Well having read these I think the thing that got to me was how quick the progression was. I expect in that setting you would have a lot of people who didnt really know what they were doing. Fighting technique would redevelope latter, I would expect a lot of desperate melees and small group engagements. Sure there would be people who knew proper technique and tactics, but that takes time to proliferate. I also dont think they would return to old lone em up style warfare. Assuming military personnel or even enthusiasts survived I would image they would advocate more modern guerilla tactics, though it wouldn't translate over perfectly since we dont have modern arms. Weapons would be shit for a while while we rediscovered how to do things, I would not be at all suprised to see jerry rigged spears and clubs and whatnot in a lot of cases.

>>47307318

I was totally with this series right up until the neopagan gods showed up.

>burn the witch
>burn the MacKenzie

All hail William Windsor, King of Britain and Emperor of the West.

>>47307566
same, all the pagan shit got in the way of the interesting parts

I'm a material engineer and those books piss me off. Stirling writes it as if everything would be falling apart in 30 years. With the big die off he describes (as with many post apocalyptic pieces of fiction) there would be no scarcity of resources.

Futhermore how many millions of tons of stainless steel sheet metal ready to be hammered into plate armor is out there.

Plausibility is satiriced for story. Just like ridiculous ammo shortages in Walking Dead.

SCA nerd "knight" unites and leads the criminal street gangs of Portland Oregon. Between that and I insufferable pagans I stopped reading after book 1

>>47308044

Blessed Be! What's this?! We found an Englishman who just happens to be Long Bow expert, bowyer, fletcher and a skilled trainer/teacher in the woods of rural Oregon a few weeks after all modern tech stops working? Holy fucking Mary Sue Faction!

>>47308388
how quickly does steel corrode, assuming it's left out in the open? The leaf spring swords would probably work well until they rust through, but even then you'd have plenty of metal to harvest from other sources.

Hell, you could loot construction sites for I beams. How many swords or chain hauberks could you make with a single one of those? Probably enough to arm a few dozen men

>>47307712
This was my favorite part of the series. Watching wee William accidentally conquer/inherit what's left of Europe was fantastic. And it's only a side plot.

>>47308532

Roofs are not going to spontaneously collapse. There a thousands of warehouses, factories, dry docks etc full of heavy gauge sheet metal, millions of tons of wire ready to be made into maille. No need to fuck with melting Dow structural steel beams.

After the big die off what happens to the material wealth of 320 million people? It does disappear or become unusable that's for damn sure.

>>47308388
Well, while this also always irritated me, there is a reason. even a decade and a half after the Fall there's still a hideous amount of flesh-eating rovers in the cities.

And, really, would YOU want to walk into Detroit, Atlanta, L.A. or Manhattan armed with aught but a sword and board? There's a reason the PPA raises a coalition army to move into California, later in the books.

Also, the Sword of The Lady is an "I Win" button and I hate those. You're better than that, Sterling.

>>47308727
I guess a lot of it is just stored too fucking far away for most people to get to if they dont have cars or anything.

>>47308727
>what happens to the material wealth of 320 million people? It doesn't disappear or become unusable that's for damn sure.
Well, for at least fifteen years after the Fall people aren't worrying about material wealth, they're worried about survival and settlement.

>>47308727

> There a thousands of warehouses, factories, dry docks etc full of heavy gauge sheet metal, millions of tons of wire ready to be made into maille. No need to fuck with melting Dow structural steel beams.

Problem: how to haul this without access to even a steam traction engine. You got slaves to haul out those warehouses?

It's been a while since I read the series, don't steam engines not work anymore? Would hydraulics work then, if pistons don't?

Cause air bags are dependent on computers to work, and brakes/steering are dependent on hydraulics. If those give out, everyone on the highways are gonna have a bad time, to say nothing for people on mountain roads

>>47308823
Also making the journey to those warehouses in the first place

>>47307318
Short term: small warbands, early-medieval but more armour going around.

Long term: It's almost guaranteed that it'll just get back to being pike formations, but in the early renaissance model of offensive formations rather than later when they're around to protect the guns from cavalry.

And cavalry is almost certainly gonna be a thing, though I suspect that there would be a lot of mounted infantry types, especially in the US due to the distances involved. But they'd face serious opposition from any decent defence force so it's gonna take large, expensive infantry formations hauling their asses around at walking speed to really project power on land against competing empires.

>>47308388
>With the big die off he describes (as with many post apocalyptic pieces of fiction) there would be no scarcity of resources.

This is really interesting. What sort of implications does this have for post apoc in general?

>>47308449
>a guy is good with bows
>ZOMG MARY SUE

>>47308823

Why haul the materials out? Build your forge and smelter at the source, then fortify. Requires a small work crew that doubles as garrison, and a wagon or two for the bits that make jumpstarting industry easier when pre-fabbed. No need to bring the mountain to Mohammed.

>>47308963
I say this as someone who loves Emberverse with a burning passion, the Aylwards are OP as fuck.

>>47307318
>Ignoring opinions on the series
But I wanted to say it was shit, OP.

>what kind of weapons/tactics would you expect to proliferate in the setting?
Have you actually read through the entire original Change arc? Because it basically lays it all out. Everything that's even remotely plausible comes into play, including humans-in-hamster-wheel-tanks.

>>47307566
>I was totally with this series right up until the neopagan gods showed up.
To be fair, Odin isn't "neopagan." Odin is fucking Odin.

>>47308761
>Also, the Sword of The Lady is an "I Win" button and I hate those. You're better than that, Sterling.
But Rudy doesn't win in the end. (And Sterling isn't better than that.)

Also, protips:

1. The series is the Emberverse series.
2. There's a related series called the Nantucket series that is vastly superior. Read it instead.

>>47309020
Uh-huh. And supply said small settlement (as that is what would be required) how? You'd have an Erebor situation: huge foundry and manufacture center entirely dependent on other settlements for survival. Which, i suppose would make a good hook for an RPG: escort missions to the smith-cities of the Great Lakes.

But you still have a problem of supply far exceeding potential demand. There just aren't that many people left, much less that many people trained in the necessary techniques.

>>47309114
Also, no, before you say it, you can't plant proper fields in the inner cities. Maybe, MAYBE if you devoted Central Park in Manhattan to a proper cornfield, but really not plausible.

>>47308944
Only really works in this or other sudden but non-destructive post-apocalypse situations. Against things like zombies you can expect a lot of property damage through the actions of the military, and just a lot of ammunition use in general by people, so really it depends on how long it goes on for. Nuclear exchange based apocalypses add the annoying factor of radiation to industry destruction so even useful, intact materials might not be accessible.

In this one what gets people is rampant starvation and disease. Which will lead to temporary devastation of local wildlife pretty quickly too as people try to avoid starvation by hunting and trapping.
It's all about getting over that initial hump of death though and how badly that affects things. Most casualties would be in the first month iirc, and from there on it's a steady decline until population hits a stable level for the surrounding area. Fires and water damage resulting from people's actions/inactions early on will probably do some but not really significant damage to the amount of usable material around.

Environmental damage takes a long while to set in, and whilst a lot of things would be suffering immediately (like the scary amount of under-maintained bridges and other infrastructure that'd lead to serious but localised problems), most stuff will hang around long enough to be exploited still.

If and when it does come down to mining, a lot of places are gonna have problems due to all the resources that are easily accessible by low tech mining techniques are just gone from centuries of exploitation.
But there's simply so much steel and what-not out there in everything, that's a problem for millennia ahead.

>>47309031
I am just saying that I'm sure they were Mary Sues, but describing someone as a Mary Sue *for having a perfectly ordinary, nerdish hobby that turns out to be useful in a freak scenario* is going to sound painfully hyperbolic. That sort of person alone would be helpful but hardly one of a kind. My uncle wasn't remotely an RPGer/SCAer kind of guy, but he was super muskly and forged and swung his own crazy swords.

>>47309192
Interesting. What's the ETA on most roofs no longer really working, incidentally? 5-10 years?

>>47308449
Literal divine intervention. That is far less meddlesome than changing universal constants to say "fuck your electricity and cars".

>>47308944

Broadly speaking there should not be material scarcity of non-pershiables goods in post apocalyptic settings. This assumes a rapid collapse and mass casualty rate with a survivor rate of less than 5%

Resources are now localized of course but ample. Particularly when you consider access to large distribution centers for nationwide chains and government. How many billions of rounds of small arms ammo do military depots hold. How many cans of food in a Walmart distribution center?

Material scarcity is a plot device. Even un-treated fuel lasts a few years plenty of time to start cooking bio diesel or distilling ethanol.

A lot of people rip on the series for getting all fantasy-y after the first trilogy, but the point of the setting is for an almost Conan style fantasy world. Stirling even came out and said that the first trilogy was just a setting primer, to set the stage for the neo-Hyperborean world he was writing.

>>47309340
Interesting.

>>47308858
Yes, actually that is exactly what happens. There are also massive fires caused by crashing planes and fuel tankers. (Although internal combustion does not work, many highly flammable things still burn, albeit much less intensely. So thermite works, but it's gimpier. And so does the now less impressive but still highly flammable jet fuel and gas in said vehicles.)

One of the main characters leverages skill and/or luck to bring in his stricken prop plane in Idaho I think? It still crashes like a motherfucker, but it's a crash landing, and they live. Although I think there were injuries. Then they have to deal with shit like Neo Nazis on mules with machetes and sticks.

Later, some of the most shit eating and troublesome enemies for the "Good People" are produced by other unsavory refugees from InnaWoods in Idaho, namely crazy cultists who go on a roadshow and convert a lot. Cultists who benefit from being helped by the definitely very evil forces that also exist alongside the good ones. Really, really evil. Also cheating bastards in that they can "overdrive" their cultists into crazed avatars of destruction (mostly the priests, but also others, they have a lot of priests though). Only the person bearing the Sword (It's the platonic ideal of a Sword, and magical as shit) can really deal with them, and there is only ever one of them.

This is bad because the more powerful priests like that can go full on Bullet Time, and the lesser ones are simply "slasher flick monster tough" and don't go down until you literally hack them to pieces.

>>47309098
Although, Nantucket also has the whole "Did I mention I like Lesbians?" thing going on too, but that's almost inevitable.

I also quite liked "The Sky People" and "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings".

The Martians are fucking great.

>>47309405

People in general myself included have difficulty envisioning just how many humans there are in the world. We tend to have trouble "seeing" the scale of the world beyond our immediate 50 mile radius around our home. All those people cranking out and consuming more and more non-pershiable stuff.

Crowd funding really opened my eyes where just a few thousand people could raise millions of dollars.

>>47309424
the family Mike Havel(the bearkiller MC) had the mom break her ribs I think. She got killed by the neo Nazis later on.

I couldn't get into the books after the original trilogy, I'll have to check them out now. How far into crazy tech ideas does it go?

>>47309489
*the family Mike havel was flying

>>47309424
Ahh, yes, the CUT. I've the met the IRL whackadoodles that inspired them, and believe me, them becoming a slave-driving death cult of fanatics that makes ISIS look like a bag of friendly kittens is ENTIRELY believable. Fucking Livingston is a weird place. Where else would produce Paolini and Eragon?I don't know what it is about Montana, but we seem to attract nutters like a magnet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphant

>>47309671
>Kenneth and Talita Paolini, the parents of Inheritance cycle author Christopher Paolini, were once members but later left the organization. They have since written the book 400 Years of Imaginary Friends: A Journey Into the World of Adepts, Masters, Ascended Masters, and Their Messengers, which discussed their experiences of the sect as well as a history of it related to other groups.

Kek. This explains almost everything about Chris Paolini's books.

>>47309671
I have a hard time taking this crazy shit seriously. Even just the Wiccan stuff in Dies the Fire made me cringe slightly.

Is this how missionaries felt when they arrived in the New World? I'm not even religious, some stuff just seems too silly to be real

>>47309857
A rule I live by is that nothing is too silly to be real.
People bumble their way into all sorts of shit.

>>47309857
>Is this how missionaries felt when they arrived in the New World?

Yeah, a lot of missionaries wrote about how when they finally could understand the stories they were being told, they wrote it off as pure silliness. Specially on the Plains.

>>47309671

Didn't know the cutters were real! Very interesting.

The further the books and the characters are removed from our world the less interesting the Emberverse series is to me. Just becomes another fantasy story. I did like the first book. It's interesting to see Sterlings take on modern institutions and people in a medieval world. The discovery period is always the most interesting to me. Seeing just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

>>47309990
A whole series of interlocking stories, all with different protagonists set at the first few years of the Change would be amazing. You'd get a view of Hawaii, a retrofitted USS Constitution, the rise of neo-Mongols in the Great Plains, sugar trade in the Caribbean, and Great Lakes cites exporting custom plate armor.

You could do so much with the setting, letting it become a standard fantasy series is a waste

>>47310109
There is an anthology of stories writing by other authors set in the Emberverse. Included in it is such stories as the reformation of the Venetian League, a story of salvagers going into the ruins of Sydney on the behalf of the Merchant Republic of Darwin, and an exploration of the neo-tribes of Northern Alberta.

>>47310109

Hawaii is fucked they grow very little of thier own food (20% last I heard) It's all flown in. There isn't even a Commerical dairy.

>>47308858

steam engines kind of still work. The doctor/scientist guy got one started up and it very very sluggishly turned a wheel.

He found that the way the steam behaved had changed. No matter how densely the steam was packed into a space, the pressure would never rise above a certain cap. If there was enough in there that it ought to have a much higher pressure it would still only push against a piston or leak out at the capped force.

Not a thing that can do useful work anymore.

man, imagine if you were on a cruise/worked on a cargo ship when the Change happened. You'd be fucked, no way to control the ship and no power to light it. You probably wouldn't run out of food on a cargo ship, but with no desalinater working, you'd need to do it manually. Cruises would be the second worst place, after airplanes, to be when it hit

>>47311556
There's a story about a salvager in Alaska who comes across cruise ships that are just abattoirs filled with eaters and madness. Cruise ships would be nightmare scenarios for sure. Airplanes would just be scary for a little and you'd be dead before you know what's happening.

>>47311556

I would take 2 minutes of screaming and then death over the fucking nightmare of starving to the point of death or cannibalism on board a no longer functional cruise ship.

>>47311804
>>47311762
The absolute isolation would really fuck with people

You have no idea why the engines are dead
You have no idea it's worldwide
You have no control of the ship

Hell on Earth, I'd probably try to steal a life boat and abandon the ship. A smaller boat is easier to rig a sail for after all, and you can steal provisions in the massive chaos that would arise

>>47308944
>>47309192
>>47309340
The Stand does the scarcity thing pretty accurately, food and water are plentiful, the biggest issues ends up being finding people with knowledge. Doctors and technicians and such.

>>47307318
lost me at SCA Larpers becoming the top polity.

>>47312505
>people who have what is now the most advanced functional military equipment and a basic idea how to use it
>not the new biggest kids on the block

>>47312505
>>47313956
Not to mention a smart evil bastard at its head for whom this is a dream come true.

>>47307318
is it out on kindle yet?

>>47311762
dont cruiseships have life boats?

>>47308414
I won't even bother with anything with Mr Fetish's name on the cover.

>>47308823
What, did all the fucking horses and cows die off too?

>>47310252

Good thing they're surrounded by all those fish, anon.

>>47307318
What to expect to proliferate? Fuck your plate maille and swords, bigass crossbows, horse-drawn arbalests and ballistas, drums of flaming oil or industrial chemicals.

>>47318195
Many would. Cows, especially dairy cows, will die very quickly if there's no one around to tend to them. Dairy cows just bloat up if no one milks them on the regular. Many horses would be in stable or such things while their hobby owners are at work in the city, or in pasture that they are conditioned not to flee from. This isn't to say that horse and cow will all die, in fact most factions in Emberverse make heavy use of both animals, and most factions have cavalry based military (PPA, bearkillers, CORA, Lakota, both RCMP Dominions, etc).

>>47314148
Modern lifeboats are'nt the classic wooden Titanic boat. They are fabric rapid deployment rafts that work off of pressurized gas. The change made such luxuries untenable, so they would try to deploy the raft and have it just not work.

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/3340a2fd97cf403ba9725e3617ccf8f1/inflatable-liferafts-in-hard-shelled-canisters-and-lifeboat-on-board-bmfej5.jpg

>>47318195
Cattle, and I say this as a rancher, are the third stupidest animal on the planet behind lemmings and sheep. They WILL die if left untended, especially dairy cattle, or worse they go feral, in which case they are as dangerous as bison and even more prone to disease.

>>47318195
It takes a specific few breeds of horse to train to haul, otherwise you are just as likely to snap Mr. Ed's spine as move a wagon. Most of such breeds have died out since the late Sixties. The Amish keep stables of wagon-horses, as do Mennonites, but they ain't gonna be sharing in a situation like the Change.

>>47314013
I have the last couple on mine.

>>47310258

...this annoys the physicist in me.

I feel the urge to go beat a wizard to death yelling about mass and velocity.

>>47309990
Spinning the collapse as a truce between a orthodox human faction and a transhumanist faction at the omega point, trying to avoid a failed singularity works.

It made more sense than outright magic...

>>47319134

Not much you can do about god(s) saying fuck you and changing the rules.

>>47312000

>week 3
>The interior is either pitch black or full of choking smoke from improvised torches and shit because the lights and ventilation are gone
>anywhere there is light and smoke it's probably making you horribly sick because they're burning chemically treated wood paneling
>the whole ship reeks because the refrigeration failed and all the food on board started rotting
>everyone reeks because there isn't enough water to shower or wash clothes or laundry
>there is literal shit everywhere because plumbing system failed
>vomit too, because with the rationing of canned goods, close quarters, and poor sanitation people are getting sick
>fights and riots are becoming common
>a few people already died and there are increasingly loud arguments about whether the bodies should just be thrown overboard so that they don't make the sanitation problem worse
>all this happening amogst the relentlessly cheerful decorations of Carnival Cruise Lines

Fuck, that. Fuck every single thing about that. I would leave. Jump and swim for shore, if I had to.

>>47320382
Yikes, at least in the Poseidon Adventure they still had electricity and lighting.

>>47308727
>No need to fuck with melting Dow structural steel beams.

How can they melt stuff when combustion stopped working?

>>47308944
>This is really interesting. What sort of implications does this have for post apoc in general?

Generally postapocs means that the crunch is people, not materials.

See: Native Americans who pretty much put every slave or abductee to work in a completely uncontrolled and unregulated manner right away.

>>47320564

Only explosions don't work, burning stuff still works just fine.

In fack, former high explosives burn rather vigorously.

>>47320668
>Only explosions don't work, burning stuff still works just fine.

...so black powder still works? It's fast-burning rather than explosive after all.

Oh wait, whom am I kidding, right?

>>47312000
>>47320382
Apply that, then multiply by order of ten for deep submarines.

>>47321196
Yup, it burns, but much more slowly. Useful as a firestarter, but it can't explode.

>>47307318
I would develop momentum and potential energy based equipment for use.

For example, if you have a massive centrifuge, and you spool it up, it will have very high amounts of kinetic energy. When you apply a small force to reduce this energy (IE breaking), this energy will be transferred to the breaking object. So, use muscle power to spool up this centrifuge to the point where it can be "shaved off" in small amounts and applied to the forward momentum of a vehicle. The issue with this design might be twofold -- first, the vehicle in question would probably weigh 15-20 tons, and second, the centrifuge would have to be spooled up manually -- perhaps by a team of a dozen men over a period of time. However, this does overcome the limitation of not being able to use internal combustion, which means it's possible to create vehicles in this particular universe.

In another way, massive springs can be manually compressed to allow projectile weapons to launch objects almost as forcibly as current bullets. Also useful is compressed air guns, which can be pumped by hand until high enough pressure is obtained to launch a projectile.

Clockwork objects might also find some use, though I can't think of any at the moment. Something simple like a fan for cooling might be an example.

Pnumatic tube computers could also function, running off of compressed air as their logic gates. In the very, very far future, biological processing might be a thing as well, moving to organic computing.

>>47321813
>which means it's possible to create vehicles in this particular universe.

Or we just get an ox or horse or three and have it/them pull the vehicle.

Because, you know, that'd actually work.

>>47321932
Or use rail and sailing to transport goods a long distance. Like they do in the series.

what kind of fun murder machines would become relevant?

I could see Da Vinci's tank, modified for crossbows, making a comeback. It would be pretty good against the people that depend on bows a lot like the pagans

>>47324774

Bicycles just like in a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Bicycle mounted infantry (dragons) could cover a lot of ground with less logistical needs then cavalry.

>>47309294

The faction is Mary Sue you tard. The bowman is a world renown bow maker not a hobbyist. You haven't even read the fucking books yet defend them?

>>47321813
>A regiment of Girandoni rifles vs. a pseudo-Norman cavalry charge

Oh my. I want.