Chapter 39-2 Chemical Reactions

[scbubba]

Thanks goes everybody for the HUGE support of my research and my throwing of ideas at walls.
Now, with my "inbox" asploding when I log in to the desktop site, I've noticed that I have killed a jumper, (yay me!) I'm a "Hoarder" now and I'm Loved to Death. Cool.

That's just cuz you're awesome, dude!

Now, for a moment I'd like to shift gears and talk about a few other things:

The first is the ammo situation. It has been discussed here on the boards, on We're Not Dead, and more recently on the WND Fan Cast with the situation now being directly addressed in show. Mick & Red, you discussed the issues with making your own powder, a non-trivial issue. What about the Naval Station? It has the potential to solve many current problems. Probably plenty of small arms and its ammo, more hummers (all you gotta do is jump them off), probably some fuel... hell, if they are lucky they could even stumble on a truck mounted Phalanx. (Though I'll readily admit that one falls squarely in the Deus Ex Machina category.)

Barring all of that if it turns out to be a bust, there is still one thing they may find to be useful. Shells for large naval guns, maybe powder bags. Attempting to "open" a five inch shell for a naval gun is, frankly, a stupid idea. I'd rather try to cut open a 16 inch gun powder bag. May not be exactly the type of powder needed but with a stash of those... well, powder until the end of time. Now, the last of the Iowa class were stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on March 17th, 2006, but the USS Iowa was retained in the Reserve Fleet until October of 2011. It stands to reason that the navy was maintaining a reserve supply of munitions for the big guns.

Now, about the fuel. I gotta ask, is the colony just too far to go back to the tank farm?

I've been thinking about the ammo situation since Season 4 started. At first it was concerning the minigun since it chews up ammo so damn fast. It eats 7.62 rounds which most of the other weapons don't. Then I thought of the the .50 cal machine guns, which use a different round (but more rare in that it wouldn't be available for scavenge in civilian locations mostly). The the small arms: 5.56 for the soldiers rifles and a collection of 9mm and other assorted calibers for handguns and the (probably rare) submachineguns.

A couple of things popped into my mind: 1) I could get pretty easy access to everything on that list other than the .50 by scavenging in a 10 mile radius of my house. 2) Unless it was during a supply scare for ammo like we had for almost the past year. 3) I don't live in a major metropolitan area in California - I live in a place that has some of the highest private gun ownership in the free world.

As someone else pointed out before (sorry I can't find the post right now), leading up to May 2009, there was a nationwide ammo shortage. It was hard to find everything from .22LR to popular hunting caliber (.308/7.63, .30-06, .243, .270, etc) and all the handgun calibers (9mm, .45 ACP, .38, .357, etc).

So the supply of ammo in commercial locations would have been low in general due to the shortage. The number of commercial places that sell ammo in LA is (IIRC) fairly small in general (a current yellow pages search turned up less than 2 dozen places in LA). And we have a year's worth of time for people to collect and use the existing ammo. So, yeah, the "private sector" in the area is pretty well tapped out, I'm thinking.

So the military locations. Other than the base that Michael mentioned (Navy base, right) and the National Guard base (which has long since been empties), we don't know the state of any other potential military supply locations. I'm guessing that Michael and Co haven't made a visit to any of these military locations in Season 4 but I wonder what they might find if they did... If the zombie opposition is so very smart AND observing Team Human's activities (and I think they are), would they recognize the push to resupply at a military location and seek to deny the humans access to the location/supplies?

As for access to reloading supplies, powder might be the easiest of the materials to come up with. Brass could be in decent supply depending on how much of their own they have saved. The primers are going to be the kicker there. During this year's ammo shortage, primers were one of the 1st reloading materials that I saw go into short supply. And given Cali's general low ownership of firearms (compared to most of the rest of the US) I would think that the general availability of primers would be really low in May 2009 in LA.

To the best of my knowledge, the US military doesn't do much if any reloading (Cabbage Patch, any info on this?) so I would think that there wouldn't be a supply of primers for any caliber available at any of the military locations.

Basically, reloading probably isn't as easy as you might think it would be for the characters.

EDIT: And while I'm typing, Grog snipes me with a short and to the point post...

That's enough for now, but as a parting shot I'll leave you with this. From the Science news segment of the Skeptic's Guide of the Universe, episode #432 October 26th 2013, (@8:20) they discus a recent development in antibiotics called PPMO's or peptide-conjugated phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomer. Gesundheit. Current antibiotics fall into two categories: bactericidal which kill bacteria and bacteriostatic which prevent them from reproducing. Both function by disrupting cellular function. PPMO's may become a third class of antibiotics.

PPMO's have been found to be in many cases far more effective than existing antibiotics and found effective against resistant bacteria. PPMO's can also be used to treat genetic diseases.

SGU Episode
Article

Precision targeted gene suppression. What could possibly go wrong?
Sounds like something a particular pharmaceutical company might have been interested in.

Uhhh, yeah. What Red Shirt said. Most of that went over my head by I get where you are going, I think. Start playing God of the Genome and things probably get bad....