New answers tagged post-apocalypse
0
The leader is a benevolent dictator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
A benevolent dictatorship refers to a government in which an
authoritarian leader exercises absolute political power over the state
but is perceived to do so with regard for benefit of the population as
a whole, standing in contrast to the decidedly ...
1
I really don't see that you actually have a problem here. Dictatorships almost always form around a cult of personality, and the more pressure the population is under, the more quickly they can form. All you need is the Dictator to accumulate just enough power to create a safer place for people to be than wherever they were, and they'll flock to him.
...
3
So who says he just started gathering followers after the apocalypse? Maybe he had a cult going when the end happened, hell maybe he predicted it (or something close enough he can pretend).
If he had already been stockpiling loyal cult members and supplies then once the apocalypse happens he's in a great position to take over. He's probably got a ...
0
Well besides that 500+200+200 are at least 900 years it sounds more or less plausible.
I’d suspect that within 500 years of wars and technology recession...a lot knowledge might be lost. That’s what you are indicating here. However what kind of technology would that be. I have a hard time believing that this would be technology concerning war but rather ...
1
Very plausible. This has happened numerous times in asian history, great empires fracturing after a great defeat or civil strife. look at china and middle east most of it will be there. While knowledge wasnt wiped out, talented people got killed, people who knew how to administrate,lead and execute orders. You could say that leaders are easier to replace ...
6
In the real world? Not feasible at all. It might just be possible with quantum-locked superconductors, but (unless these are cryogenic aliens living on a world with a surface temperature well below 100K) that will not happen naturally. Maybe room-temperature superconductors are possible, but if so, they are definitely not simple natural materials; they would ...
12
hydrogen is too weak – one flaming arrow and the approaching flying
battle-platform turns into (cinematographically appealing) fireworks.
Only if your engineers are idiots. The cinematic flames from the Hindenburg crash are not burning hydrogen--they are from the combusting envelope, which was basically painted with jet fuel. The hydrogen didn't help, ...
4
You don't "farm" bullets, you manufacture them. Or fabricate them. Or produce them. You want a factory.
That said, people would make their own bullets way back then. Melt metal in a mold and pop them out. In fact, many people still make them themselves. For cast-lead bullets, basically all you need is the raw materials, a campfire, and molds (...
2
Certain books.
The kind that teach how to build stuff. How to make concrete. How to build a forge and make tools. How to make gunpowder and a alcohol still. How to fix a car and how to make a electricity generator.
Even today, these books make a very small percentage of the total amount of books. Libraries are full of self help books about building a ...
0
Well, settlements ne ed to grow edible plants and breed edible animals. So corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, chicken, cows, pigs, horses. Sometimes deer, boar etc... For hunting and fighting people would use something that cannot be depleted or can be easily refilled. Say goodbye to guns. People would use Fiskar tools sport bows and crossbows made from ...
0
How about a no-moving-parts solution? Do it like trees do, with capillary action. Trees manage to lift water from the ground all the way to their tops this way. The leaves evaporate the water, which causes a suction pressure which pulls more water from cells below. Trees are a constant elevator of water.
I can imagine a long rope of some hydrophilic ...
0
There will be enough preserved, canned food available to survive for some months, maybe years. During this time the survivors will need to get a solid supply of electricity going. Wind and water turbines will still function quite well. The survivors will need to locate themselves where there are waterfalls and height differences, and build lots of water ...
0
Very simply It is a nuclear hardened bunker and the door is locked, or worse rusted shut.
Hope you have a few months to hang around cutting it open.
Worse when you finally open it there is gaping hole, the supports for the floor having long since rusted away and collapses (not uncommon in old bunkers) and across the gaping hole you see... another *******...
0
Today about the most precious thing is data. And it is likely to be even so in the future.
So your hypothetical scavenger 150 years from now probably does not want to salvage rusty metals, and old computer hardware, but want the data. We are already very good at encrypting data, and not so adept at preserving it for a long time, so it will not be easy to ...
3
As others have pointed out, you will not get contemporary masks and all that without extensive effort. But that might not be useful anyway.
Short answer: you can not just produce everything again after an apocalypse
The manufacturing process is massively complex and if you do not have EVERYTHING needed, including maintenance knowledge for all the required ...
7
Modern "blueprints" are a closely guarded secret. They are also enormously complex and basically useless. By the time you can use them, you have more than enough development in place to recreate them. It would be better to develop some basic computing capabilities so that you could recreate a VHDL synthesizer. Then you can take VHDL files and synthesize ...
0
The other answers are likely to be what you're really after, but the first Emperor of China's burial tomb has lasted thousands of years without being breached. Sure, these days we don't dig it up for fear of contaminating it, but even as recently as a couple of hundred years ago we weren't so careful about such things.
My point is, it's somewhat hidden in ...
9
Chip makers are paranoid when it comes to protecting their designs and processes.
A bunch of people with low budget has no chance to find on the internet some recent design which makes sense (on line scammers are another story).
That said, you cannot mix in the same computer a CPU from 2010 with a RAM from 1980, because they would be blind and deaf toward ...
6
In europe 75-year-old unexploded bombs are found on a weekly basis. Once or twice a year one will explode on its own, sometimes creating a 30-foot-wide crater. Thankfully, usually in farmland rather than city centres!
Some of the bombs used in WW2 were chemical time-delay bombs, designed to explode after the initial bombing raid, to kill rescuers. Ain't war ...
7
The military base was in the process of being enclosed in a minefield. There is decaying explosives everywhere. No longer is there a need for triggers and proper arming of the devices, chemistry and time has made them into Russian Roulette To Go.
As the base was in the process of being enclosed in said minefield, not only are there mines scattered around, ...
-1
Your military base is build into a salt mine -> electronics are well preserved as the air is veeery dry (though you shouldn't take them home, as the salt dust will attract water from the air, ruining it).
Your military base uses thermal energy as source of electricity
It was shut down, but you entering it reactivated it -> lights are still working
So from ...
4
Feral guard dogs
There are plenty of places where military bases are guarded, in part, by dogs. Sometimes, those dogs are real nasty:
Also, they're huge.
If a bunch of these got loose when the base shut down, and no one bothered to corral them, there's a solid chance a pack of them could grow and expand in the environs of the military base. A large pack ...
4
Lots of stuff about passive defence here, not much about active.
Passive stuff is easy: fail-closed electro-mechanical systems are old hat, and what you can't conveniently lock you can always (conveniently or not) conceal.
But how about active deterrents that won't suffer from decay if they happen to sit idle for a couple centuries? Seems like we should ...
2
A story I read used an RTG to keep capacitors charged. Those capacitors energized various electric-fence-like obstacles, including strips across the floors of entry chambers to bunkers. The scavengers in the story were familiar with this design, and knew to short them before entering, but this wasn't common knowledge among others.
13
Scorched earth
A scorched-earth policy is a military strategy that aims to destroy
anything that might be useful to the enemy while it is advancing
through or withdrawing from a location. Any assets that could be used
by the enemy may be targeted, for example food sources, water
supplies, transportation, communications, industrial resources, and
...
49
I'm thinking in an entirely different direction. In one of the Indiana Jones movies he met this cult that was dedicated to protecting a relic and keeping unworthy people from getting it. Suppose that, since the apocalypse, the locals have built up a cult that just absolutely does not want anybody to have what's in the military base. They could be the ...
16
Previous answers have correctly pointed out that infrastructure and electronics decay over time. However, what if that particular base had been the test site for cutting edge military weaponry?
More specifically, AI research, with integrated combat and repair drones. As the world succumbed to the apocalyptic event which wiped out civilization as we know it, ...
1
(From the way your question is phrased, I'm assuming you mean "Leave remains that are recognizable as a man-made structure or monument" and not "Remain in working order." If you mean the latter, you way want to re-word your question.)
The answer is that a great many things would survive. Five hundred years is not a long time, really -- just think how much ...
2
I really like the other answer for this question but I just wanted to add a little something to the discussion. The odds of a monument's survivability relies on the massiveness and the maintenance requirements of the structure. Materials also come into play as buildings made out of ferro-concrete are stronger but last less long compared to those that aren't ...
91
I know you want proper booby traps, but I doubt they would be the biggest dangers or challenges of invading a military base. Security measures would have a far larger impact.
Firstly a 1 meter thick steel door should make it extremely hard to get in. With the electronics degraded and any ball bearings and grease long gone you will literally have to drag ...
4
Electronics and chemistry do not hold well against time, and electronics need also power to be operating. Therefore I don't expect them to be effective after 150 years.
Booby traps working with gravity will probably be still effective.
Something like:
hanging spike balls
masked holes with spikes inside
rocks falling
requires nothing too complex to be ...
1
Framing Challenge
You're getting a lot of pushback over the specification on radiation levels, but realistically (and most in what I think is the real spirit of your question), it's not actually radiation that's going to kill all the humans, it's starvation.
From a 2007 study on widespread global nuclear war:
"A global average surface cooling of −7 °C ...
11
The capability to survive the event depends, in part, on the species capacity to heal its own genetic and cellular structure. Higher-order mammals that evolve quickly have the least ability to repair this kind of damage, since its why we evolve so quickly compared to creatures like crocodiles and cockroaches. Mammals have changed immensely while other ...
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