This is a scrap of setting that might be useful in the future.
There was a Great War. Who the antagonist was, or who was at fault, or who the leaders were are all lost, and all the Great Colleges have small departments of harried historians who argue what they think are facts from the past, one they cannot even begin to explain.
But the detritus of this Great War remains.
Imagine if one day all the gasoline on earth simply evaporated. And every effort to refine oil to make gasoline was of no avail, it would simply turn into vapor and escape the atmosphere. Every car on the highway simply rolled to a gentle stop. There would be frustration, a focus on fixing things, a mad rush for electric cars, but eventually, people would move on. Imagine living in that world a couple generations after that. You’re somewhat aware of what these big rusting lines of shells were supposed to be, but what do you make of a car air freshener? Or a tire iron? Or a tire? Or a drive-in movie theater? Or a car wash? Or a race track? Or these long trails of no longer maintained asphalt?
The Great War might have been between two forces of equally equipped nations, maybe even a civil war, that fractured into more and more different factions. Like if during WWI the French army actually succeeded in mutinying against the government, and the German Army went “yeah us too”, and those mutinies had mutinies, and some squads and companies just left and became bandits or joined the other side, until whatever killed all the technology happened and the conflict was over because all of the tech that ran the weapons was gone, along with any idea of why anyone was fighting in the first place. Like a society ruled by the guillotine until the day people realized they could just stop feeding the guillotine.
Detritus remains, never in the way it was originally used. You might see a small urchin child wearing a black ballistic helmet too big for him, but you’re just as likely to see them used as decoration or soup pots. A laser rifle has the optic lenses pulled out to make a wind chime that scatters the light in a beautiful way. Almost everyone carries a Ka-Bar style combat knife. Books of ciphers and return calls have the codes ripped out to be used as journals. For every husk of a tank dotted in the fields and towns, maybe one in a thousand has a working turret with enough charge for a couple of shots. Every one in ten thousand has enough in the charge battery for a cross country journey. But there are thousands for you to try, abandoned, shoot-through throughout the land. You throw CDs.
The war used lasers and batteries, but there’s something missing to make it work, a compound or element no longer found in nature. Maybe it disappeared naturally, or maybe some doomsday device removed all traces from the world. Batteries still hold their charge, but can’t be charged again. Tearing apart the devices to reverse engineer them reveals nothing (so far).
That’s what it’s like for the people who live in the Long Rim: they understand what a knife is, and they understand they’re putting helmets to a different use, but explaining mass combat of thousands of men maneuvering in tanks with cannons and close quarter laser rifle combat in massive cities where millions of people used to live? That’s out of the scope for most of these people living nowadays.
The only exception to the rule is submachine guns. These ancient factions were worried that some kind of EMP device or some other catastrophic event would destroy their laser weapons. That they needed to have backups in case everything went dark. They were right. In abandoned outposts and underground armories all over this Long Rim, there are bunkers with rows and rows and rows of short black carbines. They’re calibered in something in between .22 and 9mm: something not big enough to kill with one shot (unless unlucky) but not something so small that recoil isn’t an issue. They were old fashioned, almost antiques to these Great War factions. They’re space age to the locals, who are still enjoying horses and bows. Everyone knows where you can find some guns, ammo is a little more scarce, with most commonly bought ammo usually reloaded with a different style of chemical compound. Never used bullets are almost a currency unto themself, but are somewhat hard to find outside of cracking an old armory.
As for patches and jackets to put them on, I’m sure there were enough left after the war. Like, a gang of bikers all using a logician company patch as their sigil, or someone wearing a vest made up of the same patch, over and over and over, or a historian collecting patches and putting them in tiny boxes for his research. People sewing bootleg patches, and new custom made patches, ways to identify and individualize.
Just a little writing to keep the blog moving.