Lets build a realistic post-apocalyptic world

Hey everyone! I've been building a post-apocalyptic setting set 300 years after the bombs fell. I don't want to have it like Fallout with stockpiles just sitting around unexplored after 200 years, or an abundance of working modern tech. I'll give you what I have so far, what else I'm looking for, and any advice or ideas would be super helpful. Thanks!

Setting: post apocalyptic Colorado or Washington State 300 years after the bombs fell.

Settlements: several varied small towns and villages, large towns/cities protected by high walls made of wood (Washington) or earth/scavenged materials (Colorado). Cities or places where the bombs fell are avoided unless scavenging parties want to risk it in search of valuable materials.

Politics: most places are autonomous at the least, if not independent from bigger entities. Political systems include feudalism, democracy, maybe a combination of the two, communism, etc..

Clothing and armor: need help here, I was thinking clothing would be leather and wool, maybe some cottons and surviving polyesters. Good shoes are valued, and surviving rubber combat boots are good trade items. Armor-wise I was thinking speed limit signs sewn into sturdy canvas (coat of plates).

Weapons: lots of black powder arms, bows, crossbows, and melee weapons. Maybe some surviving advanced tech to be used by larger cities.

Tech level: subsistence farming and a generally medieval tech level with more modern materials. Gas is gone (or available in very small amounts) but electricity is controlled by a guild-like organization that treats its tech more like a religion than science. Copper is more valuable than gold.

Now here is where I need help: what types of food would people eat? What transportation? (I was thinking horses but maybe jury-rigged electric cars?) As most of the society is scavenger tech and recycle based, how easy is it to melt down and combine different types of metals? How would people re-learn how to forge, and to what extent would they relearn it? How much modern infrastructure would still be standing 300 years from now? (would the highways collapse, cars rust into nothing?)

.... you realize we went from wooden ships to space flight in 300 years, right?

Here's the first thing you need to decide... how did the world end? Was it nukes? Natural disaster? Zombie outbreak? What? Then you need to decide what is keeping it in its post apocalyptic state. Human nature is towards organization; ANY organization. Even antisocial survivalist types have a organization with other antisocial survivalist types. They even have websites.

This creates conflicts and antagonists for characters to deal with.

Next, the thing that makes post apoc tragic is that there's evidence everywhere of the world that was. Good or bad, it was better than the wasteland. Setting something 300 years into the future, most ruins would be gone. Watch Life after People for details. For me, the sweet spot is 20-60 years after the collapse. Long enough for things to be an oxidized mess with supplies scarce, but short enough that things are recognizable.

Large scale nuclear warfare in the near-future is the reason for my world ending, so survivors would have to migrate to rural areas less affected by the bombs. The reasons I can see for the continued state of apocalypse include the loss of most knowledge (people relearning how to farm are not going to be teaching their children how to read necessarily) and the return to strongman politics with feudal overtones that hasn't evolved because those in power are loath to give it up.

I'll have to watch life after people, it sounds interesting

With no repairs, very little advanced technology would survive 300 years. I doubt you could find a serviceable rubber-soled boot after that amount of time, unless it was buried in permafrost or something. Any car not carefully maintained would turn into a pile of rust, and the same would happen to bridges, power pylons, pipelines and ships. Highways would crack, and become overgrown in many areas, but in the desert they would probably still be better than going over the rough natural terrain. Some well-built concrete buildings would still be standing, although the northwest US wouldn't be the best place for preserving them due to the abundance of rain and snow. Older stone buildings, such as european castles and manors, would stand strong as long as nobody smashed them. Most concrete dams would also collapse. The few communications satellites that didn't actually break (mostly in high orbits) would probably be sabotaged sooner or later to keep them out of rival hands.

Also, there is a *lot* of copper around. We've built millions of kilometers of transmission lines out of the stuff. Soon after the apocalypse, anyone who foresaw an application for copper would gather it and hoard it, and there would be quite a lot compared to what the survivors would need for local electrical technology. In any case, gold conducts electricity almost as well as copper, so if it really was cheaper, someone would just start building gold wires.

People would eat whatever they could grow in their area. So someone living in Washington might no longer have access to bananas or oranges transported from tropical farms, but they could still grow potatoes, apples and corn. Potatoes in particular are a high-density crop and would be favored if arable land was scarce. Livestock also remain a perfectly viable option.

There are a few people around today who keep alive the traditional arts of blacksmithing, either as a hobby or a niche profession. So it wouldn't have to be 'rediscovered' per se, just spread from those who have already studied it. These people's skills (both for practicing and teaching) would be sought after following the apocalypse, so the knowledge would probably get spread around pretty quickly.

I suspect that 300 years after a post-apocalyptic event would look somewhat like 150-200 years from now without the apocalypse.

300 years is more than sufficient time to recover completely and advance onwards, given the survivors would know what is possible and efforts would be made to restore things that we take for granted.

As mentioned above, we went from wooden ships to spaceflight within 300 years - and the big difference between that 300 years and your 300 years is that the first time around, people didn't know that electricity, spaceflight, chemistry, synthetic materials etc etc etc were possible until they were discovered.

Also watch James Burke's Connections series (there's a channel devoted to it on youtube) and see how inventions in the past paved the way for later developments.

Then imagine a world where, although a lot of the stuff is damaged, at least the people know that the stuff once existed.

You'd need to dial down the number of years to have it still harsh and "post-apocalyptic".

^ To something more like 50 to 80 years after the bombs fell at most. Within a century some 90% of everything today will be recovered, repaired or rediscovered.

That and in the case of a nuclear holocaust the background radiation levels will be so low as to be a relative non-issue.

I dunno about that. If a large enough proportion of the Earth's population were killed by WMDs, that combined with the exhausted supply of easily mined fossil fuels could make recovery relatively slow. You could always throw in some kind of luddite cult to help; for example, maybe people are less trustful of advanced technology after seeing it used to destroy everything they held dear and bring their species to the edge of extinction.

edited 23rd Feb '14 11:14:10 AM by Meklar

With a large chunk of the World's population decimated, it could also aid in rebuilding as solutions that would not work for a large global population may well work better for a smaller population - alternative energy solutions that don't scale well (e.g. "how do we produce enough electricity/bio-fuel for electric or biofueled vehicles for our current usage" becomes less of an issue if you don't have so many people) and similar things.

A lot of problems we currently face are due to our current high energy demands and the fact that it's only going to increase with increasing population and increasing demand for high "quality of life" for the existing population.

Obliterate the population back to that of around the 1100s with the potential for technology of the 2100s, and you've got good chance for recovery.

Yeah, 300 years is ridiculous, and Washington State's history starts becoming oral history when you go back more than 150 years. Even 50 would be pushing it, unless you severely changed the story. I'd suggest making them settlers from somewhere with more stable tech (think Fallout meets The Oregon Trail), as that's the only way the current setup is going to work.

Is this is after a nuclear war? If so, did that war happen before or after Peak Oil? (After would justify the lack of gas better.)

The rest of this assumes that A) background radiation is low enough to support life, and B) the survivors' ancestors weren't being affected by radiation. (Or is this going to be Adventure Time with humans...?)

The crux of the matter is, did pre-war knowledge survive? Did someone realize that the end was coming, save/print a stack of books on acid-free paper, then leave them in a climate-controlled cave somewhere (like that thing the National Film Archives does, I think)? Because then the 300 society might not be overly different from ours - a gas-free 1970s at most. (Our current technology largely can't operate fully without a disconnected network supporting it - your cellphone is a lump of plastic and metal without a connection, a database, and power to all three involved.)

If no knowledge survived, then you have a situation where a bunch of people with likely zero idea of how to make things with a non-functional 3D printer are rediscovering everything, and that begs the question of how they survived long enough.

The settlements will be based on how much communication they have with other settlements - a working postal service will do more to prevent war between villages than fear and weapons.

The raw materials to make the clothing you've described can't be found in WA or CO, I think, and would require a long-distance trade network from places that do. Leather can be cured if you have the tools to do so; cotton has to be grown (none of that in WA/CO, I think, so it'd have to be transplanted), wool comes from sheep (if any survived, they'd have to be transplanted), rubber comes from trees that grow better in the tropics, and synthetics are a farmer's worst enemy in addition to being mostly petroleum-based. Think straw sandals or leather boots instead. A society that can make crossbows (which require fine metal components) and bolts can make actual armor - there's no need for patchworks.

Black powder arms are a little impractical for a small scavenging/agrarian society to be making. 300 years later, there won't be any 'surviving tech'. I'd stick to bows and arrows, and polearms (time comes that you need a sword or mace, you're screwed enough that a dagger will work).

Electricity is not especially difficult to make, and small amounts of it will not have practical applications in any era, let alone a medieval-tech one. You will instead want a guild of matchmakers or lampmakers, though a generally tinker or metalworker will be far more prized.

Copper is so abundant now that a miniaturized society actively looking for it will have far more copper than it needs - they can foolishly build homes out of it if they want. Gold in that society would be prized for how ductile it is, not because someone arbitrarily decided that bricks of it = cash.

Food would be whatever you want it to - 300 years is enough for the ecosystem to completely change and present-day agriculture to revert to weeds - so long as it's easy enough to actually cultivate in the locations you've chosen (rubber trees are unlikely; maple syrup isn't). Hunting is probably going to be what you could get in those areas... 150 years ago?

A metal-working society would've re-discovered bicycles (which can be made partly out of wood anyway), but a clever woodworker can make just about anything short of a practical internal combustion engine. Steam power would be the first thing to come back, and overall think Venice and the Mississippi River, since they'd have to settle near running water - Ellensburg, WA would work, but Spokane would be impractical as the river dries up.

After 300 years, anything worth scavenging would've fallen apart or rusted away. You'd have to reestablish mines (I don't think there are any in WA in areas that are worth living in, and I don't know about CO), or rely on wood.

Also - you completely forgot about paper. It's the best indicator of a recovering/burgeoning society. (Incidentally, it also makes okay light armor if you coat it properly.) Following that, education, literacy, medicine and medical knowledge (including dentistry and psychology), social structures (it's highly unlikely that so many different types of political structures can function within trading distance of each other, without trying to kill each other off first), etc...

There's also the subject of whether or not everyone understands that they're rebuilding the world as opposed to trying to survive in a closed system with an ever-increasing population. They're not coming back if they're too busy killing each other, and a functioning government will be absolutely necessary in the long run.

On that note... when was the last time there was a post-apocalyptic story that focused on the rebuilding of a government? Alt-uni US Revolution, in other words...

Modern buildings and things like the Egyptian pyramids have vastly different building methods and materials. A modern skyscraper is a tall metal frame, balanced relatively precariously on concrete foundations. The Egyptian pyramids are essentially gigantic piles of stone and earth, more like man-made mountains than ordinary buildings. A skyscraper will collapse when its frame rusts away and loses integrity, while the pyramids will stay standing for a lot longer because stone takes a long time to erode, and the pyramids are an extremely stable shape in any case.

Also, has no-one commented on the fact that unrestricted nuclear warfare would likely trigger a nuclear winter? I don't know the specifics, but I'm pretty sure that living anywhere other than the tropics would be a death sentence in that scenario. I highly doubt any large-scale communities would be able to survive in Washington state until long after the endless winter had passed.

And really, there's no way to create a "realistic" post-apocalyptic world, because so much of the world that comes after an apocalypse would depend vastly on who survived, and how they chose to order the societies that followed. People talk about how valuable hobby-blacksmiths would be, but that assumes the blacksmiths survived the fall in the first place. They could've starved to death, been trampled or shot in a riot, eaten by raiders, incinerated by nukes, poisoned by fallout, struck down by disease, or any of a million other terrible things. That goes for any other hobby-survivalist - there are millions of things that could kill these people stone dead, long before they would ever be in a position to pass on their knowledge.

Same thing with societies - it all depends on the culture and worldview of the survivors. If the new world's leaders were power-hungry and authoritarian, you'd likely see a return to aristocratic feudalism and imperialism. If the new world's leaders refused to let the old flame of democracy die, you might see a lot more republics. If the leaders were Christian fundamentalists, critical thinking and scientific endeavour would die out in favour of strict religious orthodoxy. If the leaders were determined rationalists, the old ways of science and progress might still cling to life.

There's no way to objectively answer what this new world would look like, short of building a time machine and going to see for ourselves. Any predictions we make as writers are merely reflections of our worldview - of how we believe humans would "naturally" behave sans all the structures of modernity, and what lines of thought we would "naturally" fall into. If you want to make a post-apocalyptic world, you have to accept that any scenario you invent is going to be contrived by necessity. Did the hobby-survivalists survive? Or the scientists, the liberals or the scholars? That's up to you - it would be very easy to say they didn't.

edited 15th Jun '16 12:41:58 PM by Tungsten74