Headscratchers / Metro Exodus

Kalash cleaning

• Why do you have to clean your Kalash? I thought the AK series is reliable. This Troper saw doco on YouTube about the AK being stress-tested in humid conditions, blasted with silica sand and left soaked in mud (although, they cleared the chamber and firing mechanism with clean water). - Agent_B.
  • Reliable, yes. Perfectly reliable, no. If water and mud gets into the chamber and firing mechanism, it'll still degrade performance and risk jams. Cleaning your weapon prevents the degradation in accuracy from having grit and mud in your weapon and keeps those jams from occurring. - Panzerkampf

  • AKs aren't immune to mud. Yes they have loose tolerances, but enough mud gets in, it'll cause the weapon to jam, misfire or lock it up entirely. AKs have been mud-tested versus AR-15 pattern rifles, and surprisingly the AR did better, mainly because its more sealed up and doesn't allow mud into the chamber, which the AK does.

  • These are at least 20 year old rifles, heavily used, with worn down parts, jury-rigged Metro repairs, non-standard barrels and stocks, occasionally missing parts (the light stock exposes the recoil spring), used with battered and dented magazines with impractically large witness holes and firing God-knows-what quality of hand reloaded ammo from brass recycled endlessly. It's a minor miracle they even work at all.

  • Ex-military and gunnut here. Long story short, the AK-platform wasn't made to never fail, the AK was designed to be easily serviceable in the field. The AK-platform isn't perfectly reliable, no, it's not even more reliable than more "sophisticated" rifles like the AR-15 platform weapons. In dirt/mud tests, an AK is more likely to experience a jam than an AR (by the fact that the AR-platform is sealed up to prevent debris from getting it, tho once its in it will be more likely to fail). The AK minimal moving parts with lose tolerances to allow would be jamtastic debris to fall right out of the weapon with minimal effort. Mud clogging it? A quick wipe to get the bulk out, then dump a canteen of water through it to get any major clumps left. Sand? Open the bolt, drop the mag, pull the dust cover off if you can, and shake it out before throwing the weapon back together. Old Kalashnikov knew it's impossible to make a weapon that a soldier could never break, but you can make a weapon that a soldier can easily fix.

Ranger flag in the Volga.

In the bombed out building near the Terminal (where you find the AK w/ Heavy Stock), there is a Sparta Order flag flying on a flag pole. The area has a few bodies of the locals and wildlife. None of the Rangers mention having visited that area, nor would have a reason to raise the flag. What the hell happened here?

• I think I know the flag you mean. The M is different and there's a gas mask symbol, right? Pretty sure it's a bandit flag that simply resembles the Ranger one.

Lack of building and railroad decay.

In the first train section, the Aurora is travelling through a forested area near Moscow. We are told that the air is clean and that there is minimal radiation. Then why are there no people living in the houses along the train tracks? They are in far too good condition to have been abandoned for 20 years. Same goes for the railroad itself: without maintenance the track would have been ruined by ties rotting away, floods washing away sections of the line or mudslides burying it.

• Lack of food, no weapons/supplies, people gathering together in other places for safety from mutants and the like... name it, there's a bunch of good reasons for people to be elsewhere. As for the railcar, that actually has happened. Mention is made of the crew having to repair track as they go, take detours, and otherwise extend their trip due to the poor state of the track.
  • Still doesn't explain why the houses haven't rotted into ruin due to lack of maintenance. And the Aurora clearly doesn't carry the special equipment they would need to repair broken rails or construct new bridges.
    • They're background scenery. And I can tell you that a lot of unmaintained houses can, under the right conditions, look at least serviceable from the outside while being utter wrecks on the inside. As for the Aurora, yeah, fair point — but that's why they've made the detours, since they lack equipment. Look at the map, there's at least one point where they have to double back prior to Yamantau.

Russian military facility in Kazakhstan?

Looking at the map, the satelite facility is clearly located on the Kazakhstan side of the border. Why would the Russian military have a satelite uplink facility outside their own borders? No facility like that exists in real life, the closest is the Okno space surveillance facility in Tajikistan which is for tracking space objects through telescopes.

• Soviet Union never fell in this timeline? I mean, it could fit with the nuclear war and the fact that there's so much USSR-labeled equipment around.
  • Confirmed by the Hansa radio jammer station in Moscow. You can clearly see CCCP (Russian for USSR) on the map.
• In real life, Russia and Kazakhstan have fairly friendly relations, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that Russia was able to build a base in Kazakhstan or were able to outright annex the nation in the Metro setting.
• The same reason Russia still has a space launch facility in Kazakhstan.

Giul's native language?

• Giul is clearly supposed to be ethnically Kazakh, and is apparently a native speaker of the Kazakh language judging by minor grammar mistakes and use of Kazakh phrases. So why did she speak Russian to her own mother when she was a child, as heard in the tape in the bunker?
  • Perhaps as a way to practice to speak Russian better.
  • Many Kazakhs actually speak Russian as their first language. Giul's rough style of speech in her adulthood is probably an adaptation to the harsh environment and overall illiteracy of the people around her, rather than her lack of Russian language knowledge (especially since her parents were fairly high-ranking military/government staffers).

Miller's ideas about the "occupation forces"

• Miller is a professional military man. Shouldn't it occur to him that if the country really was under foreign occupation, the occupiers would want to assess the situation in the capital and send in recon teams on the ground and maybe drones as well? At the very least, the complete absence of such elements in the last twenty years should give him pause.
  • One, Miller has a bad habit of trusting people in 'authority' completely and cleaving very closely to the idea that the old Russian government is still around, almost to the point of obsession. He doesn't want to question it. Second, he was told that the people trying to come in were spies, if he ever questioned it at all.
  • Not to mention, it's clearly spelled out throughout the game that one of Miller's most deep seated fears is losing his sense of purpose, so as a soldier, he always needs an "enemy" to fight against.
  • Yes, and that's why he trains Hanza soldiers, to kill the scouts. Miller likes to think he is doing a pretty kick ass job of it too that's why they send spies that look like elder and kids. As for drones they know their missiles hit something back in his mind NATO forces are just slightly in better shape than them and back back to ground war.
  • Miller has only known about the "occupation" for six months, and it's implied he wasn't allowed to ask many questions in the first place even if he wanted to question it. Granted, train-mounted infantry patrols wouldn't be able to hold back the tanks that an occupation force would undoubtedly bring, but Miller is looking for a reason to believe the massive conspiracy has a benevolent purpose.

Eternal Pilot Light

• During The Two Colonels, how is the pilot light on Colonel Khlebnikov's flamethrower able to keep burning even when you've run out of fuel?
  • In most flamethrowers, the pilot light runs off of a separate fuel source. Also, some flamethrowers used a charged electrical wire as the pilot light instead of an open flame.

Invisible Watchers numbers are nonsense

• Seriously, the one jamming station here supposedly contains almost 4,000 people, that's a fifth of the Metro's population. What the hell is going on there? How is there even a functioning conspiracy?
  • Actually that would be less than a tenth of the Metro's population which is about 50,000 people by 2035 down from over 200,000 in 2013. Also the Invisible Watchers live within the Metro-2 complex. Third they mostly keep to themselves and manipulate things through proxies of which Miller is a half witting one, the 'Fuhrer' of the Reich faction is also being blackmailed by them. Fourth, in the books it is made clear that given the state of the Metro and how lots of scavengers and stalkers perish chasing rumours that even though Artyom has seen them that even if he tells people about them no one would believe him. Finally, the conspiracy holds together because they know enough about the fate of other underground communities — particularly Novosibirsk — to believe that their actions are messed up by justified in keeping enough people in Moscow alive.
    • Except that still doesn't make sense. There are multiple jamming stations, all of which are implied to be run by Hansa and the one we personally attack is definitely run by Hansa members. The Metro population started at 50k and was whittled down to 20k by warfare and mutants. There is no possible way for there to be that many people physically attached to a single jamming station and for there to also be a conspiracy that functions. The only solution I can think of is that some type of grift is happening where the station commanders lie to the Invisible Watchers about the number of people they command in order to secure more resources for themselves.
  • It absolutely doesn't make sense. Even if the above population figures are correct with the Metro's population at fifty thousand instead of twenty, bringing four thousand people together would be at least an entire other station's worth of people and far more than they would even need to keep the jammer and everything associated with it running, guarded, and supported. It has to have been some sort of mistake - perhaps it was meant to be that the entire jamming station system has four thousand associated with it?

Dumping the Nukes

• Even if Captain Baranov was reluctant to scuttle his submarine, couldn't he and his crew just remove the warheads from the subs missiles and dump them in the ocean?

Khlebnikov's Travel Plans

• How was Colonel Khlebnikov going to wait several months until Spring to leave Novosibirsk with his son when Kiril only had three doses of green stuff left when the Aurora arrived in December (December 21 according to the loading screens) despite only using it half as fast due to his father being gone?
  • The radioprotectant is only really necessary if you intend to go places heavy with radiation. Since they're literally the only people left in Novosibirsk's metro, the supplies and the condition of the rest of the metro didn't really matter - all they had to do was sit tight and wait until Spring in their safe zone...well, except for the maps, which is why the Colonel left.
    • No, everyone in Novosibirsk needed to take it regularly even if they never left their station or went up to the surface, because Novosibirsk was hit by a salted bomb and the Metro isn't as deep underground as that of Moscow, so the survivors weren't completely protected from the radiation. That's why even Kiril got doses of it and why Petrovich gave doses meant for him to his granddaughter. The only reason the people survived for as long as they did was because of the green stuff.

Weapons and Workbenches

• Why do you need a workbench to clean your weapons? I could clean every weapon in this game with some oil, a rag, and a cleaning kit small enough I can hold it in my hand. The only tool the workbench provides that isn't portable is a vise, and you don't need that to clean a firearm, as any soldier who's had to clean their weapon in the field can tell you.
  • See the 'Kalash cleaning' bit at the very top. These weapons are kinda a jury-rigged mess and you will probably need to open them up to deal with grime that's gotten into the workings.