Quote from Jeanette on Dec 8^th, 2018, 9:14am:

 
Skills will be used as on a "Need To Use" Basis. Thus First Aide would rarely be used. On a regular day, how often do you use your first aide kit? Hardly ever if I am right. Hell, I for bandages in my kit that is pushing over 5 years old. Even if you apply it to others, how often are you going to rescue somebody? Again, hardly ever. Though a useful skill, it will be hardly used. Car repair skills will be used more than First Aid skills. But you need to be proficient in those skills.
 
And like I said, you should be able to operate first aide with 1/2 of the things you have. You need to get to the very basics of basics, for you are not going to pull out a medical tricorder and wave it over a patient to rescue them. You need to be able to diagnose and preform what is needed with what you got.
 
I'll give you the basics of basics of car repair.
1) a car needs: Fuel, air, spark & electricity and compression. 75% of all car repairs involves fuel and/or air intake. 10% involves spark, and 15% involves compression.
2) You need tools to be able to, at minimum, swap out car parts.
3) You need skills to be able to identify car parts and test them before you swap them out.
4) You need to be able to test car parts and replace them as needed.
 
I'll give you a simple example: Battery keeps dying for no apparent reason. For sake of simplicity, car is stock, nothing changed or added that could have created a short in the electronics.
 
If the battery keeps dying, then it is not being charged. Other Symptoms include dim head/tail lights and slow flashers. Why? could be one of 2 things: Bad regulator, bad alternator. But which one it is?
 
Simple tests:
Alternator - turn car on, let the engine run for a bit to warm it up to slow idle. Turn on lights and radio. If the engine dies, its a bad alternator. Reason: Alternator is not pushing out enough juice to run everything.
 
Since many car companies have the regulator built into the alternator, to replace a regulator, you simply replace the alternator.
 
Regulator - take a multi-meter and measure the power from the battery and disconnect the battery and measure the power from the wires. It should be 12V. Anything less than 11V of more than 15V, should get the regulator replaced.
 
In older cars and trucks, the regulator is external to the alternator. On the old VW Bugs, I never seen a regulator replaced. And they have generators to make the 12V (up to 1975, alternators after '75, but some people upgrade older bugs with alternators), unless one is pushing the car with a powerful audio system, a stock VW electronics is hearty enough to last 30+ Years without an issue. Alternators tend do go bad about every 5 years. This is true for most cars.
 
Changing the alternator is simple, though different for all cars, the idea is the same: loosen bolts, move alternator to loosen belt, remove belt, remove screws, remove alternator. Installing one is the reverse of removing it, with the addition of using a crow bar to make sure the alternator is making the belt tight before tightening the bolts. This fixes 90% of all electrical problems with a car. The other 10% is harder as you have to chase down a short in the system.
 
Reading books like "How to keep your VW Bug alive for the complete idiot" teaches this and more advanced problems/repairs.
https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Volkswagen-Alive-Step-Step/dp/1566913101/
https://www.amazon.com/How-keep-your-Volkswagen-alive/dp/0912528176/
These two will teach you to fix just about any car as it covers the basics of repairs. If you want to go deeper, you need to get books specific to other cars/car groups. You can also do basic Boat mechanics with it.
 
In a Bug Out Situation, depends on how you bug out. I would never recommend to go out on foot or alone. You would need a vehicle to get there faster than on foot, and provide shelter against the elements. Thus being out there alone, you need to be able to fix what problems you may have with your vehicle, and have the tools to fix those problems. I will dare say that yo need some thieving skills too, so when you run up against abandoned vehicles you can take what you need from them: Fuel and other things.
 
What other skills would you need? Making skills, being able to make or adopt parts that would normally would not fit and make them work. Example: fitting a Chevy engine into a Ford. Sounds impossible but it is not. You have to see how things line up and you need to secure that engine in place where it normally would not belong (ie: Engine Mounts). Example II: How to fix PC Parts on a component level. Easier for older PCs. But one part that fails within 10 years is the electrolytic capacitor (those things that look like little cans). The rubber seal fails on them within that time and they short out, and can damage the board if the fluid inside spills onto the boards. Here you need to replace the capacitors with ceramic (disc) or Tantalum (Yellow Bead) capacitors. These will last 20 - 30 years. So why not have them in the first place? Cheap manufacturing - using the can caps, they save $5 - $10 a board, and with a 10 year use/shelf life, they think its OK. But people like me have computer systems going back to the 80s, and the older systems last longer because they hardly use can capacitors. So if you can solder and desolder, you can replace the caps and bring back many dead systems.
 
What skills you have and what tools you have to back up those skills can make or break your survival out there when you bug out.
 
Quote from Jeanette on Dec 8^th, 2018, 9:14am:

 
I only used being a singing actor as an example. But let say - Web Programmer. The job market in NYC is so flooded with Web programmers out there that there is a glut of 500 people for every 1 job out there. On top of that, schools are charging so much to learn such skills one can learn on their own if they sat down and read a book. One such school I see, The Flatiron School (Mid Town NYC) is charging $15,000 for a 9 month course! $15K for skills where there are no jobs in. What a waste. And those jobs are protected so if a vacancy opens up, chances are that a friend of a friend will get that job and not you, lets say, even if you are more skilled and qualified than the friend is.
 
The old saying is "Jack of all trades, master of none" is not true. being able to do a little of everything, one is able to fit into more areas of work for one's survival. Being able to change tire like you stated, hell, that is more than most "millennials" can do as they can not change a tire on average.

Quote from Jeanette on Dec 12^th, 2018, 9:52am:

 
If you are thinking that I may have prophesied another event, I will have to say that as crazy as some of the players are, they all learned the lessons of history: the use of nuclear weapons will not be used, especially against civilian targets. Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the only two civilian targets to hit by a nuclear weapon. In the 1990s Persian Gulf War, military targets were bombed with small nuclear devices like those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to my friend who was on both the Enterprise and later the Nimitz as a Weapons Specialist, several mission runs were nuclear against military targets for he armed the places with the nuclear devices himself with his crew. All sides learned that if you are underground, you could be spared the destruction of the bomb. This bought back the the block busters bombs and introducing the MOAB - the Mother Of All Bombs; a 1 mega-ton Block Buster Bomb with the power higher than most small tactical nukes.
 
In learning those lessons, though we will be at unease with each other, no one is going to press the button for a long while.
 
Seriously - I want you to think about this...
 
South Africa is going through a revolution where the Black Africans are kicking out the Minority Whites by any means necessary, including crimes: arson, robbery, rape and murder. They are killing farmers and their families to get back the farm lands that they own. It is the Chaos that the RPG had underwent in some form.
 
But, South Africa is a Nuclear World Power, having created and tested their weapons in the 1970s and stockpiling them. With the White government deposed, and the Black government doing what they want, and now in control of those nuclear arms, they are now a larger threat to the world community than any crazed fundamentalist Islamic Nation. Yet nobody is doing anything about it.

If nuclear weapons will not be used, how will Damascus, Syria be leveled?
 
As for the chaos in "After Chaos" I explained it before. Essentially I had to make things fit into the world that The Nobody created. I never got an answer to the question of what would happen if a time traveler (in this case, the Texas Spirits) stopped an event that was supposed to happen. My best guess is we would have the world that The Nobody created.
 
Understand that not every place is like this in the world of "After Chaos." Let's take North America since that is where we will be during the entire RPG. In North America, we have the small, independent nation of Charlton, the Republic of Texas, Penn Springs (located somewhere outside of Texas) and the towns along the Charlton Railroad that have an economic relationship with Charlton. How you want things outside the stated areas is fine with me.
 
Jeanette Isabelle

I have been guessing; before we go any further, I'll come out and ask: What will happen if a time traveler (in this case the Texas Spirits) stops an event that was supposed to happen?
 
I never said anything about Charlton needing to be rebuilt.
 
The Texas Spirits own a few cash cows: the power company Zero Point Energy, the Charlton Railroad and Electric Airlines. They also own a computer company and a few retail chains. I don't foresee a future economic problem for them.
 
Jeanette Isabelle

Quote from Fernando on Dec 29^th, 2018, 4:19pm:

That is what I was thinking. Is it possible to create an apocalyptic world by stopping a nuclear war?
 
That may depend on the mindset of the people. I'll use a random opinion to illustrate this: "These tree-hugging aliens have gone too far. They planed everything from the beginning to get us to use trains and buses instead of a car, it's harder to get a new appliance or TV because they are always refurbishing old ones, they say use less electricity in the summer and now they are interfering in the middle east."
 
Quote from Fernando on Dec 29^th, 2018, 4:19pm:

Stagnation is a problem. How do the Texas Spirits see things? Their interest is in protecting the environment and one way of doing so is "get it right the first time." They are not replacing old equipment with new because what they are using is "as good as it is going to get."
 
As we have discussed, there have to be exceptions such as (as you pointed out) the Texas Spirits can't change the history of the microcomputer industry. So, as we discussed, they build an expansion card with a 32-Bit 6502 and 2GB of RAM that will fit an expansion slot of an Apple II. Presto! We now Google, shop Amazon and watch YouTube on an Apple II.
 
Quote from Fernando on Dec 29^th, 2018, 4:19pm:

Remember, the Texas Spirits had no control over the weight, purity and stated value of this international currency.
 
Quote from Fernando on Dec 29^th, 2018, 4:19pm:

Charlton is a mixed economy. Though the Texas Spirits own the power company and railroad, private enterprise is encouraged in almost every other sector. If a private company wants to make furniture, for example, they would fit in perfectly.
 
On the other hand, the Texas Spirits do encourage people to go green. They don't do that through laws that go against what they believe. Instead, they help people to save money. For example, why buy a new pencil sharpener when a person can bring in their old pencil sharpener and get the blad replaced for less?
 
Quote from Fernando on Dec 29^th, 2018, 4:19pm:

I'm confused. How is the Texas Spirits only servicing themselves? The Charlton Railroad goes to many places, though not everywhere, throughout the North American Continent. Zero Point Energy has many power plants across North America. Again, not everywhere. Electric Airlines flies overseas. The Texas Spirits has retail stores in the railroad towns and, in a few cases, away from the railroad.
 
Jeanette Isabelle