History Headscratchers / Revolution

*** Exactly. Aside from what the network or the FCC will allow on the air, he's a minor character to begin with; there's too much going on overall to develop a guy who's going to be dead in three episodes anyway. Besides, he may very well be molesting the children in his war band (or raiding other communities for ''their'' kids). As for why he has a wife, his tastes may be toward AnythingThatMoves (or in her case, [[{{Squick}} doesn't move much]]). As they say in Texas, "he needed killin'", even at the hands of the BigBad Patriots.

** They said he was the number two man in the Republic. They said he trained the militia. Now i understand that only maybe 10% of the militia actually met him, but that is waaayyy more than enough. Maybe if in another episode Monroe says that he knew where he was and didn't care, i'll buy that, but there's no way one of the most recognizable faces in Monroe's republic [[spoiler: tended bar]] and didn't get noticed.
** Anyone who joined up/was conscripted after [[spoiler: Miles left]] wouldn't know who he was, or have had any contact with him. And Chicago looks to have reverted to a frontier-town 'ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies' mentality (think of Mos Eisley in ''StarWars''). In any case it doesn't appear that Bass has really been looking for him all that hard (a few 'Wanted' posters could have set things up a little better).

* I assume they didn't kill them all everywhere anyway, ......I mean I hope they did'nt have several main characters die off screen.

So glow plug alternative, chemical heating or friction heating. You'll need some other source of energy on-board, and the fuel it requires. For any sustainable quality engine lasting more than a few hundred hours, high quality and high tech knowledge and materials are needed. An electronic governor alternative, an mechanical governor. Not so high tech or hard actually. Electronic fuel injection alternative, carburetor. Easy non-high tech. Electric starter alternative, compressed air starter, Really big gears and a strong human or horse to hand crank, and the time necessary (don't stall, good luck to you in battle). The diesel engine you can build in early industrial age would not take kindly to being jostled to exposed to the elements. It would require a huge investment in time, resources, knowledge, and skill to build _and maintain_, but would work. Now you need the oil and refinery to make diesel fuel. Lots of impracticality. Oh ya, forget the crud oil, use vegetable oil, right? Oh think again, vegetable oils are acidic and detergent. Acidity going is going to eat away your non-metal parts very quickly. In modern diesels, critical non-metal parts are fairly isolated from the fuel and the ones that will fail due to exposure will last as long any other parts that will eventually require a re-build or scrapping of the engine, including the metal parts. Fuel lines, pumps, and filters take a punishment though, even in modern engines. A non-modern early industrial engine will have many exposed non-metal parts, or many precision-manufactured alternatives. It just got more high-tech and high-quality. The detergent nature of vegetable oils actually adds huge advantages such as keeping every little internal bit of the entire machine from gas-cap to exhaust eat-off-it squeaky clean, IF YOU USE ABSOLUTELY PURE FUEL. Any impurities introduced to the fuel or carburetor will physically and chemically grind their way through from gas-cap to exhaust. Cylinders will be first to fail for both the acidity and impurity problems. Effects can be mitigated a bit by using large cylinders and less of them, which means to engine is bigger, heavier, and less powerful simply for you cylinders to last as long as the other parts of the failing engine, which will be fairly quickly due to all of the aforementioned problems. OH, by the way, impurities include the glycerin naturally present in vegetable or H2O, which _must_ be introduced to vegetable oil to remove the glycerin and other impurities. H2O is difficult to completely remove from the processed vegetable oil in a modern high-tech electricity-rich world. In an early industrial non-electric world, forget it, water will quickly kill your engine. Now, stack the required resources against the payoff to anyone in the post-blackout world. I think you'll find steam pays-off better in any role.

*** The pendants appear to invoke the Nanites' original purpose which, as we found out in an early episode, was to act as a cheap plentiful power source. The nanites go from absorbing electricity to supplying it, so long as the amulet is overriding their Absorption command. In other words, [[{{Spaceballs}} they go from suck to blow.]]

*** TruthInTelevision: longbows are notoriously hard to learn how to make and use properly and require constant practice and a great deal of upper-body strength. While modern longbows made from composite materials certainly exist, they too are subject to wear over time. If the blackout conditions persist for more than a generation, the traditional English longbow may make a comeback--but that's how long it will take to train a deep enough pool of people to make them effective in a massed fight and to ensure the skill sets for making and using longbows are preserved. ''{{Emberverse}}'' benefitted from having a master longbow craftsman present among the main group of survivors the initial series focused on, who in turn was able to train a cadre, which trained everyone else. Even at that, it took most of a decade for this group to field a sizeable longbow-equipped army. If such a person existed in the Monroe Republic, Monroe probably either recruited or assassinated him to preserve the balance of power. Crossbows by comparison are easier to make and use, at the cost of range and rate of fire, which is why everyone else outside of England adopted them during the medieval period. Also, for a population that's used to the concept of aiming and firing a gun, the crossbow is a more natural progression than any other kind of bow.

* Why is the wasteland even a wasteland? The area around Salt Lake City should be very well-organized, given the Mormon emphasis upon disaster preparedness and family ties (this area figures prominently in ''{{Emberverse}}'' for exactly those reasons, and this setting isn't nearly as restricted). I would expect an LDS-controlled enclave somewhere around Salt Lake (and probably extending farther than that). Much of Arizona is hell on earth without climate control but it's not completely uninhabitable or unorganizeable or else it would never have been settled in the first place. If nothing else, California probably would have conquered Phoenix and Tucson out of spite (or, more likely, set up puppet buffer states). Likewise, Texas should extend at least as far west as Albuquerque and Santa Fe (this was an historical goal of Texas at least through the Civil War--control of trade routes almost the entire length of the Rio Grande. The blackout conditions would make this a priority again). If this hasn't happened it's because someone has set up a New Mexico-based enclave powerful enough to hold Texas to within its very arbitrarily-drawn state line to the west. Additionally, there are well-organized Native American communities including the Navajo Nation, the nation's largest Indian reservation (in the Four Corners region where Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona meet) and home to the second-largest tribe in the nation. The Apache are similarly situated in southern Arizona extending into Mexico. And Denver is almost a secondary capitol of the United States--some sort of faction should have grown up in Colorado as a result. Did the producers just get lazy, [[FlyoverCountry figuring nobody would notice]], or does the Monroe Republic simply not have intelligence about this region?

* So they have a locomotive they've gotten up and running. Where has it been for 15 years? How did they get it onto the track? Who cleared and inspected the over ''500 miles of tracks'' through and around several major cities between Indiana and Philadelphia?

*** Diesel would not have to be replaced; just modified with early 20th century fuel injection systems. One of the reasons the U.S. military relies on diesel-powered machines is that they could still work, after a few minor modifications, after an EMP from a nearby nuclear blast.

**** You know how some fat people use the "I can't help it, its genetic" excuse....yeah, turns out not all of them are useing excuses. This in turn raises the question of how someone with those conditions could last in those conditions

*** There could still be a few hundred thousand left. But that's assuming the population loss didn't ''disproportionately'' hit Arab-speakers due to, taking the most optimistic option, demographic shifts as people moved southward into a relatively more stable Mexico with a warmer climate. It would be interesting to see if the show's writers account for this possibility.