Post-WW2, I would expect a decent number of people should be able to reverse-engineer a breech-loaded just from knowing about them, given a few years. That the local area has reverted to muzzle-loaded guns strains my SOD.
I'm guessing the apocalypse happened not long after WWII (within two decades?), if there weren't enough nukes for complete annihilation. (Anyone know how many nukes it takes to get to the center of Mount Rushmore?)
I was going for more of "a couple of centuries" after the apocolypse, not just a few generations. Notice that a character
doesn't believe in France, which suggests a lot more than simply not knowing how to make a decent gun. Also, breechloaders are in production, they're just very expensive because of the high level of workmanship required. They use muzzleloaders a lot because it is extremely easy to turn those out with very little in the way of tools. What is extremely rare is repeating guns such as William's fancy revolver and rifle. (Didn't include that primarily in an effort to avoid my tendency to infodump.)
What happened to the wealth of automatic weapons left after the Battle of Keystone? I think there should be at least a line mentioning it.
The implication that I was trying to get across was that the ammunition was even rarer than the guns (the local tinkers, at least, are just barely able to replicate 1880's pistol cartridges.)
Or carried by bandits, who seemed to have an unlimited supply. Although a rare problem, these raiders were becoming increasingly dangerous.
A) Please do not start paragraphs with 'or.'
B) Your tense is off. If the raiders have not been seen since the Battle of Keystone, they had been becoming increasingly dangerous.
A:) This is a matter of style. I'll begin a sentence with "or" whenever I want to.
B:) I thought it was clear enough that William doesn't believe the Battle of Keystone to have destroyed the raiders, or done much more than set them back a bit. To the average fringer, they "had been" a threat. To William, they "are" a threat.
along with her mother's and her own shorter gun. They were already loaded, as was the brace of pistols that they retrieved from a kitchen drawer. Both had always hated those two guns.
It took me two re-reads of this paragraph before I realized that they hated the brace of pistols, not their own guns.
I see your point, but how would you have worded it? I can't see an alternative that isn't really, really clunky.
Is the protagonist of our Bay12-dark post-apocalyptic interdimensional action/adventure a twelve-year-old girl? This should be interesting.
Assuming that Remurtha doesn't pull a timeskip, or switch focus to another character, or something of that sort.