Have any of you been watching "Into the Badlands?"

Wacky baseless fan theory:

The Badlands are 500 years ahead of us. Fallout is 250 years ahead of us.

What if they're the same? What if the Badlands are what happened to the Fallout world in another 250 years?

There's lots of great potential here.

What if Azra is a city that somehow thrived?

What if the "Dark Ones" are the result of a fallout style experiment?

Barons are servants as much as overlords. What if their liege is from Azra, and rules from a Vault complex? This knowledge would be secret, passed down from Baron to Baron, but since Barons kill each other off so much, maybe they forgot? Maybe Azra sends out kids like Sonny and MK with those medallions as reminders of who is really in charge?

Maybe reuniting the whole country at once was too hard, so regional baronies were established by Azra, a city in the NCR maybe, to help keep things stable until such time as little regions ( baronies ) could be reintegrated into the new Union?

I watched a couple of episodes. I can believe in a world overrun by zombies but a world without guns I can not.

The reason people invented guns was so you don't have to be a master sword fighter.

Guns are certainly still around, I'm sure.

Gunpowder, though.. that's probably long gone. It won't last 500 years, and these people probably forgot how to make it. Heck, most of them seem too stupid to even understand the concept of bullets.

The art of making swords for actual combat and not just wall hangers I would imagine would be long forgotten in whatever apocalypse before everyone forgets how to produce modern gun powder.

There are the recreational blacksmiths.

I have met some, but they don't have easy access to the best metals or equipment to make fighting swords.

I would guess there are a lot of people in the United States that know how to make guns, or at least how to maintain them so they would last a very long time.

True, but who here knows how to create gunpowder.

Here, not many, but I know several people who recycle their brass and load it. Not all that unusual even in California. Go to a truly rural state and its probably near common

I didn't actually know that. That is pretty cool.

Books on how to make your own ammo can be bought pretty much anyplace that sells guns and ammo. One of these days I am going to get around to learning how to reload myself. I know many people who could teach me.

I have had some issues with reloads in the past so it has put me off somewhat on using it. I know people who are really good at it and some that are very inconsistent to put it nicely.

I do. Or at least I used to.

Back when I was a kid in the back-when times of the 90s there were some books floating around, like the Anarchist Cookbook and others like it. At least one of them had a recipe for homemade gunpowder. I don't remember it for reasons of I'm not a nutbar who would bother to remember that kind of thing but I do remember the basic ingredient was graveyard dirt.

Sulfur, Saltpeter, and charcol, black powder.

Yeah that sounds about right. It had something to do with the minerals left behind in dirt when things rot or something like that.

So the general consensus with this fan theory is that this is more like fan fiction?

Black Powder is easier to make then what is used to day which is smokeless gunpowder. So even if you could make black powder, you are still a long way off to having smokeless powder.

So it isn't as simple as mixing up Charcoal, Saltpeter and Sulfur.

But still I can't see an Apocalypse where firearms have been completely forgotten.

Where in the world does one even find saltpeter, anyway?

Back to the Badlands, one of the plot points is that somewhere along the line some Brotherhood-of-Steel like group went around and seized all of the guns and destroyed them after some huge war. The hippie-dippy "guns are bad" philosophy was taken to an extreme and backed up by force. Gun ownership was a crime, and I suppose they killed off anyone they could find who knew how to make bullets.

I'm sure they missed a few. Why have a "there are no guns" premise unless someone out there has some?

That kills the fan theory. If the BOS decided that they would have to fight the Enclave, the Institute, the Minutemen, the Legion, the NCR, the Great Kahns, and other smaller tribes and factions. Even if several factions teamed up they couldn't do this act.

Sultpeter is found in some caves, graves(I think) and some other places.

Take a way the guns and people just kill one another with blades. Guns are gone but what about explosives? I see there are cars, so what about Tanks, Planes and so on?

It is a dumb concept. There are clearly warring factions that want an upper hand over one another and yet they don't invest in firearms? Hell a bunch of vehicles with explosives would do more damage then a bunch of guys with swords.

I am going to guess that there is some super power city out there that will crush anyone who uses firearms. Those Brotherhood of Steel like group or some such thing.