[quote=@Chairman Stein] I hate to argue but I will at least defend myself somewhat. On the issue of population you also must take into account my regional span. I see some other players with considerably less land with almost equal population count. I won't be stating names but for regions on the east coast with considerably more urban and industrial targets you would think they suffered significantly more than those on the West Coast, with only places like Seattle and Portland being significant targets. Regardless I'll bump it down to perhaps 7 million for fairness sake. [/quote] Whether or not you're a primary target to a nuclear attack doesn't really matter in this instance when the majority of deaths all over the board would be caused by illness or starvation or the crumbling national (or even international) infrastructure that supports the modern population has been removed from underneath the community as a whole. A MAD scenario wouldn't be the thing that kills the most: it's the following effects of social collapse, the loss of food production or even distribution, and the loss of the medical infrastructure that'll start dropping people like flies. And when you've stated the Canadian territories are largely empty and depopulated it doesn't make sense when your nation is basically at full population for Washington and Oregon. [quote]Yes, Tractors are very complex equipment. However you must take into account the fact that there is a 50 year span from the point the war began to now. So you would have to assume that all human knowledge after the war simply ceased to exist for your argument to fully work. Plus some of the most technological companies in the world have headquarters and offices in Oregon, Northern Cali, and Washington. So I'm almost positive that at least one barn still stands in the entirety of the Northwest with a operational tractor and that it could be taken apart and modeled into a crude replica over the course of 50 years.[/quote] Knowledge about the given equipment=/=capability to manufacture. Just because corporate headquarters are in your given region doesn't mean that you will be able to, since all headquarters are is a centralizing area for the corporate administration. The headquarters aren't involved in the manufacturing process themselves and their corporate body is more than likely totally divorced from the manufacturing process. For example: John Deere has plants primarily deeper into the Mid-West and these only handle small pieces. Otherwise the rest are in China. You can't really claim new production of new parts since that requires a significant amount of milling and tooling and dying which would be beyond the capabilities of the post-apocalypse societies. You can really mold a drive-chain the same way you could a rifle barrel. The matter gets more complicated over-all when the nation would have better things to put their efforts towards and the individuals within as well. A lack of mechanization demands more people to go into the field to try and acquire as many goods as they can with more effort. We're not producing the same amount of food goods as we once were. [quote]Now on the issue of Fuel I'll agree with you overall. While IRL there are a lot of different military documents about fuel consumption in the case of disasters, I can't back up anything from a Pacific Northwest sense. If we were discussing say the U.K I'd have a more backed argument. So I'll concede on that issue and simply say that agriculture is predominantly through horse-drawn plows. [/quote] State-mandated fuel consumption rates hardly matter when the state it self is gone, and any group with enough guns can lay siege to any location with a fuel pump.