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Ammuniton. A rare commodity. We all know that the map starts to run dry of resources if you've survived long enough. So what if you could use spent casings and scavenge gunpowder? Seeing how Kentucky is probably huge on guns(Any Kentuckyians willing to confirm this?), I'm sure people would have no problem finding gunpowder in abandoned gun stores. To add a challenge, using homemade bullets would cause the gun to degrade faster as you're using filthy casings. One issue that I've noticed with my suggestion if one can make gunpowder at home with the right materials. I'm no expert on explosives or guns, so please tell me if I'm wrong.

 

 

Anybody agree with this or would like to add onto it?

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Potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur should do it. Would be awesome.

 

However, I think the problem you want to tackle ("ammo depletes") will always be a "problem", since these sources (Potassium nitrate, sulfur, or just premade gunpowder) should probably be looted from stores. There is no easy renewable way for 1 person to source the ingredients from nature (like you do with farming) without introducing very elaborate mechanics.

 

However I like the idea for some additional mechanics to do some chemistry, and this one (adding gunpowder and/or the ingredients) is cool, even if the current "available ammo" should be the same it could replace some of those bullets to add some difficult.

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Homemade gunpowder in not going to be a pretty picture in modern, zero tolerance firearms.  Bad ammo can cause weapons to misfire, jam or possibly explode.  Putting in some crap non-smokeless powder is a disaster waiting to happen.  Now if you want to go make some black powder and put it in a weapon with more tollerance for this sort of thing (like a musket or blunderbus) then be my guest.  Musket balls are much easy to fashion and you can put all sorts of crap down a blunderbus.  However, you now must contend with horrible accuracy, having to worry about "wet" powder and all the smoke your flash is going to generate.

 

Also pressing your own ammo requires:

  • proper powder in meaured amounts - you need to have a proper scale for this, not some pinch to tablespoon found in your kitchen
  • usable casing
  • primers
  • lead

 

Pressing your own shells is far easier than the operation of pressing your own bullets.  Shotguns are a bit more tollerant.

 

Experience - I shot skeet and trap with my father for years growing up.  He would not let me quail or duck hunt unless I knew how to hit a bird on the wing.  We salavaged our spent casing and spent many a Saturday nights pressing shotgun shells.  I have no experience pressing bullets .  I have watching the process and I would not want to do it.  It is easier to screw up and pistols have far less tollerance for failure.

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Crafting a single barrel shotgun, or some form of blunderbuss, and loading your own shotgun rounds using scavenged powder + coins/minnows/gummybears/batteries/shot/ball-bearings could work reasonably well in PZ. Making your own powder though? I can't really see it happening. Scarcity of the ingredients aside, it'll be hard to make the tedious process of collecting, processing, grinding, carefully mixing, and -drying- the powder entertaining from a gameplay standpoint, without abstracting out the realism we all know and love in this game. Plus, black powder is pretty... unimpressive as far as homemade boom-booms go

 

Hell, it makes more sense for the character to make their own bolts or arrows, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish now, isn't it? :P

 

Oh, one last thing. If you can source tins/containers of gunpowder (or even black powder) for making some ammo in game, personally, I wouldn't use it for making ammunition.... There are numerous uses for explosives after all, from pulling hordes, knocking down zombies, and blowing open the odd locked door.

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Depending on homemade powder to deliver for you in a time of need is suicide, IMHO.  I would love to be able to pull the powder from shotgun shells to make other things, but I can wait on it.  If they are going to get that detailed, I would like for them to add powdered launrdy detergent.  I could then put the powdered detergent in with my gas and make "poor man's napalm" (basically a sticky molativ).  That may be beyond the pale for a "normal" person though.  

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I've done a bit of reloading (and my grandfather, a former secret service member, did it all the time) and even though *some* people do it down south, between the scarcity of materials, equipment, and knowledge I'm not sure it's very reasonable. Trying to do it without the proper tools is suicide.

It's also worth clarifying, the powder you find *somewhat* commonly in stores can't be added to normal bulletin casings, as American Steel pointed out, that's for muzzleloaders and such.

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I've done a bit of reloading (and my grandfather, a former secret service member, did it all the time) and even though *some* people do it down south, between the scarcity of materials, equipment, and knowledge I'm not sure it's very reasonable. Trying to do it without the proper tools is suicide.

It's also worth clarifying, the powder you find *somewhat* commonly in stores can't be added to normal bulletin casings, as American Steel pointed out, that's for muzzleloaders and such.

 

The way powder is refined for a round, putting shotgun powder into a 9mm might end up performing poorly to.  It is not like they make one powder and every shell/casing just gets different amounts.  That stuff is very specific to the rounds being fired now.

 

Even if you could produce a reasonable source of powder from the quality establishments in and around the game aread, primers are going to be HARD to find.  I don't recall the last time I saw primers and that was even at the big box sporting good stores.  Granted I was not looking for them :)  The spent primers make great ammo for hunting slingshots though!!  You have to use them at short range but it is pretty easy to knock a squirrel out of a tree.

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Honestly, if we're gonna be making gunpowder from naturally occurring elements (possible, if difficult), then it might be more useful to find other uses for it. One idea I had would be to make black powder pipe bombs with a primitive impact ignition or some kind of makeshift fuse. That way you could tape it to arrows and launch them at a distance for makeshift artillery to use against invading bandit groups or as a distraction to lure zeds away from where you are. You could practice such a method using identical pipes filled with sand to help the archers get used to using the unwieldy ammunition.

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I don't think we should have the ability to reload shell casings, i can just imagine people in Multiplayer servers manufacturing massive amounts of ammo and making every encounter a gunfight.

 

The ammo should be limited as it is in real life, use it sparingly because if you run out when you need it, you're screwed.

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As I'm originally from Kansas and lived for a short time on a farm, I'll add my 2 cents.  My grandfather raised cattle, and he explained to me how cattle were killed in the slaughterhouse.  I have no idea if this is even remotely accurate in today's terms or if grandpa was just full of it.

 

Supposedly, cattle are led down a chute that ends with a device for killing the animal.  In the olden days, ranchers would use a gun and bullet to kill the animal with a shot to the head.  As this is expensive and dangerous, a different tool was devised.  Rather than fire a bullet, the device fired a metal rod into the steer's brain.  The rod could be retracted to reload it and fired again.

 

I assume this was powered by pneumatics and air pressure at one point, but modern versions would probably be electrical.  Again, I have no idea if this is remotely accurate.  But I'm headed to a slaughterhouse in the event of the zombie apocalypse.  Humans have industrialized killing things on a mass scale, and those tools seem like they could be useful against the undead scourge.  Especially things that need to be made dead with a shot to the brain.

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That's accurate (the steel rods) (I was a cattlehand on a beef ranch for a time), but the device itself is fairly sizable and likely built in. The chances of getting anything practical from it are… unlikely at best. Not to mention there's usually only a few in each state- the drive to ours was pretty long.

 

 

Honestly, if we're gonna be making gunpowder from naturally occurring elements (possible, if difficult), then it might be more useful to find other uses for it. One idea I had would be to make black powder pipe bombs with a primitive impact ignition or some kind of makeshift fuse. That way you could tape it to arrows and launch them at a distance for makeshift artillery to use against invading bandit groups or as a distraction to lure zeds away from where you are. You could practice such a method using identical pipes filled with sand to help the archers get used to using the unwieldy ammunition.

 

I don't think it would be possible to actually launch an arrow with any real weight on the end. The arrow would just tumble unless massively counterbalanced on the other end, at which point they would likely be too heavy to shoot more than 10 feet anyways.

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As I'm originally from Kansas and lived for a short time on a farm, I'll add my 2 cents.  My grandfather raised cattle, and he explained to me how cattle were killed in the slaughterhouse.  I have no idea if this is even remotely accurate in today's terms or if grandpa was just full of it.

 

Supposedly, cattle are led down a chute that ends with a device for killing the animal.  In the olden days, ranchers would use a gun and bullet to kill the animal with a shot to the head.  As this is expensive and dangerous, a different tool was devised.  Rather than fire a bullet, the device fired a metal rod into the steer's brain.  The rod could be retracted to reload it and fired again.

 

I assume this was powered by pneumatics and air pressure at one point, but modern versions would probably be electrical.  Again, I have no idea if this is remotely accurate.  But I'm headed to a slaughterhouse in the event of the zombie apocalypse.  Humans have industrialized killing things on a mass scale, and those tools seem like they could be useful against the undead scourge.  Especially things that need to be made dead with a shot to the brain.

 

Uhhh.... how does that have anything to do with this?

 

Depending on homemade powder to deliver for you in a time of need is suicide, IMHO.  I would love to be able to pull the powder from shotgun shells to make other things, but I can wait on it.  If they are going to get that detailed, I would like for them to add powdered launrdy detergent.  I could then put the powdered detergent in with my gas and make "poor man's napalm" (basically a sticky molativ).  That may be beyond the pale for a "normal" person though.  

 

There's another way of making napalm: petrol+foam

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I don't think it would be possible to actually launch an arrow with any real weight on the end. The arrow would just tumble unless massively counterbalanced on the other end, at which point they would likely be too heavy to shoot more than 10 feet anyways.

I imagine it would be doable, if a touch unwieldy. So long as the arrow explodes in the general area of where you're shooting it, its gonna do the job it was intended for. The shrapnel from it wouldn't even need to kill, really. Just cause a shock and startle the human opponents. Maybe drive them from cover or damage they're hearing. It also would help that bows launch silently and the explosions of your arrows and they're guns would be drawing zeds to their position and not yours.

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No, I'm not sure you understand. An arrow can't fly straight when the front is weighted- even wrapping cloth around the front to do a torch arrow can make it tumble, and that's pretty light. Attaching a heavy weight to the front of an arrow makes it unfirable- it will tumble and fall to the ground right in front of you. Gunpowder is heavy, as are pipes. You might as well put a brick on the front of your arrow- it's not going to work in any practical sense. The *best* you could hope for would be a little firecracker that makes a pop. It's not going to hurt anyone, it won't be causing shock and awe. Plausibly could work as a distraction, that's it.

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No, I'm not sure you understand. An arrow can't fly straight when the front is weighted- even wrapping cloth around the front to do a torch arrow can make it tumble, and that's pretty light. Attaching a heavy weight to the front of an arrow makes it unfirable- it will tumble and fall to the ground right in front of you. Gunpowder is heavy, as are pipes. You might as well put a brick on the front of your arrow- it's not going to work in any practical sense. The *best* you could hope for would be a little firecracker that makes a pop. It's not going to hurt anyone, it won't be causing shock and awe. Plausibly could work as a distraction, that's it.

I'll have to respectfully disagree. I know you won't get quite the same distance as you would with a normal arrow, but I think that you'd get just enough distance for it to be worth it. It'd go much farther than you could probably throw one, at any rate.

 

But even if the explosive arrow idea is total bunk, I still think it'd be useful to have some means of delivering a primitive, grenade-like explosive at longer ranges than you could if you simply threw it.

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No, I'm not sure you understand. An arrow can't fly straight when the front is weighted- even wrapping cloth around the front to do a torch arrow can make it tumble, and that's pretty light. Attaching a heavy weight to the front of an arrow makes it unfirable- it will tumble and fall to the ground right in front of you. Gunpowder is heavy, as are pipes. You might as well put a brick on the front of your arrow- it's not going to work in any practical sense. The *best* you could hope for would be a little firecracker that makes a pop. It's not going to hurt anyone, it won't be causing shock and awe. Plausibly could work as a distraction, that's it.

I'll have to respectfully disagree. I know you won't get quite the same distance as you would with a normal arrow, but I think that you'd get just enough distance for it to be worth it. It'd go much farther than you could probably throw one, at any rate.

 

But even if the explosive arrow idea is total bunk, I still think it'd be useful to have some means of delivering a primitive, grenade-like explosive at longer ranges than you could if you simply threw it.

 

Javelin maybe?

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Uhhh.... how does that have anything to do with this?

 

 

Sorry my rambling turned into a non sequitur.  My point is that ammunition and guns might be wholly impractical for the zombie apocalypse given their danger and limited sustainability.  A rifle with a bayonet would kill more zombies with the bayonet part than the shooting part.

 

Part of the power of the gun is the fact that most enemies respect it.  Zombies don't.  You could empty a clip into a zombie and it will keep coming at you unfazed.  

 

To put it in perspective: For every insurgent killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (as of 2011) the U.S. fired 250,000 rounds.  Think about it.  These are trained experts at firing a weapon.  A kill shot can hit any part of the insurgent body and potentially kill him.  Yet it still took 250,000 rounds per insurgent killed. Link.

 

Guns and ammo are fun in PZ.  But in a Zombie Apocalypse, they would be utterly useless.  The average American would have to average something like 2 million rounds per zombie killed.

 

Now granted, you can argue that human insurgents make more challenging targets than a mindless brain eating corpse.  Still, zombies would be incredibly hard to kill with a gun.  They give off no heat (like insurgents) for night vision equipment, they require absolutely no logistical support (like insurgents), they have an even greater decentralized command and control system (insurgents have some form of leadership), they don't suffer morale issues (like insurgents) and they can literally fight non-stop.

 

Humans would be doomed.  Our only hope of survival would be building Terminator like robots that combine the inherent advantages of the zombie with the sentience, intelligence, and awareness of the human brain.  Of course that would only lead to bigger problems...

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Next time I'm at my hunting cabin I'll see if I can take some video of me with my bow trying to shoot an arrow with something heavy on the end. Even with my powerful longbow, I doubt it's going to go far- and that's from practical experience, not conjecture.

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Uhhh.... how does that have anything to do with this?

 

 

Sorry my rambling turned into a non sequitur.  My point is that ammunition and guns might be wholly impractical for the zombie apocalypse given their danger and limited sustainability.  A rifle with a bayonet would kill more zombies with the bayonet part than the shooting part.

 

Part of the power of the gun is the fact that most enemies respect it.  Zombies don't.  You could empty a clip into a zombie and it will keep coming at you unfazed.  

 

To put it in perspective: For every insurgent killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (as of 2011) the U.S. fired 250,000 rounds.  Think about it.  These are trained experts at firing a weapon.  A kill shot can hit any part of the insurgent body and potentially kill him.  Yet it still took 250,000 rounds per insurgent killed. Link.

 

Guns and ammo are fun in PZ.  But in a Zombie Apocalypse, they would be utterly useless.  The average American would have to average something like 2 million rounds per zombie killed.

 

Now granted, you can argue that human insurgents make more challenging targets than a mindless brain eating corpse.  Still, zombies would be incredibly hard to kill with a gun.  They give off no heat (like insurgents) for night vision equipment, they require absolutely no logistical support (like insurgents), they have an even greater decentralized command and control system (insurgents have some form of leadership), they don't suffer morale issues (like insurgents) and they can literally fight non-stop.

 

Humans would be doomed.  Our only hope of survival would be building Terminator like robots that combine the inherent advantages of the zombie with the sentience, intelligence, and awareness of the human brain.  Of course that would only lead to bigger problems...

 

 

Yeah, I already knew all that, read World War Z.

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Another bit of a note about my boom-boom idea. Glass jar full of powder and nails/screws, with a fuse running through a hole in the lid. Think of the ad hoc hand grenades they'd make in World War 1 by retrieving explosives from dud artillery rounds. Obviously you'd need a lighter to use it, and only under specific circumstances. I personally wouldn't huck one unless I had some nice, solid brickwork between me and the blast area.

 

But, that being said, being known as the crazyf*cker with the bandolier of unstable homemade grenades could be useful when interacting with NPCs :P

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I'm reading a lot of misconceptions. I'm a Kentuckian. We are very pro-gun. Reloaders are a common sight, I have family members that do it. You can indeed buy black powder, in large amounts at that, for use in both reloading and for muzzle loaders(black powder rifles that fire .50 slugs). We can buy it in several states like this at not only gun stores, but franchise markets like Bucheitt. It's very easy to get ahold of the loaders and materials. They're just expensive so it's not something we all have. It's also not a thing you can just walk up and do. You can kill yourself easily by screwing up the process. It is not to be taken lightly and no common Joe is going to be able to do it without at least a detailed manual and healthy respect for what they're doing. Even experienced folks only do it with zero distraction. Until you've seen a gun backfire firsthand, it's hard to express how risky this is. That's why it has no place in the game, at least not any time soon.

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