The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland

Thanks for that recommendation. Though on a different topic, I found the following post particularly interesting:

"Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – an Army’s Role"

https://angrystaffofficer.com/2025/03/02/failure-mechanisms-...

I submitted it now for discussion on its own:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084653

I remember infamously in one of the fallouts there is a tram system- this was implemented in game by giving a npc a hat that was a giant bus, putting the npc underground and having him run along a course with only his head visable above ground. If they made vehicles I hope it would be done in the same way

In every movie except the first one (where society was starting to collapse, it hadn't fallen yet) the question of "where's the gas" is a major plot device

I'm not going to sit here and argue Beyond Thunderdome is high art or anything, but kind of the whole point of the Mad Max films is not just to comment on resource scarcity and control but to make them the call to action for everything in the story. You're asking "who's making all the gas" because that's exactly what George Miller wants you to be thinking about.

> Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries.

The majority of the content I see in this space is overwhelmingly supportive of rolling your own grid. The point isn’t to reject electrification as a technology, but to reduce or eliminate reliance upon the electrical grid. A lot of homesteaders operate wood boilers for heat simply because it’s cheaper, but the truck-driving redneck you’re envisioning lost faith in industrial society a long time ago.

Sure making high quality gasoline is difficult, but making shitty gasoline or fuels that can take the place of gasoline with a bit less power is not some crazy technology. Gasoline engines, if tuned to do so, will run off naptha and ethanol mixtures. And if you are creating it fresh, like from the existence of a place called gas town, it will allow you to use more volatile but higher octane fuels mixed to make decent octane gasoline, it just won't last sitting around for very long. And methanol is fairly easy to produce from heating up nearly any organic matter up in a dry still. Diesel engines will run off nearly any oil that will burn.

I mean sure, fuel refining knowledge isn't super common, but plenty of people still know enough about it and chemistry to less efficiently produce fuels as long as they have a source material, be it an actual oil well or enough organic materials, with some basic tooling. Tooling which we would already know exists by the fact that people are maintaining a fleet of vehicles. And you also have to remember that Max himself was alive and working in world pre-collapse, it isn't a world 10+ generations into an apocalypse, only like 2 maybe bordering on 3 generations of apocalypse with some people still remembering the old world, albeit in a decaying state.

There are hippies that process wood into usable liquid fuels you can find on youtube. If we wanted to be more realistic, they would be driving less, and have a far higher percentage of diesel vehicles because diesel is so much easier to make and the engines are easier to run on even garbage fuels. But Mad Max isn't like 200 years post-apocalypse.

Water world at least had some tanker to explain where all the gasoline were coming from.

Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.

   SVBIED (Suicide Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device)

The Miocene Arrow is an interesting post apocalyptic novel that takes this problem seriously. In it a neofeudal society is oriented around producing surplus grain and processing it into alcohol for small diesel-powered airplanes, maintained in small numbers at vast expense by an aristocratic class as both symbol and means of enforcing their dominance. Entire hereditary craft guilds for all the support and subskills necessary to keep them running etc. Sort of analogous to warhorses in premodern europe I guess. Solid book, the first one in the series is interesting too but based in a different setting.

The gas was being refined from crude oil in Gas Town. This was explained explicitly in both modern Mad Max movies, but in fairness I haven’t seen the old ones.

Once again everyone has underestimated the cunning Toyota Prius, especially the new plug-in model, the Prius Prime.

Your gas went bad a year after the hammer fell? The Prius Prime can drive highway speed on its battery, and you can charge that with solar and an inverter.

Need to break camp and make yourself scarce in 5 minutes? Toss some fuel tanks in the back and floor it. The Prius Prime has a 600-mile EPA range on gasoline.

You can't believe they just had a large amount of oil left over from the apocalypse that could sustain a few hundred thousand people? It's just a matter of cartelling it and controlling the supply.

If an apocalypse happened, believe it or not, the few remnants of Earth would have all the world's knowledge via an LLM. How could that be? Wasn't everything destroyed? Nope.