THE HALL

[Gamer]

We're 3 years into a post-apoc world (a plague has wiped out 99.9 percent of humans) and we the survivors have formed into small and widely scattered groups.
For a while we lived off tinned food from deserted supermarkets and basic medicines from pharmacies but everything is dwindling and/or going mouldy by now, so we're moving out of the city (which was dark and unheated and rat-infested) to set up a small community somewhere in the country.
Hence this thread, which I hope will let us have fun discussing exactly how we plan to stay alive, almost like a role-playing game, it'll cover hunting, fishing, agriculture, food preparation and so on, but only in a general "fun" way, as there are already hardcore threads that go into the nitty-gritty details.
Our group consists of about 15 people (6 men, 6 women and 3 kids of assorted ages from 5 to 75), none of us are related and all of us lost our families in The Plague.
Okay, first question to start this thread-
Do forum members think this place (which we shall call The Hall) would be a good place to settle in?

Needless to say it stands empty because the Plague took the owners (we'll bury their dusty bones out back with due reverence)
It's in a temperate zone, is spacious and in excellent repair, water can be drawn from the river, and fish from the river and sea (and sea-salt).
Assorted cockles and mussels etc can be gathered from the shoreline, the woods and fields will provide small animals and partridges etc for meat, and the fields will provide crops, and small vegetable gardens will provide veg.
Have I overlooked anything?

[Morning Sunshine]

too many ground floor windows - entry points for bad guys who want what we have.

On that note, while I like trees as much as the next person, the trees behind are too close to the house.  again, a good place for the bad guys to hide.  Also fire could be dangerous

[Gamer]

too many ground floor windows - entry points for bad guys who want what we have.
On that note, while I like trees as much as the next person, the trees behind are too close to the house.  again, a good place for the bad guys to hide.  Also fire could be dangerous

Thanks mate, you're a natural to be one of our Security Team..
Yes, there are bad guys around, they ate each other in the cities and now the survivors are venturing out into the countryside to look for new meat such as us!
No place is perfect but The Hall's advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages, so to some degree we'll have to "adapt, improvise and overcome".
For example we could board up all the downstairs windows to stop people eyeballing us, and we can all live on the top floor, the place has got plenty of rooms.
If they do smash their way in downstairs we can pick them off as they come up the stairs. (You could double as a Weapons Instructor and give us firearms training, I've never fired a gun in my life)
As for the trees providing cover for bad guys, the upside is that they won't be able to use long-range sniper fire, they'll have to get within spitting distance and if they can see us, we can see them.
Needless to say, we wouldn't parade around at the upper windows to give them easy targets.
The fire risk from trees could be eliminated if we chop down the ones nearest the Hall, we'll need firewood anyway. The rest we can leave standing as long as possible to shield us from the winter gales off the sea..

[archer]

looks like it has some good grazing land, that branch of the river would be used for power generation i expect.
lots of trees for wood.
the bridge looks pretty good for defense.
should also put a guard towser near where the river splits (next to the power generation area).
is the ivy covering windows? if so, pull it down. might as well pull it down anyway, fire hazard and ppl could possibly climb it.
stone is cold, what is the inside like? modern so it stays warm?

[Mr. Bill]

A survivor shows up with solid proof that he/she is the legitimate heir and legal owner of The Hall, and tells you to leave.  What do you do?

[David in MN]

A survivor shows up with solid proof that he/she is the legitimate heir and legal owner of The Hall, and tells you to leave.  What do you do?

Fart in his general direction. I've seen the movie...

[mountainmoma]

A survivor shows up with solid proof that he/she is the legitimate heir and legal owner of The Hall, and tells you to leave.  What do you do?

Ask them to join you. They cant survive alone either

[DrJohn]

What is the elevation of the property in relation to the waterways?  Might be able to build irrigation canals and such if it's not too high! But on the downside what is the flooding potential?

[Hurricane]

What about hurricanes? No more satellites to tell you they're coming.

You will need a watch along the shore for ship-based threats.
Your cooking/heating smoke will be visible for a long ways out, at times.

[Gamer]

..stone is cold, what is the inside like? modern so it stays warm?

Warm as toast with that big roaring fire in the grate and the warm mellow glow of candlelight..
And not everything is stone, check the wooden floor and wood panelling.
Also, because the outside of the Hall is built of good solid stone, we get an extra warm fuzzy feeling from knowing people can't break through the walls unless they've got a tank.
We'll call this "The Living Room", it's on the ground floor and is where we hang most of the time for chat, discussion, banter, and to play card games, Monopoly and Donkey Kong etc before going up to our separate bedrooms for beddy-byes, but if anybody wants to stay down here and doze off on a sofa or chair in front of the dying fire it's up to them.
Notice we've boarded up the big windows to deter snipers and to make it harder for anybody to break in, leaving just a small gap at the top for daylight.



Below- this is before we boarded the big windows up, obviously we couldn't leave them like that..

[Gamer]

A survivor shows up with solid proof that he/she is the legitimate heir and legal owner of The Hall, and tells you to leave.  What do you do?

That's your job mate, you can be our resident Diplomat and try to talk him into joining us like Mountainmoma suggested, she can flutter her eyelashes at him to back you up..

[Gamer]

What is the elevation of the property in relation to the waterways?  Might be able to build irrigation canals and such if it's not too high! But on the downside what is the flooding potential?

Good thinking, you can be our Navy Chief of Staff..
As insurance against floods we can keep a small rowing/sailing boat on the upper floor so we can get out if we have to.
The Hall stands on ground that's a few feet above sea level, but we learnt from geography books that the area has never been prone to flooding, and even if it is we can retreat to the upper floor to avoid getting our feet wet until the water subsides..
 

[Gamer]

What about hurricanes? No more satellites to tell you they're coming.
You will need a watch along the shore for ship-based threats.
Your cooking/heating smoke will be visible for a long ways out, at times.

1- Hurricanes will still hit us whether we know they're coming or not, but our solid stone Hall will no doubt withstand them, it's been standing for 200 years and has never featured on "Destroyed in Seconds"..
2- Some of us will be down at the beach every day collecting shellfish from the rockpools and will hopefully spot incoming raiders and shoot a few before falling back to the Hall. But thankfully this is not a Hollywood movie and the countryside is definitely not crawling with too many raiders/zombies/mutants/aliens, they're an ever-present threat but only a relatively minor one.
3- Yes smoke from our cooking and hearth fire giving our position away is a problem but there's zilch we can do about it (sniffle)..

[CharlesH]

How many people are actually around?  0.1% of 327 million is about 32 million and I’d think that means less than 600,000 in this particular state.  Those people would not all have survived the last three years.  Some got “ate up” literally, but some, maybe many, just died.  Young children, elderly, those requiring electricity for medical care, those who couldn’t cope losing everyone they knew and committing suicide, those getting food poisoning, etc.  What kind of human threat does this leave in our area?

[Mr. Bill]

That's your job mate, you can be our resident Diplomat...

OMG NO!  That's too much like being a moderator!

[LvsChant]

Assess the foodstock and plan for winter... any domesticated animals around? Chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, dogs?

[mountainmoma]

How many people are actually around?  0.1% of 327 million is about 32 million and I’d think that means less than 600,000 in this particular state.  Those people would not all have survived the last three years.  Some got “ate up” literally, but some, maybe many, just died.  Young children, elderly, those requiring electricity for medical care, those who couldn’t cope losing everyone they knew and committing suicide, those getting food poisoning, etc.  What kind of human threat does this leave in our area?

.1 % of 327 million (327,000,000) is not 32million.

It is .327 million, which is 327 thousand  (327,000)

[CharlesH]

Thanks MM, without calculators I’m toast in this new world.  So 327000 distributed across the country means even fewer people in this area, especially after what was probably a rather large (on a percentage basis) kill-off of the plague survivors in year 1. 

[mountainmoma]

Thanks MM, without calculators I’m toast in this new world.  So 327000 distributed across the country means even fewer people in this area, especially after what was probably a rather large (on a percentage basis) kill-off of the plague survivors in year 1.

in this new world, I can do math..... I can also teach it to well behaved young people who want to learn, if i had the time between repairing everyones clothes, making soup, and keeping the little ones out of trouble....

[mountainmoma]

Thanks MM, without calculators I’m toast in this new world.  So 327000 distributed across the country means even fewer people in this area, especially after what was probably a rather large (on a percentage basis) kill-off of the plague survivors in year 1.

% symbol means /100 ( read as over 100 or divide by 100)( which is why it has a / and two zeros, % is short hand for /100), /100 means whatever number preceeded the % sign as the numerator, top number, in that fraction with 100 as the bottom number, such as 1% means 1/100. In simple terms, when you see the percent symbol, it means divide by 100.  An easy way to divide by 100 is to move the decimal point over two places ( 100 has two zeros, the % symbol has two zeros), so that 1% x 327,000,000 ( 327,000,000 x 1/100 is 327,000,000/100) , you would move the decimal point over twice ( which direction you ask ? Well, you are dividing, so you are making this number smaller ) in this case 327 with 6 zeros after it becomes 327 with 4 zeros after it 3,270,000.

In the example here, we had .1/100 which is (1/10)/100   this can be thought of in many ways, but one way is to take the 1% of answer and then take 1/10th of that  -- move the decimal point one more place ( 10 has one zero) 3,270,000 x 1/10 is 327,000

[Gamer]

..How many people are actually around?..

We just don't know, but we can get an idea from the fact that our little group consists of a mere 15 people (6 men, 6 women and 3 kids of assorted ages from 5 to 75 out of our home city of 1 million, that's all we've been able to put together since P-Day (Plague Day) 3 years ago, just 15 out of a million!.

What happened on P-Day was that like everybody else in our city, country (and possibly the world), we went down with a fever and crawled into bed where we lay tossing and turning in sweat-soaked delirium for several days, then we woke up and found our family and neighbours dead because they unluckily hadn't the level of immunity that we had.

Thankfully the water was still running in those days, so we were able to stagger to the kitchen tap to re-hydrate ourselves.
The electricity, phones, TV and radio stations were all dead, so we got in our cars and drove around our cities looking for other survivors, tooting our horns as we went, and every few weeks somebody would run out to flag us down, so little by little over the months our group slowly began to increase.

At first things were easy, we simply lived in a nice deserted house in the city, living off the food and bottled water from deserted supermarkets, but after a year or so the food began to go off and the water was running out.
Also during our trips to the supermarket we now and again caught sight of the occasional furtive-looking person dodging out of our sight, and some were carrying rifles, we half-jokingly called them "zombs"

Sometimes too, we'd hear shots ring out from somewhere in the city but whether it was aimed at us or whether it was zomb groups shooting and eating each other we don't know.
All we did know is that we then agreed we should move into the countryside to hopefully live securely and self-sufficiently, so we drove around looking for a country property, and The Hall seemed as good or better than most, so here we are, we moved in a few days ago at the start of this thread..

Below- This first episode of 'Survivors' (1975) mirrors what happened almost exactly, a butterfingered scientist drops a flask of plague germs in the intro, then people begin dropping like flies.
An especially powerful bit is at 28:50 when Abby wakes up from the fever and finds her hub dead on the sofa.
At 32:00 she puts on her coat and trudges round her village looking for other survivors.

PS- How do you post vids in the forum, all I'm seeing on my monitor is this line of text instead of the youtube picture, but hopefully it'll work if you click on it- 

https://youtu.be/zAyjkaFYnzE

[CharlesH]

We could get an idea of people in the area by looking at stores in the area and seeing how much they’ve been picked over.  An empty gun store would be a bit ominous... But, based on what I’m hearing the human threat seems smaller than I thought.
 
  Thought 1.  Risk mitigation.  Post-apocalyptic books seem to ignore this.  We should regularly consider potential risks and work to mitigate (not eliminate...) the most severe ones.  The army had a good (albeit painfully time consuming) method for this.  Looking up information on composite risk management can tell you all about it.  I’d pay particular attention to mitigation of risks to our health.  Minor events that would require a quick trip to a clinic today could be life threatening in this scenario, so let’s think about how we minimize the risk of those kinds of things happening to us.
 
 Thought 2.   We should search for heirloom style seed stock.  It’s already been three years so seed viability may be dropping fast.  Let’s put some stuff in the ground as soon as we can.  Protein seems fairly available from the sea and river, but it would be nice to scout out the area and see what we have in the way of traditional livestock that has gone feral but could be domesticated.  I’ll bet we find hogs, but wouldn’t it be nice to run across some chickens and a cattle herd with some lactating cows!
 

[LvsChant]

This scenario reminds me so much of the novel Earth Abides. One thing I always felt really sad about the premise in that book was the complete failure to educate the children of the next generations. I could not understand that at. all.

So... to put an emphasis on the importance of education, I think we should also immediately begin holding homeschool lessons for the children in our group, even if it doesn't seem to be the most urgent... unless that habit and emphasis is placed for the next generation, the knowledge base we take for granted will be lost to the new generations, who will never have experience the wonders of technology when the entire world 'worked'.

[mountainmoma]

This scenario reminds me so much of the novel Earth Abides. One thing I always felt really sad about the premise in that book was the complete failure to educate the children of the next generations. I could not understand that at. all.

So... to put an emphasis on the importance of education, I think we should also immediately begin holding homeschool lessons for the children in our group, even if it doesn't seem to be the most urgent... unless that habit and emphasis is placed for the next generation, the knowledge base we take for granted will be lost to the new generations, who will never have experience the wonders of technology when the entire world 'worked'.

yes. And my previous post was wrong, as I or any of us, can educate the kids while we work. Most is oral, math, history, morality, science concepts while we are cooking, gardening, mending, all of these we can talk while we work.

[jerseyboy]

Fun thread.

So many ways to go here.  Are there any fruit or nut trees in the area? What about berries?  What about infrastructure/fencing to keep animals in or out.  Livestock shelters?

We need new seed stock like was said before.  We have to start growing things and saving seeds.  We need to propegate fruit trees and get an orchard going.

We need a greenhouse for year round growing.

Okay, we are surviving, what about propagation? Why is everyone going off to their separate bedrooms?  We need farmhands. Lots of them

What about communication? Are there any solar panels around (did we get the hydro power working)? Ham radios? Antennas? shortwave listening radios? What is happening in the outside world?  Wouldn't it be a shame if we were living in the 18th century while people 100 miles away have their power plant working in their city with 50 people and 10,000 head if cattle?

Jerseyboy

[Gamer]

We could get an idea of people in the area by looking at stores in the area and seeing how much they’ve been picked over.  An empty gun store would be a bit ominous... But, based on what I’m hearing the human threat seems smaller than I thought...

Yes, a group of zombs might not ever turn up, or they could turn up tomorrow, which is why we'll go armed at all times. What sage words of divine wisdom can you give us grasshopper?



Your comment also raises the dilemma of what we should do ourselves plunder-wise right from P-Day til now?
I mean, as soon as we woke from the fever, should we have gone round all the local gunshops and systematically carted away everything we could lay our hands on, handguns, rifles, shotguns, ammo, knives, sharp sticks etc mainly to stop other people getting it?
Same applies to foodstuffs and bottled drinks, should we have grabbed loads of stuff for ourselves, or left some for any other poor schmucks who might need it?
 

[Gamer]

We should search for heirloom style seed stock.  It’s already been three years so seed viability may be dropping fast.  Let’s put some stuff in the ground as soon as we can.  Protein seems fairly available from the sea and river, but it would be nice to scout out the area and see what we have in the way of traditional livestock that has gone feral but could be domesticated.  I’ll bet we find hogs, but wouldn’t it be nice to run across some chickens and a cattle herd with some lactating cows!

Are there any fruit or nut trees in the area? What about berries?  What about infrastructure/fencing to keep animals in or out.  Livestock shelters?
We need new seed stock like was said before.  We have to start growing things and saving seeds.  We need to propegate fruit trees and get an orchard going.
We need a greenhouse for year round growing.
Okay, we are surviving, what about propagation? Why is everyone going off to their separate bedrooms?  We need farmhands. Lots of them

Okay guys, below are a few stock pics from the internet showing what we're aiming for, our group is 15 strong, so we'll tailor our efforts into providing enough food to feed ourselves and have a nice surplus to see us through the winter. We'll also scout the area for berries, nuts, loose livestock etc.
We'll have a nice little veg garden out back as below (this one says "English" but it could also be anywhere in any temperate zone in the world)
Question- what do you think the most efficient manageable size of our spread should be, 1 acre or 5 acre?
(PS- I've photoshopped coils of barbed wire (red) around the farmhouse to stop cheeky zombs coming up trying the door handles, and we can also put wire around The Hall)- 

[Gamer]

This scenario reminds me so much of the novel Earth Abides. One thing I always felt really sad about the premise in that book was the complete failure to educate the children of the next generations. I could not understand that at. all.
So... to put an emphasis on the importance of education, I think we should also immediately begin holding homeschool lessons for the children in our group, even if it doesn't seem to be the most urgent... unless that habit and emphasis is placed for the next generation, the knowledge base we take for granted will be lost to the new generations, who will never have experience the wonders of technology when the entire world 'worked'.

yes. And my previous post was wrong, as I or any of us, can educate the kids while we work. Most is oral, math, history, morality, science concepts while we are cooking, gardening, mending, all of these we can talk while we work.

Incidentally, our group won't have a "leader", we'll be a democracy all chipping in with ideas for discussion and friendly debate, then going with the ones the majority likes best..
Regarding education, our kids will no doubt find it fascinating to see pics of the Old World in books (planes, ships, trains etc) and will be asking us "what was it like", so in the interest of balance, can I just chip in and suggest we don't forget to tell them that it wasn't all sweetness and light, and that it could be a (gulp) very scary, smelly overcrowded place at times..



-

[Morning Sunshine]

Incidentally, our group won't have a "leader", we'll be a democracy all chipping in with ideas for discussion and friendly debate, then going with the ones the majority likes best..
Regarding education, our kids will no doubt find it fascinating to see pics of the Old World in books (planes, ships, trains etc) and will be asking us "what was it like", so in the interest of balance, can I just chip in and suggest we don't forget to tell them that it wasn't all sweetness and light, and that it could be a (gulp) very scary, smelly overcrowded place at times..

foolish.  One person will emerge as a leader.  A good leader will sometimes not be seen as THE leader.  But there will be one.  As long as everyone in the group feels heard, it will work.  But remember, a pure democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep looking for dinner.  If one person's opinions are always voted down, he/she will feel unappreciated.  And that will lead to resentment and contention.

I, for example, am NOT pleased with this house, location.  I feel it is too vulnerable to attack by water or land.  To vulnerable to natural disasters.  I also think it is too big for our needs.

there are only 15 of us.  Big spaces are modern day luxuries we could not afford to heat or take care of.

I like the garden and animal plans.  Can we keep the animals in what used to be the garage?  People used to sleep in the same room as their animals to protect from predators, 2-legged and 4-legged.  The garage would be close enough.


don't forget, in our foraging - dehydrators and canners.  Jars, lids, etc.

[Gamer]

Incidentally, our group won't have a "leader", we'll be a democracy all chipping in with ideas for discussion and friendly debate, then going with the ones the majority likes best..

foolish.  One person will emerge as a leader...

Good point..
People generally need a good strong leader to give them a warm fuzzy sense of security and it remains to be seen who'll emerge as The Leader, heck it might even be me!
After all, as a game-player I've already managed to survive on the Armed Assault multiplayer game servers for 3000 hours against human opponents, my strength lies in tactical and strategic planning, here's a screenshot of me leading some of my squad in the game, I tell them-

"Fight with your brain first and your weapons second, and stick with me if you want to live!"