So this week a scrounger excavates inside a Kroger store and discovers half a case of canned creamed corn. Yum! Lots of robust meal opportunities there! Sautéed creamed corn. Steamed creamed corn. Pan fried creamed corn. Creamed corn with creamed corn. Oh, it’s gonna be a good week! Next week though, when the scroungers only come up with a few bottles of cider vinegar, promises to be somewhat – eh – different. Almost as uncomfortable as the week the toilet tissue searchers could only find a big box of steel wool.
Somehow, supplying that large a community by forced tribute alone strikes me as less than sustainable. Somebody is going to need to do some dirt farming, and soon.
Speaking as someone who reloads his own ammo, it would be very easy for Eugene to wreak havoc with Negan’s armory/ammo stash and it’d be very hard to place blame on him
He could;
1; deliberately under-charge the powder load, causing a squib shot that blocks the barrel, if the barrel is not cleared of the squib and the gun is fired again, it could damage the barrel, possibly even causing the gun to energetically self-disassemble
2; deliberately overcharge the round and/or use the wrong powder, causing the gun to kaboom
3; set the bullet far back in the casing, causing an unpredictable pressure spike
4; crimp the bullet so tightly into the case that the pressure spikes and blows the case
5; use black powder instead of smokeless and wait for corrosion to damage internal components
Or any combination of these, sprinkle the sabotaged rounds randomly throughout the guns, that way the failures appear random and difficult to trace
Find some way to get Negan’s handgun and slip two sabotaged rounds into the middle of the mag, one squib, one overcharged, if he’s firing rapidly, the squib round will block his barrel and the overcharged round will destroy the gun, injuring him badly in the process
The only flaw with this otherwise cunning plan, mi’lord, is that Negan does not seem to be the type to assign blame based on logic and proof but rather on whatever whim strikes him. So methinks it would be more like:
Goon #1: “Negan, our ammo is failing.”
Negan: “Dwight, go get the iron ready and somebody go get our ‘Chief Engineer’”
I’ll add another complication, although I recognize that it would be unfair to require a TV script to indulge this much detail. That’s the matter of dealing with your crops once you’ve grown them. Real farmers and anyone who’s ever planted a home vegetable garden will tell you that when the zucchini is ripe you’ll be buried in squash up to your eyeballs. You’ll be so sick of eating it that you’ll get the heaves just looking at the color green. You’ll be creating a squash landfill. Zucchini mulch will dominate your flower beds. But two weeks later you’ll be out of food and wishing you had the wasted ones back.
Just sayin’, our latter day pioneers need to spend at least as much time and effort figuring out storage systems as they do on acquisition. Otherwise a bountiful harvest will be followed by crushing starvation once the preserved leftovers of civilization run out.
Canning. MIL v.1.0 and Mrs. Plant (v.1.0) worked a great deal at it with tomatoes.
Mason jars, rims and lids. I would imagine that most of the blood thirsty groups haven’t looted Mason jars.
That’s why you use a kinetic hammer bullet puller to sabotage the commercial ammo, done correctly, the sabotage would be undetectable, having the bad ammo come from a “commercial” box of Gold Dot, or Hornady or Federal or Remington would keep the suspicion off Eugene.
Besides, a conscientious and careful reloader (which Eugene most likely is) will turn out far better and safer ammo than mass produced commercial ammo, plus, at this point in the zompocalypse, commercial ammo should be getting rare and hand loaded ammo the norm
once the primers are all used up, they’ll be back to black powder weapons, once percussion caps are gone, it’ll be flintlock and matchlock
I really don’t think Negan would think about it that carefully. Ammo fail would equal ammo maker fail. Far too risky for the extremely risk adverse Eugene in any case.
True enough. Eugene will very much do what he needs to do to stay alive. Does it even matter if he’s all Neganed up or not? He’ll act like he is until Rick and his bunch roll back in.
It didn’t make sense on any level. I don’t see how Dwight is more important than a doctor, and Negan believing that lame story was very odd.
Yup. They’d be canning and preserving and drying and salting their asses off. Or having their thralls doing it.
While I don’t disagree, the point was to show that Negan is on a hair trigger when it comes to his wives. Any suggestion of hanky-panky and he’s not thinking straight at all.
They’ve done a piss poor job of making that work on screen. From what we’ve seen the number of predators, the Saviors, numbers in the hundreds. We’ve seen like maybe 50 or 60 folks between Hilltop and Alexandria combined. Heck, it was practically man to man coverage when they showed up at Alexandria for tribute. Kingdom seems to have several, but from the cafeteria scene, maybe 100. You can’t have that many lions feeding on such a small herd of antelope. Negan’s group would have to be farming to continue to eat.
That’s why he keeps Dwight around; power. Negan loves the power he has over Dwight, and the way he’s turned Dwight into his accomplice. Negan is all about dominance, any other feelings he may once have had are long gone.
If you mean primers, yes, they can be homemade, but its labor intensive and they are far less reliable than commercial primers
The primer has three basic parts, the cup, the anvil, and the priming compound…
Bear in mind that priming compound is an impact sensitive explosive and can be difficult/ dangerous to work with
You can take a fired primer, remove the anvil, iron out the firing pin strike from the cup, refill the cup with priming compound, and replace the anvil