History Main / ApocalypticLogistics

* In ''Anime/TrainToTheEndOfTheWorld'', Agano is fairly well off, aside from everyone turning into animals. Their three staple crops grow at an accelerated pace after the disaster, providing a nutritious if boring diet. The [=7G=] also passively provides electricity, or something similar to it, sufficient to keep water running and power one or two household devices at a time. Any items they can't obtain locally are traded via armored delivery trucks, though the companies are being wiped out one at a time.

In RealLife, a lot of elements are needed to produce, distribute, and maintain much of what we take for granted. Cars need someone to mine and process the metal for the parts, someone to extract and refine the oil, and so on. Guns need someone to produce the weapon materials, ammo, and someone to put it together. Refined foods need a large food production and processing system in order to be accessible to a large number of people. Without rail traffic and maintenance, rail lines get overgrown by vegetation or washed out. Even an object simple as a wooden ''pencil'' needs all sorts of industry and resources to bring it together. (Someone has to get the wood, someone has to mine or manufacture the graphite, someone has to get the rubber for the eraser, etc.) And of course for all of these, someone needs to ship the finished product from one end of the world to another.

Also keep in mind that gasoline does not sit long. If it were ideally stored with periodic stirring and temperature control; it could last several years. Otherwise gasoline is unusable after 6-12 months. Post-apocalypse depictions people driving cars around years after the end of civilization are unrealistic.

* In ''VideoGame/Metro2033'' and ''VideoGame/MetroLastLight'', while pre-war ammo is now a currency, and weapons are largely cobbled together from spare parts, in both games there are enough resources to cobble together fully functional train cars that are ''self-propelled''. Though most trains are also shown to be handcars, while the few self-propelled ones belong to one of the three major factions in the Metro. In one level the Rangers ride on a train that is explicitly shown to be fueled by wood. While the fuel could be justified in being methane from pigs, or vodka from mushrooms no remarks are given as to how it would be refined and put to use in vehicles. Weapon mods are also readily available and used quite a bit by {{mooks}} in ''Last Light'', although since the game takes places in and around military installations after the Third World War, could be justified as coming from military stock.

* ''Series/{{Station Eleven}}'' addresses this head-on in both the original novel and television series. As combustion engines become useless due to the degradation of gasoline, by Year 20, automobile frames are converted into horse-drawn carriages and carts, and bicycles are highly valued. As a whole, post-pandemic society tends to embrace the recycling of pre-pandemic materials for other uses. The band of traveling Shakespearean actors and musicians in fact regularly search for interesting items to use as props in their productions, leading to Hamlet's costumes being made of interwoven whole jackets or even a gorget made of golf-gloves- literal coats of arms.

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'': Ammo and pre-war guns, while rusted out and not in the best of condition, are still common enough to be in the hands of most {{mooks}} and available in many shops. Even more complex energy weapons are still a relatively common find. Despite being over 200 years since the bombs fell, pre-war supplies can still be found in abundance in ruined buildings, in areas with beings that would have had found them and used them long before the game even started. The larger factions have their own manufacturing capabilities, justifying this to some extent, but they (barring the New California Republic and its affiliates, which by the time of ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' encompasses California and some areas beyond) have far more resources to produce new supplies than they realistically should, and there are still a lot more usable items just lying around than there should be.

** Implied and briefly discussed in ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact''. The film takes place ten years after the Third World War; the war killed somewhere between six hundred million people (the figure given in the film) and two billion people (consistent with the "30% of humanity" figure later given in ''Series/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds''), while the only major North American city established in licensed works as surviving is Denver, Colorado. However, despite living in what is described as Bozeman, Montana (although it's much smaller than the actual city of Bozeman), Cochrane and his team have no issues getting the resources they need to build their first warp ship. This particularly stands out given that we know all future warp technology will require things like antimatter (extremely difficult to make with a fully intact developed economy) and dilithium (which is suggested in licensed work not to be present on Earth at all).

* ''Series/See'' is set centuries after an apocalyptic plague that killed the large majority of the population, with the survivors and their descendants all-but-universally completely blind. Technology is generally Iron Age. Despite this, Queen Kane has the generator building of an operational hydroelectric dam as her palace. Meanwhile, Jerlamarel, who can see, is able to find large numbers of pre-plague books and operational guns and ammunition.

* ''Series/See'' is set a centuries after an apocalyptic plague that killed most of the population, with the survivors and their descendants all-but-universally completely blind. Technology is generally Iron Age. Despite this, Queen Kane has the generator building of an operational hydroelectric dam as her palace. Meanwhile, Jerlamarel, who can see, is able to find large numbers of pre-plague books and operational guns and ammunition.

* This crops up a few times in ''Series/{{Jeremiah}}''. In an early episode, the characters briefly talk about how 'farming' is starting up again 'down south'. Not mechanized and industrial farming surely. Nor would such farms be of any use to Jeremiah or his friends as there is no transportation system, or systems of any kind period to transport food in any event. In the second season, Jeremiah meets a man whose life ambition is to be a 'baker'. Needless to say, any bakeries he came across equipment would all be electrically powered (no grid,) rusted, and seized, and it's never discussed where the wheat (flour,) yeast, clean water, sugar, salt, etc. would come from to supply his would-be bakery. Even worse, there is no formal 'economy' of any kind, besides barter and salvage, in the town he lives in--no money and everyone is still more or less permanently hungry. If he did manage to overcome the (many) logistical hurdles, his fellow townspeople would likely simply rob him of all his food and not feel bad about it later. The second season did mention the revival of regional trade routes, as well as law and order on the community level.