Lets say, hyopthetically, there were a bronze age collapse tier catastrophe that set society back to the dark ages.

Lets say, hyopthetically, there were a bronze age collapse tier catastrophe that set society back to the dark ages. Large scale production is gone, cities and infrastructure crumble, global oil supplies are depleted and the global population drops to the hundreds of millions. Knowledge of advanced technologies could survive but much of it would be unuseable. E.g. someone could understand computers on a fundamental level, but would not have the means to build one. The only machines that could be built or maintained by hand would persist.

What does warfare look like 200 years into this dark age?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    rock and stone

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Guns wouldn't change much, we have the techniques down pretty good we'd just have to go back to manual milling powered by water or something.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >What does warfare look like 200 years into this dark age?
    Take whatever year you imagine us regressing back to initially, then slap on at least 300 years of progress from there as society re-stabilizes and people start building up everything needed to make the marvellous things detailed in the old books again instead of having to make it all from scratch.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Yeah, but I'm asking about how warfare during the dark age would look. Would aircraft still play a part? Would fielding armor in any decent capacity even be possible? Would it be armies of dragoons with ARs?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        maybe it'd be how african wars are currently fought, so basically a lot of small arms shenanigans and paratroopers dropped off civilian aircraft

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The exact same as now. Bronze age collapse would be impossible. Our technological capability would get kicked back to steam engines at the least, those are easy enough to manufacture even with very basic tools. And once you have steam generators, electrical power etc. It's only a matter of pretty short time before you're back up to a technological age.
    At least, for the higher humanoids. Africans would return to monke.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Bronze age tier means massive long lasting famines caused by environmental factors and a sudden absence of the resource society is based on ( in this case fossil fuels). So how do you rebuild industry with such a tiny population? Europe only got out of the dark age because of a major increase in population causing the infantry revolution. And what about powering this industry, the only fuel you have available for these steam engines is wood.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >the only fuel you have available for these steam engines
        There are huge amounts of idled coal mines andproven unused reserves, totally ignoring what hasn't been been discovered yet.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    We would have any kind of small arms, radios and some vehicles. Perhaps mortars too. That's all pretty achievable.

    Fuel would be scarce but available in some quantities. Mass warfare might resemble WWI. Horses would be scarce too so people would walk and you might have trucks and busses and trains.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Ww1 was possible because the logistical capabilities of the armies fighting it. I don't think armies in a new dark age would be able to supply the amount food, ammunition, and men needed to fight war in that way.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    propably ww2 tier?
    industrial scale iron smelting and steel refining only kicked off in the second half of the 19th cenutry, not even 50 years later armies fielded mass artillery and machine guns

    Everything humanity had before 1850 was a glorified mud furnace and water driven power hammer
    >he only fuel you have available is wood.
    Its all you need realistically. charcoal is a better fuel than coal or even coke

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Its good for fueling forges, but not for transportation. It burns too hot and too fast. Coal burns slow which is why it was used for steam engines.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >It burns too hot and too fast
        it burns as hot as you allow air to enter. there are no volatile gasses that could leave the chimney unburned.
        Coal was widespread used because it was cheap. Even poor farmers in the 1920s could afford a truckload to burn some bricks.
        Quality also matters here, shit coal is full of water, sulfur and sweats out tar which clogs up a burners airways, hence the process of cokeing. Good coal is deep underground

        https://i.imgur.com/a9KGCBx.jpg

        >the only fuel you have available for these steam engines
        There are huge amounts of idled coal mines andproven unused reserves, totally ignoring what hasn't been been discovered yet.

        there is no way you could exploit a shaft mine without pumps and motorized bucket chains. coal will not kick start civilization

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >coal will not kick start civilization
          what kind of leftie brain damage is this?
          have you heard about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Requirements

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Hard to say, because it depends on things like how much detritus remains from the ancien regime. For example, a new PRC bioweapon that took population below a billion and wrecked all economies would still leave millions of firearms and billions of rounds lying around, and those are pretty easy to use even if you don't have the knowledge of how to make new ones. Likewise, all it takes is a handful of people here and there who remember gunpowder, and either know how to make it or have enough of an idea that they can re-discover it, and you're back into pike-and-shot by next Tuesday.

    Knowing that something is *possible* is a tremendous advantage that potentially shaves hundreds, even thousands of years of technological development (at pre-industrial rates of advancement) off of the timeline. So, it's more likely to be a question of whether you end up with pike'n'shot, Napoleonic, or WWI small arms and artillery.

    Computers and stuff, sure, that's hard to reinvent without a fairly prosperous Industrial economy. But firearms? Those can be made fairly easily, as can black powder.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Depends on the nature of the collapse but probably back to flintlocks and horses.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It would look like ww2, except with some more steam punk, because new emerging nations would immediately rush anywhere with easy oil and lock it down, so everyone else would be forced to use coal, steam electric, giant self propelled power stations land ships etc

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    200 years is a long time, but you don't need to know how to computer real good to make black powder.
    >mass pop die off, society reverts to tribalism, possibly with the formation of isolationist city states
    >rifles and shotguns are cared for as family heirlooms and relatively well-maintained
    >ammunition is almost exclusively questionable black powder reloads in brass fired 10,000 times
    >makers of fresh brass are treated like kings by their legion of followers
    >by comparison makers of primers are hallowed as demigods of myth
    >rifles maintained well or not, marksmanship will suffer due to garbage quality ammo with poor qc used in weapons never designed for black powder
    >most warfare is small scale skirmishes revolving around raiding wives, tech and horse
    >more serious conflicts will feature great use of ambushes and large BP mines/fougasse and early grenades or rarely even cannon/carronade
    >basic steam and wind power is revitalised by individual city states that retain tooling, but energy storage is next to nonexistent, likely a juryrigged array of car batteries at best, as such a lively trade in wood, hunted meat and hides/leather develops
    I can still see some places having working computers to be honest. Packaged spares stored well should last quite a while, but when supplies dry up you'd be boned. Also good luck finding info, net is likely toast, better hope a courier can deliver you the last CD-ROM copy of Britannica in existence so you can rebuild society.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >black powder
      if you have the means to manufacture black powder you can make smokeless powder

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >energy storage is next to nonexistent, likely a juryrigged array of car batteries at best
      This is a little pessimistic but I don't blame you for not knowing that the best option available to us right now is to use an elevated reservoir as a massive kinetic battery. Super efficient, minimal issues with decay over time or over repeated charge cycles, and simple enough to be viable even in a post-collapse world dependent on steam engines. If we get kicked back to the Bronze Age in 2023, the lights are coming back on in every population center with more than a thousand people by 2030 at the latest.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >What does warfare look like 200 years into this dark age?

    Spears, Muskets and Battle Axes. Wars over fuel. Return to basics, DIY 19th century tier analog electronics manufacturing. Mass steel recycling from destroyed cities. Horses.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Gunpowder is stone age tier with the right knowledge

    Books will keep knowledge of things like steam / simple diesel engines around. Aswell as stuff like chemical weapons, aeronautics, armor etc

    Horses would probably make a big come back if fuel was hard to find. Fuel could be produced from biomass like palm oil trees or processed coal most likely but in many areas it would be horses, camels, yaks, llamas, reindeer and elephants all the way for transport, depending on what shithole you find yourself in.

    So probably chemical / gunpowder warfare powered by steam and horse ala the us civil war on the low end (Complete with things like steam tanks, ironclads, and chlrorine gas howitzers),

    or like end war nazi germany improvised stuff on the high end, + some survivng archaeotech stuff like old rigged up mbts and helos that are still chugging.

    You could theoretically build a fleet of he162s with nothing but scrap high quality steel, some wood, and palm oil for fuel. Germans built hundreds in literal basements will being bombed, engines were the only half hard part but if youve got modern engine designs + modern steel alloy scrap it would be doable.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This is just making me imagine a duel between a 200 year old abrams modified to run on palm oil and some wrought iron steam tanks, with both being supported by technicals and dragoons.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Yeah. But 200 years. That's the difference from when Washington died until now. Minus a generation or so. With all that knowledge preserved one would expect our acceleration into the technological age to be even faster.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Definitely. But it depends on the nature of the apocalypse.

        Something that really wrecks our current infrastructure and destroys our cities totally (ie, persisting radiological area denial or something) would leave us very few options for swift recovery

        All non hyper remote surface oil is about gone. All surface copper and aluminum, even pure iron is pretty scarce. We've burned through the easy resources now, our increasing technology is the only thing sustaining our abillity to continually access more

        We cant even farm crops without fertilizers made from petroleum products and LNG, phosphorus is utterly depleted in most human localities, it aint a pretty picture to technologically regress now.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    OP,
    SM Stirling generally writes stories about this kind of shit, his "Nantucket" series is roughly similar to this type of scenario.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      His Emberverse series is even closer to the mark (the rest of the world *other* than Nantucket gets all forms of advanced technology wiped out; the culprit is most likely highly-advanced aliens, who subsequently begin pretending to be various pagan gods, answering prayers made to Odin, or Isis, or whatnot). Gunpowder (including black powder) is expressly rendered inert; otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to justify swords and spears (and longbows) as the primary weapons of war.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Figuring out how to make a computer isn't hard. You don't need photo-lithography out of the gate and people would still want your computers because you're good enough to compute important things like the weather or census data, same things that made computers important items in the first place.

    It's pretty much the same with most things. It's not like you'll find books lying around showing you the best engineering humanity is capable of, but you'll find some that teach you the basics, which is actually more important in your use case.

    An actual collapse like you're talking about would have to be so severe that it would either require total loss of all preserved knowledge (which would logically have to be so severe it'd also wipe out all of humanity, too) or the human condition would have to be different in the aftermath (meaning people wouldn't want to preserve said knowledge or something else unlikely).

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    so fallout?

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