This week, we’re doing another ‘silly’ topic, but this being me, it is a silly logistics topic, because – as the saying goes – amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. So we’re going to be professionally silly this week and talk about the logistics of vehicle warfare in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting, in part because this is a good way to also think about why militaries (of various description) use the vehicles they use, from a logistics standpoint.
Our pop-culture starting point here is going to be the ‘Mad Max’ universe and similar settings (Rage, the recent Badlands Crew, Fallen Earth etc), particularly the vision of motorized post-apocalyptic warfare that emerges quite clearly from Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.1 I should note that while I’m treating Mad Max as a single setting here, I’m going to focus a lot more on Fury Road and Furiosa, because those are the films that feature the most large-scale warfare (though we’ll get a few mentions of Mad Max 2 as well). We’ll outline in a moment the overall warfare ‘model’ these settings use, but what I find particularly notable are the vehicles used: often large numbers of motorcycles and motorbikes, muscle cars and the distinctive presence of ‘war rigs’ – massive weaponized trucks – and the assumption that a lot of the fighting is conducted ‘at speed.’
Of course that’s not the only vision for vehicles in the post-apocalypse. In some settings, vehicles figure in only a little: in the modern Fallout games2 the only vehicles of gameplay import are aircraft. The existence of ground vehicles is implied in dialogue, but we never see them, presumably because they’d be too difficult to implement in the engine. Zombie fiction often features small groups of survivors in individual civilian vehicles, sometimes hardened for combat, but typically not (and often when they are hardened, it is for ‘ramming’ crowds, which is not a thing that would be good to modify a civilian vehicle for).
I want to focus on the Mad Max-style settings because they feature larger factions engaging in warfare at a variety of scales with modified and even purpose-built vehicles. We wouldn’t expect small survivor groups weeks or months after some form of the apocalypse to be significantly modifying their vehicles but we would expect substantial modifications to be made by full societies engaging in warfare at scale with these vehicles. Also, again, it’s a fun setting.
So what we’ll do is outline the ‘warfare model’ of these Mad Max-style settings, discuss the problems with that warfare model and then lay out a more plausible replacement and in the process think a bit about modern military logistics.
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The Mad Max Warfare Model
We want to start by laying out what I am going to call the ‘warfare model‘ of the setting. When I say ‘warfare model’ here, what I mean is how a fictional setting imagines warfare to be conducted across all of the different levels of military analysis. Put simply how does warfare work in this setting? So the ‘warfare model’ is a big collection of smaller models, like a ‘strategic model’ (what aims are pursued by war in the setting and how) or the ‘tactical model’ (how does battle with these weapons actually work) and so on. For this post, we’re really interested in the tactical and logistical models, but I want to start by outlining in a basic way the whole ‘vision’ and how within the fiction it fits together.
This is, I think, a particularly handy framework to think about in science fiction, because while fantasy works often implicitly borrow a lot of their warfare model from pre-modern history, science fiction settings do not. They may feature radically alien war aims, logistics or tactics, predicated on equally unusual technologies or conditions.
Fortunately for us, the Mad Max warfare model is not so alien, though it does have quirks. Warfare in these settings is waged principally over resources, primarily four: water, food, gasoline and ammunition. The primacy of those resources is most clearly demonstrated in the two most recent Mad Max films (Fury Road and Furiosa), where each wasteland ‘fortress’ is clearly tied to one of the resources and the central economic function of the setting is moving those resources between the three fortresses. In practice, a wasteland warlord would likely have other resource concerns as well, but for a setting that due to the brevity of film, must dwell in simplicity, this more or less works: those are the most substantial logistical demands of any modern war machine.3 Warfare is fought either to control production of those resources, or to scavenge them, as stronger groups cannibalize smaller ones.
The one oddity here of note is that the nodes of resource production (or substantial storage) appear in Mad Max setting specifically as points, rather than zones of control. The Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm and even the fuel refinery from Mad Max 2 are also single points of production, in a single settlement. In practice, in the real world, resources tend to be a lot more spread out than this, demanding military powers – like the warlords of the setting – to disperse their forces much more widely to enable production and extraction. Reducing resource production to a handful of ‘strongholds’ surrounded by ‘wasteland’ allows these warlords to concentrate their military forces a lot more than they otherwise would, which we ought to keep in mind.4 Warfare is thus about either raiding groups moving between these fixed resource points, or efforts to seize control of one of the points itself.
To that end, we see variations on a single military system developing, both in Mad Max and derived settings. Tactically, these systems anticipate primarily vehicle combat: even when attacking a fixed point, the ‘road warriors’ (as it were) are never far from their vehicles. What is distinctively missing are motorized or mechanized infantry – troops that, whatever their transportation, expect to fight primarily on foot. Instead, a lot of the fighting is done while moving at speed and vehicles are present even in static engagements. We’re thus dealing, effectively, with ‘vehicle armies.’
The centerpiece of these vehicle armies is what we may call (following Fury Road and Furiosa) the ‘war rig,’ large improvised vehicles that serve as both transports and fighting platforms. Obviously the most memorable of these are Immortan Joe’s war rigs5 from Fury Road and Furiosa, but we see other smaller factions employing smaller war rigs, like the spiked and armored tractor-trailer of the ‘Buzzards‘ in Fury Road. These show up in other takes on the setting concept too, like the big centerpiece vehicles in the convoys of Rage 2. As noted, the recent Badlands Crew, set in what I can only describe as a ‘legally distinct’ Mad Max setting is all about building and fighting with these sorts of war rigs.
War rigs appear to serve a few functions. On the one hand, they are larger, more heavily armored platforms capable of absorbing punishment and holding a substantial number of combatants and heavier weapons. At the same time, a lot of them are built also for carrying cargo and could – on longer campaigns – serve some sort of logistical sustainment function, refueling the smaller vehicles.
Supporting the war rig are what we might call ‘outriders:’ smaller combat vehicles that are more maneuverable but often function principally as escorts for the war rigs. Notably, there’s a consistent tend in these settings that these tend to be cars or sometimes buggies, with the two recent Mad Max films favoring a range of muscle-car and antique car bodies, albeit often with the trunk space opened up to create a fighting platform in the back. These vehicles are much less heavily armored, but faster and more agile and make up the majority of most army’s combat power.
Finally, we see the heavy use of motorcycles and motorbikes, both as raiders and as escorts. Often this is by ‘factions’ in the setting implied to be poor (like the ‘Rock Riders‘) or roving gangs like Dementus’, but we also see them employed by large factions: there are motorbikes in the escort of Immortan Joe’s war rigs in both Fury Road and Furiosa. Notably, these function in a lot of cases as primary combatants: both Dementus and the ‘Rock Riders’ attack war rig convoys with bikes, so these aren’t just personal transport or scouts, at least for some of the factions that use them.
And of course we should note that as fiction these vehicles have an important role in signaling things to the viewer. A faction that mostly uses dirt-bikes and lives in the mountains feels rugged and almost half-civilized, while Dementus’ giant hoard of motorcycle-mobile raiders visually evokes the way Steppe nomads get presented in media, complete with massive dust-cloud (fitting, as Dementus is presented as a nomadic warlord). Cars covered in spikes might not be very effective as weapon-systems, but they visually communicate something fairly primal and direct to the audience.
Because most of the fighting in the setting involves either overrunning thinly garrisoned fortresses or attacking motorized convoys moving resources, a lot of the fighting is done ‘on the move,’ with vehicles moving continuously at full speed while exchanging fire. In the Mad Max setting, its clear that proper firearms (or perhaps more likely, their ammunition) have become relatively rare, reserved for key combatants and vehicles: instead, improvised weapons using cruder explosives or gasoline are a lot more common, so thrown explosives are a key component in this sort of fighting. That varies by setting, of course and in some settings we see a lot more guns (or non-gun missile weapons made mechanically equivalent to guns through the magic of video game rules).
Road War Tactics
In practice, I see two problems with this combat model, one tactical and the other logistical. We can start with the tactical problem, which comes down to two fairly simple points: first, without complex modern stabilizers (and often even with them) it is extremely hard to hit a moving vehicle firing from a moving vehicle and second, armoring most of these vehicles to resist even small arms fire would be difficult and involve prohibitive increases in weight.
We can start with the accuracy side of the equation: these settings very often feature combatants firing (or throwing weapons) from moving vehicles on to moving vehicles and that’s just very hard to do, except at very close ranges. After all, not only does a shooter on a moving platform have to account for their relative velocity with the target (which may be rapidly shifting) but a moving platform isn’t going to be perfectly level either, with bounces and bumps throwing off aim, potentially in all sorts of directions for a vehicle moving at high speeds on rough terrain.
You can actually get a sense of how hard a problem this is with even a brief look at the development of stabilizers for the main guns of tanks. The first attempts at tank gun stabilization come in the 1930s, but the initial capabilities were really limited, requiring tanks to basically stop to engage in accurate fire. The United States, for instance, didn’t think stabilization was really worth it in the 1960s and an add-on stabilization kit for the M60 main battle tank didn’t come until the early 1970s. On-the-move accuracy without a stabilizer – or even with an early stabilizer – was remarkably poor. The consensus to my understanding, for instance, of WWII-era tanks, was that none of them had much chance of hitting a tank size target at any range that mattered while moving, even tanks like the M4 Sherman which included very early stabilization technology.
Indeed, the Allies ran accuracy tests (because of course they did) on the M4 Sherman the Crusader Tank and their stabilizers and Tank Archives was good enough to dig up the reports. You can really get a sense of the problem from the table on p. 12 of the report, the table labeled “Stationary Fire, Firing from Halt, Moving Fire with and without Gyrostabilizer.” It records accuracy against a stationary 49 square foot (7×7) target “under the most favourable conditions,” as a ‘probability of hit’ at a given set of ranges:
| Type of Fire | 200 yards | 500 yards | 1000 yards |
| Stationary | 99+% | 99+% | 99+% |
| From Halt | 99+% | 99+% | 88% |
| Moving, with Gyro | 82% | 46% | 19% |
| Moving, without Gyro | 46% | 18% | 6.5% (est) |
And the problem should just jump right out at you: under conditions where a shot fired stationary or ‘from halt’ (slam the breaks, wait for the tank to stop and stabilize, then fire immediately) could be accomplished (in training field conditions) with basically perfect accuracy, firing on the move with a basic stabilizer was a crapshoot and without a stabilizer, the chance of hitting anything collapsed to almost nothing beyond extremely short (for tanks) ranges. As the report notes, in combat conditions – with all the stress and confusion that implies – these figures must be substantially lower. After all, WWII era tanks did not, in fact, have perfect accuracy at 1000 yards in actual combat – far from it! The report goes on to note that the ammunition cost of firing on the move “is largely wasted in view of the evident lack of advantage gained over firing from halt.” In short: the chance of hitting anything firing while moving was so low it wasn’t worth wasting the shots and you instead ought to stop the tank if you needed to fire (‘fire from halt’).
Of course you might try to square the accuracy problem with volume of fire: simply get something fast-firing and put a lot of rounds in the air. But that runs into the second problem: these are societies with pretty sharp limits on ammunition production. Spraying thousands of rounds into the air to maybe-or-maybe-not disable an enemy vehicle is probably not viable. Of course one option would be to drive much closer and engage the enemy at very close range. But the far better answer in most cases is going to be stop and fire when stationary. Once you stop moving, you have a stable firing position (no bouncing around) and only need to lead the target based on their motion, which is not a trivial task at long ranges, but a far easier task – human soldiers with nothing more than iron-sights and the Mk1 Eyeball are regularly able to put bullets on speeding automobiles at non-trivial ranges.
The other tactical complication, once your war-vehicles are being shot at by stationary enemies, is that armoring large vehicles against that small-arms fire is actually pretty challenging.6 It takes a non-trivial amount of steel plate to stop even standard rifle calibers (5.56mm, 7.62mm, etc), as you can find any number of YouTube tests demonstrating. The upshot is that for a steel-plate defense, ‘safety’ looks to be more than a quarter-inch (closer to half an inch) and that’s quite a lot of armor, which substantial weight implications. In practice, a number of modern armored vehicles, like the M2 Bradley and the M113 APC use aluminum armor (on the Bradley, enhanced by laminate plates) at an inch thickness or more (aluminum is almost three times less dense than steel).
But the weight premium for ‘can resist small arms and not much more’ over an entire vehicle is substantial: the M113 APC is 13.6 (short) tons, the BTR-80 is 15 tons. Not only is that vehicle going to need a much more powerful engine, that engine and weight is going to have logistically significant impacts to fuel efficiency (to say the least!) which we’ll get to in a second.
But tactically, the implication here is quite bad for our ‘war rigs’: as moving, fighting platforms, they can’t fire back effectively, but they’re so big that a stationary enemy can probably put a good amount of fire on them as they pass by. Worse yet, there’s simply no feasible way to protect the rig or its combatants from much of that fire. You probably can slap armor on some key elements (the tractor cab on the front is the obvious choice), but there’s really no way to offset the vulnerability created by size (and less ability to maneuver) by just slapping on armor. In particular, the ‘tanker’ components of the Fury Road and Furiosa war rigs, simply due to the size, are going to have to be far too thin to actually repel rifle fire, which could be particularly awkward if fuel or ammunition is being moved.
So while I can imagine throwing a couple of light-weight fighting positions on to a large cargo-carrier simply to provide an extra amount of deterrence and firepower, you really wouldn’t want to take it into a fight. You might be slightly more willing to risk the outriders and bikes, but even then, these are going to be thin-skinned vehicles that can’t do much more than demonstrate with fire unless they stop. Of course I am assuming no one has a functional stabilizer here, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.
Because first we need to talk about…
The Logistics of Road War
The logistics of this kind of warfare, like nearly all modern logistics, centers around two considerations: fuel and ammunition (and, as we’ll see, also spare parts). But we need to distinguish between operational logistics concerns and strategic logistics concerns, both of which matter here. Put it this way: a given faction in the wasteland may have a certain stockpile of gasoline and bullets, but any given raid or convoy is only going to carry some much smaller amount of that larger stockpile. Once they leave base, they have to accomplish whatever their mission is with that smaller amount, so there a concern with how much can a given force carry in the field (operational logistics) and a concern with how much do operations in the aggregate consume against production and stockpiles (strategic logistics).
In essence the operational question revolves around matching up consumption (of fuel and munitions) against the carrying capacity of the vehicles involved, which determines operational endurance. By contrast, the strategic question revolves around matching the consumption of many operations against the productive capacity of the faction as a whole to determine how long operations can be sustained and at what tempo.
Both considerations would shape the actual conduct of ‘road war,’ albeit in different ways.
We can begin with the operational limits: any given raid or convoy can only carry so much fuel and ammo for itself. Spare parts are less of a concern here, because only relatively minor repairs are going to be possible in the field. Of course not only can vehicles move fuel in their fuel tanks, if they have cargo capacity, they can also store spare fuel (and spare munitions). Now, I have to confess, I am not a ‘car nerd’ – nothing against car nerds, it just isn’t my brand of nerd – but we really do need to benchmark here against some numbers, because the actual fuel mileage, fuel tank size and cargo capacity for actual vehicles matters for this question. So forgive me if I have made any errors here, but here are some relevant figures:7
| Vehicle | Fuel Mileage (mpg) | Fuel Tank (gallons) | Op. Range (miles) | Cargo Capacity | Notes |
| Yamaha WR250R (motorcycle) | c. 54 | 2 | 108 | Not Much | 295lbs total mass |
| BMW R18 (motorcycle) | c. 50 | 3.5 | 175 | Not Much | 761lbs total mass |
| 1973 Ford Falcon | c. 7.4 – 13.8 | 21.2 | 225 | ||
| Toyota 1995 Hilux | 22-27 | 13.7 | 335 | 1,820lbs | |
| Toyota 2025 Tacoma | 21-26 | 18.2 | 428 | 1,700lbs | |
| Semi-Trucks (estimate) | 6-8 | c. 300 (in two tanks) | 2,100 | c. 45,000lbs on road | Not designed for off-road |
| Deuce & 1/2 (Military Truck) | 8-11 | 50 | 475 | 5,000lbs (off road) | 12+ passengers diesel |
| Humvee (HMMWV) | 8-11 | 25 | 237.5 | 2,500lbs | ~4-6 passengers diesel |
| M2 Bradley IFV | 0.75(-1.6?) | 175-197 | 80 (300 on-road?) | 6 passengers diesel | |
| M1 Abrams MBT | 0.19-0.52 | 504 | Road: 265 Off Road: c. 100 | Uses JP-8 jet fuel |
And from that we can make some observations. First, the relative weakness of motorbikes and motorcycles comes out pretty clearly. Sure, they have very high gas mileage, but for almost no cargo and an extremely low passenger count. Cargo payload and passenger count matter here because that is where our combat power – mounted weapons, munitions, or combatants beyond the driver – go. A motorcycle delivers a combat power of one human with small arms. By contrast, the pickup trucks have half the gas mileage, but if you are willing to load up the bed can deliver half a dozen or more combatants, making the fuel-to-combatant ratio actually very unfavorable for motorcycles. Indeed, given how light some of these motorcycles are, you could load the motorcycles and its drivers on the back of a truck (either a pickup or the heavier Deuce-and-a-Half) and gain operational range without losing mileage efficiency. Heck, putting ten Yamaha WR250R’s in the back of a Deuce-and-a-Half might appears to end up as significantly more fuel-efficient than driving the bikes, plus you also get a truck out of the arrangement.
As a result, the usage of motorcycles, so common in these settings, would in practice probably be extremely limited. They’re not effective combat platforms – too unstable for effective fire and bad at carrying additional combatants – and they are terrible as a means to move combatants to a combat area as compared to just loading the same troops in a truck. Where one might imagine them used is as couriers or scouts, where a ‘minimum vehicle to move one person’ is valuable. I could thus see a raiding party loading a bunch of motorcycles on the back of a truck precisely to be able to use them as scouts and flankers, particularly if they can communicate back to the main force via radio (thus allowing for over-the-horizon scouting). But you wouldn’t want to try to use them for any actual fighting.
We can also see, both operationally and strategically, why even if a Wasteland Warlord had access to military combat vehicles, they might not keep using them: the fuel consumption on armored vehicles is extremely high. The HMMWV obviously has battlefield mobility advantages when compared to a Deuce-and-a-Half, but as a pure tool for moving combatants, supplies (or heavy weapons – we’ll come back to this) it is a flatly inferior system: the same fuel mileage, with a smaller tank and half the cargo or passenger capacity (and still in most cases too thin-skinned to really function as an armored vehicle).
Meanwhile, the actual armored vehicles are staggeringly resource expensive to even use, getting gallons-to-the-mile rather than miles-to-the-gallon. Running an actual tank or infantry fighting vehicle with your wasteland convoy is going to burn up a lot of fuel: both operationally (because that tank may need refuel from other vehicles in the convoy) but also strategically: keeping that thing on the move is going to rapidly overtax whatever fuel-production capabilities your faction possesses. Which goes back to their design: military vehicles were designed by and for modern industrial militaries. They assume a supply chain that reaches back from the front line through rail and shipping networks to the massive production of large-scale industrial economies; if any of our wasteland factions had such an economy, it wouldn’t be a wasteland anymore.
Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup. So while I can imagine a wasteland warlord maintaining a few actual military vehicles as prestige objects and perhaps for emergency use in siege contexts, these things are impractical for regular use by wasteland factions who simply cannot afford their sustainment.
Instead, in an operational context, the wasteland warlord is interested in platforms that combine favorable operational range with carrying capacity, either to move combatants, cargo or heavier weapons. At the same time, at the strategic level, the concern becomes less about operational range and more about combining favorable gas mileage with carrying capacity, in order to be able to regularly move combat power around. We haven’t talked much about mounting weapons to these vehicles yet, but carrying capacity here too matters: armor and weaponry are basically going to ‘come out’ of the payload capacity of any vehicle, so vehicles with a lot of spare payload can potentially be armored and can carry more combat power, be that a bunch of combatants with improvised weapons or perhaps a single more traditional heavy weapon. Finally in both contexts, simple, robust machines are likely to be prioritized over custom or exquisite systems: you want something you can repair easily which shares lots of parts with everything else you have.
In that context, the frequent appearance of ‘muscle cars’ and indeed, cars in general, is strange. As you can see, glancing up at the chart there, Mad Max’s own 1973 Ford Falcon is the worst of almost all possible worlds: limited cargo capacity, terrible gas mileage, highly limited range. It does nothing the wasteland warrior cares about well.
So we have a film combat system of war rigs, outrider muscle cars and motorcycles. Except that the war rigs are too large and vulnerable for combat: big enough that they can’t avoid all of the fire they aren’t heavily armored enough to stop. As you can see above, big trucks make sense as pure cargo carriers, but you’d want to keep them out of the fight if at all possible. Meanwhile, motorcycles work as scouts but not as combatants, while outrider muscle cars perform almost no task particularly well, given their cost. If we strip most of the weaponry, beyond perhaps token deterrence protection, from our war rigs (making them pure cargo carriers) and only use motorcycles as scouts and messengers, we’re closer to a system that works, but we lack a primary combatant vehicle, for both combat and combat-transport.
What we actually want is a platform that is robust, easy to repair, fuel efficient when compared to its payload capacity, which can move lots of cargo and people and which can be fitted with heavier weapons.
And behold, providence offered forth the perfect vehicle of its wrath and fury: the Toyota Hilux.8
Technically Speaking
And now, just 5,000 words into this post, we actually get to the meat of it, which is that we can be relatively what sort of combat vehicles a faction or warlord under Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic conditions would use because those tactical and logistical conditions already exist and they resulted in a distinctive kind of military vehicle: the Technical.
‘Technical‘ here is a term for a militarized civilian vehicle, usually a pick-up truck with some sort of heavier weapon mounted on the roof or in the bed, to be operated by a combatant standing on the bed. In this sense, the technical is simply an improvised version of a gun truck. As far as I know, there isn’t a clear consensus on where the term ‘technical’ comes from, but in English it has stuck as the term for this sort of vehicle.
An open-bed pickup truck is reasonable fast and agile and capable of rough-road and off-road (within reason) driving, but at the same time the bed can take payloads of upwards of 1,500lbs. That’s enough to mount not just machine guns (although that is the most common armament), but all sorts of heavier weapons: improvised multiple rocket launchers, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), autocannons, rotary cannons, mortars, etc. and still be able to carry a small number of ‘dismounts’ either in the cab or the bed. That means a pickup truck technical can be modified – weapons permitting – to function as an unarmored (or very lightly armored) version of basically any of the armored fighting vehicles we discussed back when we talked tanks: it can move troops (like an APC), offer heavy weapon fire-support for infantry (like an IFV), mount heavy direct-fire guns (like a tank) or indirect fire weaponry (like a self-propelled gun), depending on what weaponry is mounted in the bed.
Now of course these platforms are vastly inferior to their specialized military variants. While there certainly are up-armored technicals, that armor – for the reasons we discussed above – is generally very modest. Most remain ‘thin skinned,’ offering no real protection to crew or passengers from even small arms. Moreover, absent stabilizers and sophisticated optics, the weapons on the backs of technicals, aimed using the Mark 1 Eyeball, are going to have limited accuracy – and effectively no accuracy on the move. Like WW2 tanks, technicals need to halt to deliver fire effectively (though fire-on-the-move can still deliver some suppression). Technicals also can’t mount the heaviest and most sophisticated weapons, which is a particular problem against opponents with modern air forces, since there’s basically nothing you can put on a technical that can engage a modern multirole combat jet.9
But in a context where purpose-built military vehicles and combat aircraft are rare – be that a post-apocalypse or simply civil wars in developing countries with limited economies – the technical has some remarkable advantages. Looking above, we can see, in particular, how it solves a lot of the logistical problems our wasteland warlord might otherwise face. As a front-line combat vehicle, it is remarkably fuel-efficient, out-performing even purpose-built military mobility vehicles (like the HMMWV) in terms of delivering combatants and light vehicle-mounted weapons.10 Of course for moving heavy loads and reserve troops, a heavier truck (like the deuce-and-a-half or more modern Medium Tactical Vehicle or a similar modified civilian platform) is going to be even more effective. It’s easy to imagine then front line and escort forces employing technicals, supported by a logistics backbone and mobile reserve in trucks of various kinds – alas, no place for our iconic ‘war rigs.’
The other major advantage the technical offers is maintenance and repair. In the real world, groups using technicals tend to prefer simple, robust, easy-to-maintain models with minimal ‘frills’ – famously the Toyota Hilux and Land Cruisers have often been the models of choice. Remember: modern purpose-built military vehicles are built by and for militaries that sit at the tip of vast industrial systems capable of mass-producing precise, interchangeable spare parts at scale and maintaining expensive, complex, sophisticated systems. Like any group using technicals, our wasteland factions do not have that background: what they cannot scavenge, they must, at best, hand-craft. That means simple and reliable are the watchwords, followed by common: the more common a platform is, the easier it will be to source or scavenge replacement parts as things break or wear out and the easier it will be to find or develop the mechanical expertise necessary to maintain them in the field.
And ho boy are these platforms common. The United States has built, for itself and its allies, some 281,000 vehicles of all models of HMMWV as of 2015 (production started in 1985), just under 10,000 vehicles per year. By contrast, Toyota started making the Hilux in 1968; by 2017 they had sold 17.7 million units, more than 350,000 per year. That is, a popular consumer pickup truck might produce more vehicles in a year as a purpose-built military vehicle might produce in three decades. Now I should note, depending on where you are, the locally available and popular pickup truck might be different: Land Cruisers and Hiluxes dominated in the technical-centric warfare in Africa over the last several decades because they’re popular models there. By contrast, the Hilux isn’t even sold in North America – instead the heavier (and for these purposes, notably less capable) Toyota Tacoma is. But a post-apocalyptic faction isn’t going to get to choose: if your wasteland warlord is operating in Nebraska, the core of his technical fleet is going to be Ford F-Series trucks, simply because they’re the most common in Nebraska (even though a somewhat lighter, more robust and simpler model might be better in some ideal sense). Simply being common makes these vehicles easier to repair and maintain; that they tend to be built to be robust under heavy use is a further advantage.
Technicals of this sort are a standard feature in warfare in parts of the developing world and have even shown up in industrialized peer-warfare (for instance, in the War in Ukraine). Perhaps most famously, in 1986-1987, Chad was able to defeat a Libyan invasion of their country using an army primarily composed of technicals (mostly the Hilux and Land Cruiser, of course), even though the Libyan army had large numbers of conventional military vehicles, including tanks and aircraft, in what has become known as the Great Toyota War. One wonders what Toyota’s PR arm thinks about that. The use of technicals gave the Chadian military a lot of operational and tactical mobility in sparsely populated regions and the Chadians benefited from French air cover which kept Libyan aircraft largely out of the fight. That said, I should note the victory of technicals here was unusual: generally technical-based armies that find themselves fighting conventional armies lose, badly and quickly: technicals are not survivable against modern armored fighting vehicles.
A New Model of Road War
With that, we can return to our original topic: the shape of post-apocalyptic wasteland ‘road war.’ Now I should note that, as is the case with any fictional setting, an author that wants to can tweak the world almost endlessly to produce a specific vision of warfare. If the resources of the wasteland were less concentrated, or its industry more advanced, or less advanced, or the laws of physics altered, we would have a different result. But proceeding with the ‘rules’ of the setting – Mad Max-inspired wastelands – as they are presented, we can posit a more grounded model for ‘road war.’
Wars in this setting are fought over resources – food, water, fuel and ammunition primarily – which are concentrated in very small geographic spaces, linked together by travel routes. Large factions control the resource nodes themselves, while small factions attempt to survive either scavenging over the wasteland or by raiding the routes between the major settlements. That raiding threat in turn requires resource shipments to move in guarded, road-bound convoys. Large factions thus need military force which can both secure the key resource nodes and also guard convoy transit between them, while smaller factions aim simply to raid transit routes.
‘Leg infantry’ is out except as stationary garrison forces on the resource nodes: the expanses of distance and difficult terrain essentially rule out foot-mobile infantry. At the same time, the sharp limits on fuel and spare parts rule out a modern mechanized military, so we would expect to see a force composed of militarized civilian vehicles. We might see motorbikes and motorcycles used in scouting and courier roles and larger trucks used for bulk freight or to move troops, but the front line vehicles are probably going to be armed pickup trucks, because they offer the most favorable combination of reliability, firepower and fuel-efficiency.
For a small, raiding faction, you might imagine a handful of gun-armed technicals to represent the ‘high end’ of their military power, since ammunition is rare in the setting. By contrast, a big time warlord like Dementus or Immortan Joe might have fleets of technicals. Because the technicals themselves are the basic unit of military power, their display becomes an important element of prestige, a way of demonstrating the power of larger warlords. At the same time, it seems like in a lot of these settings proper firearms and ammunition are rare enough (and gasoline-based explosives common enough) that we might also see ‘low end’ combatants using improvised grenades (like the ‘firesticks’ of Furiosa and Fury Road) or flame-throwers as close-combat tools, probably also from the back of militarized pickup trucks.11
So we might imagine a convoy raid conducted ‘to doctrine,’ being a bit of a multi-stage affair, primarily using technicals. Initially, the convoy is spotted in movement by scouts, perhaps using motorbikes, and communicated to a main raiding force, split between higher-end technicals armed with firearms or heavy weapons and low-end vehicles (again, probably also militarized pickups) with combatants armed with those incendiary grenades or flamethrowers. The mobility of the technicals enables the force to reach the convoy and engage it (probably setting up ahead of the convoy on its route). The ‘gun-technicals’ aren’t going to accomplish much firing on the move – they’re almost certainly not fitted with even very basic stabilizers, so they wouldn’t hit anything – so we’d imagine them maneuvering to a firing position and them firing ‘from halt’ and stationary as the convoy passed.
That fire would be intended to take out convoy escorts, but also to ‘suppress’ the convoy – composed of heavy trucks and armed technicals – by forcing it to keep moving, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of its return fire. Those high-end gun-technicals could also be carrying ‘dismounts’ to both protect the vehicles, but also to dismount and offer additional fire from small arms or crew-served weapons. In that context, you might create enough fire superiority for the low-end vehicles, filled with combatants using cheaper, shorter-range weapons (because you haven’t enough guns or bullets to go around) to close in, force the convoy to halt and seize its vehicles and resources.
Of course a big warlord running those convoys wants to prevent this and one way they might do so is by deploying more threatening escorts. By having more technicals with heavier, longer-ranged weapons, a big warlord might be able to deter such attacks by having enough firepower for their escorts to also halt to fire (remember, no one can hit anything while moving) and proactively engaging opposing vehicles or dismounts. Rather than a gigantic war rig – which is every bit as vulnerable to long-range fire from technical-mounted heavy machine guns as anything else – the fearsome assets of a warlord might be technicals carrying heavy weapons, like recoilless rifles, anti-tank guns, autocannons or mortars which could rapidly destroy enemy technicals even at longer ranges. As noted, I can imagine such a warlord carefully hoarding a small supply of actual purpose-built armored fighting vehicles, but I have to imagine these would be employed rarely, not regularly on convoy duty – they’re too expensive to fuel and maintain to use frequently.
That leaves capturing these key resource nodes. The work of capturing a larger, resource-producing settlement is going to be mostly done by infantry unless the defenses can somehow be compromised, which means the incentive here is for vehicles which can deliver the most infantry and supplies for the minimum of fuel and maintenance costs. Technicals actually square up well here – you can load a lot of armed combatants on the back of a pickup – but I suspect you’d also see larger trucks loaded with as many combatants as they could carry. That said, given that very few of the settlements we see in these settings are fully self-sufficient, a siege approach would also be viable and probably mandatory for factions too small to mount a large clearing operation of a fortified settlement.
All of that is a kind of warfare that actually supports the fractionalization of power, producing the sort of smaller-scale warlordism that the fiction tends to want in these settings. But rather than display their power with massive (but very vulnerable) war rigs, such warlords would likely attempt to overawe foes with impressive displays of their large stock of technicals. And, this being a Mad Max themed setting, by large spikes placed on everything.12
- In part because those are both great movies and this gives me an excuse to rewatch them. Look, you guys made me watch Rings of Power; sometimes I get to have treats.
- Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76
- The big thing missing is ‘spare parts,’ but this too is filled in a bit in the fiction, in that we see The Citadel’s mechanics and machine shops and the use of cannibalized vehicles to supply parts and raw materials for new vehicles. Such reuse couldn’t continue forever, but it might continue for quite a while.
- Note again, in the real world, production would be more dispersed. In particular, the Citadel is simply not big enough to produce enough food to feed all of the people we see in Immortan Joe’s empire (Badlands Crew also indulges in the ‘walled, densely populated stronghold produces its own food trope). But we’re accepting the basic structure of the setting for the sake of argument here.
- There are three main war rigs in these films: in Furiosa there is the initial war rig (captured by Dementus), the ‘bommy-knocker’ rig later in the film, the heavier rig used in the escape in Fury Road. But compared to the war rigs of other factions we see (Dementus’ monster truck and the Buzzard war rig), we should probably also count Immortan Joe’s monster truck and the drum-and-speaker rig of the ‘Coma-Doof Warrior’ (the guy with the guitar) in the broader category of ‘war rigs.’
- Credit here to Furiosa, which shows one of the war boys (the one manning the fantastical rear-end flail weapon) shot fatally through a steel hatch, because a thin steel hatch is not necessarily going to stop a rifle round.
- A few notes: I’ve used the 1973 Ford Falcon – a modified version of which is Mad Max’s famous car – to represent the frequent use of muscle cars in these settings. I pulled its statistics from this page. I opted for the Yamaha and BMW bikes because they were, from what I could find, the most common models used in the two recent Mad Max films. Passenger count for the HMMWV is variable in different configurations; 1 driver, 3 passengers, 1 gunner is a standard configuration. I found correlating attested fuel mileage, tank size and operational range figures for the M2 Bradley very difficult, this the question marks. Finally, I thought I should include a semi-trailer truck here because the tractor cabs of these trucks are often the basis for ‘war rigs,’ but of course actual semi-trucks are very much purpose-built bespoke on-road vehicles that assume a fairly solid surface in their design.
- And also the Land Cruiser and several non-Toyota low-end pickup truck models.
- Helicopters on the other hand, can be engaged by technicals mounting either anti-aircraft guns or fixed mounts using what would otherwise be MANPADs.
- Albeit with significant tradeoffs in all-terrain capability, protection and so on. Again, I am not saying that the military vehicles get nothing for their greater cost: if you can sustain a force of purpose-built military vehicles, that is always the right choice. But if you can’t…
- Please note that whatever the economics of this in the real world, in the setting we see pretty clearly that ‘firesticks’ and other gasoline-based incendiaries are a lot more common and cheaper than actual firearms, the latter of which seem reserved almost entirely for elite individuals.
- Especially their groins. Go back and watch the two recent Mad Max films and notice how the reproductive anxiety of Immortan Joe and the other warlords is expressed by how they tend to put decoration and protective covers over their groins. If that seems unrealistic to you, let me remind you of the early modern armored codpiece; if anything, I thought that sort of behavior and the efforts of some of the warlords to deploy different versions of status-bearing clothing (suits, uniforms, etc) from the older times actually fit quite well with the sort of self-presentation such warlords might engage in.
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You should try the 2015 game Convoy (it’s on steam). It seems to very much agree with you in thinking.
Now I’m wondering why fallout doesn’t have ground vehicles
In the case of the Fallout franchise, likely because there are almost no gas cars, the nuclear war of the setting started from a conventional war over quite literally the last remaining oil deposits up in Alaska. Pretty much all remaining vehicles are powered by mini fusion reactors, a daunting prospect for a wasteland mechanic to repair.
“Pretty much all remaining vehicles are powered by mini fusion reactors, a daunting prospect for a wasteland mechanic to repair.”
Heck, if they’re recent, the Ford F-series mentioned by our humble host are going to be daunting to maintain for a wasteland mechanic. They depend heavily on electronics that aren’t going to be available except by scavenging. (Mostly whole boxes I suspect. Troubleshooting the interior components isn’t exactly going to be within the ambit of the shadetree mechanic.)
which might help explain why musclecars and buggies are so prevelant in the wasteland.. muscle cars pre-date the shift to computerized vehicles, yet also are something that pre-apocalypse, plenty of people dedicate themselves to restoring, preserving, and even scratch building. as such they might well be one of the few pre-apocalypse vehicle types that don’t require extensive rebuilds to be usable. while buggies can be built from scratch so long as you have an engine, some wheels, and a few axles.
it is notable that outside of the Immortan’s forces, ‘war rigs’ seem to be mostly logistics vehicles.. Roadwarrior had two, the tanker truck (a fuel logistics vehicle) and the school bus (used as a door at the compound but later which hauled most of the civilian populace to safety), while in Fury Road, the main war-rig is a fuel, water, and food (milk) hauler, while the convoy that pursues them includes a car-transport (presumably vehicle recovery) and several elaborate tanker and cargo trucks. the doofwagon with the mucisians arguably belongs here as well, as what it’s hauling is meant for morale boosting.
it is very likely that the term ‘war rig’ is meant less in the literal sense of a large truck for fighting, and more the organizational meaning of “the rig that allows us to actually conduct a war” (by hauling around the logistics needed to let a bunch of cars, buggies, and bikes travel long distances away from their home-fortresses)
The quality of gasoline may also be a practical justification for the muscle cars. The warlords should not be able to produce modern quality gasoline with all the additives they use. A Hilux may not run well enough on that fuel, a large low-compression carburated V8 may be the best engine option.
So, we should start calling the war rigs by the proper word for the concept: train, as in, baggage train or siege train? Etymologically, the word even derives (via Medieval Anglofrenchlatin) from trahere, the same root as “tractor”, which is Victorian Latin simply meaning “puller”.
“which might help explain why musclecars and buggies are so prevelant in the wasteland.. muscle cars pre-date the shift to computerized vehicles, yet also are something that pre-apocalypse, plenty of people dedicate themselves to restoring, preserving, and even scratch building. as such they might well be one of the few pre-apocalypse vehicle types that don’t require extensive rebuilds to be usable. while buggies can be built from scratch so long as you have an engine, some wheels, and a few axles.”
This seems to assume Mad Max’s apocalypse had occurred a lot later than it actually did. The main thing we know about its timeline is that things were already going to hell in a handcart in Australia all the way back in 1983, when it was forced to establish the special police unit where Max serves in the first film. According to the below, even electronic ignitions did not become standard on American cars until 1975. That is, electronic, NOT computerized – those followed in 1976 on Chrysler (where they barely worked), 1978 on Ford’s elite Lincoln Versailles ONLY and 1981 on unspecified GM cars.
https://www.autotrader.com/car-shopping/when-did-cars-get-computerized
In all, not a lot of time for all but a small minority of cars to be computerized.
True, though very few of them are actually required for the basic functioning of the vehicle.
Or, rather, they are if you want it to meet current vehicle roadworthiness regulations (including emissions), and keep things like your rain-sensing wipers working. Not really considerations for your average wasteland mechanic. There’s very little that truly needs electronics, even with the most modern engines. Rip off all of the fuel injection gubbins, weld up an intake manifold, stick a carburettor on top and it’ll run. You might need to wedge bits of metal into stuff like the variable valve timing and jimmy a distributor on to do the timing, but that’s common practice now in the modification community.
Modern automatic gearboxes may be more difficult as they’re often electronically operated internally with no easy facility to just bolt a lever on the outside to move the valves about. Though really it’s just a case of ripping the electronics out, drilling holes in the outer casing and feeding wires in to operate the solenoids directly with switches (and/or teeing into the existing electronics at a point after the computers). Will it be as smooth shifting? Absolutely not. Will it work? Yep.
Source: am actually a car geek.
Major production centers are good nuke targets, and you are using up your stockpile anyway, so not much material or know how left.
And even then, most pre-war vehicles in Fallout were nuclear in nature, meaning they probably used uranium as fuel and ran on steam. So you’d need nuclear knowhow to produce or repair one of these, the ressources to do so, and then you need fissile material. Complex to produce, hazardous to scavenge due to radiation and raditation-induced mutated creatures, even assuming the material doesn’t decay over time.
Gasoline may have not been much in production anymore anyway, and you run into similiar problems. Nobody’s capable of maintaining oil rigs after the world just ended unless you’re a facist deepstate using it as a secret base, and then you get blown up.
But diesel powered vehicles should work well enough, since it’s not that hard to make bio-diesel.
No, bio-diesel isn’t that hard to make, so long as you have all the needed feedstocks and equipment. Obtaining the feedstocks and equipment however are significant projects in their own right.
Seriously, people underestimate just how hard some of this stuff really is when you lack the support of an industrial civilization.
Game engine limitations, mostly, like the OP said. Fallout’s maps are designed to be navigated on foot, and a car would be a buggy, immersion-breaking mess.
Fallout 2 (a “pre-modern” Fallout game, and thus not one of the ones referred to in this blog) had a car you could get, and if you read the game manual (like you did when you bought an RPG in 1998), you’d learn that cars were rare but not-unheard-of luxuries, although you never actually saw any but your own. This car could only take you from one point on the overworld map to the next, at which point it would park itself at the edge of the area map until you were ready to leave. You couldn’t cruise around that game’s towns in your car, even when those towns clearly had paved streets, because the game engine wasn’t up for it. Even the sharply limited car we got was notoriously buggy.
The “modern” Fallout games (beginning with Fallout 3, which being from 2008 is itself old enough to drive a car now, but let’s not dwell on that) are open-world, so there’s no overworld map for the car to travel on, and thus not much reason for it to exist. Plus, by 2008, it was simply not acceptable to give the player a car and then *not let them drive it.* Either your game has fully realized vehicle physics including vehicle-based combat like in a GTA title, or else it doesn’t have cars in it.
Agreed. Obligatory Fallout 2 car link: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Highwayman
In Fallout 2, the car made sense. I think the trunk storage mattered, but IIRC there were also events auto-firing at certain dates, so the speed with which you could travel on the world map actually mattered as well.
The trouble with cars in 3d games is indeed that you need to assign a decent amount of engine and level design to it if you want them. The minute you add cars, you change the character of the game to something like GTA (3+), Borderlands (3), or Cyberpunk 2077.
Adding horses to a medieval game is mostly game-mechanic preserving, a player can still reasonably opt to walk. (Of course, if you already allowed the player to rush through the undergrowth without ever spraining their ankle, you might as well extend the same courtesy to the horse if it goes off-road. Perhaps don’t do the Skyrim thing where a slope which is to steep to walk can still be ridden up, though.) Adding cars, rideable flying creatures or helicopters will completely change the game.
I should also note that as venerable as it may be, Fallout is far from the only post-apocalyptic RPG to ever exist. I.e. in 2004, there was a German take on the concept called The Fall: Last Days of Gaia. Besides releasing almost exactly in between Fallout 2 and 3, its gameplay could also be considered an intermediary between the two – it was 3D, and had real-time combat, but the perspective was third-person and practically top-down rather than the first-person of Bethesda’s (and one Obsidian) Fallout. But unlike either version of Fallout, it seemed to feature directly drivable vehicles, if this trailer is any indication. (I haven’t actually played it, but I did listen to the trailer song by Darkseed quite a few times, since it remains quite a standout for video game music.)
I am also a little surprised that nearly a week on, absolutely nobody mentioned Wasteland 3, which had an APC-like thing named Kodiak as a vehicle used by the player squad for world map travel and fire support during combat. Had a ton of customization too, some fairly silly (one of the possible weapons is a mortar named “goat cannon”.)
After all, the original Wasteland actually preceded Fallout by 9 years, coming out in 1988. The sequel from 10 years ago, Wasteland 2, was at the time one of the most heavily-backed games on Kickstarter. In what likely sounds utterly unbelievable now, it received over 3 times more support than Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin – ~2.9M USD vs. ~0.9M USD (Same Larian who went on to make Baldur’s Gate 3 on the back of their success with the 2 Original Sin games). Of course, Wasteland 2 ended up with rather less-unambiguously positive reception than Divinity: Original Sin, but even so, the third game was still played by >2 million people by 2022, so it shouldn’t have been that obscure.
https://www.rpgsite.net/news/12078-wasteland-3-surpasses-2-million-players
I think the Doof Wagon specifically actually might have a practical purpose, if we make a certain assumption: Radios are semi-rare. In this scenario, you have some radios, but not enough to put one in every vehicle even in a convoy. In that case, the Doof Wagon serves as basically a command and control vehicle, where orders are relayed by the music the Doof Warrior plays, like drummers or buglers in other armies, if you need to send orders to the convoy from home base you radio the Doof Wagon and the Warrior relays the orders. The specific use of music and songs would be more training intensive than just having a commander shout verbal commands into the mic, but in the case where you have to relay the information out loud, may be worthwhile, cause instead of letting your enemies hear your orders, they’re coded in the music so only your troops can understand them.
Honestly, I was half expecting trains to be brought up, although that would conflict with the aesthetics.
Trains can be loaded up with armour and weapons in both real life and fiction, and I’m sure someone somewhere has added spikes. Anyone got a reference to spiked trains?
It’s more that these movies are set in Australia, and we just don’t have very many rail lines. Travel between major cities is almost always by car or plane, so trains are not something that immediately jumps to mind for an Australian writer / director. And trains would seem weird for anyone somewhat familiar with Australia.
the problem with trains in a mad max style world though is the need for fixed position railways.. it would be very easy to stop a war-train by just ripping out the rails, which would make them very vulnerable.
more likely you’d get Australian style ‘road trains’, which are basically just semitrucks hauling lots of trailers. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train ) which are really just ‘war rigs’ on a larger scale.
If you really want to get fancy, someone might independently reinvent the Overland Train concept, which basically takes a road train and enlarges it and turns it into an off-road heavy cargo vehicle.
I think the problem with trains is the rails. The wastelanders aren’t likely to be able to lay miles and miles of rails, so they’re stuck with the existing lines, which were laid out before the apocalypse claimed the urban centers, so they probably go way out of your way. Then there’s the problem that any determined person with fairly simple tools can break the rails at a convenient ambush point, forcing the train to stop for a long time while repairs are made, easy prey for technicals hiding behind a hill.
Trains work when you have forces to defend the tracks.
Sure, in Old West style settings, you have train robberies, but my understanding is that they worked because they were rare enough that their cost was smaller than putting enough guards to prevent them on every train.
Also, train tracks are a giant infrastructure project. Moving goods is incredibly cheap once you have them (compared to other overland options), but the upfront costs are high. A warlord will likely not have his own coal and iron ore mining operations with Bessemer converters. His logistics problems are likely not “I need to transport a million tons for 10km” (where a railroad might be feasible for him) but “I need to transport 10 or 100 tons for hundreds of kilometers, repeatedly in different directions”.
The other option not discussed is of course waterway transport, which would also conflict with the aesthetics somewhat.
Deep nerdery here, but railroads actually tend to get better as distances increase.
In the first approximation, the cost of building the track and the costs of the competing options scale together, and thus merely cancel out of the comparison, giving a fixed tons-per-year traffic density as the boundary. However, while his coal and/or iron mines (depending on which, if any, the steel mill is located at) do produce a thick enough flow of cargo to justify single-origin-to-single-destination trains (“unit trains”), his subjects and some of his ancillary interests will have logistics needs that only fill a few wagons at a time, at most (“wagonload freight”). Bundling these shipments together in one train lets them take advantage of the drastically decreased costs. However, only large factories will justify having their own siding; by number, most businesses will have to carry their cargo on road vehicles between their premises and the nearest station, and transload it there, which costs the same no matter how far it is being shipped. Additionally, at some point(s) it is necessary to sort out what’s going on with all these different shipments going to different places, which means physically sorting wagons in a marshalling yard, but if someone competent is running the railway, the various costs of that operation scale well below linearly with distance (let’s call it logarithmic).
It’s also possible to simply put the road vehicle (or some kind of detachable cargo compartment) onto a train, if transferring the whole thing works out to be cheaper than transloading the cargo itself.
With that said, at a time when the alternative is the horsecart, even warlords with large agricultural estates, forestry operations and even surprisingly modest mines will find that investing in (narrow-gauge, and often muscle-worked, whether horse or human) railways pencils out. Often it is part of the idea that as the location of the most intense activity slowly changes, on the timescale of weeks or months, the “final” part of the railway is correspondingly temporary, and it is repeatedly pulled up and relaid. Less frequent but not-unheard-of usecases are large-scale (masonry) construction projects, demolition projects (or to be more precise, rubble-clearing after another warlord has done the demolition), racing advancing enemy troops in WW1, and turning over shipments to artillery when the recipient refuses to take delivery of 100,000 t of explosives by other means.
Trains worked in the Old West because no one had both the inclination to rip out the rails and also the tools and materials to do so.
Or at least it wasn’t common. There were probably many more train derailments from badly built railroads than deliberate sabotage.
The Mad Max films seem to have roving bands of bandits more or less everywhere, with tools and equipment to keep those vehicles running. Those tools could also be used to wreck the rails, and probably would be. Or at the very least they could squat on a rail and charge tolls.
“The other option not discussed is of course waterway transport, which would also conflict with the aesthetics somewhat.”
Well, it conflicts with the ecology somewhat given that the films are set in deserts. You could do a Mad Max-aesthetic film involving water transport, though. Dennis Hopper could play the bad guy.
Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress (甲鉄城のカバネリ) is an anime that does zombie-apocalypse-warfare on trains. Although (even if admittedly I’ve only seen the “Battle for the Unato” part on Netflix) it doesn’t really seem to deal with the extremely sharp limitations of train movements. You not only need rails in good repair (which the show does admittedly features, with rail repair being a constant concern), you need to have a network that allows trains to back into branch lines to pass each other, not to mention the large turning radius and shallow incline tolerance that trains have that sharply limits where you can go.
> you need to have a network that allows trains to back into branch lines to pass each other
Or a system with mostly 2-way tracks, as is the case in Europe
A bunch of people have already pointed out that tracks are vulnerable, but and even bigger issue in that world might be that they’re also valuable.
In a modern industrialized world that isn’t at war long stretches of high grade steel can sit outside unguarded without too much concern, but in a Max Max situation that stuff’s almost as valuable as anything on the train itself.
On graph paper, I would imagine technicals to have very little defense at bearing 0 while mobile. IRL I guess this is solved with bounding overwatch, but if your convoy is just running perpendicular to the enemy, can’t your motorcycle guys dissuade the enemy from halting to fire by continuous harassment of the windshield, forcing the driver to evade?
Are technicals that vulnerable straight ahead? Modern car windshield glass seems to be very tough stuff, and it’s sloped for deflection.
Problem for the motorcycle guys is that they are going to be even worse shots on the move than the technicals, with shorter range and probably non-automatic weapons. If a technical and a motorcycle are going head to head at speed, I’d want to be on the technical.
I would be seriously surprised if the windshield could stand up to a modern assault rifle even once, much less a sustained burst.
I was going to say “windshields can’t even stop arrows”, drop one of several videos showing just that and call it a day, but then an actual video of handgun tests vs. a windshield came up, and some of the lower-caliber shots did get deflected, and from a fairly close range, too! Moreover, the creator quotes a Clint Eastwood movie, The Enforcer, where the main character alludes to .38 Special deflecting off windshields – right after demonstrating that exact thing happening (about half the time.)
> I would be seriously surprised if the windshield could stand up to a modern assault rifle even once
It obviously can’t, but it’s also not very relevant for this specific scenario. A motorcycle rider won’t be shooting an assault rifle unless they actually stop to fire – and I don’t see that happening in front of an oncoming car. (Even if the shots hit, the car won’t stop moving – while the rider would have to restart the engine and put the rifle away to place hands on the bars in the mere seconds before it impacts.) A passenger on the back of a typical bike will have so little free space even holding an assault rifle with both hands (without falling off) will be difficult, let alone shooting it. I guess someone on a sidecar might manage it.
I would think that if that was an effective use of resources we’d see that in actual conflicts.
I read a report of a try by a technical warlord to raid a refugee supply convoy escorted by a company of Australian troops. They whooped over the hill, ignored a few warning shots, lost most of the leading elements to steady fire and whooped back in disarray. A convoy with good discipline should be able to see off most threats.
“A convoy with good discipline should be able to see off most threats.”
In the Mad Max setting, however, good discipline seems to be in pretty short supply.
I would guess that most armies using technicals lack the kind of discipline described here, i.e., men who maintain formation (whether stationary or coordinated motion) and deliver controlled and well-aimed fire.
I would like to see the motorcycle rider who is able to fire a rifle while riding, even directly forward, and have it hit anything except by accident. Even at lance range, let alone the ranges that someone dismounted can reach.
Keep in mind that this is almost certainly not on a well-paved road, and generally won’t be on a road at all.
A passenger might be able to fire to the side, and may even be able to fire backwards. But it’s still not going to be very accurate, and it won’t be forward without heavily restricting the driver.
A passenger also loads the motorcycle down much more than the technical. You’d want to modify the bike so your passenger doesn’t end up with a leg in the wheel.
Yes there are purse-snatchers using dirt bikes etc. But those are riding much slower so they can corner, and it’s generally a well-paved road or possibly a sidewalk, not desert with possible sand and other obstacles. They’re also not shooting.
I half hoped you’d include the screen capture of the – who was it, the bullet farmer or the man-eater? – who complains and calculates the costs of the raid (in gallons of guzzoline and bullets, notably not in men) over “a domestic squabble”.
The People-Eater, who oversees gastown. https://madmax.fandom.com/wiki/The_People_Eater
apparently the name is quite literal.
IMO, the best part of Furiosa was the expanded role he had. The visual of him standing in his full stockbroker’s suit next to Joe and his sons, all half-naked as the setting’s canons demand, is just so damn memorable every single time.
Granted, I say this as someone who didn’t like the film much. There was always a limit to how much I could like any of these due to the inherent contradictions of the premise (so I liked Fury Road, but did not love it), but Furiosa found all-new ways to disappoint. I was particularly surprised just how DULL the fighting felt to me, since all of it seemed far too staged to really carry over the feeling of humans trying their best to kill the other and survive themselves, with all the desperate excitement that brings. While others grumbled about the film not depicting what could have been a big final battle, I can sorta respect the decision to immediately cut away from every fight not involving Furiosa.
What I cannot forgive is the ludicrous accuracy in the fights we ARE shown at length, which make everything look like a shooting gallery. This post already discusses accuracy on the move, but if you have not seen it, you would not really understand what prompted it. The film’s massive midway battle over that War Rig features assailants throwing spears (tipped with explosives, ofc) from moving bikes and PARAGLIDERS (not discussed in the post at all – I wonder if a certain real-world parallel was the reason?) onto guys on the roof of an also moving War Rig – and hitting EVERY SINGLE TIME (unless Furiosa and another (temporarily) plot-critical character are concerned, I guess) – only to themselves ALSO get taken out with perfect accuracy moments later. Somehow, this actually looks less ridiculous then the ambush on the ground where Furiosa and the aforementioned plot-critical guy (who jarringly breaks the series’ trend for standout characters and is somehow the most generic hero archetype imaginable) seem to pull off something like a dozen headshots in a row against fighters they spotted seconds ago. (Then, of course, they proceed to miss multiple shots on Hemsworth’s villain under far more favorable circumstances not much later, in a stunningly blunt example of plot armor.) And then there’s the prologue, where, amongst other things, Furiosa’s mother snipes one of a pair of bike riders as the other one rides with her kidnapped daughter into the Dementos’ camp, in full view of seemingly everyone – and none of them do ANYTHING about it, and appear completely surprised when she shows up the following night.
And though a fairly minor point, it was really funny how a film set Down Under STILL has all the bad guys use AKs, because OF COURSE that is coded as the “bad guy” weapon in Western films. Never mind that whatever number of AKs Australian collectors might have managed to import before the society collapsed (presumably no later then the real-world release date of the original Mad Max) would have been dwarfed many times over by M-16 stocks from military bases. (Background material even claims Joe used to be a military man, so that is all the more inexplicable.) Then, it jumps the shark when Dementos finds what was probably the lone working RPG-7 in Australia instead of something which would actually have a reason to be in the country, like a Carl Gustav.
Great piece, I was thinking a paragraph in ‘this is a solved problem in the Sahel’ and it was great you explained the actual historical/contemporary solution in depth.
As you say, the obvious thing the movies ‘get wrong’ other than vehicle choice is the overwhelming focus on groups in motion, which means they skip the ‘infantry plus land mine ambush’ solution which a lot of smaller groups rely on to hit technical based forces, relying on the fact that while wheeled forces *can* go cross-country, they vastly prefer roads to conserve on fuel and vehicle wear.
Another notable omission: the tank transporter. When going for a siege, extend your operational range, save fuel, save wear on difficult-to-replace components. It makes for an excellent test of whether an army is serious (it invests a fraction of the resources that the tanks themselves cost into these cheap and boring logistics vehicles) or is for the parade ground (it sacrifices the tanks’ strategic mobility for buying fractionally more of them).
And in a pinch, some kinds of vehicles can fire from the transporter without being offloaded first. Call that setup Prigozhin’s war rig?
And even if you lack any actual tanks, a tank transporter could well be a great platform to armour – if it can carry the weight of a tank, it can carry the weight equivalent to all the armour a tank has (even if on a trailer, rather than as a full-bodied unit). You are still not getting the high-hardness materials for that kind of armour in the first place, of course, but a lot of otherwise non-viable options open up. I.e. you should be able to fit just about any working towed gun, including the 15(0/2/5) mm piece, on the tank transporter part, while retaining the weight allowance for bulletproof protection and leftover storage weight.
Moreover, if you lack in good steel but have a decent supply of cement, you could probably replicate the British Bison’s fighting compartment without also replicating its inability to go anywhere but barely crawl around airfields!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_concrete_armoured_lorry
I wonder if that would be an interesting justification for a blinged out war-rig in a Mad Max wasteland setting (maybe a touch more industrialized). War-rigs wouldn’t be good for field battle, but beside carrying fuel and ammo, maybe they are carrying pre-apocalypse towed guns, which might be eaiser to maintain than a full-on tank/IFV. Fielding a few of these things would allow a wasteland warlord to siege down wasteland resource hardpoints much, much easier, and carry the prestige and threat that ability entails.
In fact, a wheeled vehicles require quite peculiar “country” to go cross-country. You can traverse a desert, a semi-arid plain or grassland with an all-road car. On the other hand, you cannot really drive in forested areas (either trees or tree-stumps), or in swamps, or on seriously rocky ground. Even a seriously muddy field is an obstacle. If you have any terrain like this, the movement of wheeled vehicles is easily canalised on some very predictable routes.
Essentially, the technical is a good weapon on ground where cavalry would also come handy, and can be ambushed in the same places as you would ambush a cavalry force.
I would say dirt bikes actually start to become tempting in terrain such as forests and hill country due to their mobility.
It’s an open question as to whether dirt bike equipped troops would be faster or slower than just walking.
I suppose the vehicles might come in handy if you end up in a place where they’re faster.
I will note that as far as I know, motorcycle troops are very thin on the ground today, when we have lots of equipment to work in niche situations and lots of money to develop those.
I think we have a data point for this: in the attack phase of the Continuation War, Finnish invasion of East Karelia proceeded with bicycle troops forming the point of the spear. A non-motorised bicycle was a fast, cheap and efficient way for the rapid movement in the terrain that was almost roadless, and extremely difficult. You could traverse the forest paths formed mostly by people moving on foot quite fast (realistic movement speed perhaps ca. 10 km/h) by bike. So, even non-motorised bike is faster than walking.
I know this to be true also from personal experience. I spent a lot of time in my childhood riding a normal street bike in forests. And did this also during conscription, as we trained infantry movement by bike. Biking in a rocky forest is quite doable, but you need to be careful – and you are still confined to tracks, only that the required track is much, much smaller.
We saw this in the initial push in the Ukraine war, where spring basically meant no off-road vehicle movement for weeks due to mud.
“you guys made me watch Rings of Power”
Let’s be real — you were never going to not watch Rings of Power. And you were never not going to blog about it. We are all just profiting off the positive externality!
Now I wonder if there is a way to make the plot of Mad Max: Fury Road still work within this more realistic model. An Imperator would probably command from one of the more well-armored technicals, but five women are much more difficult to hide in one. The resources carried in the war rig are important at several points in the movie, but they would be in a much less armed truck. So Furiosa would need to have at least one truck driver on her plan, but her original plan having her do all the work alone is thematically important. So it seems that with the more realistic model we would need to drop at least one important component of the movie.
Could have Max join the crew by being pressed into service as a truck driver. Or have one of the wives able to drive the truck and factored into Furiosa’s plan.
I she would have one or two stolen technicals hidden near the route, ready for the five women to take over once she shed her escort. Or maybe the deal with the mountain bikers would be for passage plus some vehicles, instead of just passage.
Having her do all the work alone may be thematically important, but it’s completely unrealistic. You’re doing a reverse “opening a gate” in a siege. Where are the co-conspirators that would be required to pull this off?
I guess there’s the attendant who’s left to confront Immortan Joe at the beginning. But no suborned harem guards? Did she sneak the others out under her dress?
No vehicle mechanics? No fuel techs? Both of these would be working on the war rig.
But I suppose showing these would take up half the movie, and change the theme entirely.
You know, having the villainous warlord break out an actual tank at the climax of a movie dominated by technicals could very cinematic. Play up the indestructibility of the tank, the terrible effect of each and every shot from its main gun, the complete hopelessness of trying to destroy it with small arms and gasoline-based incendiaries. Would make for a great David-and-Goliath battle.
Are molitov cocktails still effective anti-tank weapons? I’m not aware of any specific developments which would make the radiator of an Abrams more tolerant to being doused in flaming petrol than that of a T-28, but I’m hardly an expert.
Of course even if it can disable the voice getting within effective range is another matter entirely.
Mm, less effective on modern tanks, for a number of reasons. And their efficacy was always a little questionable: to actually kill a buttoned-up tank with molotovs, you needed either a LOT of fire over a period of time (probably more than a single volley), or a lot of luck. There’s a reason anybody who had any other anti-tank weapons used those, and also a reason why approximately no purpose-built AT weapons took the form of a beefed-up molotov.*
My suspicion is that most molotov “kills” were not down to the effect of the weapon on the exterior of the tank resulting in a hard kill. Either someone got one down an open hatch, or the tank was isolated and under close infantry attack and was doomed anyway**, or it was a psychological kill: “aah! the tank is on fire! bail, bail, bail!”
Modern tanks are, on a technical level, less vulnerable to the first and third of those. More and better vision devices make it harder to get close enough to put a bottle through an open hatch, and modern vehicle hatches often have an “open protected” mode that lets a commander keep some vision without risking a fiery three-pointer. And modern tanks have much better air-handling systems (so burning petrol on the outside of the tank will have a much less dramatic effect on the atmosphere inside: it’s easy to think the fire is inside when the turret is suddenly full of smoke because your air just comes through a bent pipe and a fan) and much more reliable fire-suppression systems (so if the system isn’t tripped, you’re less likely to think you’re about to burn to death just because you can see flames in the periscope) and are generally less likely to catch fire (so if you’re not spending 10% of your worries on getting burned alive in your vehicle just in general, you’re less likely to panic at the first hint of ignition).
Training and doctrine also make modern AFVs much less vulnerable, but presumably Dementus’s boys haven’t exactly been to armor school.
Now, heavy vehicular flamethrowers could be very effective, even on modern vehicles (especially if their NBC systems haven’t been well-maintained).
*Yes, I know the Finns made official army-issue molotovs. You will note, however, that they only did so during the period when they were literally unable to provide any other anti-tank weapons to most of their forces. And again, even having that experience with purpose-built molotovs, they did not then go on to issue a petrol bomb with a grenade fuse, which would have been a very logical and cost-effective thing to produce… if the molotovs had been any damn good.
**Under those circumstances, you could accomplish the same thing with logs. Jam the tracks, jam the turret, and if they don’t surrender, pull the engine decking up and start ripping it apart until something flammable starts spraying.
You are generally on the right track (see my other comment and its link about the actual Finnish experience with Molotovs) but the last part is really silly. “Under those circumstances, you could accomplish the same thing with logs”?!
Just to give an idea of what tanks can actually do, while continuing with the Winter War theme, here’s a video of the infamous Soviet military march written for that war, Принимай нас, Суоми-красавица (Suomi beauty, welcome us”), overlaid over the contemporary footage. While that march is now best-known for evidencing that the invasion was planned a lot earlier than admitted (it refers to “The low autumn sun”, i.e. it couldn’t have possibly been prepared if the USSR was merely responding to (faked) Finnish shelling over the border as was claimed at the time), what I would like to point out is the moment at 0:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re7qYwNaD_I
There, the lyric “Tanks BREAK wide paths through the forest” (emphasis mine) is synced up with the footage of a T-26 quite literally driving over TWO WHOLE PINES, knocking both down in seconds without even visibly slowing down. Those may not have been the largest or thickest pines – but they are certainly way larger and heavier than any log a human – or even a group working together – could ever hope to throw into the path of a tank. Note, also, that T-26 is effectively a minnow by modern armoured vehicle standards – at a little over 10 tons, it is 1.5 times lighter than the BTR-82, circa 3 times lighter than the Bradley, 4 times lighter than the T-72 and 6 times lighter than the Leopard 2 or Abrams. Plus, its badly underpowered engine (never mind the Hilux – any Corolla from 1990s onwards would have a stronger engine than what any T-26 had) means that any modern-ish armoured vehicle has a far more favourable power-to-weight ratio, and consequently is far more capable of powering over obstacles. (On the flip side, modern tracked vehicles’ ground pressure would be ~1.5 times higher, and many times higher still for wheeled vehicles, potentially leaving them more prone to get stuck in the mud – but that is hardly something infantry can rely on in a fight.)
That’s not the way the logs were supposed to be used. They were much smaller fireplace-sized logs carried by a single man. The idea was to put the log inside the track so it would jam between the wheel and track and break the track.
Apparently it wasn’t very effective tactic. You would need to sneak even closer to the tank than with molotov, you probably needed to put the log in just the right way, and it would probably still be unlikely to break the track.
I would concur. The log is not for stopping the tank. (The standard Finnish anti-tank dragon tooth was about 0.5 m X 0.5 m X 1.5 m hewed stone set half a meter into the ground, and emplaced in three rows.) A very light tank can be stopped with a log jammed between the track and the first track wheel. If you manage to put about 10 cm thick piece of wood there, and twist, the movement of the track might pull the track off the wheels, or jam it. This is a desperation tactic, and anything but sure, even with a T-26. With anything more modern, it doesn’t work.
However, the Molotov cocktail did work against tanks of Winter War: T-26 was a gasoline-fired tank and if you manage to break the bottle on the engine air intake, the buring tar-petrol mixture flows into the engine compartment and sets it on fire. Again, more modern tanks have much better protected engine compartments.
The throw charge, a set of 2-4 kg of explosives with a handle for throwing, was a much more effective weapon though: thrown on the tank, the charge was quite effective against most tanks of WWII.
All of these tactics worked best in the early phase of Winter War, when the tanks attacked without infantry cover, driving near or straight into Finnish infantry positions without protection. In such situation, it is possible to destroy a tank with almost bare hands, because you don’t need to worry about the infantry trying to shoot you. The Soviets were badly lead, but not quite stupid, though. They managed to change their tactics, and by February 1940, the tanks were operating with infantry screens.
In Winter War, the Finnish Army destroyed some 1,200 Soviet tanks in total, and with less than 250 anti-tank guns, so a lot of the tanks were destroyed with very primitive means.
> In Winter War, the Finnish Army destroyed some 1,200 Soviet tanks in total
Interestingly, this is actually the lower bound – according to Wikipedia, one source claims as much as 3,543, though that appears completely incompatible with the tally of Soviet production figures + known inventories and losses in 1941. (I.e. ~10,300 T-26 tanks and vehicles on their chassis were on the Soviet inventory books in 1941 – when their total production was ~11,300, including the ~330 tanks shipped to Spain, Turkey and China, and the losses taken in clashes with Japan.) It’s also unclear if this figure is for tanks alone, or if the substantial armoured car losses were also included (since I could not find a separate tally just for them.)
It should also be said that though T-26 was the most common tank, it was hardly the weakest one – in addition to it, the BTs (equivalent armament and armour, but faster) and the (somewhat) better-armoured but unmaintainable multi-turret T-28, there were also several thousand of the amphibious tanks (tankettes, really), which were largely useless whenever there wasn’t water to cross, as well as 4,000-8,000 models of the MT-LB ancestor – T-20 Komsomolets armoured tractor for anti-tank guns, which was basically another tankette (just look at it) and so the Finns probably counted it as a tank in their tallies as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komsomolets_armored_tractor
> The throw charge, a set of 2-4 kg of explosives with a handle for throwing, was a much more effective weapon though: thrown on the tank, the charge was quite effective against most tanks of WWII.
In fact, the same Jaeger Platoon link I have cited for Molotov cocktail (in)effectiveness provides the following breakdown:
> During Winter War Finnish military also observed effects of various satchel charges used in battle. As a result Chief of Engineers reported Finnish General HQ following in February of 1940:
> 2-kg satchel charge: Effective against armoured vehicles weighting less or around 6 tons (All Soviet armoured cars and amphibious tanks).
> 3-kg satchel charge: Effective against armoured vehicles weighting less or around 12 tons (T-26 series and BT-series tanks)
> 4-kg satchel charge: Effective against armoured vehicles weighting less or around 30 ton (T-28 medium tanks).
>…Development of Soviet tanks effected also to Finnish production of satchel charges. When Soviet tank production focused into manufacturing of medium and heavy tanks 2-kg factory-manufactured satchel charge became outdated as antitank-weapon, but they still remained useful against fortifications and as a basic demolition charge. At the same time 3-kg and 4-kg satchel charges remained useful against tanks. When it comes to largest factory-manufactured satchel charges 5-kg version was apparently popular against bunkers and even if 6-kg satchel charge must have been somewhat clumsy, it still remained in production until end of the war.
> Armed Forces wide gathered inventory list from 1st of April 1940 provides a glimse into the numerous versions of satchel charges and anti-tank hand grenades, which had been used in Winter War:
> Anti-tank hand grenade 2 kg: 9,135 pcs
Anti-tank hand grenade 3 kg: 7,025 pcs
Anti-tank hand grenade 4 kg: 2,883 pcs
Anti-tank hand grenade 1 kg: 1,456 pcs
Anti-tank hand grenade 2.5 kg: 676 pcs
Anti-tank hand grenade 1.5 kg: 1,534 pcs
Satchel charge 1.5 kg: 58 pcs (+ 30 pcs of mixed variety)
Satchel charge: 800 g: 17 pcs
Molotov cocktails were an urban weapon used against tanks in city fighting. With a WW2 tank, the commander’s hatch would have to be open to get any sort of visibility so you don’t get someone sneaking in a mine to blow off a tread.
Tankers hate city fighting for good reasons.
There’s a Finnish website painstakingly going through ALL of the military equipment they used during what they call Winter War and Continuation War. It obviously devotes plenty of paragraphs to Molotovs – from the step-by-step breakdown of their adoption and production (which benefited greatly from the Finnish state-run monopoly on alcohol manufacture and distribution) to the simple fact their legendary effectiveness was almost entirely a byproduct of the most numerous pre-1942 Soviet tank, T-26, being uniquely vulnerable to them. After all, it:
* Had a gasoline engine;
* Placed that engine in the very rear of the hull, where it was air-cooled through simply being open at the top, with a mere grate covering a fairly large area that was both hot and generally already covered in grease and engine oil;
* Had an internal air intake which was liable to blow any flames from the engines directly into the crew quarters;
All of these limitations of early 1930s tank design, when simply having a vehicle that could move faster than a horse, cross a range of obstacles, withstand bullets and fire both a machine gun and anti-armor + explosive shells (not very effective ones, mind; 45mm HE shell had the explosive filler roughly akin to 2 hand grenades – and the HE shells for its contemporary 37mm counterparts were much weaker than that) was already considered a triumph soon stopped being relevant as the tank design rapidly advanced during the war. Hence, I quote:
https://www.jaegerplatoon.net/OTHER_AT_WEAPONS1.htm
> Molotov cocktail proved effective weapon against Soviet tanks in Finnish hands when introduced to use in early December of 1939. It was not a super-weapon and did not change the course of war, but at least it gave Finnish infantry lacking other more sophisticated antitank-support something to fight against enemy tanks. And in many situations having at least something for fight with is what makes the true difference for fighting moral. In reality even during Winter War molotov cocktails were mostly used for demolishing tanks that had already been knocked out with other weapons – once a tank was successfully set on fire with molotov cocktail, repairing it became so difficult, that it was usually no longer a practical choice.
> Using weapon such as molotov cocktails against tanks was both difficult and dangerous. Getting within throwing distance from enemy tank demanded Finnish infantry to get very close to enemy tanks, so more cover the terrain offered, easier it was to use this sort of weapon. Open terrain and daylight were the least favorable conditions for their use. The Soviets also learned some lessons and adjusted their tactics: If their tanks succeeded getting behind Finnish trenches at daytime, they usually returned to their own lines before nightfall – and attack of Finnish infantry using cover of darkness. Soviet tanks also started covering each other and tried to avoid going too close Finnish trenches or terrain that offered too many good hiding places for Finnish infantry. Later on the Soviets even tried increasing chances of molotov cocktail not breaking by adding tree branches or wire mesh on top of their tanks. In this minor arms race the Finnish soldiers responded adding two or three stones connected with strings to bottle of molotov cocktail to make sure that it always shattered on impact and added some barb-wire around the bottle made sure it stuck to mesh.
> Molotov cocktail remained as part of Finnish antitank weaponry also for Continuation War, but saw even less use as antitank-weapon during it. Already during Winter War molotov cocktails had been as antitank-weapon used mostly for burning already immobilized or knocked out Soviet tanks instead of being used as primary antitank-weapon and by Continuation War there were other more effective weapons available for Finnish infantry. By beginning of Continuation War antitank-rifles were being issued in large-scale and antitank-guns had become available in sufficient numbers, hence in year 1941 there was lot less need for Finnish infantry to rely molotov cocktails and satchel charges for fighting enemy tanks. Also new Soviet tanks introduced after Winter War were far less vulnerable to molotov cocktails than their predecessors.
Breaking up the long excerpt to emphasize the next point, which ironically echoes “I’m not aware of any specific developments which would make the radiator of an Abrams more tolerant to being doused in flaming petrol than that of a T-28”.
> Already T-28 medium tanks was difficult to destroy with molotov cocktails due to its structural design and new Soviet diesel-engine equipped tanks like KV heavy tanks and T-34 were practically impossible to destroy with molotov cocktail unless hatch happened to be open. Year 1941 the weapon type that Finnish infantry used to knock out most Soviet tanks with was antitank-rifle, which were sufficiently effective against pre World War 2 tank designs still being mostly used by the Soviet Red Army at that time. New Soviet tanks like KV heavy tanks and T-34 started appearing in Finnish – Soviet front in real numbers in year 1942, which forced Finnish Army start a reform with its antitank equipment. Anti-tank rifles and antitank-guns existing in Finnish inventory were quite useless against tanks like KV-1 and T-34, so Finnish infantry fought these new Soviet tanks to its best ability with antitank-mines and satchel charges.
And this is worth even further emphasis.
> As part of this reform started in year 1942 Finnish Armed Forces GHQ ordered in summer of 1942 some 200,000 molotov cocktails remaining in Army inventory to be disassembled and their materials to be recycled for other purposes. For all practical purposes this seems to have marked the end for large-scale use molotov cocktails in Finnish Army. Satchel charges remained in use and starting summer of 1944 Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck bought from Germany were used along them.
So, even the Finns decided that as early as 1942, Molotov cocktails were so useless that they ought to be recycled outright – and that is when faced with “mere” T-34s, which lacked the NBC protection that’s been standard on tanks since late 1950s and obviously makes it even harder to destroy them with fire.
Now, it must be said that while the Red Army itself used “Molotovs” (not that they called them that, obviously) in 1941 and beyond, their design included white phosphorus and aimed to blind and potentially debilitate the crew with toxic smoke, rather than actually burn down a moving Panzer (an abandoned one is another matter.) While operating manuals called for two people in a three-man team to toss these bottles at the German tanks’ observation slits, while their leader awaits with submachine gun to hose down the escaping crew, in practice the vast majority of such attempts have ended with the demise of these teams. The aim seemed to be more to stiffen the morale by giving freshly drafted troops the impression they could do SOMETHING against the tanks besides just running, and as soon as PTRD/PTRS (anti-tank rifles) became frequent enough to fulfill such a role, their use had again diminished.
In a way, the myth of the devastatingly powerful Molotov is much like the medieval fighting myths discussed at length in the early years of this blog – like the inverse of “battering ram horse” or “unstoppable war elephant”. Unlike those, however, this myth is relevant enough to the present day that it still has the power to kill. An infamous episode of the Ukraine War was the rapid abandonment of Kherson effectively as soon as the full invasion began (now frequently theorized to be the result of betrayal), with practically the only forces attempting to give a fight being the Territorial Defence squads. They aimed to take a stand at the city’s Submariners’ Park, and stashed Molotovs in it ahead of time. I think you can still easily find videos of the aftermath, where the only sign that Russian armoured vehicles were ever in that park are the wheel and tread marks – and bodies of the Territorial Defence, many literally torn limb from limb by the impact of 30mm rounds.
They can clog up an Abrams’ intake filter, but aren’t likely to permanently damage it. Most tanks designed to survive CBRN conditions can probably survive a couple of Molotov cocktails if buttoned up, and drive away far enough to get to friendly territory. The really serious risk is crew morale since even in the 1930s it was more common for crews to abandon their tanks prematurely in the face of Molotov cocktail attacks than for the tanks themselves to actually be disabled by the weapon.
Modern tanks are at least in principle vulnerable to Molotov cocktails directed at the radiators or engine air intakes – engines tend to seize up quickly and catastrophically when the radiator is covered in burning napalm with a blower fanning the flames.
But the air intake is typically kept small, and inconveniently located for would-be attackers, and protected by metal screens and halon fire extinguishers. The screens can’t be a perfect defense, obviously, and there’s a finite quantity of halon available. Particularly for a post-apocalyptic tank whose fire-protection system hasn’t been serviced in twenty years, it would be worth a try (but I’d rather someone else do the trying).
IOW, you need a precise hit on the thermal exhaust port. And then it’s up to the screenwriter whether the fire extinguisher still works.
The British deployed tanks in perimeter defence on the Afghan frontier. The tank would rumble out at evening, take a position, switch off everything and wait. After a while it would switch on the searchlight, check all the ground around, go dark, start engine and rumble off to another position. Very effective deterrent to infiltration (an armoured corps officer told me it’s very difficult to tell by sound where the vehicle is – the sound reverberates all around).
Jeez…
Been a religious reader of ACOUP for a few years now. I’ve got to start paying for this.
This right here is the quality content I come to read.
Bravo!
Beside the main point, I know, but your references to the limited utility of bespoke military vehicles in this setting made me think, “Yeah, trying to besiege someone who can make a sally *with a tank* sounds like a terrible idea in this context.”
And then my mind jumped to the idea of this settlement developing a religion around the tank as their guardian deity. Tank operation skills are the mysteries of the high priesthood, they drive it around the temple now and then for propaganda and calendar-keeping purposes, they put sacrificial items (and maybe people) on the road for it to run over, for new years they build a big garbage sculpture and the priests shoot it with the main gun (just so nobody forgets what that does), they have a doomsday prophecy about the world ending when they run out of tank shells (but if they did only the priests would actually know so maybe they’d just try to bluff their way through it), their founder warned that if they ever drove it out of sight of the settlement it would
run out of fuelcease to be their god, etc., etc..So, a miniature version of W40k?
Thematically I love this. Pedantically I think gasoline goes bad after 6 months or a year. It definitely goes bad after generations. Mad Max land depends on the refinery for all their gasoline. And (I imagine) there is no way a Mad Max refinery could make jet fuel. So no modern tanks. Maybe they have some WW1 relic tank?
The M1 Abrams engine was designed to use a number of different types of fuel, at least initially.
The only “modern tanks” (quotes because they were first produced in 1980s) which use jet fuel are the Abrams and the T-80. Everything else you could name – T-72, T-90, Leopards, Challengers, Leclercs, Merkavas, PRC’s Type 99 (not to mention their earlier tanks), Korean Black Panthers and even small-production oddities like the Indian Arjun and the Italian Ariete – ALL of that uses diesel engines. (In fact, even the majority of remaining T-80s may now be diesel – Pakistan’s fleet of an estimated 340 tanks had been modified with a diesel engine, and the T-80 loss rates in Ukraine had been so horrific due to their autoloader design (like in T-64, rapid-firing, but very easy to hit from the side) that the Military Balance now suggests Pakistan may possess more of this model than Russia and Ukraine combined.)
I should also note that IF the post-apocalyptic refineries somehow could only produce gasoline, then their choices would not be limited to “WW1 relic tanks” but also include nearly all the WWII designs – the only diesel-using exceptions were the Soviet tanks starting from T-34 and KV, the Italian and Japanese tanks (practically the only area where the lesser Axis’ tank forces were ahead of Germany and the Western Allies) and the Lend-Lease version of the Sherman. However, since diesel is substantially easier to refine than gasoline, there is absolutely no reason where such a situation would arise. (Outside of, perhaps, a religious prohibition on diesel caused by their notoriously dirty exhausts.)
(And if there are no refineries…well, both diesel and gasoline apparently start to degrade after a year of storage AT BEST, so neither tank would operate. While diesel engines CAN take vegetable oil, as explained below, they apparently cannot be run exclusively on it. Plus, the logistics of growing enough oil to fuel tanks with 500 HP (T-34) to 1500 HP (tanks like Leopard 2) engines imply something rather more lush than the dried-out wastelands.)
https://www.utilitysmarts.com/automobile/diesel/how-to-run-a-diesel-engine-on-cooking-oil/
we know they can refine diesel because they’re using semitrucks to build their ‘war rigs’.
though iirc most of the current US Army’s non-tank vehicles which use diesel engines run on JP8 to simplify the logistics of supply. (this was put into place in 1990, and the army has been running entirely on JP-8 since) my understanding is that they even have gotten vehicles that use gasoline engines (like motorbikes) to run on JP-8. JP-8 is a kerosene-type jet fuel. since it can be made from both coal and petroleum, it might actually be the best choice of fuel to produce, if you can. plus it has non-vehicle uses for cooking and lamps
My understanding was that because the U.S. possesses an unusually aviation-centric military (not just with the massive size of the Air Force and the Navy aviation, but even with the high saturation of support helicopters assigned to the Army) it was concluded that making everything, from wheeled vehicles to tanks and even stoves and generators run on the same fuel aviation uses made the most logistical sense.
Even so, that was never an uncontroversial decision – as attested by the repeated efforts to explore fitting a diesel engine into Abrams, as described below. (From 2013, so ultimately unadopted.)
https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/abrams-dieselization-project-doing-the-math/
> Cannon offered a quantified operational cost for the combat systems in the current ABCT baseline – including 60 Abrams, 60 Bradley IFVs and 112 M113 combat systems – of $66,735 per mile.
> “So at almost $67,000 per mile you’ve got a tank that only goes 205 miles before you have to ‘hit it with fuel.’ And in order to help that happen you’ve got to carry 195,000 gallons of fuel with you, to basically do a LOGPAC [logistics package] every 12 hours,” Cannon said. “And you’re limited in your range to 205 miles. So that’s 126 fuel truck drivers, 15 M969A1 5,000 gallon fuel tankers, and 48 M978 2,500 gallon fuel tankers.
> “But if you put the diesel engine in the tank you’ve just decreased that cost by $10,000 per mile.”
>Specific GDLS supplied figures for the ABCT with dieselized Abrams are $57,636 per mile (14 percent reduction), while also creating a 300+ mile range for all vehicles, decreasing fuel truck drivers by 14, decreasing 5,000 gallon fuel tankers by three, and decreasing 2,500 gallon fuel tankers by four.
> “We just came out of validation testing on this [dieselized Abrams] design with TARDEC [Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Command] at the end of September,” Cannon said. “And they’ve validated our numbers. So basically this vehicle design uses 50 percent less fuel on a combat day than a turbine-based Abrams.
The T-80’s turbine can run on most fuels, including gasoline and diesel, at least for some time in some capacity.
While they have other issues, I thought gas turbines were generally less picky about fuel than piston engines, with jet fuel being standardized to simplify logistics and get consistent performance rather than because only this specific fuel would work.
Others have pointed out that very few types of tanks use turbine engines at all (there used to be the Strv 90’s combined powerplant too), but the M1 Abrams’ engine actually runs on the same fuel as the Bradley and the Humvee for the sake of logistical simplicity. In fact, it’s generally a heavier mix of fractions than most diesel fuels, so would probably be more easily available in most crudes (though it takes slightly more energy to extract).
JP-8 isn’t so much “jet fuel” as the omnifuel the US Army and Air Force have decided that basically everything is going to use. And it’s *mostly* interchangeable with commercial diesel fuel, or home heating oil or kerosene, all just slight tweaks to the same formula.
Back when I was an Aerospace Engineering undergrad, I found a set of manuals for an F-4 Phantom jet fighter in one of the labs. It did include a section on what to do if you had to run the thing on ordinary diesel fuel, e.g. if you’d landed on an autobahn because all the airbases were nuked, and you had to “forage” from passing truckers to get back in the air. Basically, double-check to make sure there’s no water in the fuel, try to keep below 18,000 feet, and accept that the crew chief is going to give you hell for it, but it will work.
An Abrams, is definitely going to be designed to run without issue on most any sort of diesel fuel. Including biodiesel.
Yep. Everyone talks about ‘jet fuel’ as if it’s some magical substance. It’s overwhelmingly just kerosene. Depending on how loosely you can get everything to work (i.e. knock the power output down a bit), jet engines can burn practically any old junk you chuck through them. Vegetable oil if you really need to. Fairly sure you could get one working on wood gas if you had some sort of fervent compulsion to spaff tens of thousands of pounds on something utterly pointless.
Whether that would be a feasible engineering project for our wastelanders, I have no idea. I’m more of a pistons guy than turbines, but AFAIK you need to do funny stuff with turbine blade geometries to reduce the compression ratio to stop the pre-ignition. Maybe you could do that with a file if you were really careful (and didn’t mind shaking a few turbine engines apart when you get it wrong).
As Cabin Pressure fans will know, you can indeed feed a cheetah on lots and lots of bunny rabbit food. (S1E4: “Douz”)
The creator of Apocalypse World (a Mad Max-esque TTRPG) included a note along the lines of “yes, I know gasoline goes bad and wouldn’t survive in the post-apocalypse. I don’t care. If it bothers you pretend it’s biodiesel instead.”
This idea in the context of the post in general reminded me of this: https://www.keiththompsonart.com/pages/sequester.html
Check out the rest of the artist’s work, there’s plenty more of these haunting little story concepts in his galleries…
“Look, you guys made me watch Rings of Power; sometimes I get to have treats.”
I did no such thing. On a completely unrelated note: Is there any way I can get you to watch Andor?
I remember when the US finally gave Ukraine some M1 Abrams tanks, Mike Kofman was like “say a prayer for whoever’s in charge of Ukrainian logistics, because how they find the fuel for those things is beyond me!”
For the more bespoke big impractical vehicles, those would be more about status symbols for their owners than raw military utility. Sure you could get more utility out of spending the same resources on more technicals but Lord Pig Dawg wants something badass looking.
I do also like the distinction of vehicles for convoys (technicals) and vehicles for sieges amd repelling sieges that are just too fuel inefficient for regular raiding or convoys (military vehicles). As other have said a climax in which a tank sallies out against technicals would be a lot of fun.
“say a prayer for whoever’s in charge of Ukrainian logistics, because how they find the fuel for those things is beyond me!”
I don’t see why that would be an insoluble problem, given that the front has usually moved so slightly.
Kofman was presumably reacting to the announcement of the impending delivery…which had occurred all the way back in January 2023. (The delivery itself had to wait until October of that year.) Recall that back then, people still talked about “a spring counteroffensive”, and the massively successful offensive in Kharkiv and largely-successful offensive in Kherson occurred only 4 months earlier. Back then, I don’t think anyone was predicting that the frontlines would shift so gradually ever since then, and those offensives would end up as the high watermark of both Ukrainian successes and general maneuver warfare effectiveness in that war.
Besides, Abrams’ fuel consumption challenges arguably grow even worse in static warfare, because gas turbine engines don’t just consume more fuel when they are actively moving, but even when they are at idle. It’s a trade-off of their ability to start very quickly and operate well in cold conditions (Russia’s T-80s are/were primarily slated for the Arctic units for that reason), but it’s a severe one indeed. (There is a story that during the First Chechen War, a unit which was trained on T-64s/T-72s got assigned T-80s, they idled the engines some time before the assigned marching time like they were used to, and ended up running empty well before getting to their target location.)
As for Abrams, according to the specs below, their engine consumes 10 gallons per hour (that is, nearly 38 liters) at idle – which obviously goes up to 60 gallons/hour (227 liters) when traveling cross-country and 30+ gallons/hour “while operating at a tactical ideal” (meaning, on a paved road? I have no idea how else to read that.) Now, it does take a lot of stored chemical energy to move >60 tons of steel at a decent speed, but still, that supplying that is definitely a challenge even for a functioning country – never mind the post-apocalypse!
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m1-specs.htm
Ukraine already used turbine engined T-80’s in their ‘airborne divisions’ (which despite the name are largely ground based, filling the role of armor cav)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/01/19/ukrainian-paratroopers-prefer-their-speedy-t-80bv-tanks/
ukrainian quartermaster general isn’t just about the worst job in the world
Oh, good grief. Even if Kofman didn’t understand that the M1 has a multifuel engine, did he really think that a country that was running a functional air force with multiple squadrons of jet fighters, was going to have trouble scrounging up some jet fuel?
That just serves to show the competence level of the commentariat, duh. A (former) major industrial nation with population in dozens of millions, which just a couple decades ago built Antonov planes and Kharkov tanks, in their world is unable to deliver fuel for three dozen tanks on a largely static frontline, over non-interdicted logistic network.
The other rather impractical desert warfare model I can think of is Homeworld Deserts of Kharak with its landship model featuring carriers and cruisers as large as real world naval vessels while even their standard armored vehicles make the Maus look like a toy. There is something of a justification, which is that they needed to launch a large expedition into enemy territory and needed a mobile base more than anything else (Kharak also seems to have somewhat less gravity than Earth, so the size is less of a problem structurally). It’s also more overtly science fiction than an example like Mad Max as the vehicles are using salvaged starship tech.
Not sure what the more practical alternative would actually be because no army has ever had to do something quite like this. Probably just lots of supply trucks with aerial resupply and similar levels of salvage to what they use in the game.
Definitely not aerial resupply. It’s not only inefficient as all get-out but also very limited in total throughput. The real world solution is tactical pipelines that can be laid relatively quickly, with trucks along a semi-improved road network (also relatively quick to get into action, with the right engineering assets) in the interim.
It would probably require a bit of stop-start instead of continuous momentum but fuel logistics are brutal if you want to operate off an improved road net.
That reminds me of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engine novels, in a post-apocalyptic setting where the cities have been rebuilt onto mobile platforms. They hunt and attack one another, with the loser torn apart to provide fuel, food, and material for the victor. It’s not sustainable, a theme that’s developed in the novels.
Per the original Homeworld’s manual the Kushan were using landships for centuries before DoK, with the equatorial desert being crossed on ships driven by sails (don’t look too closely at the physics there). It also makes sense from a gameplay design perspective with DoK being a fairly straight translation of the old Homeworld games’ naval-inspired 3D space combat to a terrestrial setting, so landships are kind of inevitable there. They don’t make a huge amount of sense from an engineering perspective, at least not at that scale (although I can envision something like an enlarged Kharkovchanka being used in Kharak’s hellish desert wastes) but they are undeniably cool.
I haven’t played the game though I’ve seen trailers. It seems to be a fairly straight translation of the original Homeworld model of one big mothership producing smaller ships to fight with.
The original made sense because they uncovered exactly one FTL drive, so they built it into one huge ship, and all the factories and people lived in that ship.
Presumably at the end of every scenario, they transferred all the crew out of the smaller ships and broke them down into materials (so they would fit) before FTL’ing to the next place. If they didn’t, then they left those guys behind.
I’m not sure what justification they made for doing this in the Deserts game.
In the OG Homeworld I seem to remember them docking all of the ships into the mothership prior to engaging FTL. Might be wrong with that one, though.
It was generally a good gameplay tactic to scuttle your ships and recoup their resources prior to moving onto the next mission though. The quantity of opposing ships you’d face in the next level was calculated by the number of strength of your fleet when you finished the last level, so if you leave with a full fleet you’ll end up absolutely hammered by enemies (ask me how I know, bl**dy Gardens of Kadesh).
I just wanted to mention Desert of Kharak! And yes I also wanted to see our host’ take for the original Home world too. Looks like it’ll be neat.
Something about the warlords marshaling their fleets of wheeled vehicles brings to mind the chariot armies of the Bronze Age – now we just need a 40-ft high mural of some latter-day Rameses II heroically firing a recoiless rifle from the back of his spike-covered technical
honestly, this is probably a good model for the socio-military structure of the warlords. in the bronze as the military power of your kingdom relied heavily on how many chariots you could maintain.. not just build but supply with horses and trained crew. in the madmax wasteland, a warlords power would absolutely depend on how many war-cars and other outriders they could actually operate reliably.
which is one of the reasons why i argued that the ‘war rigs’ aren’t combat platforms earlier in the thread, though they have basic defenses should they be attacked. from the types we’ve seen in the the franchise, they’re (mostly) force projection platforms meant to resupply a force of war-cars with fuel, food, water, and ammo. thus allowing said force to travel much farther from the warlord’s home base and raid other warlords or independent settlements.
The analogy between tacticals and chariots works rather well! They share 3 main features: they’re status symbols, can carry troops to active fighting, and are mobile fighting platforms. But those come with caveats. Tacticals aren’t a peak status symbol like bronze age chariots were; they’re very much a 2nd class alternatives to MBT, IVF, etc… And while tacticals can ferry large numbers of regular infantry around, chariots were more of personal taxis for the elite.
I do wonder how practical chariots were. Presumably if you had two chariot armies they would go find a flat area both sides could use to fight on.
Which works until you get someone who doesn’t have chariots and still has an army. Who isn’t interested in fighting on your favored ground.
This may have taken a long time since the situation could end up being stable. If you don’t have chariots you don’t get an army, but if you get chariots they will only fight on their favored ground. Round and round. It may have lasted until the polities with chariots got into such trouble none of them could support chariots.
I think it’s fair to say that chariots were very useful in their context. Both for winning battles and, of arguably greater importance for the people using them, for elite self-assertion and aggrandisement. Whether they would have been very effective on a purely tactical level against an enemy that was specifically trying to negate their value is another question. But one which is almost a hypothetical rather than historical question because that’s hardly ever what actually happened.
I almost feel bad to point out our host had already written a post three years ago devoted to chariots – where he does compare them to technicals, but also notes people tend to MASSIVELY overrate how effective they actually were. Far less effective than cavalry of pretty much any kind, for starters, and certainly never effective to the point of “if you don’t have chariots you don’t get an army.”
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/13/collections-ancient-tanks-chariots-scythed-chariots-and-carroballistae/
*Technical not tactical in the above. No idea why I used the wrong word.
The resource-heavy nature of war rigs serves a purpose though. Like a Super Star Destroyer or war elephant the sheer waste serves to demonstrate one has the resources TO waste. You have made it big and can maintain such a giant. Having one of them at the core of your road fleet would have a strong psychological impact on one’s foes.
On a different note the similarity between Mad Max warfare and naval warfare using wooden ships and sails is striking. Many of the same considerations come into play. The main difference being the higher rate of fire from modern weapons.
The effect on the enemy is likely secondary to the effect of on your own polity. IIRC there was a meme in India that a good king keeps war elephants, so that became part of the performative duties of kingship. You were signaling to your vassals that you are not some random guy who commands an army, but you were clearly destined to rule or some such.
I think that main difference between wooden ships and technicals is that the only way to turn a ship into a stable firing platform is to run it up a sand bank, which has other downsides.
I will grant you though that there are likely courses with respect to the waves which make the ship heave even more, and that cutting your speed before firing might be beneficial.
Your first paragraph is a really good point. Half the purpose of a Super-class Star Destroyer, or war elephant, or chariot, or (in relatively poor regions of the world) tanks, fighter jets, and nuclear weapons, is to signal to one’s own people that you’ve made it big. This was discussed in a number of other essays on this blog; I can only speculate that it’s absent here for (relative) brevity and because too little info on the society and politics is given in the movies. (No insult intended about brevity here–I love these posts!)
I think that’s an issue that Bret failed to fully address in this essay: War isn’t just about fighting the enemy. There are a lot of internal factors that play into it as well. A road warrior that said “I know war rigs are cool and all, but to be more efficient we’re going to pivot to pickup trucks” could easily lose face and thus lose standing or even his life (gangs with warlords tend not to handle apparent weakness with grace!). I can easily see a situation where the warlord would love to move to better options, but while a war rig is worse for combat and for strategy it’s better FOR HIM, personally, to keep it operational. (Then you get an Alexander who uses technicals and wins big, causing a rapid restructuring of armies–which would be a pretty good movie.)
Your comment about ships is a good one, but I think the ability to hit wooden ships does to some extent undermine Bret’s argument about accuracy. I’ll grant that a lot of shot went into the sea instead of the enemy, but it was hardly unusual to succeed in hitting the enemy. This demonstrates that with some training you can get people to hit moving targets from moving vehicles. I’ll grant that the slower speeds made this a lot easier, but “not easy” is a long way from “useless”!
This may explain why gasoline-based weapons are so common: They’re easy to train on. You can learn to throw a grenade by throwing a pot of similar weight, and you can learn to shoot a flame thrower by shooting a similarly-powered hose. Neither is hyper-advanced tech; you can make a pot out of dirt, sand, and a reasonably sized camp fire, and pumps for hoses were invented well before the steam engine (chain pumps). If ammo is rare you can’t waste it on training (the British Royal Navy had some pretty extreme limits on firing the great guns for training), but again, dirt’s literally dirt cheap and you don’t need to make the pots pretty, they just need to break. So while such weapons may not make sense from a combat standpoint, from a training (and thus strategic) perspective they may be the best option.
On larger ships the movement is probably slow and regular enough that you can do well enough by timing the cannon fire. Waves often arrive on regular rythm. On the other, with a technical driving offroad the bumps happen at random interval and they have much bigger and sudden effect.
The effective range of wooden ships was pretty bad, even considering their weaponry. They had to get in pretty close to have a decent chance of hitting.
In the age of sail, ships occasionally fought while (unintentionally) entangled with each other’s rigging. Since the battles were going to take a long time anyway, an aggressive commander had no particular reason not to order his fleet to engage from within point blank range, “so close that the target fills up the area the shot can go into”, that makes it impossible to miss if you even try to hit. IIRC occasionally muzzle blasts (from hefty loads of black powder, mind) set parts of the target on fire.
Ships also 1) roll (and/or pitch, but that tends to be a small motion if the weather is good enough for a fight) at a regular rate, 2) are very big even in this era. USS Constitution is 175 ft (53 m) at the waterline, and notably was smaller than “proper” ships of the line (though not by much; HMS Victory, a three-decker, is 57 m on the gundeck). For our purposes, she’s two-ish stories tall (ships of the line with two or three, rather than one, gundecks are obviously even taller targets). Simply, ships are far larger targets than trucks. (She also had an action, against HMS Guerriere, where the latter’s loss of maneuverability resulted in the two ships unintentionally colliding and becoming entangled. This would be quite unlikely if they fought from much more than a ships length apart — a slowed and turning ship would pass behind the other, not crash into it in a disadvantageous position.)
On the other hand, deliberately shooting away masts and wheels generally took master gunners. It occasionally happened that ships fought from a longer distance away (if the one capable of setting the range had mostly cannons while the opponent mostly had carronades). However, with rare exceptions shots beyond …perhaps 100 m or so?… would have been intended to damage an enemy’s sails/rigging, slowing them down and letting you either flee or draw into the range where you can fire for effect.
Some of the short range is yes for better accuracy, but some of it is also due to wanting to *capture* the other ship instead of sinking it.
Sinking the other ship just means you lose ammo, and possibly take damage and casualties. You get some glory because it’s written in your log.
Capturing the other ship means you get glory when your prize crew sails it into your port. It also gets you money when the court condemns the ship as an enemy – either the navy buys it into service, or it’s auctioned off. Any cargo also gets condemned and sold at auction. Surrendering enemy crew also result in prize money per head. Depending on who did the capturing, they may also have been sold as slaves.
The incentives very much were towards capturing the ship. Which means short range so you can shoot down the sails or rigging, as opposed to putting holes in the hull.
This changed when warships changed in design so much they ended up being much easier and safer to sink than capture. Navies became less interested in bringing enemy captures into service as well when not just cannon but also ship parts became not interchangeable.
> This may explain why gasoline-based weapons are so common: They’re easy to train on.
Which does not make them any less expensive to operate, though. The USSR, by far the most extensive operator of flamethrower tanks, provides some illustrative numbers. Its initial conversion of T-26, KhT-26, had a flamethrower which consumed 5 L of fuel per burst in order to fire at most 35 meters ahead. The later version, OT-130, could fire up to 50 meters ahead, but it now consumed 9 L per shot (while carrying a 400L tank.) When the Finns captured a dozen or so of these tanks, they ended up converting them all into regular ones after just a few months of combat deployment!
https://www.jaegerplatoon.net/TANKS4.htm
> Finnish military was not overly impressed about OT-130 and OT-133 flame tanks. Their flame-throwers had been noted unreliable and somewhat ineffective already during Winter War and after that Finnish soldiers had also gained some user experience. During World War 2 Finland suffered shortage of fuel, due to which both gasoline and diesel were already early on limited available to only for military use. The shortage of both gasoline and diesel was so severe that by end Continuation War also large part of military trucks had been converted to use woodgas carburetors. Situation being this, KS-25 flame-throwers were also considered wasteful in its use of fuel. It must be also noted that 45-mm tank gun was notably more versatile weapon, than these flame-throwers. As a result, Finnish Army decided to convert its existing OT-130 and OT-133 flame tanks into gun-tanks.
If a nation-state was lacking in fuel to operate a flamethrower vehicle effectively, what hope do the warlords have? At most, I would see flamethrowers as status symbol, borderline “white elephant” weapons, whose purpose is to show “yes, I can afford to spend enough fuel to run my bike for an hour just to ensure you die painfully.” In that case, though, they would only be used by the warlords themselves and their most elite of the elite. So, the guitar on the Doof Wagon fits with that idea. Seemingly every third marauder in Furiosa operating some sort of a crappy flamethrower? Not so much.
Wooden ships could fire at long ranges, you just had to have veteran gunners who could compensate. This can cause either a virtuous and a vicious cycle, depending on how you treat those gunners and their casualty rate.
It does help that you have lots of cannon on each side, and you can do rolling broadsides and other means of increasing the accuracy.
“Look, you guys made me watch Rings of Power; sometimes I get to have treats.”
Hey, technically we *paid* you to watch Rings of Power.
I don’t wonder if what we’re usually seeing here is actually mostly “personal” vehicles being recruited by warlords. They’re spiky and dramatic because they’re in a power-demonstrating culture, but their actual role is just to get people around their communities, which we see as being really centralised and distant, without it taking three days, and when raids or wars happen they just show up with whatever they ride normally, even if that’s a bike.
Yeah, I think this makes the most sense. Mad Max is decentralized so there isn’t a military doling out resources as efficiently as possible but rather just people showing up in whatever they’ve got.
I went back and refreshed my memory of the Mad Max movies, which I don’t think I’ve watched since Fury Road, and in spite of what a great movie Fury Road is, it does sort of seem like a good example of a fictional franchise becoming a sort of parody of itself over time.
The very first Mad Max movie isn’t really “post-apocalyptic” in the sense the term is used today—it’s very explicitly about a society that’s falling apart but hasn’t fully fallen apart. Therefore, the fact that everyone is driving muscle cars isn’t really that hard to explain. The gangsters think they’re cool, and they have advantages in a high speed chase between law enforcement and gangsters. Fine.
Then we get Mad Max 2, the one with Humungus as the villain. Society seems to have fully collapsed, but only recently. Humungus and his army were probably once mere gangsters, so okay they haven’t clued in to the virtues of pickup trucks as military vehicles yet. A modified big rig plays a key role in the plot, but its presence can be justified as “it’s what they happened to be able to salvage”.
But Fury Road appears to be set decades after the collapse of society, such that it’s hard to make sense of its film’s Max being the same guy as the original. And the visuals are a wildly exaggerated version of the visuals from the original films, even though it makes no sense for things to have continued trending in that direction for decades.
Still a very fun film, though.
Among historical examples, weaponry and transport tech were also, conveniently, prestigious imported goods. Could be Furiosa-era warlords settle most of their conflicts on a diplomatic level, performing highly visible stunts as part of a tradition established by the gangsters who got it all started, reassuring their own followers and intimidating opposition as a prelude to negotiation, rather than pushing all the way to hard logistical limits. Attacking while on the move is absurdly inefficient, but maybe the inefficiency is the point – as a demonstration of extraordinary personal bravery and (ideally) skill, similar to “counting coup.”
Switching to less flashy methods would provide material advantages over the longer term, but that’s not enough reason to try it if the corresponding perception of weakness results in a short-term morale collapse and becoming the target of more aggressive raids. If there’s no conventional industrialized power occasionally reaching in from outside the wasteland, fixed near the the top of the prestige hierarchy by virtue of arrogant disregard for local politics and wildly overwhelming force… some objectively bad idea could stick around for a long time just because none of the powerful people stand to gain, in the short term, by unilaterally disputing it.
This does sound like the “wars” that tended to happen in early cultures. The ones we know about tend to be two sides gather almost at the edge of ranged weapon range and they shoot at each other. Not many casualties happen here, but it’s highly visible.
The high casualties intrinsic to those cultures tend to happen in midnight village raids. Those are low visibility during the raid; the prestige comes from the loot and slaves you bring back.
It is notable that while Immortan Joe can call up help from gas town and the bullet farm, he also has what is clearly a trading relationship with them, and they could easily just be long term alliances based on resource monopolies. A lot of the other grounds seem pretty marginalized, and could easily be the equivalent of bandits who lurk around and cause trouble but aren’t significant military threats.
I’m pretty sure if there a moment where Mad Max became a parody of itself it’s Beyond Thunderdome
My attempt to convince my son of the self-evident truth that Mad Max 2 is a far superior film to Fury Road failed miserably
“Parody of itself” makes it sound like a bad thing. But I think that kind of aesthetic intensification is usually a good thing. I’ve seen it in several genres and I’ve liked it each time.
The Mad Max films are not a future history, though. There’s very little reason to think that they are trying to tell one consistent story. The histories we get in the first two films are just about reconcilable with each other (if we make some fairly big assumptions), but don’t match what we get in Beyond Thunderdome, which doesn’t match what we get in Furiosa or Fury Road.
My reading is that they aren’t, with the definite exception of Furiosa/Fury Road and the partial exception of the first two films. Instead, they’re telling stories that rhyme but don’t exactly follow. Likewise, Max is the same character, but trying to figure out the exact timeline is like trying to put every story of the Round Table in chronological order: either Sir Lancelot can have about six month-long adventures in a day, or he lived from the fall of Rome to the American Revolution… and that’s before you get into all the contradictions between the different stories.
So if you get a story where Arthur is a Romano-British warlord, and another story where he’s clearly operating in the shadow of Eleanor of Aquitaine importing the notion of courtly love… You’re not really meant to look at that and go “ah, yes, Arthur must have lived from before 400CE well into the 13th Century, presumably Merlin was supplying some extremely effective arthritis treatments.” They’re different stories, they may have some of the same *characters* but we shouldn’t understand them to be happening to the same *people* necessarily, and certainly not all in sequence.
(And in some cases, they have characters with the same name who don’t seem to be the same character. Sometimes Gawain is a badass, sometimes he’s a putz. This also neatly resolves things like the Gyro Captain/Jedidiah question: no, they’re not the same exact character, but yes, they sure do rhyme.)
Exactly! Max is Arthur in a different setting.
Each movie has different background, and if you think of them as being the visualization of a store narrated by a different person, years or decades later, it comes out like this.
Mad Max is difficult; it could be narrated by Max himself many years later.
Road Warrior is explicitly narrated by the pilot character.
Beyond Thunderdome is narrated by (I think) the story teller girl.
Fury Road is probably narrated by Furiosa, or possibly one of the other wives.
Not sure about Furiosa as I haven’t seen it.
If these are stories narrated generations later, possibly to be written down by a Grimm brother equivalent it fits even better.
I recall Furiosa actually has two voiceovers by two different characters at two points in the narrative. The title character narrates the epilogue… but right before the pivotal battle (which we don’t really get to see) The History Man (a very old, white-bearded figure who had covered his clothes and skin in hyper-efficient cypher and narrates Britannica entries verbatim) is ruminating on the nature of war in another voiceover narration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CZ-Lbyzzkw
It’s a cool scene, but I’m not sure what it means for your theory.
Man you’ll love this if you haven’t read it already: https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/exploring-the-historiography-of-mad-max-fury-road/
Ah yes, I recall seeing Nathan’s comments on some posts here.
Too bad I mostly associate him with “Pax Americana”, which is just silly even by alt-history standards.
https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2025/03/01/the-pax-americana-part-one/
Ah, that is…less to my tastes. Increasingly so the more the incumbent government gestures towards Greenland.
Even in Mad Max 2 the entire thing takes place in the wasteland, but that’s somewhere Max went after the end of the first movie.
The gas refiners have a specific plan for getting out of the wasteland (after extracting some valuable resources), and going back somewhere that we don’t hear much about. So we could easily imagine they’re just headed back to a less well resourced civilized area. (As if the entire thing happened in a near future North Dakota, and their plan is to get the oil and hightail it back to the Twin Cities with it.)
An in-universe reason for the muscle cars and motorbikes: these are status symbols, conspicuous consumption.
These aren’t military systems designed from scratch, they had to evolve from the pre-apocalyptic society and values. And in current day Australia, the Hilux and other pick-up trucks are, at least according to the advertising, driven by hard working farmers and other manual workers. The “elite” of the roads are the race car drivers and bikies. So post-apocalypse, muscle cars and motorbikes advertise that you are out of the ordinary, a dangerous person. This would be why Dementus still drives his own “bike”, even though he could probably have an armoured vehicle as a command post.
This makes sense for Humungus in Mad Max 2, I’m not sure it makes sense in the new movies which seem to take place decades after the apocalypse.
Fun! This is also a problem with the classic (and very complicated) board game CAR WARS, which wanted to be about fast-moving post-apocalyptic vehicular combat but in many scenarios actually favored dug-in infantry, or at least slowing down so you could actually hit something: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2795/car-wars
The stock (heh) Car Wars setting wasn’t post-apocalyptic, it was more like future high-tech dystopia a la “Death Race 2000”. There was a variant set of rules published IIRC in Dragon Magazine that de-rated the weapons and vehicles tech down to “Road Warrior” levels but as far as I know they weren’t official.
It grew out of the (I think) fairly common situation where you’re a child sitting in a car in traffic and you fantasize that you have jet engines and a machine gun on your car.
“Why Johnny can’t Speed” by Alan Dean Foster is I think cited as an explicit influence. Also “Devil Car” and “Damnation Alley” by Roger Zelazny.
A competent military force with military vehicles will absolutely trash technicals. But in practice an awful lot of militaries in regions with technicals aren’t very good. Mobility and aggression can do a lot in those circumstances and that is something a technical army can do quite well (incidentally during the Toyota War Chad forces figured out if they moved fast enough they could outpace the timed fuses of the minefields they were crossing!). During the collapse in 2014 Iraq lost thousands of humvees, quite a few armored personnel carriers, and even several Abrams tanks. Heck the Sudanese army has (or had) about a thousand tanks and the RSF was largely gaining ground for the first year-plus. ISIS tended to use some form of IED to cause chaos and damage and immediately strike. Very much a shock and awe approach in its own way.
Reading this from the perspective of a longtime Paradox gamer, and I wonder if it would be a fun concept for a video game to play as the strategic-operational leader of a military force going through the apocalypse.
Sort of going “down the tech tree”, as it were, with you *starting* with the modern military of a small but reasonably prosperous country, and having to scramble to adapt as the world collapses on itself, your resource base dwindles to basically nothing, your threat profile devolves from ‘next-door regional power’ to ‘bandits and warlord gangs’, and your strategic objectives slowly transition from defending the country from foreign threats to keeping the country from shattering.
…and zombies. Everybody likes zombies, right?
It’s not a proper Paradox game as it’s a Civilization clone (with the divergent eras as the only real interesting feature that largely sounds cooler than it is), but Millenia does have this as an option. With the nuclear DLC one of the divergent eras is a Fallout and Mad Max inspired post-apocalyptic wasteland created if you destroy the world with nuclear war.
You can also end the world by summoning Cthulhu instead of triggering the industrial revolution, but that’s not an apocalypse you can even remotely recover from. The alien invasion or Singularity AI apocalyptic threats are extremely high-tech by comparison.
I’ve wanted a game like this for a long long time. Expect without zombies.
My one issue is the idea that accurate firing from a moving vehicle is never going to be possible, based on testing done by mid 20th century gunners who were, crucially, not dedicating their entire lives to dying historic on the Fury Road
Much like mounted horse archery cannot be trained in agrarian peasant levies, but can be effective if the archer is essentially raised in the saddle in a culture that values that form of warfare (something this blog has covered multiple times) I have to imagine that several generations of half-life war boys spending their entire lives engaging in high speed gun battles would, over time, learn to shoot at speed well enough to be effective (a group of motorcycle nomads who have been practicing shooting on the go their entire lives would have a tactical advantage over a group that has to halt to fire)
I also suspect there could be some use for motorcycle troops fighting as dragoons, using their motorcycles purely for mobility, and dismounting to fight. It makes sense, given the scarcity of ammunition and the empty expanses the wars are fought in, that single shot, high powered rifles would be especially useful from a value-per-bullet perspective (this is basically what we see the Vuvalini and Mary Jobassa doing, in both Fury Road and Furiosa) Having a small, highly mobile squad of motorcycle riders shadow a war convoy, repeatedly making longer range sniper attacks before disappearing back into the dunes could be an effective way for a numerically inferior raiding party to inflict disproportionate casualties on the convoys, softening them up before committing to a more conventional final confrontation.
The problem here is that the accuracy of Steppe nomad archers and horse archers in general is substantially in learning to time their shots to the regular beat of their horse’s gait, releasing at predictable points. But a truck speeding across the ground does not have regular bumps and bounces coming in a rhythm, the jostles are entirely unpredictable. The response to this problem has, always and everywhere, been technological, rather than training based.
So far as I can tell, everyone’s doctrine was to halt to fire, until quite late when stabilizers got good enough to compensate for firing on the move and *even then* tanks still halt to fire if they can.
Steppe warrior mounted archery at the army level was an area-fire weapon system. Elite individuals might have been highly accurate on a training course, but in battle shooting Parthian at that regiment chasing you, it was more like 17th century musketry than sniper fire.
Yes, the horse is paying attention to the ground (no potholes please), and attempting to regularize its gait (less effort)
The vehicle is doing no such thing. At least not unless it’s more advanced than the ones we have today. Which kind of nullifies the whole “low tech post-apoc” thing.
Hear me out (as one of those car nerds you were talking about). Mobile technical warfare…except it’s all classic Citroens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–rRyeh-viI
Regarding the merits of the Toyota Hilux in a post-apocalyptic setting, I draw attention to the “experiment” conducted by the driving-adjacent show Top Gear. They bought a Hilux with 190,000 miles on the clock and then attempted to destroy it. Every time, a mechanic had to get it running again with basic tools (and, if I remember rightly, not even any spare parts).
The Hilux was, inter alia, dropped from a crane, hit with a wrecking ball, driven into a building, submerged at high tide, had a caravan dropped on it, and each time was restarted. Eventually they subjected it to a building demolition, putting it on top of a 23-storey building shortly before the building was imploded. They then dug it out of the wreckage… and got it running again.
I can see why they’re the vehicle of choice for modern-day warlords, and surely they would be for our post-apocalyptic ones too.
That was indeed a classic. My question is, how have we been talking about Hilux-based technicals all this time, without anyone posting the obvious graphic? https://i.redd.it/9w3qjdpxnlo71.jpg
You mention semi-trailer cabs being built for solid (presumably sealed road) surfaces. What about road trains? The Australian super trucks that drive hundreds of kms across dirt roads in the outback?
> That fire would be intended to take out convoy escorts, but also to ‘suppress’ the convoy – composed of heavy trucks and armed technicals – by forcing it to keep moving, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of its return fire.
I can’t really visualize this scene.
First, the territory seen in the Mad Max screenshots and images of technicals seems very ill suited for a vehicle-based ambush, especially the kind of ambush which would not be spotted by motorbike scouts. (I am not sure how tactics work if both parties see each other outside their effective range and would like to give battle, given that the one who drives into the others zone of fire is at a disadvantage. Presumably, whoever has the other outgunned (and wants to capitalize on that) would have the stronger incentive to move forward?)
I understand suppressive fire in an infantry context, the aim is to force the enemy from whatever they are doing and go for the nearest cover. It is less clear how this would work for a moving vehicle, especially in terrain where cover is absent.
I mean, if you find yourself driving towards the fire, then continuing to drive in that direction seems a terrible life choice. Your options would be to either drive a curve or to halt. Halting seems like a reasonable tactic — it allows your infantry to disembark (which will both make them much harder to hit and allow them to actually shoot back) as well as the driver (who made the decision to halt). Going in a curve will not win you the engagement, but might save your life. Of course, if you were facing the shooter, you will have to present your broad side to the enemy, and given a distinct lack of cannon batteries this might go badly. Also, if your vehicle has any armor, it is probably mounted on the front, which is typically also the way your main armament is facing.
If you come under fire from the side or the rear, turning tail and driving out of the (stationary) enemy’s zone of fire seems more reasonable.
And if a group of vehicles comes under fire, then that might go badly for whomever is the first to turn to face the enemy, halt and return fire. But then again, the main point of military drills is to train soldiers to do things which collectively enable them to achieve their objectives instead of selecting individual actions which will optimize their respective life expectancy.
In a setting like this, if two forces encounter each other and both want to give battle, the most likely result is that they would approach each other obliquely, maybe even in something like an Age of Sail line-of-battle formation. A ‘diagonal’ approach means that you are changing both the range and azimuth quickly, which is good if you want to get closer without being shot.
I’d also expect there to be quite some emphasis on outranging your opponent as well. Provided you could halt, fire, and resume your progress faster than your opponent could close into firing distance, halt and then fire, you could quite readily ‘kite’ your opponent while whittling down their forces.
Of course, that would take considerable co-ordination when done with a fleet of vehicles. There’s also the old challenge of how you actually accurately assess what the effective ranges of you and your opponents are (especially as weaponry is unlikely to be standardised, and there’s going to be an aspect of skill in hitting targets at long range). And then also knowing what proportion of different ranged weapons each of you have (i.e. they might have one 800 yard gun, but you might have four 700 yard guns).
I’d probably expect it to look something similar to a stuttering chase as the side that believes they have the range advantage fights in an organised retreat while the other side races to get into range and fire off a shot (potentially with some interesting multi-vehicle tactics coming into play to attempt to pin the longer-ranged technicals to allow your dudes to get into place).
I recall that Tesla Cybertruck was advertised as being ‘Apocalypse-proof’. Those claims of course should be taken with a big grain of salt, but in general I wonder how electric cars or trucks compare to gas powered ones? Would in a post-industrial society be easier to produce electricity than gasoline? You may not need a special resource to dig from the ground, you can produce with solar panels or wind turbines or water turbines or burning gas or coal. On the other hand, the maintenance will be more challenging, and once the batteries reach their end of life, you cannot replace them. (And especially the Cybertruck may be quite challenging to maintain and repair with simple tools)
I don’t think you’d want to start with a Cybertruck, or any modern electric vehicle, for the reason mentioned above with F-series trucks – they’re so dependent on the electronics, which are going to be impossible to maintain. Heck, there are enough horror stories from owners in our (presumably) non-post-apocalyptic era about the vehicles bricking themselves.
Going the “buggy” approach – a frame, four wheels, electric motors, and batteries – might work, and could make for a neat aesthetic. Plus we could take bets on whether the writers come up with some idiocy, like mounting a windmill on the vehicle so that the wind of its movement it would recharge the batteries.
The biggest obvious problem is the batteries (As it is with existing electric cars, weirdly enough.)* To make a good battery for a vehicle (rechargeable, lots of energy per volume and mass, doesn’t degrade much, produces lots of power, etc.) is hard to do, lots of technical skills and equipment goes into it (Simpler earlier battery types like lead acids don’t store a lot of power, lithium ions require a lot of unusual materials that Mad Max world probably has trouble making). You can see this now by how lots of more powerful battery chemistries are in development, and often physically work for some specialized applications, but after years of development aren’t close to widespread use.
* I call them battery cars as a personal quirk for that reason, since the battery is where the challenges and advantages come from, while things like diesel electric locomotives or steam electric ships show the other parts of the system work well already.
Forgot to add: they can obvious scavenge batteries, but if you have to prepare more vehicles, repair things, replace degraded batteries, etc. then making new batteries, or cannibalizing parts from individual batteries, will almost certainly be more complex than replacing metal parts.
Adam Someone did a youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w__a8EcM2jI) on the Tesla semi that gets into the logistics of that a bit. Despite improvements, a battery that will take you N miles still weighs a lot more than diesel that will do the same.
The result is that an electric semi with the same range as a diesel has much less cargo capacity. According to the video, on US highways with a weight limit of 36 tons, a diesel semi can carry 19 tons of cargo, versus (drumroll) 3 tons for the electric.
Caveat: the video’s a few years old, so maybe battery technology has gotten a lot better. That’s even touched on in the video – if batteries were just 50% better than in his assumption, the electric semi’s cargo capacity would shoot up to 9 tons.
The major flaw with that video is the assumption that an EV truck would need to have the same range as diesel truck. He even proofs himself wrong at the beginning of the video when he shows the spec sheet for Tesla Semi and complains it doesn’t tell the load capacity. But it shows the range, 300-500 miles, so obviously the Tesla Semi isn’t carrying 17 tons of battery. Diesel trucks have such an excessively large tanks because carrying all that fuel isn’t much of a disadvantage. The way it works with an EV truck, is you start the work day with a full battery, drive for 4.5 hours, then take your legally mandated 45 minute rest period with lunch and charging. After rest you continue for the rest of the day, possibly take another rest and charging break at dinner. Then return the truck to the company depot for full recharging, or sleep for the night at a charging station. In US this would be more challenging with legally mandated 8 hours driving, 30 minute rest cycle, but it doesn’t need to be a major problem. American EV trucker would just take more rests and make up the difference with reduced fuel costs.
In a way the range is easier with trucks than passenger cars. With cars you can’t really know how much range the owners would need or what is the charging infrastucture where they will be used. But a lot of trucks operate regular routes or the legal rest periods set strick limits on the maximum possible driving distances.
The load capacity for EV semis seems to be about couple tons less than diesels. This probably isn’t major issue either, I doubt trucks are at full capacity that often. Either the limit is with cargo volume or the destination doesn’t need a full load.
To learn more about this you should check the YouTube channel “Electric Trucker”. It is created by a German EV trucker working for a logistics company with a fleet of EV semitrucks from multiple manufacturers, Iveco, Scania, Volvo. He has driven around Europe with EV semis, Austria, Spain, UK. Often he charges his Iveco next to Hyundais and Volkswagens at passenger car stations. You would expect those stations are too slow when you compare to car charging speeds, but with semitruck you can charge at 200-300 kW for the full battery capacity so on average it’s fast enough.
They also rather dislike being damaged. Petrol isn’t exactly inert either, but petrol tanks aren’t actually all that easy to set fire to with small arms.
Modern EV batteries, however, are relatively readily upset and when the do go it isn’t generally possible to put them out.
I’m sorry, but I can’t take any of these cinema post-apocalypse scenarios seriously. The lack of food supplies, refined gasoline, spare parts, ammunition for all these automatic weapons, a dependable supply base in the rear — when I read about how many breakdowns the *partially* motorized German Army faced in WWII, with the resources of an entire conquering nation at its back, I can’t imagine how these ridiculous factions in the movie series can function.
Plus, didn’t WWII also teach us that too high a proportion of armored vehicles to infantry results in a weaker, more vulnerable unit? Wasn’t that the problem for the Soviets?
Why couldn’t they armor the war rigs? I know that would hurt the feul efficiency a lot, but it seems worth it when the alternative is losing your entire counter fuel load to some raider that snipes it with a rifle. And there’s only one of these things per faction, it’s the most important vehicle they own, so as long as it can go the distance, the overall fuel cost probably isn’t too bad.
I know it doesn’t particularly look armored in the movies, but it seems like it should be, even if none of the other cars are. It doesn’t have to stop an anti-tank round, but it should at least stop a rifle bullet. I imagine it would be more like an armored car that banks use for transporting cash, focused on protection rather than offense.
It’s a simple question of weight ratios.
If you armor much at all the gas mileage becomes so terrible that without a modern logistical system their range becomes laughable.
They could, but by the same token it’d be much more resource-effective to armour several medium-sized lorries/trucks and distribute the resources among them. That way the resources would be better protected and the loss of any one vehicle (in or out of combat) would not have led to the loss of a large chunk of the entire convoy’s payload.
OK, doing the math, putting half an inch of steel all around a typical tractor-trailer rig would require thirteen metric tons of steel, probably fifteen tons with the necessary bracing and reinforcement. Even if you can find that much half-inch plate, the total payload capacity of the vehicle is only twenty tonnes.
Interesting! Thanks for doing the math. (I’m assuming you did something like, treat the war rig as a rectangular prism with the length of a tractor-trailer, calculate the volume of 1/2 inch of steel around it, and multiply by the density of steel?)
Does that change if you’re not using steel, but something like aluminum, wood, or kevlar? Again we’re not trying to protect it from modern anti-tank weapons, which seem to not exist in their universe, but from small arms and crude homemade guns.
You could also choose to armor *just* the tank. The crew is replacable, but not the guzzoline…
There’s no point in armoring the tank. It’s big so armoring it would increase the weight even more than the truck. The gasoline is the prize attackers are after, so they wouldn’t want to shoot at the tank and risk destroying it or the gasoline leaking all over wasteland. And if the truck is left unarmored, then the attackers can just shoot the driver and one of them can hop in and drive away with the war rig.
Another big hole for the armor scheme are the rubber tires. There is no practical way to armor them, so after couple well aimed shots the war rig would be crawling so slow the attackers can just climb aboard.
The loss of fuel efficiency and payload capacity as problems with extra armor was already addressed, but another major one would reduction in reliability. This was demonstrated by the WW2 tanks. Panthers and Tigers had powerful weapons and thick armor, but this made them too heavy for the capabilities of the drivetrain. Way too often the transmissions would fail even before the tanks reached the battle field and would end up abandoned on the side of a road. Immortan Joe would even bigger problems acquiring the nickel needed for high quality steel alloys than Nazi Germany.
The way I’m imagining it is that attackers wouldn’t really be trying to *steal* the guzzoline, just cause damage so they can make ransom demands. Like how Demtus in the second movie was able to sieze gas town and demand payment- he wasn’t trying to run home with the gas because there’s be nowhere to take it to. Immortan Joecompletely dominates the area.
If anyone tried to hijack it they’d be attacked by the huge escort that always drives around with it. Presumably that escort would also include some spare parts and mechanics. (for worldbuilding reasons the people in mad max seem to always get infinite spare parts for cars even though they can’t find guns).
I would like to double-check John’s maths myself – if only because I’m curious if by “all around”, he means just the vertical surfaces (front, sides and rear) or the floor and the ceiling as well.
On one hand, effectively nobody ever protected the roof and the hull floor as well as the most obviously exposed surfaces (though that Nordic Leopard 2 variant with a reinforced roof might be an exception.) On the other hand, if you have gone to the trouble of placing that much steel onto a vehicle already, it would seem like a total waste if a mere grenade tossed underneath it could rupture something important and wreck it all – possibly in a ball of flame.* (And though harder to accomplish, a grenade or other explosive landing on the roof would hardly be a picnic either.) You don’t need the full half-inch for that – about 5mm of armor-grade steel seemed sufficient for WWII vehicles. (Some tankettes used as little as 3mm, though that was much less reliable against even anti-infantry mines.) However, I would first have to know which vehicle he assumes to be “a typical tractor-trailer rig” with 20-ton capacity, since even small differences in dimensions could lead to large differences in weight.
On the other OTHER hand, once you even START thinking about protecting the floor of the vehicle, you are liable to get a massive headache once you realize that the ACTUAL, hands-down most stupidly cost-effective anti-vehicle weapon in a Mad Max universe…is a spike strip. The only thing anyone would really need to stop a war rig of any size is to get some distance in front of it (which any technical, muscle car or what have you – probably even a basic civilian sedan, as uncool as that is – ought to do quite easily even if they don’t already begin ahead of it) and roll out from their flat bed/cargo compartment whatever they can that is spiked – actual police spike strips would obviously be ideal, but barbed wire taken off some abandoned military base (or even converted from some chicken wire fence) should also do well. For a very resource-strapped warlord, even something like a long tarp or other thick cloth with a lot of broken bottle shards stuck through it ought to perform alright if it can be made long and wide enough. (Though, since this is Mad Max, metal spikes seem everywhere already, and the first warlord who figures out they should take those off their vehicle and interior decor and stick them into strips ought to get an insurmountable logistics advantage.)
And of course, if you are expecting enemies to wield guns (if you don’t, why are you trying to make it bulletproof in the first place?), then they can just shoot at the tires – although that is relatively hard to do reliably without a lot of sharpshooter training or a proper machine gun and all the ammunition you’ll never be getting back from it. There is a reason military armoured cars of WWII (probably WWI too, even) used bullet-resistant tires, no matter how crappy they may have been in other respects.
(Now, granted, you may note that if it was THAT easy, then the technical armies we have seen in real life would have also lost to spike strips and never got anywhere…but then again, those armies battles’ against other vehicles tended to occur at far greater ranges with things like anti-tank missiles (see below for the most famous example already alluded to in the post) and against a strip prepared well ahead of time by the infantry, one could just dismount, take it apart on foot and get back in. Very different scenario from Mad Max’s battles taking place so close, combatants seem to routinely jump onto each other’s vehicles.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fada
*Damage to hull floor from grenades is hardly a hypothetical concern either – even the so-called “IMVs”, which are basically the nation-state version of a technical, as they take a civilian or dual-use car chassis (HMMWV is also available for civilians as an unarmoured Hummer, German Henschel UR-416 places armoured plates around Unimog 416 truck chassis, the mass-produced (Oryx lists hundreds of losses by now) Ukrainian Kozak-2 and Kozak-5 do the same to an Iveco Eurocargo 150 E28 and Ford-550, etc.), which are often barely rated to stop standard bullets, are nevertheless still supposed to withstand a pair of grenades tossed beneath them under the most basic STANAG 1 protection level (and I believe all its non-NATO equivalents worthy of note do the same.)
I think the issue with spike strips is that there’s not many roads. Immortan Joe basically just has two roads, which are both regularly patrolled, so it would be hard to set it up without being noticed. And then everywhere else, people just drive offroad, so it would be hard to know where to put it.
But maybe that’s why the gyro captain made his autogyro …
For those who would like more numbers …
Australian road rules limit the size of a semi trailer to 19m long overall, 12.3m for the trailer; 2.5m wide; and a max height of 4.3m. Not surprisingly, the trailer limits are just a fraction over a standard shipping container.
A slight problem is that the height is above the road, and we don’t care about armouring the sides below the trailer. So I’ll assume 2.8m height, just a fraction over a standard shipping container.
(Yes there are oversized vehicles, no post-apocalyptic warlords aren’t limited by the road regulations. We’re just doing a back of the envelope calculation for a large surviving semi trailer.)
With 12.7mm thickness of mild steel at 7.85 gm/cm^3 density, I get 12 tonnes if you armour the sides, front, and back of the enclosing box; another 4.7 tonnes if you want armour on the roof.
This is for a full size box around a maximum legal size semitrailer, why my figure is a bit higher. Still, the overall point remains, this would be a huge chunk of the total cargo capacity.
Aluminium/aluminum vs steel is difficult to calculate because an awful lot depends on what kind of alloy you have.
My inexpert research suggests that steel alloys can be made much tougher and more resistant than aluminium alloys, which is why steel armour is/was used on tanks and battleships: even though steel is denser, the extra thickness of aluminium needed would actually end up heavier than steel. But in the wastelands we’re just worried about small arms fire and we’re probably relying on scavenged pre-apocalypse supplies or the kind of steel mass produced for building and light industry, not specialised armour plate.
Mild steel isn’t great at resisting bullets, but aluminium is apparently even worse. The Bradley IFV “aluminum” armour seems to have a layer of steel on top.
So, aluminium is roughly one-third the weight of an equivalent thickness of mild steel; but if you need twice to three times the thickness to resist bullets, not much weight advantage. And steel is much easier to weld IIRC.
Wood can resist bullets if it’s thick enough, but you need tens of centimetres, seriously cutting into the internal volume for cargo and passengers. And where do you get wood from in the Australian outback?
Kevlar and similar carbon fibre composites are maybe similar to aluminium, but who can make this in a post-apocalypse society?
Cool! Thanks for doing the math and researching this stuff. I still think there’s potential there to find *some* way of adding armor, even if they have to give up a big chunk of the cargo capacity to make it work. Maybe rubber, ceramic tiles, or something else that’s specifically designed to stop a pistol bullet while still being reasonably light. But I can also see how post-apocalyptic savages wouldn’t be able to make it work, and why modern combatants on technicals don’t bother.
This post is also a good idea source for the tabletop rpg Twilight: 2000. It’s about soldiers surviving at the end part of a nuclear war at the end of the 1990s. It was first published in the Eighties, but there is a more recent version from the Free League. The basic premise is that after some years of fighting everything just breaks down in 2000, and the characters are NATO soldiers in Poland, trying first to survive and them maybe get back home, home usually meaning the USA.
There are other starting points, like the Finnish one done by Finns in the early Nineties, and Sweden for the latest version (The Free League are a Swedish company.)
In the game, you get some equipment in the beginnign, but much of the gameis trying to get the supplies you need. You might get a Bradley or even an M1, but they are difficult to use and find fuel and ammunition for. Usually it’s best to have truck or two.
It’s kind of close to the Mad Max rpg experience, though Europe is slightly different from Australia.
You´re saying that technicals do not survive confrontation with real tanks or even IFVs.
Look at the quoted MPG numbers.
Bradley 0,75, Toyota Hilux 22 or more.
For the same fuel allowance, you could support 30 Toyotas against one Bradley.
How would one Bradley fare against 30 Toyotas that take a few losses if they´re unlucky to get in Bradley´s range, but otherwise use their mobility to stay out of Bradley´s range and dismount their dismounts to prepare mine, ditch and other obstacles to stop and preferrably trap the Bradley?
Do the Toyotas get an ATGM?
This is an extremely abstract thought experiment. One clearly not relevant to conventional warfare, as any force which can afford to wield a Bradley is going to have more than one (unless it’s a trophy, but even then, it would still have other, likely also armoured vehicles operating with it) and dubiously relevant to post-apocalyptic settings either.
As in, why would a Bradley, operating alone, need to chase after 30 Toyotas in the first place? Those Toyotas presumably came from SOMEWHERE – drive your Bradley to that “somewhere” and let the Toyotas “stay out of your range” if they want to while you thoroughly wreck it and ensure they have nothing to come back to. Granted, whoever owns the Toyotas would almost certainly foresee this, and so unless they really have A LOT of anti-tank mines/comparable IEDs, they would seek to focus their use on protecting their stronghold rather than hand them to Toyota crews in the hope they can bait their opponent’s crown jewel into a chase. But then, Bradley owner would also foresee this and likely not even bother to deploy it at all if they cannot also spare the fuel for any pickups/trucks/buses travelling next to Bradley and carrying the dismounts who could attempt demining (and, in case they can find a settlement without sufficiently strong obstacles, those dismounts and their vehicles would also be doing the strategically vital task of carrying off whichever loot matters the most.) In all, very, very silly.
P.S. About ditches as obstacles – Bradley apparently has the certified capability to cross a ditch between 2.1 and 2.5 meters wide, depending on the variant. How long is it going to take your Hilux dismounts to dig a ditch wider than that, as well as deep enough to actually trap a Bradley, and then also hopefully wide enough to actually be plausibly driven into? (Which would almost certainly require something like a suitable camo net painstakingly draped all over it to actually work.) For that matter, it’s hardly exceptional at that – in fact, many WWII and interwar tanks had similar capabilities, with some markedly exceeding it (T-28 and T-34 are said to have been able to cross ~3.5 wide ditches). Modern MBTs generally have the capacity of around 2.8m, though some (Leclerc, Merkava) are rated for 3 meters. On the flip side, even some of the least mobile tanks ever made, the French Renault R35s, could still cross ~1.5m ditches. Infantry warfare against armour without high-tech stuff is hard!
This makes sense. One major point for developing tanks was to be able to cross trenches without having to scramble in and out of them.
If you want to beat an armoured force with a non-armoured one, the key is using the terrain. A modern IFV can rip you to shreds with its auto-cannon from kilometers away. So, you don’t want to fight it in wide open fields. You try to get close and personal, selecting areas where the enemy is unable to utilise its mobility and fire power freely, and then, you use a combination of mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons and small arms fire to destroy the enemy.
I expect the more pressing concern would be operational. If you have 30 Toyotas they can be doing up to 30 different things. Meanwhile that Bradley can only be doing one.
Yes, you’d have the issue of the Bradley just waltzing up to your fortress and besieging you, but for the majority of the time you’re not going to be fighting the overwhelmingly rich wasteland lord with the trophy-tank (even if you’re another overwhelmingly rich wasteland lord with a trophy tank). You’ve, presumably, got lots and lots of things you’ll need to be doing. Guarding all sorts of stuff, patrolling the wasteland, terrorising your subjects, raiding your neighbours.
30 Toyotas is going to be far more operationally flexible.
There were technicals even without engines. Horse-drawn machine gun chariots used during the Russian Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachanka
I was wondering how different a technical is conceptually from, say, a zamburak (and they’re 17th century!).
As the article points out, tachankas were also used quite extensively by the newborn Polish Army – even in 1939! Though, at that point they were seemingly expected to be used more for anti-aircraft fire rather than frontline combat – where the ~800 tankettes they made would have replaced them. Unfortunately for Poland, tankettes weren’t much more viable than horse carriages by 1939 – and aircraft like Bf. 109 and Stukas flew too fast and often had enough protection around the cabin and fuel tanks to avoid being seriously damaged by ground fire from fairly light machine guns on those tachankas. (Though at least such fire still substantially interfered with accuracy and effectiveness of hostile air support, which is a lot more than could be said for tankettes.)
Moreover, the Wehrmacht ALSO used its equivalent, which it formally described as Infanteriefahrzeug If5.mit MG Zwillingslafette 36 (commonly shortened to just If. 5). That is, two horses pulling a wagon consisting of two parts connected by an axle. The front sits the commanding officer and the horse driver – the rear, the dual machine-gun mount (with anti-air sight) and the gunner. The whole thing even had automobile-style tires with metal discs and tyres! (To be able to go quickly on paved roads and provide smoother ride/firing platform.) It sounds unbelievable, but multiple scale kits of this exist – along with historical photos attesting to its combat deployment in WWII.
https://www.mbk-b2b.com/en/Portfolio/Infanteriefahrzeug-If5-mit-MG-Zwillingslafette-36-en
Really liked this post! I hesitate to leave this comment but I’ve now seen this both here and on bluesky so it seems like a genuine error…you seem to be using ‘hoard’ in place of ‘horde’ consistently.
Not being pedantic! If it was me I would want to know…
The part about accuracy reminded me of the book “Par le fer et par le feu. Combattre dans l’Atlantique. XVIe – XVIIe siècle” (By iron and fire. Fighting in the Atlantic) by Alexandre Jubelin. The book talks in particular about the transition from naval combat based almost entirely on boarding to combat based almost entirely on cannon fire, and the book deals in particular with the period when both approaches were still used.
The problem with boarding was that it was very risky, and the problem with gunfire at the time was that it was at best very imprecise. One example given in the book, from memory, is a fight between two ships where they shoot at each other for hours on end… then split up a bit awkwardly because they’ve run out of ammunition but nobody wants to board. Hours of shooting with no results.
With two important points: a successful hit can immediately sink a ship, so it’s still tempting to try and limit losses by shooting, even with little chance of success; and at sea, stopping isn’t enough to ensure good stability and be able to aim correctly, even (given that these ships don’t have turrets) it prevents you from being able to shoot at the enemy, so you have to aim while taking into account your speed, the enemy’s speed, and compensating for the ship’s roll, of course…
Yes boarding would be extremely risky. You’re gambling that you will win, and the other guy will surrender or that you kill them all.
I don’t know of any boarding actions where they mutually gave it up and went back to their own ships without a result. Getting disentangled once you’re on the enemy ship would be just about impossible. And the crews would know that.
On the other hand, shooting at each other until you run out of ammo and then splitting up is possible, and might not even give the captains a bad reputation. Particularly if the weather was bad.
If lack of fuel is a severe problem, might the use of camels for transportation be feasible?
Camels still run on water and grain, granted they get a lot better MPG, but their RPM and cargo capacity leaves a lot to be desired in comparison. Depending on the exact climatic and environmental conditions, some or all food and water for them would have to be brought along, and judging from the “naught but barren sanddunes” desert portrayed by the movies, that would seem to fall heavily on the side of “all”. That would feed into the same logistical constraints on non-mechanized transport discussed countless times on this blog- longer timeframes means more food and water required for drivers, handlers and camels alike, which means less space for actual cargo per camel, which means more camels, in turn demanding more drivers and handlers for a given level of transport. I have no idea what the actual size of a camel caravan needed to equal the logistical capacity of 2 guys in a truck with a full tank of gas and a couple jugs of water would be, but returning to camel would require a much greater societal and agricultural base to comprise and feed all those caravans. Also, breeding stock and a working knowledge of animal husbandry would have to be built up from a fairly small starting point, though it would be going on concurrently with a complete retrenchment of society to the near-subsidence agriculture around water sources seen in every other preindustrial desert society.
Going full Bedouin would be in the long run the better and ultimately the only choice, -even in a desert there’s a lot more water to be obtained from the sky and ground then there is gasoline- but while there’s still any gas at all in warfare at least the sheer operational advantage of “Hilux with a mounted machine gun, 4 guys with guns, a radio, and a couple jerrycans each of fuel and water” would dominate in the same way the Mongols did on the steppes.
“In part because those are both great movies and this gives me an excuse to rewatch them. Look, you guys made me watch Rings of Power; sometimes I get to have treats.”
Time to reveal one of heretical beliefs, but I think I’d rather rewatch RoP and I think RoP is bad.
I think it’s interesting from a vibes and setting flavour perspective how the three newer Mad Max properties (the two movies and the 2015 game) take the original films’ “Toyota War but punk and inexplicably BDSM-flavoured” warfare aesthetic and expand it into a weirdly aesthetically coherent cross of Wild West Native/Mongol cavalry hordes and early modern naval warfare. The War Rigs in particular go from the perfectly normal semi truck in The Road Warrior to being treated as the wasteland equivalent of galleons that have whole crews manning them and are fought over with boarding actions. Badlands Crew seems to just extrapolate from that to make it more or less just a naval warfare game where the ship is a truck.
The motorcycles are intended to say “horse” to the audiences hindbrain. I.e. these are steppe nomads, cowboys and Indians, etc.
Of course a motorcycle driver is going to be much less capable of shooting than a horseback rider would be, because the horse can drive itself. But putting horses in this setting causes a lot of other logistics problems since they don’t use the same fuel cars would.
As for armoring: I wonder how much more armor you would need on a fuel tanker over and above what it already has to contain the fuel, to make it more or less proof against small arms bullets? I’m not sure of the count of firearms in Fury Road, but the escapees cache seemed to be mostly pistols. Yes, that makes the accuracy problem worse.
The cars aren’t armored, or at most there’s some plates around the driver. They seem to work on the chariot model, and the fighting guy is completely exposed. Not too surprising since much of the fighting consists of melee or thrown weapons. Common firearms and ammo would make the cars un-survivable, and you would go back to making something like a WW1 film.
I suppose the food-growing could be high-yield hydroponics, which would allow for the area to be fortified. Certainly the area around Immortan Joe’s fortress doesn’t look like you can grow anything at all, even with irrigation.
Properly stored ammunition will last for decades, while gasoline tends to go off in less than a year. So for cars to work, you need to refine new stuff, while you probably can loot ammo caches for decades. You would also need to modify car engines somewhat. Lead-free fuel is more difficult to make, leaded gasoline needs a source of tetraethyl lead. You might be able to get diesel engines to run, but those are purpose-built – as far as I know you can’t modify a gasoline engine sufficiently to run on it.
The logistics don’t really make sense; they’re what looks cool on screen. The movies are also intended that much of the color and dialog aren’t necessary. There’s a cut of Fury Road available on Blu-Ray that’s in black and white. I suspect you could do it as a silent film too, with appropriate music. Piano by itself could work, but some sort of heavy metal band as backers might be better.
The audience doesn’t need to speak English to appreciate stuff blows up.
Have you considered that firing to hit the enemy might be a red herring? I think I read a couple of years ago in Nathalie Wlodarczyk’s “Magic and Warfare: Appearance and Reality in Contemporary African Conflict and Beyond” that magical practices were so important during the civil war(s) in Sierra Leone because most combatants lacked the training to fire their weapons accurately, and thus various kinds of magic (especially invulnerability) became important as a way to break the enemy’s morale when it was largely impossible to achieve this morale effect by causing physical casualties (since the combatants couldn’t aim worth a damn). Commanders gained reputations for being bulletproof by charging ahead on foot or motorcycles without being hit (see General Butt Naked next door in Liberia), and used this reputation to intimidate enemies into fleeing or surrendering. This also explained why the fighters basically got massacred when they ran into professional soldiers who actually aimed to hit the enemy, like the British intervention force. Thus the inaccuracy of fire from moving platforms might not be a huge issue when nobody had the training or incentives to fire accurately even on foot, with the emphasis being shifted to the noise and the spectacle of the fire for intimidation’s sake.
This doesn’t change the overall conclusion much, since I’d still agree that pickups and medium-sized lorries still make much better platforms to deliver manpower and “firepower” under such a tactical paradigm. But the result would probably have been much more colourful, with decorations like feathers, flags, and bright war paint in addition to the spikes so prominent in the genre’s visual trope.
The films more generally felt quite aware of the medieval literature as well, with Immortan Joe’s display of power by commanding his warboys to jump from a mountain clearly drawn from how the Matter of France depicts Rashid ad-Din Sinan at al-Kahf as The Old Man of the Mountain. The militaries also have a more accurate fyrd structure than even most fantasy, with semiuniformed retinues of retinues organized around clear bannermen and chiefs. I’d love to see an essay on the post apocalyptic genre as reception, particularly around the narratives of the fall of Rome, with A Canticle for Leibowitz standing as a pillar of the genre.
Another awesome piece. My one thought is that motorcycles would make for lousy scouts in general because you can hear them from miles away and you can see their dust plumes from even farther.
There’s really nothing in this hypothetical environment that wouldn’t make noise and dust moving at speed, and spotting/shadowing an enemy at all is more important than doing so stealthily. Bikes would still be more discrete than a full convoy, and if stealth was important riders could park in concealment and peek over a dune, or trail a convoy’s dust plume at far range using terrain and distance to stay hidden. They could even keep behind the convoy unseen by staying in the blindspot of its own massive plume.
> It takes a non-trivial amount of steel plate to stop even standard rifle calibers (5.56mm, 7.62mm, etc), as you can find any number of YouTube tests demonstrating. The upshot is that for a steel-plate defense, ‘safety’ looks to be more than a quarter-inch (closer to half an inch) and that’s quite a lot of armor, which substantial weight implications. In practice, a number of modern armored vehicles, like the M2 Bradley and the M113 APC use aluminum armor (on the Bradley, enhanced by laminate plates) at an inch thickness or more (aluminum is almost three times less dense than steel).
I would like to note that this passage is a bit imprecise with its terms. Yes, the videos are undoubtedly correct about the amount of STEEL it takes to stop a bullet. However, they do not show ARMOR but so-called “mild” steel. While it is, in fairness, pretty much exactly the kind of thing prospective warlords would be using, it also strictly inferior to anything placed onto purpose-built armoured vehicles since basically their inception (WWI armoured cars already using high-density steel grades), and I think the sudden jump to aluminum military vehicles undersells this point.
Thus, the aforementioned BTR-80 (and its direct, barely-different predecessors, BTR-60 and BTR-70) as well as the other lightly armoured Soviet vehicles like the reconnaissance armoured car BRDM-2 and the tracked gun tractor (not that it’s typically used for that purpose nowadays) MT-LB used a mere 7mm armour (barely above a quarter inch) across most of their structure, and that is still sufficient to reliably protect them against military-grade rifle-caliber bullets which are not specifically armor-piercing. Of course, this armor-grade steel is superior because it’s denser, which means that it is heavier per unit of volume – as already said in the post, BTR-80 weighs 15 tons (technically, that appears to be the figure for its modernization BTR-82, while the original BTR-80 is 13.6 tons – the difference is mainly because the newer version sports an autocannon (which it struggles to stabilize) instead of a “mere” heavy machine gun for its main weapon, as well as internal spall lining + shock absorbent seats to improve crew survivability vs. mines.) Point is, either figure is twice what the aforementioned Deuce and a Half weighs, with the difference largely down to those ~7mm as their dimensions are fairly similar. Sticking the same 7mm onto a War Rig’s ludicrous surface area is an unenviable proposal, with armoured trains probably the closest historical counterpart to something like that occurring in real life.
I might conclude by mentioning a notable real-life vehicle which did end up seeing combat while lacking proper armoured steel (instead, it was civilian ship-grade – not sure if that is softer or harder than the one in linked videos). That is the На испуг (“For the Sake of Fright”), which was made in Odessa in 1941 by sticking two layers of said steel (with wooden boards in between) onto a tracked agricultural tractor, and placing a turret made out of the same with two machine guns on it.
As their name implies, they (50-70 were made) were mainly expected to have a psychological impact, since it was not only weakly armored and armed, but also extremely slow with 7 km/h top speed (because of the attachments adding two tons of weight to the chassis, but also because tractor itself was never intended to move quickly while working the fields.) Yet, since Odessa was primarily besieged by the Romanian forces, who had few tanks of their own, it worked in at least one recorded instance where a sally led by these vehicles broke the morale of an artillery detachment and left the defenders with a decent number of trophy guns. This history probably makes the most notable vehicle of this kind (others include a similar tractor conversion made at Kharkov and the tiznaos of the Spanish Civil War.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_tank
(Ultimately, of course, the cold logic of superior numbers and logistics took its due and after two months, the siege prevailed, and most of these ended up captured and eventually used for training purposes. Then, many of the civilians who weren’t lucky enough to get evacuated in time were massacred, as Romanians were enthusiastic participants in the Holocaust, and Odessa was effectively the capital of Jewish life across Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. An estimated 10% of the city’s population was lost in the first week after the capture.)
Apologies if someone else already raised the point, but I think I can see why muscle cars and motorcycles might be preferred for escorts of the big war rigs.
A heavy truck – deuce-and-a-half, semi, whatever – has much lower power-to-weight than anything else on the field. They can get up to good speeds, but they take a while to do so, and they can’t stop or change direction easily.
Vehicles of similar low agility can maintain formation with it, but can reposition only at the cost of speed. Several war rigs following in line ahead, could not quickly redeploy to line abreast.
So for convoy escorts to respond to threats, they need to be meaningfully faster than the things they are escorting. An army that can hustle escorts from the rear to the front, to help repel an attack from the front, will have a substantial advantage over one that cannot.
A pickup-based technical might be insufficiently more agile than the war rigs. They can reach higher speeds and accelerate more quickly, but not that much higher, nor that much more quickly. A muscle car at the back of the convoy can zoom to the head, if needed, or can pursue fleeing enemies a good ways and still catch up to the war rigs.
In turn, that means raiding parties need a similar speed advantage. You can’t attack a convoy with a force moving the same speed as the convoy, unless you can pre-position ahead of them. Even then, if your raid fails, you want to be able to retreat – they will offer pursuit, but won’t stray too far from their war rigs, so to safely withdraw from a raid, you only need to outpace the war rigs.
(That said, I really liked your thought of “it’s more efficient to carry the motorcycles on trucks than to drive them”, and if I ever direct a Mad Max movie, there will be a dump truck that tilts back and pours out a squad of bikers, as a quick response force to an enemy approach.)
The apt comparison here, I think, is naval. Atlantic convoys were escorted by destroyers and cruisers. A cargo-carrying Liberty Ship could make 11 knots. A Fletcher-class destroyer could make 36 knots, and even an Evarts-class destroyer escort could make 19 knots or more. With roughly twice the speed, a handful of escorts could protect dozens of cargo vessels in the convoy, able to bring the entire force to bear on attacks from any direction, or be dispatched to chase down a submarine contact without losing the convoy it’s meant to protect.
Technicals still make some sense in this model, as close-in escorts. They would stay with the war rigs, even if attacked – maybe one at each end, a foreguard and rearguard, and maintain that formation to ward against split attacks. Or they might form the core of an impromptu counter-raid – a force broken off from the convoy, sent to chase the raiders back to their home and destroy it, but with the expectation that they would not be part of the convoy defenses, their return would come only after the convoy reaches its destination. And raiders in turn would use them if possible, as their heaviest weapon; but they may not be able to join the intercept on the convoy, instead forming a mobile base of support (and helping see off any pursuit or counter-raids, if the attack fails).
I also suspect that there is substantial *morale* implications. “Performing generalship” (as our wise blogger has said) is crucial in any society, and apparently in these settings, they don’t want big noble speeches, or animal sacrifices to ensure divine favor. They want the general to dress up like a BDSM enthusiast and drive some loud, impractical thing festooned in spikes and torches. Indian monarchs and their war elephants come to mind – not the most practical way to win battles, but the most practical way to win wars and remain king. So maybe technicals faded from use, evolving into the muscle cars or smaller war rigs, as better propaganda.
> in the unlikely event that anyone other than me plays Rage 2 (I played it at release, it was fine?).
Well, if THAT feels lonely, consider how Skyshine’s Bedlam’s players must have felt! That was a Kickstarter turn-based roguelite (a combination of FTL map with Banner Saga combat), which released only a few months after Fury Road and has a great number of similarities. In spite of a number of interesting ideas, the game ended up performing so badly due to bugs, imbalance, etc., that it ultimately got pulled from sale a few years ago, so nowadays, reading the Kickstarter is probably the quickest way to understand what it was meant to be like.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skyshinegames/bedlam/description
In fact, what makes it particularly fitting for this post is the focus on logistics, where running out of either one of the key resource was a rapid way to reach a gameover. In fact, it (apparently) featured a particularly cynical gameplay approach where the number of civilian passengers on your Dozer at the end of the game was effectively your endgame score – because the player is frequently tempted to exchange some of those same passengers for the key resources, with deeply unpleasant implications, so the more you can hold back from it, the harder the game becomes, and vice versa.
Additionally, since it was Banner Saga-based, all the combat was dismounted, either outside the Dozer with the player occasionally able to use support weapons onboard – or worse, boarding actions against your Dozer, where external weapons are obviously unavailable, and a defeat means game over, rather than “merely” losing the fighters you committed to that one fight. Thus, it also averted the pitfall of ludicrously accurate firing on the move, even if it probably never really intended to.
Further, it is interesting to see repeated mentions of Badlands Crew without no acknowledgement of the somewhat older and seemingly far more popular game with the same premise (Mad Maxian world as an excuse for players to design whichever murder vehicle strikes their fancy), called Crossout. Granted, that one is online multiplayer only, but it actually had a much older single-player predecessor called Hard Truck: Apocalypse (or Ex Machina domestically.) The latter probably has the only trailer in existence which features both trucks firing machine guns and launching blocks of unguided missiles at each other AND a scarab rolling its ball of dung, so there’s that.
https://youtu.be/I58jmN8WmNI
A Toyota Hilux might make 22-27 MPG, but that’s probably not with 1,80Th0 lbs aboard. I would assume that the “inefficient” motorcycle MPG is, obviously, with a rider aboard. So once you load all the motorcycles and riders into the Hilux, the fuel usage comparison won’t be as favourable as stated.
I’d also wonder how well a Hilux’s suspension would stand up to racing over desert with that full 1,800 lb load of stuff aboard. Not that great is my guess. Yes it can be fixable, but you are now stuck out in the badlands. Advantage: you are now at a halt and can fire accurately! Disadvanage: you are now dead in the, er, water?
The problem that you will likely really have, more than a few years after the apocalypse, is tires. They just don’t last forever in storage, and I expect being kept in the hot wastelands will dry rot them even more quickly. You may be able to make some kind of replacement tire, but it’s going to have the durability of a tire from the 1910s or 1920s at best…..back when motor cars came with at least one spare tire, and often two, just in case. And good luck throwing your homemade tires on a Hilux and loading it up to 1,800 lbs and then trying to make time through the wastelands.
That being said, the last time I saw any of these movies was at a repertory cinema that had advertised Mad Max and Mad Max: The Road Warrior as a double bill. After we promised to buy stuff from the concession stand, they threw in Beyond Thuderdome as the third feature. I enjoyed them. I’m not sure I care about the CGI modern movies with no doubt superhero-movie influence.
Fascinating read as always!
I wonder how much the design of the war rigs draws (consciously or accidentally) from armored trains – large, multi-part vehicles with fighting platforms on different points along the vehicle.
I am not a car fanatic, but have seen Mad Max commentaries from them. Using muscle cars may be a logistic strength – the common (old to us) V8 is not the most efficient, but will run on lower grade fuels. It also is low pressure and so is forgiving to non-stock replacement parts, even dury rigged or hand made parts. This resiliance is one of the things that made them popular – fast loud and cheaper to repair is a good mix. This may also be why AK series rifles are used, also simpler to produce rugged and still effective.
It is also noticable that they have worked to make the cars technicals, with mounted weapons and small fighting platforms. I would also note they do focus on close fighting (an explosive spear has limited range), and the motorbikes seem to be used for suppressive fire and to deliver the rider, as as soon as they can hang on to a war rig or car the bike is abandoned (no doubt to be collected latter).
The weakness of the transport war rig like the tanker to small arms is likely less of a problem as capturing them appears to be the goal when assulting them. Damaging the cargo (especially fuel or munitions) would be a negative (potentially explosively). The fighting positions may be more to obscure the exact position of the defenders, mount heavier weapons and to give a place where they are less likley to fall off between fights. Given the limited accuracy of gunnery on the moving cars and the obscured defenders would lead the attacker to spray and pray, and lower the density of hits helping survivablity despite the lack of protection. A rifleman on solid ground would be in a position to deduce the defenders position and shoot accurately throught the thin armour but from a fast moving car on an off road course it is a very much harder.
As for the effective shooting of the paragliders, they all use full automatic fire giving them the best chance of a hit as they are moving reletively smoothly at a comparable speed to the rig. They do however burn through a lot of ammo to get this result and are no doubt an exceptional drain on resouces (especially the octoboss with is 8 AK mount).They are air capable and that is vanishinly rare and not one that most would make defences for. Striking alone they did loose lot to the war rigs superior stamina and fire power, but along side ‘conventional’ mad max support could well change the course of an encounter.
Kalashnikovs are only more practical to produce in a factory setting with industrial stamping machines, assembly lines of workers/robots doing only one step of the process each, and all. They’re actually more expensive and more difficult to produce in small workshop settings than the AR-15/M-16, and I doubt Bullet Farm really has the kind of capacity needed to make Kalashnikov-style designs viable.
Thing is, in the Mad Max’s written lore (it exists!) the Bullet Farmer himself is LITERALLY (a) Kalashnikov! Yes, really!
https://madmax.fandom.com/wiki/The_Bullet_Farmer
Now, is there any real reason to assume that a Major in the Australian Army in 1970s-1980s would have ever been in the same room as Mikhail Timofeevich who invented the actual weapon, even if they did happen to be related?* Of course not! However, we are clearly meant to assume this universe runs on nominative determinism, and just like how WH40K Ork craft go faster if they are painted red and become luckier if painted blue, him sharing a last name with likely the most-famous arms designer of the 20th century would bestow upon him the ability to replicate his work by osmosis!
(As I already commented, I’m unimpressed by this approach and think that giving them the M-16s, Carl Gustavs, etc. they would have actually had most access to would have been the bolder choice, no matter the dissonance it might have invoked in some viewers. Besides, it must be said the new films’ viewers weren’t all that numerous either way: Fury Road’s theatrical run was barely profitable and commercially, Furiosa was outright one of the biggest bombs of 2024 – second only to Joker: Folie à Deux (IMO, both are of similarly meh quality and the latter is about as strongly underrated as the former is overrated.)
* Interestingly, the fictional Kalashnikov and the real-world one being related isn’t actually that implausible – Mikhail Timofeevich himself had seven surviving siblings (along with nine who died in the early childhood – being aware of the preindustrial demographic patterns amongst Russian peasantry does a lot for one’s understanding of their support for the Revolution) and if you consider the family members of his paternal uncles as well, etc. then the odds of one of them becoming rich enough to get to Australia are still very low (early-20th century Russian emigres tended to be dominated by various nobility) but aren’t nil.