so mad max was wrong...

[Mishmash]

i didn't know that gasoline go bad over time pretty quickly,people will do nothing with gas tanks several decades after apocalypse.
soo,what's a realistic main fluel in a post apocalyptic setting,aside from horses/brahmin/other animals?

 

[Hassknecht]

Probably some sort of biofuel, like bioethanol made from sugarcane or variants of biodiesel.
Methane or even hydrogen could also work, if you can make the tank for it.

 

[Illuminati Confirmed!]

Nuclear power. All the pussies whining against it in modern times will probably be wiped out.

 

[Mishmash]

Nuclear power. All the pussies whining against it in modern times will probably be wiped out.

trains or caravans that run with nuclear energy? in fallout could work but fallout also got plasma guns and wacky mutations (and even a lot of aliens thanks to beth!)

 

[Illuminati Confirmed!]

Most trains today run on electricity (which would be provided by nuclear power plants), and for maintenance purposes, there's always coal.

 

[Risewild]

Redacted Post because I stupidly posted something thinking it was a different thread .

Solar power could work somehow, we even have solar power being used in Fallout New Vegas in a couple of places.

So all they need is a way of having electric cars and manage to keep the solar panels well maintained I guess.

 

[Hassknecht]

Nuclear power. All the pussies whining against it in modern times will probably be wiped out.

That would depend on how much infrastructure is left. Nuclear power isn't exactly trivial.

 

[Spacemunkey]

All the vehicles in Mad Max run on the tears of those who have forced the Lord Humungus to unleash his dogs of war.

 

[DVL]

Didn't the first movie have a refinery?

 

[Risewild]

Didn't the first movie have a refinery?

I can't remember much since I haven't watched the old Mad Max movies for years now, but I think the first movie still had a "modern civilization" and Max was a police officer, so I think all the Mad Max movies happen right from the collapse of "modern civilization" to just a few years after, so gasoline could still be good I guess.

Also I think there is a Mad Max movie where they raise pigs for the methane and that is what they use to power their vehicles and their entire settlement.

 

[Hassknecht]

Didn't the first movie have a refinery?

That was the second movie, The Road Warrior, and it was a major plot-point. The first one was actually pre-apocalyptic, so it makes sense that there's still fuel around.
The third showed that at least Barter Town had a new fuel economy using methane produced from pigs, and I think Fury Road also mentioned different bases with different functions like ammunition production and, yes, fuel refining.
So I guess using Mad Max as an example would be kind of silly as fuel and energy production was always kind of a big plot point in the movies after the first one...

 

[Juza The Cloud]

Solar panels made from compressed sand.

 

[SuAside]

i didn't know that gasoline go bad over time pretty quickly,people will do nothing with gas tanks several decades after apocalypse.
soo,what's a realistic main fluel in a post apocalyptic setting,aside from horses/brahmin/other animals?

Mad Max 1 showed a society in collapse. They still had production capability at that point, so only scarcity was a problem for fuel.
In Mad Max 2, Lord Humungus was attacking a pumping & refining station to be able to acquire more fuel. Again, easily explained & consistent.
In Mad Max 3, most of the fuel was gas. Specifically methane & byproducts, produced from biowaste. Again, easily explained in-universe.
In the newest Mad Max, they speak of a "gas town" with which they trade water for fuel. Gas town is probably a pumping station & refining capability. I'm not a particular fan of the latter, but it's explained in-story once again.

As for realistic fuel post-apoc? You can run an engine on a huge amount of types of fuel. From wood (yes, wood), over coal & alcohol to nuclear power.
The question is, what resources and knowhow will be available in your specific post-apocalyptic setting?

 

[Mishmash]

Mad Max 1 showed a society in collapse. They still had production capability at that point, so only scarcity was a problem for fuel.
In Mad Max 2, Lord Humungus was attacking a pumping & refining station to be able to acquire more fuel. Again, easily explained & consistent.
In Mad Max 3, most of the fuel was gas. Specifically methane & byproducts, produced from biowaste. Again, easily explained in-universe.
In the newest Mad Max, they speak of a "gas town" with which they trade water for fuel. Gas town is probably a pumping station & refining capability. I'm not a particular fan of the latter, but it's explained in-story once again.

As for realistic fuel post-apoc? You can run an engine on a huge amount of types of fuel. From wood (yes, wood), over coal & alcohol to nuclear power.
The question is, what resources and knowhow will be available in your specific post-apocalyptic setting?

mmh,what about the oil is finished and cars use scrapped motors re assembled by cavaniers, mechanics and such?

 

[Hassknecht]

Oh yeah, wood gas. That one's probably the best one for a realistic setting where trees and wood are still plentiful.

This is a german car shortly after WW2. Due to fuel shortages during the war quite a few german cars and busses were fit with wood-gas generators to produce wood gas on the fly, but wood gas generators were used in other countries, too, especially in rural areas. And you can fit basically all biomass available in there, it's like a Dieselpunk Mr. Fusion. Hm, maybe you could even gasify corpses with those? For the more evil raider guys...

C'mon, that's basically 46% Mad Max style right there.

Granted, it probably wouldn't work with fancy electronic modern engines, but those would be fried, anyway...

 

[zegh8578]

In my work-in-progress I am imagining large scale solar power exportation, but I´m not sure how this would function practically. It is far futuristic, though, so I may just resort to some techno-babble, but I would prefer to base it on something real. I imagined batteries at first, but my god how cumbersome (although household gas is often sold in huge, cumbersome canisters, but industrial-scale energy would obviously require something more practical than batteries). Massive fuckin electrical cables, spanning entire continents? Don´t we kind of allready do that?

I like the idea of wood as motor fuel, although alcohol or kerosene and such are also perfectly plausible, and in use even today

 

[SuAside]

The problem with alcohol is that to produce it, you generally sacrifice food. Something often scarce in most post-apoc scenarios.

 

[DVL]

I was going to mention charcoal. Not exactly high-tech, but easy to make if you have lots of wood and a kiln.

 

[Mishmash]

in a post nuclear setting every single mile of coltivable land is too precious to not make a farm from it. so no wood gas.
but i really how that car looks. some other pa fluel that can work with a visually similar engine?

 

[DVL]

in a post nuclear setting every single mile of coltivable land is too precious to not make a farm from it. so no wood gas.
but i really how that car looks. some other pa fluel that can work with a visually similar engine?

*raises eyebrow*

Why? The one thing you have when there's no population is that there's too much land and not enough labor to cultivate it.

In the sort of apocalypse where you would have trees and forest ecologies around it still makes more sense to use it for logging, hunting and whatnot. You're not running out of overgrown farmland anytime soon.

Heck, by Fallout New Vegas, most things get done by irrigation in NCR. Jacobstown could be valuable for lumber. It's a mountainous area and it's not as if the New Vegas region or the NCR don't already have farms. If anything, an intact forest ecology of any kind is something you want to preserve. Nobody is running out of blasted desert to cultivate.