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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Yeah, Deer and pigs are absolute menaces. Over here its not even that their predators have been wiped out, its that the deer are just way outbreeding in manicured suburbia thanks to the food abundance. Which leads to massive cycles of feast and famine every 5-6 years where the population explodes, then starves as they eat every green thing they can reach, die off to lower levels, the greenery recovers, and then it just repeats. Coyotes and mountain lions will go into the suburbs, but they can't keep up with the deer.

Pigs of course have no real predators other than humans.

Piggies are also a human introduced invasive species.

Like US Crawfish in certain UK rivers. How we’ve not gone Seafood Boil on them, I don’t know. Crawfish are delicious, and invasive. It’s not a one season fix, but if we got organised and ate as many of the critters as we could? It would help, and overtime potentially sort them right out.

And give me a damned good feed at the same time.

They tried that with grey squirrels once, but it didn’t take. It needs the right kind of incentives from the restaurant industry.

True. I understand part of the problem is sizing, and that the females (the ones you really want on the table to curtail breeding cycles) tend to just hide in their mud burrows.

The size thing is fixing up the right sort of trap, so you’re not overly bothering native river life.

I've kept Crawfish in a large tank before. IDK if it's just the one I had, or if they are all like it, but the one I had was a total A-hole. I had fresh water crabs in the same 75 gallon tank and he thrashed most of them within 72 hours.

 Just Tony wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


My daughter struggled with her Air Force rifle qualification - not so much the accuracy, but the manual of arms. It got her flustered, which spoiled her accuracy. So we went to range and I called out the commands for her (loading three rounds per magazine) until it felt familiar. It is a bit convoluted.

She did fine on the M9 (which the Guard still has). I never got a chance to do pistol qualification in either the Army or the Air Force.

It is different per service? From memory I was sure its platform based in the UK, though everyone has their own usage twists.

The standards are different, but the issue with the M9 is that she's a medic, and they all train with the M9 as they may have to carry one for self-defense when rendering humanitarian assistance.

With my career field it's assumed I'll have a rifle. The Army likewise never trained me on the M9, for the same reason. Rifle and grenade, yes, but no pistol.

All of our medics were trained on the M9 AND the M4/M16. Likewise when I went through 11B OSUT we were trained on EVERY weapon system utilized by the Infantry. I'm not sure how you got breezed past the 9. That sounds like a unit thing and not an Army thing.

Yeah, when I had the BN Scout Platoon we trained M9, M4, M249, M240, M203, M2, MK-19, and probably others I don't remember right now.

 CptJake wrote:

Yeah, when I had the BN Scout Platoon we trained M9, M4, M249, M240, M203, M2, MK-19, and probably others I don't remember right now.

The vast majority of my career was in the ANG, and rifle was all that was required, and that was intermittent at best. I put far more time in on my civilian weapon than anything issued to me.

I did Army basic in the beforetimes, so the whole course of fire, notion of tactics and self-aid/buddy care was completely different. We were basically training to treat people injured in accidents, not combat casualties under fire.

I remember the update where they said "Yeah, forget everything we told you. Do it this way now."

Rifle qualification also evolved, especially with the growing understanding that in theater, there are no "secure areas."

Question time again!

Watching S10 of the Walking Dead, and we see Daryl recovering magazines of ammo from Zombies that were soldiers.

By this point in the timeline, we’re well over a decade into the Apocaylpse. So it seems likely the soldiers have been zombies for a long old time, wandering around aimlessly as the dead are wont to do. But of course, we can’t rule out the possibility they’d been sheltered inside a building and had only been recently released by some hapless survivor.

Where my question lies is whether the ammo Daryl recovers would be at all trustworthy? The Magazines were held in pockets, and aren’t visibly dirty or corroded.

All ammo has a life expectancy, saying that it is extremely conservative. We for example dispose of certain batches after 10 years of storage or if they have been open and exposed to the elements for a certain period of time. The idea is to aim for a zero failure rate (impossible, but the SA80 LA1 is an example of what happens when you aim for 95% reliability).

We have seen insurgents use loose discarded and badly storied ammo with visible corrosion and while there are stoppages, a bunch still goes off (or indeed goes up unexpectedly in the case of stuff like mortar rounds). When stored properly people still use WW2 ammo.

While stuff exposed in magazines will have suffered and be less reliable, you can still use a bunch of it. Especially modern military issue which has various sealants and processes applied to make it more resistant to degrading. But you should see them dealing with defective rounds a fair bit, something I bet you don't

(It gets more crazy with missiles with them frequently being in multiple pieces and each piece has different amount of time it can be airborne without being fired - tracking that and mixing and matching pieces is fun.)

We kinda do! Ish. Not often, and sometimes the result of very deliberate sabotage (Eugeeeeeeeene!).

What we don’t see, now I think about it, is anyone grab a manky old mag off a fallen zombie and slap it straight in for immediate use.

Eugene may be the key there. He knows how to assemble ammo, and make the round itself from scratch. Perhaps what they’re doing is gathering the ammo, then passing it to Eugene for refurbishment.

As in, take pliers and remove the Freedom Seed, tip out the grains. Then use the casing and Freedom Seed to assemble a new round with fresh grains and that?

Sounds like a lot of work. But when ammo is increasingly scarce, and living humans even scarcer? Perhaps such a process to ensure reliable ammo is worth the effort?

The age wouldn't really be the problem. Its the exposure to the environment.

If the zombie was walking around but the clothing hadn't rotted off it probably means there wasn't much exposure to water(from like rain and stuff) so it might be fine. Brass cased ammo would hold up way better to water exposure then steel cased, and since its in the US it is definitely brass cased.

So yeah, the ammo could be fine, and likely most of it would be. You'd want to check each round. Take them out. Look for any signs of water damage around the primer. Shake it and see if you can feel the powder moving.

A decade for a cartridge that has been stored in even moderately acceptable conditions is not an issue by itself though. If a 10 year old round has a misfire and it was stored properly it was probably defective to being with.


Refurbishing ammo would definitely be a good idea if you can. You can disassemble the rounds, collect the powder. Mix it up, test some to see if it still burns, then reassemble them. The Primers are the most likely to decay with time as that is the most chemically unstable part of the cartridge, but if you can make new primer compounds you could possibly even refurbish those. Take the primers out, disassemble them, put new primer compound in them, reassemble, then put back in the casings.

Both Primer and smokeless powder are not terribly difficult to make if you have the basic chemistry knowledge.

That was one of the sticking points in France when smokeless powder was invented. They knew they couldn't keep smokeless powder a secret because the formula was so simple it would be found eventually so they didn't really try. And primers have been around for a while before that.

As for getting wet, you can actually dry smokeless powder(and black powder) and it will work again. The primer however will be ruined if it gets wet.


This is one reason I say if and when another appocalypse happens we will not lose firearm technology. Black powder, smokeless power, and primers are chemically easy to make so it is highly likely that someone is going to maintain some production somewhere.

 Grey Templar wrote:

This is one reason I say if and when another appocalypse happens we will not lose firearm technology. Black powder, smokeless power, and primers are chemically easy to make so it is highly likely that someone is going to maintain some production somewhere.

One can make percussion caps from pop cans, and there are lots of those around.

Remanufactured ammo is quite easy to do, and when ammo prices went through the roof, there were tons of start-up outfits that jumped into it and subsequently got out when production picked up. They were at shows, offering discounts for used brass, which they got in quantity.

As far as longevity, environment definitely matters more than age. I've got Spanish ammo from the 1960s that came sealed in the ammo can that runs perfectly.

It's kind of like canned food: no one is really sure where the absolute limit is.

If you have quality ammo in cardboard boxes, stored at under 55% relative humidity, and in 50 to 75 degree Fahrenheit temperature, I'd willfully use 50 year old stuff without much worry. If it's sealed in a can, add another 20 years.

Dunno how you’d quantify, but these were stored in ammo pockets, on a well rotted Zombie.

We do see not long after our protagonists visit a military installation which had survived the previous decade without obvious or major water leakage. Hence I’m hesitant to claim the ones Daryl took out and looted for said ammo must’ve been out and about for around a decade.

Also, because sloppy corpsey decay slime? We don’t tend to see that in the show. And the very end of “The World Beyond” clearly states the zombies show delayed decay.

If the zombie is mobile and not in an enclosed space the magazines probably wouldn't get too contaminated by any rot byproducts to effect the ammo inside them. Its just going to evaporate and dry before too much of the zombie juices spread. I would expect some surface rust potentially on the magazines themselves depending on how worn their surfaces might have been.

The ammo and mags probably smell awful though

The mags, to my uneducated eyes at least looked in good condition.

Certainly they weren’t immediately obviously all manky and stuffed.

But this thread being this thread, and my ignorance in the arena? I dare say someone actually informed might watch it, and then comeback with “well, you see at the top of the first magazine? There’s a clear difference in the stamp which is something the manufacturer includes to tell the informed that you might want to check first, which can be seen by no more than 10% of the stamp being mildly rusted in a very specific area”.

Yes I’m having fun with that, but in a respectful way!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Dunno how you’d quantify, but these were stored in ammo pockets, on a well rotted Zombie.

We do see not long after our protagonists visit a military installation which had survived the previous decade without obvious or major water leakage. Hence I’m hesitant to claim the ones Daryl took out and looted for said ammo must’ve been out and about for around a decade.

Also, because sloppy corpsey decay slime? We don’t tend to see that in the show. And the very end of “The World Beyond” clearly states the zombies show delayed decay.

Climate very much matters, and the question of exposed ammo has an interesting analogue: whiskey.

It is interesting to contrast Scotch with bourbon. I did a distillery tour in bourbon country some years ago and one of the reasons that bourbon doesn't generally approach the same age as Scotch is that the temperature swings are so much wider, that evaporation is a real problem. To put it another way, the hot/cold variation pushes the whiskey in and out of the wood at a much faster rate in Kentucky than it does in Scotland, so bourbon basically ages faster.

The same applies to ammo. In the UK, I expect even exposed ammo is doing to do better than stuff in America because our temperature swings are just so much more radical. I live in a rather unremarkable location, but it in any given year, the outside temperature will experience a variation of at least 90-100 degrees F. That would really mess with ammo. In a place with less variation, not so much.

This is why I suspect that European surplus is much more trustworthy than stuff stored in hotter regions. Yeah, maybe it was in a cool bunker, or maybe it was in a warehouse massive swings.

The Swedes, Norwegians and Finns would be fine with scavanged zombie ammo.