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Last Model Army
Article 1 a rifle for the landowners' boys
Part 1 : General context (I'm trying
something a bit more original in terms of post apocalypse, somewhere between
The Rover and Zardoz)
In the 2020's the United States opened the
way for a planet-wide civilisational change called the Great Leap Beyond.
Automation, robotics, artificial
intelligence and bioengineering offered new possibilites of genuine
self-fulfillment and a life free of stress and harm in general. No invasive
programming, no heavy drugging, no adherence to a cult was necessary. Of course
there were still problems, but life was all about solving these problems in
optimal, and often creative and constructive ways.
Al this was made possible by seperating
oneself from the vast multitudes of people who used to be necessary to create
value before the technological Great Leap Beyond.
For all we knew, about 2% of the world
population was finally reaching the next step in human civilisation. Among the
multiple movements that opposed the Great Leap Beyond, it was understood that
the actual figure was closer to 0.2%, but for most humans like me, it was the
“same difference”.
The world entered a stage of deep turmoil. Vast parts of the “human-based”
economy collapsed at various speeds.
Russia and China did not intervene since
they were not threatened ; their elites were eager to make their own versions
of the Great Leap Beyond, and the
Westerners were actually helping them achieving just that. It was a jolly,
international “Fraternity” of assholes, which children actually turned out to
be quite decent fellows, much to the despair of the rest of us.
The Fraternity claimed vast swathes of land
for themselves ; they already posessed a large part of it as private properties
even before the Great Leap Beyond began.
No opposition movement ever managed to get
traction since we quite rapidly slipped into the present-day “Warlord Era”.
There are about 1,500 warlords in the United States now, some are actual state
governors with the corresponding ressources, most are little more than
successful highwaymen.
After the debacle and self-cannibalism of
the Great Unification Campaign, it is covertly understood that the Fraternity
will never allow us to leave this state of warlordism, perhaps forever.
Part 2
How do we live ?
After the “Three Sisters of Cyberdeath”,
there are few modern computers left in working order. In some places primitive
computer networks are known to exist, but for the common man we are practically
stuck somewhere in the 1980's.
We have reverted to using bicycles, while
there still are car tires left to recycle. Large industrial sites outside the
Fraternity Zone are silent, most work is being done in small shops using muscle
power ( http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/history-of-pedal-powered-machines.html
)
In well-organised towns like this one we
can find a mixture of micro-hydro, windmills and watermills. The overwhelming
majority of these machines reuse parts of cars, appliances or infrastructure.
These towns look a lot like booming slums of the Old Third World, and drawn a
lot of capable young men to them.
Some motor cars are still running, they're
using methane from bioreactors (we call them Shit Rockets), usually they
operate for the merchants and the few manufactures.
Who are we ? Well 75% of the US population
used to live in the cities. Once things stopped working, a lot of them died.
Many were hooked on machines in hospitals, others needed some medicine or
another, like insuline. All those people died almost overnight. A lot more
committed suicide. Then of course, we had the appaling sanitary conditions, the
starvation, the riots, the plunder and the despair.
We didn't exactly welcome the few that
escaped these hellish places, there was already too little for us, and we
already had to kill all the Welfare Queens, The Queers and the Niggers. Yeah,
tough times, but what were we supposed to do ? First we look for our own.
At that time we had a few slave farms,
before the Fraternity somehow messed these up as well. Nobody should ever
become powerful in our country. So yeah, without anything to feed these losers
we had to kill them. Many of us actually ate them, because there was nothing
else to eat anyway. You weren't there, you can't judge us.
Now, after the die-off and the continuous
fights, we are still 60 millions Americans, and half of us are below 25 years
of age. We all have our patches of land to tend to and what we own is mostly
what our families brought with them from the Old Times. We all wish we could
have bought and kept more books, because we're bored all the time, but at least
we're got roleplaying games.
Part 3 : armament
Now my job is gunsmith. I mostly do repairs,
when I have enough the time and parts, I also refurbish guns, but my thing here
is making barrels. More on that later.
The most common gun around is the shotgun.
People reload these with anything they can get their hands on, mostly scraps of
metal but sometimes even pebbles. You can get primers and shells at various
places, a lot of traders always have small items like that to sell, you know, along with plastic
lighters and sewing thread.
By the way, the primers I sell are made in
town by a renown craftsmen, they are packaged airtight in glass jars. I sell
them by the unit.
Apart from the shotguns, the most common
rifle still is the .30-30 lever action rifle. .30-30 is the standard cartridge
around. Most rifle owners have between ten and twenty rounds for their rifle.
In any neighbourhood there is somebody who can cast bullets and reload the
brass, but the powder is the key element. Too many people lost their hands,
their eyes and their rifle because of homemade, dubious powder. What is good
enough for the shotgun ain't good enough for the rifle, as they say. This is
why serious folks come to my place to get the powder they need.
Then we have .30-caliber hunting rifles,
mainly .308 and .30-06. There are still enough cartridge cases around for our
needs, but I can order newly made ones, they're very nice but very expensive. A
good friend of mine once bought me ten of them as a gift for the wedding of his
nephew.
Pistols are no good, revolvers are much
prefered, again for reloading reasons, but also reliability, and wasteful
practices. In semi-auto you just can't stop popping them, and who can afford
that ? For the same reasons, the few semi-auto rifles that weren't sent
overseas to fight the Genocidal Wars are not really used anymore.
Here's where I come in, you see. I set up a
venture with different land owners and shop owners in town. We managed to get
the machines necessary to rebore barrels and cut new rifling. These machines
were already in town, so somebody would have used them anyway. I'm the lucky
guy, because I am a trained mechanic. You see, these flywheels are connected
through those belts to the main shaft, which in turn is connected to this water
mill, we have constant flow from the dam just behind. Thrity-two slaves died
building that dam, but it's a good, sturdy one.
Most of the time, I make new barrels for
non-.30 caliber rifles. Short actions I convert to .300 Blackout, most others
to .30-30. Customers are afraid that a barrel rebored in .308 might explode. I
know my barrels don't, but people don't take the chance.
We still have some AR-15s and M-16s around
– the Old Army confiscated the privately owned ones but left its really shitty
ones in the US. These were the ones that were really worn out, you see. These
are the most common weapon platforms outside of hunting rifles, and so we make
Warboys Rifles out of them.
If the landowner is really serious about
the guns he's going to lend to his boys, he asks me to make new barrels from scratch, in .300 Blackout.
It's in .30 like every other rifle and you can cut down the 5,56x45 brass, of
which we can many from the scavengers when they return from the cities.
If the landowner is of the stingy type, I
take the thicker 5,56x45 barrels and rebore them to .30 diameter. Then, I have
to cut down some length of the breech, where the screw thread is, actually. I
bore through that part too, and then insert the machined new breech into
it. It saves me some time and energy but
the difference is not that great. But hey, stingy is stingy, right ?
All this trouble is because you can't
chamber .300 Blackout on top of 5,56x45 chambering. Well, most people do just
that, because it's so much easier, but I say it's dangerous, and I live by my
name. If my reputation gets rotten I don't get to eat, there are plenty of
other good craftsmen out there in need of my job.
Anyway, in these old barrels I plug the
vent hole shut, in the new barrels there is no hole either. The new barrels are
extra thick, they're supposed to last a lifetime now. This way the rifle becomes
a straight-pull rifle, like they used to make in England in the Old Days ( http://www.lannertactical.com/AR15-UK-Straight-Pull-Rifles.html
)
I do barrels for all the towns around,
mostly I do new ones, because people don't like my way of reboring the old
ones. Now I don't do the stocks, there are other people for that, I don't even
have the tooling for wood, you see.
Nowadays stocks are usually made at home
anyway, craftsmen are expensive. Yeah, but then we all know how homemade stocks
warp and split : hey, you got what you paid for, right ?
Yeah about tooling : once a year a Shit
Rocket leaves our town for Little Rock, we get all out cut bits and chamber
reaming tools from the annual Great Fair there. We buy them from merchants
coming from la Republica de Texas, that tells you how much we care for quality.
By the way, in Little Rock there is a guy
who refurbishes or cuts down damaged metal magazines for these rifles. Nowadays
they prefer having 10-round magazines than those large ones that snag
everywhere. The Warboys usually have never more than eight rounds on themselves
anyway.
The cartridge can't reach too far, but
besides fighting that's OK to shoot coyotes and vagrants. Beyond 200 yards you
can't see shit anyway, and everybody is a bad shot. Everybody, don't let nobody
fool you. 200 yards is more than enough.
Right, it's getting dark now, let's call
this a day. Another day, I'll tell you about our troops, or our wagons.
END
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