This is a little late, so my apologies.
Militia armament isn't standardized. The level of armament is specifically up to the local community to determine.
And the *ideal* is that militia shouldn't be using firearms in their day to day interactions with their communities. Not "I guess I'll die"
*shrug*
If you say so. I can accept that's the ideal that is espoused , while wondering how well it would actually work in practice.
This recalls something I've heard said about the Middle East. In these societies, long arms are actually viewed as relatively innocent to possess, because they are tools that you'd use to defend your community against armed attacks by organized outsiders. But pistols are viewed as sinister and dangerous weapons, the tools of criminals or of secret policemen.
So giving your police sidearms isn't necessarily going to make them LESS suspect in a society that's undergone decades of semi-anarchic warlordism punctuated by terror whenever a Victorian division passes through.
They may be actively less suspicious if they are carrying, say, hunting rifles, which are present in large numbers on the civilian market and which are still quite useful for self-defense without being ideal weapons to stage a massacre or to brutally murder people in their own homes.
I can't speak for the Middle East of course; I have no personal knowledge, and my academic knowledge is strictly dilettante-level.
But I do have personal experience of significant areas of southern Nigeria, and there the police are either carrying truncheons or carrying AKs. Sidearms are not really a thing, and more likely to be illicit weapons.
Nevertheless, the Nigerian civilian population considers a gun is a gun is a gun. No societal associations one way or the other.
Whether the sociocultural situation in post-Collapse America will be more like the Middle East you describe than the Nigeria I experienced remains to be seen. Could go either way.
I don't really expect hunting rifles to be a separate thing in post-Collapse America though.
The disposable income to afford hunting rifles separate from home defense weapons isn't there, and the sheer density of pre-Collapse home defense firearms, coupled with the small arms arsenals of the various US Army and National Guard arms depots that would be released into gen pop means that even forty years later, the market will be flooded with infantry weapons.
Thats one of the reasons I suspect the Vics would not actually bother gunsmiths in post-Collapse America by the way, which would largely be a futile enterprise. Keeping an eye on ammunition makers? Much more feasible to track the bulk chemical supplies necessary to produce good ammo than attempting to track gun production and sales among a non-cooperative population.
Personally, I read that as the, "what I want you to do," expectation, rather than the, "I actually predict that this will be the case," expectation, and canonized with that in mind. Predicting that no armed peace officer in this time and place will ever fire their weapon would be ridiculous, but making clear that they are not supposed to unless the situation has already become violent, I can see.
I guess I was thinking of things in the sociopolitical situation where, not too long ago, the Unionists were able to stir up enough fear of the Other/outside infiltrators/internal enemy that they had the popular support to get a bill through Congress that prevented refugees from becoming citizens with the legal rights of citizens, even refugees willing to join the military.
This in a new state where anywhere from 10 to 20% are
refugees immigrants.
I couldn't but look at something like that and consider how the ripple effects would manifest internally inside the Commonwealth, even with the larger federal government's official policy being rather firmly against police militarization. Especially with the assassin loose.
An Inconvenient Honest Man, Part 3
These have been uniformly excellent. Well done.
Looking forward to more chapters in our intrepid friend's life.
NETFIRES
Because I haven't posted a realworld weapon system in the thread in several months, and I should probably remedy that.
This is the XM501 NLOS-LS anti-vehicle/anti-armor weapon system, formerly known as NETFIRES
Launches two types of missile:
- Precision Attack Missile bunkerbuster/heavy armor killer with a weight of around 50kg, rocket motor propulsion, near-Mach speed and range of 40km,
- Loitering Attack Missile loitering munition/anti-light vehicle missile with a weight of around 50kg, turbojet propulsion, a range of 70km-200km, and a loitering time of up to 30 minutes.
Both munitions were multi-mode seeker equipped and networked, with GPS-INS/Imaging IR/Semi-active laser guided modes.
Originally a DARPA program in 1998, control passed to the US Army in the 2000s, with the USN keeping an interested eye on it. Successful flight tests started in 2002. Cancelled by the US Army in 2010 after one run of bad tests, fucking the USN LCS program which was banking on that missile program as anti-small boat munitions.
The Israelis subsequently built a version called the IAI JUMPER.
Each container launch unit or CLU comprised of a 4x4 block of cells with fifteen missiles and a sixteenth cell that contained control electronics.
A CLU is about 2m high, weighs about 1.5 metric tons loaded, and fits in the back of a stretch HMMV or pickup.
You can stack 3 of them in the truck bed of a standard six-wheeler truck, or just put one on the ground in the bush, or in a forward operating base.
Concept of operations was to launch these things into an area where known enemy vehicle concentrations were verified by UAV or forward observer , and allow them to autonomously pick their targets and network so as not to all hit the same target. With known enemy vehicle designs programmed into the memory-recognition algorithms of the seekers so they can, for example, pick out and attack a T-72 by its IR signature.
Datalink and semi-active laser seekers were included to allow the local commander to designate particular priority targets at need instead of just allowing the missiles to pick their own.
Sorta the "fuck that guy in particular" option instead of the "to whom it may concern" fire and forget mode enabled by autonomous imaging IR.
en.wikipedia.org
By 2076 this weapon system will be old enough to be collecting Social Security.
But it also fits quite well with the canonized fondness of Commonwealth military procurement for technicals, and weapon systems that can fit on technicals and similar light vehicles. And boats/ships.
Plus, a couple plane flights would deliver enough launch units to pose an existential threat to an armored division.
Which is the sort of disruptive equalizer worth considering given the weight of heavy metal that the Russian Imperium can supply and equip it's Victorian clients with; if they don't end up with Cold War Syria numbers of tanks as a minimum, I'd be very surprised.
Stuff like this is one of the reasons why I insist that attempting to build our own tanks instead of importing in 2076 is an elaborate waste of resources.
The threat environment is not something that homebuilt designs can handle.
Next time I'm free, we'll talk hypervelocity missiles, and why we should have them.
.Or do you think they are running the Fundy Bay tidal generators, or the Niagara power plants, without computers and stuff?
