Saturday, April 16, 2011

Protection

There has yet to be a point where I'm not surprised at the ingenuity and creative force of those who have survived along with me. Granted, some out-of-the-box thinking is a downright requirement for surviving as long as we have. More and more lately people are coming up with better or new ideas to solve problems.

One big issue we've run into is armor. At first we started cobbling together anything we could find to keep the people that had to go out into the open safe. We've used heavy martial arts Gi, chainmail, baseball pads...anything and everything we could find that worked.

Since it's a slow news day, I thought I'd share an idea that Jamie had. Jamie is our lead scout, and lately he and the scout units have had to travel pretty far and wide to look for useful items. One place that we've pretty much left alone was the small industrial complex on the other side of town. Most of what's there are factories that don't really have anything we can easily use. We've been over that way a few times to salvage metal from some of the machines along with plexiglass (which always comes in handy).

Jamie went over the the factory where Jess (and myself, years ago) used to work, before The Fall. The place was pretty empty of zombies, so Jamie and his crew had a look around.

He found a hundred little things we could use at the compound. Not because the rest of us didn't notice them, but because his mind was looking at otherwise normal objects from a totally different point of view. Where the rest of us ignored the dozens of boxes of plastic granules, Jamie saw a trove of incredibly useful materials.

Those tiny bits of plastic, ignored by the rest of us, might mean life for many of us.

Jamie hauled back a truck full of them, along with all of the technical manuals he could find. In them are everything we need to know about the materials in question. Jamie isn't a specialist in designing armor, but after a year of doing it and teaching others to...Jess is.

She and all her students are buzzing about it. All of them are in the other room right now, chattering ideas at one another about how best to design the molds. Jess knows a lot about this stuff--she worked with it a lot longer than I did. She knows how strong it is, how light it is, and how much more versatile it is than the bulky chainmail we've been using.

That's the big one. Being able to make molds to mass-produce identical blanks for the various shapes we'll need is critical. We can outfit a lot of people with armor that will be lighter, protect better, and best of all...it won't look idiotic.

To understand why this is important to me, look back at my post titled "Homemade Hero". Once you've armored your body with toilet paper and parts of toilets, you get an appreciation for good looking gear.

I'm rambling. I know this is a bit out of the blue and chaotic, but I had to share. We're all really excited about it. That alone should tell you how eager for a distraction we are.

No comments:

Post a Comment