20% of Broken Roads

I’m currently about 20% through Broken Roads (hat tip to DMJ) and I’m minded to write something.

Let me say this first of all.

Any ass-hole can find fault, being a critic is easy, lot easier than being a writer, and writers often of necessity have to employ things like artistic licence as a vehicle, if they strive for pin point accuracy it can kill the story stone dead before they start.

Star wars and just about everything else fucking piss me off because you have spacecraft performing AERODYNAMIC maneouvers in a vacuum, that shit is unforgivable, the writers need to be taken out back and fucked and dried.

Broken Roads you can tell, even 20% in, that the writer has fired a weapon, and been around what the yanks call a wrench / mechanic.

So I’m wondering, is it mere artistic licence and a vehicle for the story, or is it exactly what Rexx is talking about, that gives rise to the things I think when I read it, please bear in mind the following….

My father before me was an Engineer, like me, but a hundred times better than me, his era, he had a steam and electric ticket, otto diesel was still around, but dad’s first truck was a steam truck, made by Dennis.

95% of what I learned, I learned from my dad, so I learned how things were when HE was a boy apprentice, and later how the did things during the war, and in the jungles of the far east shortly thereafter….

Now, you can make acetylene easy enough, that’s just chemistry, but compressing and getting it into a bottle (not an empty one, but a bottle filled with a porous solid like a sponge) at high pressure is a completely new ball game, y’all try feeding a three stage diving compressor with acetylene and not air sometime, I’ll be the guy watching from 2,000 yards away through the fucking telescope…. but post apocalyptic Rexx grabbing a gas axe? (oxy acetylene torch) 40+ years after the breakdown…

The protagonist riding around on a motorcycle? Grease in a sealed tub might last 40 years, lube oil won’t, and that shit is harder to make than gasoline, many a time my old man told me the two great advances since he was a boy were pneumatic tyre technology and lube technology, the metals and engineering they had, but those two, no way.

Something no fucker talks about now, Brake Mean Effective Pressure, back in dad’s day they’d run a tuned side-valve engine at maybe 6:1 compression ratio, often 2/3rd of that, they had 100 octane gas and sub thou engineering and great steels, but no lube good enough.. if they had lube good enough, no way to get that power down as the tyres weren’t good enough.. this shit is hard limit stuff.

Gasifiers and steam power and sidevalve shit, the main protagonist might have been able to get a Model J Harley running, it was appropriate tech, the US Army used them to try and chase down Pancho Villa in real life, but what sounds like a 4 cyl jap bike with 12mm spark plugs?

Like I said, any asshole can be a critic, maybe DMJ knew all this but needed to write it his way to make the story work, and tell the story he wanted to tell, and not the story of the incredible technical challenges the real protagonists would face 40 years after the apocalypse.

So, this isn’t an appraisal of DMJ as an author, or Broken Roads as a book, rather it is about something that reading the book made me think, something that is in-line with what I have read so far.

That is that if you found yourself in that world, in reality, you would find that the reality as described in the book is a fucking fairy tale land of plenty and abundance and ease, from a purely engineering / technical POV.

I have seen with my own eyes a hand made arc welder, made in the 1990’s in africa, I have a picture somewhere, you can smelt copper and hammer it flat, but insulating it…. if you have high quality industrial weaving kit and cotton you can weave an insulator, I can remember this as a child, if you don’t, as these african’s didn’t, you hammered thin wall copper pipe flat, used hammered iron bed frame and leaf spring for the cores, and wrapped the hammered copper around the cores, using fucking paper from magazines for an insulator, an old set of jump leads worked both as the high current side and as the torch, and THEY STILL NEEDED INDUSTRIAL MADE AND COATED WELDING RODS.

This shit is orders of magnitude harder to do than anyone realises, this sounds easy, but it depends on that, and that depends on the other, and the other depends on something else, and you need all that shit in an unbroken line before you can do this…

I used to run a single cylinder static lister diesel generator, it would run on diesel, or lube oil, or ATF, and this 1.4 litre displacement single cylinder engine would produce a whopping 6 bhp @ 650 rpm, each of the twin external flywheels weighed around 300 lbs….. I personally wouldn’t even consider anything more technologically advanced or high tech or with a greater power to weight ratio for a Broken Roads scenario, we are literally talking steam power.

Similarly, 40 years after the apocalypse, my money is on the only kind of rifle the main protagonist would be able to run would be a muzzle loading flintlock, flint, black powder and lead you can do, and again, with low barrel pressures you can cast or wrap a barrel, there is a huge correlation between being able to make an engine barrel that will handle 200 psi peak pressures and a gun barrel that will do the same, to scale…. hell, the logo of BSA motorcycles until they folded was crossed rifles, Birmingham Small Arms…

But making brass, smokeless powder, and especially percussion caps… fucking hard stuff to do… so is making a rifled barrel

First you need a lathe….

But you couldn’t make that shit unless you have access to a fucking good blacksmith, and a metalsmith, and a gear cutter, all separate trades and skills, and they in turn depend on miners and smelters, brickies to make the kiln, it goes on and on, maybe when your community gets to 50,000 inhabitants you’ll have enough supporting trades and such to start making crude rifle barrels and steam engines and early internal combustion engines, Harley J stuff, assuming you have the fucking plans, and the measuring tools, and so on.

In a sense, though I am only 20% of the way into Broken Roads, I sense that this is at least one thread of the narrative that DMJ is telling a story about, our ignorance of our dependence on technology.

If he is, I find myself wondering, in 1978 the BBC did an excellent 10 part documentary series, narrated by James Burke, it was called Connections, and delved into this very subject, back in the days before TV was dumbed down into x-fuckedher I’m a celebutard.

Maybe you should all watch it.

Maybe you should download it, while you still can, in a post apocalyptic world a hand cranked charger would power a laptop and allow you to view it, and marvel at the moving pictures.

Here is episode 1