron pipe (which is why the pipe shotgun/pipe rifles are still hilarious to me, you’re literally just using iron pipe…), it’s not rated for the pressure. So you’re either casting something a hell of a lot stronger, or you’re salvaging barrels from somewhere. Other parts can be abstracted out a bit, though Kevin said he was against abstracting the different grades of metal (which is ridiculous IMO, you use the same metal for everything as it is, you’d have to overhaul the entire metal-related fabrication system). Tools… Kevin’s short writeup covers it, the M11/9 PDF has a fairly lengthy list. Hardware stores would have a decent amount of the things needed. Factories would have more of the heavy machinery (why DON’T we have factories in-game yet? it’s New England for christ’s sake) like presses and lathes. Some stuff, you’d need to go to specialty places (gun stores and sporting goods stores- am I the only one who’s ever been in Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods? they’ve ALL got a gun section except in the six unfree states, though multiple gun-ban states are in New England…), like the hand presses+die sets for reloading and parts kits for custom furniture. I can’t really think of anything on the equipment side that couldn’t be added to the game.
One thing that might help is, if we do add factories (really necessary to, imo), add a Gun Runners-esque faction. Maybe Free Merchants aligned. Have their quest line be taking over an abandoned factory and getting it working. I don’t know if you can change an NPC’s loot list with mission completion, but having the quest’s completion gradually make the grade of guns available from Free Merchant NPCs go up as you go through their quest line could give an NPC source, and if you’re the reason they even have a manufacturing facility, it’s not TOO unreasonable to think that they’d let you make use of it. Or players could strike out on their own, loot a factory, build their own mini-plant. Lots of possibilities. That said, I do favor reconstruction over stagnating, and the whole “5 days after the Cataclysm” starting date that the lore gives, assuming the wiki is up to date, is a little… short to me, I suppose?
Ideally, all tools should be moved to a generator type system, as the electrical requirements for heavy machinery aren’t going to cut it with just batteries. Since people want the full crafting experience, then hotplates, food dehydrators, and anything else that requires a lot of energy should require a generator, or a vehicle-hookup. A hotplate, for instance consumes as much energy as a microwave.
To make this less messy you could update the tool quality system to check for charges like so:
{
“type” : “tool_quality”,
“id” : “GENERATOR”,
“name” : “generator”
“min_charges” ->check in the recipes(generator should be on the have the gen-quality show up, and should consume charges while it is on).
}
Only select places would have generators, such as hospitals, retirement homes, resorts, military, lab and police. Some homes might have a generator, especially in rural areas.
You could probably use a 3-D printer to print cheap disposable guns
However:
Just the idea of a 3-D-printed lower receiver bothered him; if the ring that held on the buffer tube and stock (the big loop at the back of the receiver) were to break, he pointed out, it could unleash a large and powerful spring inches from the shooter’s face. “It scares me,” Rynder said.
[url=http://www.wired.com/2015/06/i-made-an-untraceable-ar-15-ghost-gun/]http://www.wired.com/2015/06/i-made-an-untraceable-ar-15-ghost-gun/[/url]
Other things:
Tool and Die experience to make the molds and you are going to need a mold for each part(one for the receiver/barrel/parts/stock).
Drill-press, simple pipe guns look like they could be made from a cordless drill. Oh and the drill presses probably are going to hard to move.
End mill- in the article I read, the author was told a end mill is needed, as a drill-press isn’t able to handle the lateral stress.
Grinder machine
Vice
deep-hole gauge, barrel hone, etc(can be simplified to gunsmithing tools)
Workbench
Polisher.
Blueprints-ideally one for each gun to allow the gun-maker to make one from scratch without hurting themselves
Sanding tools
chemistry set.
Welder
“Dremel”.
You can make the process simpler with a CNC machine.
Pipe weapons probably aren’t reliable for multiple uses, but I could imagine somebody constructing a very crude single-use blunderbuss out of a lead pipe and some gunpowder.
Something like this (courtesy of an /r/guns submission), made with pipe properly pressure-rated, could be really nice as an upgrade to the pipe shotgun. And I know for a fact this one works, because he test fired it repeatedly!
Nit here, in order to add unreliable scrap weapons, the misfire system needs to be extended a bit. Not too hard to do, just noting the requirement.
Lead?!? That’s some death wish you have there, lead is notoriously soft, with a very low melting point. That’s a recipe for your pipe gun turning itself into a pipe bomb.
Yeah, lead pipe sounds…not good. I thought it was assumed the bog-standard pipe in this game was iron or steel though. Because this is not ancient Rome. o3o
Yes, I know that even the ancient Romans knew lead as bad for you.
For what it’s worth, I do like the idea that was proposed elsewhere to make handmade weapons out of components rather than parts. Think of the accessory system, for example- you’ve got a slot for your barrel, a slot for your receiver, magazine, stock, etc. and you plug in an item into each one. It allows for a lot of experimenting while also having a handmade feel vs everything being identical within a given caliber like it is now.
But I have no idea how complicated that is codewise. vOv
Could be interesting. I wonder though, how many of said parts can be machined by and and/or with power tools.
It might still be possible to work around a lack of machine shop stuff, HOWEVER…there’s a catch. Two, in fact.
First, you’d still need a very exacting set of plans and instructions telling you the dimensions of every part, exactly how to work the parts to specifiations, etc.
Second, any recipe working around a survivor’s lack of advanced machinery would be time consuming to an extreme degree.
That practical scrap metal items, regardless of its total useless, did demonstrate the idea of making it easier to machine a component by drilling holes, then “connecting the dots” to cut away the desired shape.
Regardless…sorry for harping on about this idea and the information being cited concerning it.
