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ok been crunching some numbers regarding survival rations.. i found an online copy of an old nuclear war prep manual from the 1987, and while the section on food might be slightly out of date (the UN studies from various famine situations has adjusted the lower dietary limits of 'starvation' somewhat upwards since then) the numbers seem to match up to what i can gather from works about nutrition in aid programs, so i'm gonna assume that the numbers are good, and they'd just represent a ration with a little less margin than it originally did in the 80's.
link to the book: http://www.oism.org/nwss/s73p904.htm
sadly the only ebook versions on amazon are reprintings from later years which cost a fair bit.. but for RPG purposes the '87 version is probably sufficient. and hey, the PDF copy is free at least.
summing up the food section, it looks like the average person would need at least 2 pounds of food a day to survive with reasonably good health. oddly the suggested supply list towards the bottom of the section only adds up to about 1 2/3rds pounds.. probably an oversight by the writer, since he brings up the 2 pounds thing several times earlier in the section.

generalizing, i translate the listing to: 1 pound grains/starch 1/2 pound protein (beans/meat/milk product) 1/2 pound fruits and veggies (fresh or canned)
filling in the missing couple of ounces with fruits and veggies for vitamin reasons.
i would presume this would constitute the minimum diet in a survival scenario like chaos earth or dead reign. and that particularly energetic jobs (like say, doing lots of physical labor or running around being a soldier) that the ration would not only be somewhat larger but also include more of the Protein portion instead of carbs.

thoughts?

(note.. i am still parsing the section on water, but you are looking at 5-6 pints for drinking a day, with at least half a gallon per day if you include cooking purposes and basic hygiene. personally i would argue 1-2 gallons per day is more ideal, especially when factoring in hygiene needs, but it is nice to have a lower end value on hand.

I would argue that the food amounts should be based more on calories rather than mass.
plus there is storage mass, and prepared mass.

because dehydrated and freeze dried food tends to be really compact and or light for the portion amount

calories are a deceptive way of measuring it though, because calories only apply to the energy the food gives, not the actual nutrition.

as an example, you can supply the daily caloric intake with 6 chocolate bars and 3 bottles of cola. so if a survivors find a 36 count case of candybars and three six packs of bottles, he's got food for a week, right?

but that food has no nutrition. no protein, no complex carbs, no vitamins or minerals. just lots and lots of sugar/simple carbs. good for energy, but lousy nutrition. someone who eats that sort of diet for a long period (more than a couple days) is going to start having serious trouble with their health, as their body cannibalizes itself to get the raw materials it needs to sustain their metabolism, and they are going to have a real problem dealing with injury since there is no spare raw materials to repair the body.

the amounts in the list i posted are based on studies looking for the best minimal values for nutrition. that is, the best mix of proteins, complex carbs, vitamins, etc. to sustain a person longer term with the least food. personally i think it errs on the side of carbs a bit much, but most of the carbs it recommends are heavy in gluten and other plant proteins so i suspect it evens out.

real world emergency aid foodstuffs tend to split the difference.. they are calorie dense, but basically amount of fortified peanut butter and crackers.. Usually a a heavily processed and fortified nut spread and a fortified compressed grain bar. lots of calories.. but also plenty of the raw materials people who have been starving for long periods need to start repairing their bodies. useful since many of said people have been malnurished so long that eating anything complex will put them into systemic shock.

for people who aren't extremely malnourished, but just need food aid, it tends to be things like the Humanitarian Daily Ration, which is a 2 pound MRE like product supplying both the caloric and nutrition needs through a vegetarian (and kosher/halal) diet or just shipments of basic grain, beans, powdered mil, and so on that are divided up into portions to meet the nutritional needs.


and yes dried stuff can change these requirements, but it is easier to say that the weights given are post-reconstitution than it is to try and explain what amounts of protein, carbs, vitamins, etc. you need to track in addition to the caloric intake.

On the flip side you can do some pretty interesting things if your willing to sacrifice taste.
It is possible to basically live on supplements for quite a while. Which is one reason why I would suggest that one of the first places to raid would be your local GNC or equivalent. All that protein powder and vitamin pills and stuff can supplement those chocolate bars to actually let you survive for a while.

One survivalist book I have read has this as this as 1 man/year of food
300lbs hard, red winter wheat
100lbs honey
100lbs powdered milk
8lbs of salt
The meals would get hugely boring...but you could live off of that for a year. If you can supplement that with foraging (either canned food, game, plants or what have you) you could do okay.

The big issue is that most food only has a shelf life of a year or so before you start running the risk of food poisoning. The stuff that has a longer shelf life (MREs, freeze dried/powdered food, oils, honey) are likely to be used up by survivors looking for food before they are truly needed making it harder to keep stocks of them around.

I'll have to take a second look at pet kibble to see how it stacks up to those figures....

taalismn wrote:I'll have to take a second look at pet kibble to see how it stacks up to those figures....

mm
ok a bag of dog food I happened to have (diamond premium adult food) 40lb (18.14kg)
nutrition information
crude protein 26% minimum
crude fat 18% minimum
crude fiber 3% maximum
moisture 10% maximum
DHA 0.05% minimum
Calcium 1.2% minimum
Phosphorus 1.0% minimum
Zinc 150mg/kg minimum
Selenium 0.35 mg/kg minimum
Vitamin E 150 IU/kg minimum
Omega-6 fatty acids 3.0% minimum
Omega-3 Fatty Acids 0.5% minimum

Calories 4319 kcal/kg (435 kcal/cup) Calculated Metabolizable Energy

as a feeding guide for adult dogs its:
5-10lb 1/2-3/4 cup/day
10-20lb 3/4 -1 1/3 cup/day
20-30lb 1 1/3 -1 3/4 cup/day
30-40lb 1 3/4 - 2 1/4 cup/day
40-60lb 2 1/4 - 3 cup/day
60-80lb 3-3 1/2 cup/day
80-100lb 3 1/2 -4 cup/day

so based on the calorie content the dry dog food kibble in that brand (bag) a day of calories would be just under 1/2 kg, (based on 2000 cal/day)

and with something like dry dog food as long as its kept dry and cool, it can last for years, the best by dates are actually the expiration date where it starts going stale, and then gradually starts loosing some of its nutritional value.

I mean we all know the "expiration date on some "food" like twinkies is a joke, those things are so full of preservatives that they would still have ~90+% or their "nutritional value" after about 100 years they might be hard and taste worse then they already do, but they wouldn't poison you.

most food is actually safe to eat for a while past its sell by dates, its just that a lot of it starts going (or tasting off) but as long as the container isn't compromised (or bulging) you can consume it.

edit added the size of the bag.

the problem with kibble is that it is formulated for dogs, so most of the vitamins and mineral ratios aren't optimal for humans. i also question whether you could actually get enough protien and carbs from it in the right amounts. i suspect you'd have to eat substantially more than the guide for canines would call for. plus it often has stuff that in humans can cause some health issues for humans. you might be able to survive off petfood if you are really desperate, but it certainly isn't ideal for long periods.


as far as shelf lives go, i have a link for that.. https://web.archive.org/web/20121119065 ... shelff.htm
generally dry goods will stay edible for a long time as long as they stay dry, canned goods will stay edible for as long time as long as the can remains intact and sealed. obvious flavor will change, and you might lose some nutrient value on really old stuff.

it is likely the deep freeze conditions of the current timeframe in Chaos earth (where even 3 months after the start, the climate remains 20-30 degrees colder than normal for a region's winter) will help extend the shelf life of some items. (though the weather and damage to locations might ruin others)

plus is is probably safe to assume that the canning and storage methods of the 2090's might extend shelf lives. we've already seen some advances in this area, what with things like irradiation, better preservatives, and so on.

I loved the study and shelf life information but I'm not sure if shelf life is really the biggest issue. It is unlikely that any person, even the most insane prepper, would have more than say 5 years of food supply and given the population the US is likely to have, projections are 400 to 500 million, and how fragile food chains are, what are the odds that there will be any real food supplies to find after a year or two.

My interest is in how much food someone would need to survive and how much space it would take to up. I had to do these calculations years ago for Phase World, and I found information from NASA and one of my fathers outdoor/gun magazines. This is similar to what I have used recently to get decent size and weight numbers for emergency rations.

I have also wondered how much emergency rations NEMA would logically have to feed refugees and soldiers. How long would this last and where on earth would they get more?

except that the kinds of extreme conditions we see in the core book only last a few weeks, and appear to have largely cleared up by the time of "CE:Resurrection" (about 3 months after the cataclysm started, that is, April-May), something that is currently confirmed (if indirectly) in the Raw copy of the Psychic Scream. whether that remains in the final version is undetermined yet, but i suspect it will. it's still cold but the storms and ash are largely gone. (both probably have become intermittent, with patches of relatively clear weather in between)

by April-May the survivors should be able to start using agriculture to a limited extent, especially if using greenhouses. Hydroponics and indoor gardening using pots, planters, and grow-tables will have been viable since the cataclysm started, and if started in say, January when the reality of the situation starts to kick in, should be starting to produce useful results in April-May.

so i highly doubt that food chains have completely collapsed. disrupted some certainly, especially by the influx of alien critters, not not gone.

I take a mid road stance on the food chain/farming thing.
We know that the food chains don't completely collapse because if they had there would have been a heck of a lot more catastrophic effects (no possible survivor states at all for one thing!)

However, we also know that they had a mini-ice age so farming is probably going to suck for a while due to limited planting time/harvest time lack of proper seed stocks (I mean sure you can plant cold weather crops... but if your seed stock is for a clime 30* warmer your hosed), and lack of a lot of core agricultural material (fertilizers, weed killers, properly trained labor, experts, draft animals, farm machinery). And then there will be issues with things like invasive species and the rest.

THAT said, we know that some crops do survive, enough for some of the material in the book to become relevant (I won't go into details due to the NDA).

So you are likely to have some farming, but it will likely be small scale hit or miss agriculture for the first few years at a minimum. As the learning curve is solved, and better supplies are made available, and the mini ice-age ends things will start to normalize leading eventually to the current situation of massive large scale crops everywhere.

OK, I have not read Resurrection in it's entirety and I have only glanced over Psychic Scream but if the major effects are gone in just 3 months that is a major re-imagining of the coming of the Rifts. This is supposed to be the Apocalypse, not a mere disaster.

The Yellowstone super volcano erupted. That alone would darken the Earth for years, alter the climate and drastically reducing crop yields. This will bury a dozen states in 1 to 3 feet of toxic ash eliminating agriculture for a decade.

Add to that the East Coast is gone. Chicago and St. Louis are shall we say inaccessible. Space is cut off and the satellite network is severely disrupted at least so no GPS. Now we could talk about the need for fresh water, good luck when the water systems are clogged with ash, or the need of advanced fertilizers from chemical plants that would have a hard time functioning under 3 feet of ash.

Now, I think in the Golden Age there would have to be advanced systems in place to increase food production. In the real world we know that because of depletion of aquifers, population increase and climate change that there will have to be some major improvements in agriculture or we're all screwed so have to imagine that in the world of CE they have some pretty impressive food production.

Back in '92 when I first ran the ARCHIE campaign I created a map of his bunker and I included this huge, intricate, hydroponics area that could almost a thousand people. Pre-Rifts tech.

2098 Earth has to have an incredible complex and efficient system for providing food to a population that is most likely to exceed 12 billion and that system is almost certainly going to be incredibly fragile. Why wouldn't it be they are just coming out of the "Golden Age" why waste money and resources on strengthening a basic system like that.

My last point is simply story. This is the Apocalypse. We know that in North America most people die. We know the supply chains collapse because by the time of Rifts there gone. CE is like the Halo game Reach which had the tagline "from the beginning you know the end" because you know you are going to loose. We know NEMA fails. They become mythical Neemans by the time of Rifts so at some point, they run out of resources and they, and most of the people they protect, will die. I just think it makes sense that those are going to be at the beginning.

O think you misunderstand what I said. I said cleared up. Not vanished.
That ash is no longer falling does not mean that the ash that fell before is gone. That the blizzards are no longer constant does not mean it isn't still very cold. That the clouds have thinned out does not mean everything is perfect.

And no, Yellowstone would not 'darken the earth for years.' It would generate ashclouds over the great plains for several weeks while it erupts, but then they would clear up as the ash finished falling. because eruptions that produce ash clouds don't last terribly long. Usually measured in weeks. Adding in the other volcanoes would not extend this period much at all. Especially since each would be on a different eruptive cycle after that. (Eruptions run in cycles. A period of activity, then a lull(often of several months), then another period of activity, etc. each time getting weaker. Til the energy is spent and it returns to relative dormancy),

It would however plunge the world into a cold period, due to its aerosols screwing with the atmosphere. But we already know that earth is looking at decades of ice age type conditions, based on history sections in the rifts world books.

Also, ash actually gives a boost to agriculture, since it brings minerals to the soil. Some of the best agricultural areas in the world are due to volcanic soil. Yes there would be toxins but they are short lived, usually only lasting a couple months before water action leeches them from the ash and soil.

But there is no reason to assume the kind of extreme scenario you describe occured. Because we know stuff survives. Rifts earth three centuries later is basically the ecosystems of today with some alien additions. In the kinda of scenario you describe, nothing of earth ecosystem would make it. Earth would end up colonized entirely by alien species, earth life having far too little surviving to compete.

Will people die? Yes, because civilization is disrupted. Medical care will not automatically be available. Shelter from the cold is not always a given. Food will be in short supply until the survivors can set up means of production locally and adjust to the new climate, and the yields are going to be low due to the short growing seasons caused by the cold (forcing Reliance on things like greenhouses, which are fragile and low yield as well.) But it is safe to assume that the majority of the deaths would have occurred in those hellish first weeks, to the tidal waves and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, blizzards, and general panic.

And even NEMA is not going to die off fast. We are told in RUE that nema survived until the '4th demon plague". given they are currently in the start of the 1st, I think we have a fair amount of time. And even then, that was just when 'civilization finally collapsed', and we are told Nema continued to fight in some areas even after that.

to expand on what glitterboy said, I could totally see a year without a summer, being a thing IE it never really warms up for a year (or more), with that said, actually greenhouses have higher yields per area than traditional open air farming, the biggest issue is that they are expensive.
with that said it all depends on what is actually happening leading up to the cataclysm if a lot of the farming had gone to greenhouses, hydroponics and airoponics to increase yields then the disruptions while bad, may not be anywhere as bad as people assume.

as I see it the biggest issues might be to the distribution systems rather than actual production.

look at it this way, ok you have Yellowstone erupt, this may(likely) will literally throw megatons (as in millions of tons) of debris into the air., now the big stuff is going to essentially follow ballistic arcs up, out, and down so you could have multi ton boulders coming crashing down miles away (even hundreds or thousands of miles depending on various factors)
the ash from Mt St Helens fell in Minnesota, and Oklahoma, with some of it drifting around the earth in 2 weeks so the devastation to the "local" environment is going to be cataclysmic but to give you an didea ash from mt st Helens landed up to ~1900 miles away, new York city is ~2200 miles from the yellowstone caldera which means that it would be reasonable for ashfalls to go that far or further.

guardiandashi wrote:to expand on what glitterboy said, I could totally see a year without a summer, being a thing IE it never really warms up for a year (or more), with that said, actually greenhouses have higher yields per area than traditional open air farming, the biggest issue is that they are expensive.
with that said it all depends on what is actually happening leading up to the cataclysm if a lot of the farming had gone to greenhouses, hydroponics and airoponics to increase yields then the disruptions while bad, may not be anywhere as bad as people assume.

as I see it the biggest issues might be to the distribution systems rather than actual production.

look at it this way, ok you have Yellowstone erupt, this may(likely) will literally throw megatons (as in millions of tons) of debris into the air., now the big stuff is going to essentially follow ballistic arcs up, out, and down so you could have multi ton boulders coming crashing down miles away (even hundreds or thousands of miles depending on various factors)
the ash from Mt St Helens fell in Minnesota, and Oklahoma, with some of it drifting around the earth in 2 weeks so the devastation to the "local" environment is going to be cataclysmic but to give you an didea ash from mt st Helens landed up to ~1900 miles away, new York city is ~2200 miles from the yellowstone caldera which means that it would be reasonable for ashfalls to go that far or further.

Now add in other volcanoes around the globe kicking off as well and the "year without summer" gets a lot longer as the ashfall covers multiple countries and affects them. Follow this with earthquakes and demons and you'll have global distribution networks disrupted, too.

I think my biggest problem is with your use of the word "distrupted" to describe supply chains. Modern supply chains are so fragile they can't survive multiple hurricanes so I think surviving the apocalypse is a tad optimistic.

I am curious as to where you get your information on the effects of an eruption. I sited just one of mine in my previous post. I chose my wording precisely from the article. The ash will not blacken out the sky for years at a time but it will noticeably darken them for years as the cycle you mention continues. The effects of this will be immediate and long lasting creating colder, longer winters with shorter summers. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption dropped Northern hemisphere temperatures around 2 degrees and led to famines in multiple countries with the situation not returning to normal until 1890ish. That is an average volcano with bigger then average boom and it did it without demons.

Your comment about the earth heading into a brief little ice age after 2098 kind of proves my point as well.

You are correct about volcanic ash being good for farming. Volcanic ash is great for farming, years or even decades after it falls. Once the rain has mixed it with the soil and washed away the toxins but until then it just kills. People in Mexico city were still getting sick from ash in the drinking water more then a year after one of it's eruptions in 2000. The Iceland volcano that erupted in 2010 reduced crop yields across northern Europe as well.

This is the Apocalypse, it is an extreme scenario not a disruption but at no point did I say everything would die. A lot of plants and animals will live and once things settle down it will rebound, but not enough to feed the 500 million plus population that the lower 48 is likely to have in 2098.

I agree that a lot of the deaths will occur in the first weeks, heck I would say first few days, of the apocalypse but there will be deaths after. If farming did transition to a lot of greenhouse, hydroponics and airoponics by 2098 then it will be an even worse collapse of the food systems as each of these requires precise/stable conditions and constant supplies of chemical fertilizers.

Again I am not saying everyone has to die, but I think it would be interesting to know what kind of numbers of civilians NEMA is trying to protect and how much in the way of supplies they have.

i get that the scenario you outlined is not what you consider a globe killer, but a failure to do sufficient research does not override the fact that it is. lets look at the scenario you outlined, shall we?

Warshield73 wrote:The Yellowstone super volcano erupted. That alone would darken the Earth for years

ignoring the fact that yellowstone would not 'darken the earth for years' (ash fall from the largest yellowstone eruptions do not come anywhere near that, and the Mount Tambora eruption in 1815, roughly comparable to the average yellowstone eruption, only dimmed the sky [due to sulfur aerosol clouds, results were described as a 'persistent dry fog'] for a few months.), lets say you are right, and we get the kind of complete darkness described in the pages of CE for years on end. not really physically possible, but i'll humor you.

well, we know what that would do as well. during the Impact Winter caused by the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction event (aka, the K-T event, as it is more well known using an older terminology), the debris thrown up by the atmosphere appears to have reduced the light reaching the surface down to a mere 15% of normal. and it stayed there for several months.
during this time Land ecosystems collapsed entirely, causing the extinction of 70% of species on earth, including nearly all of its land life larger than mice. in the oceans nearly 90% of all phytoplankton species died off, as well as most vertebrate life larger than small fish due to the complete collapse of the oceanic foodchains due to the plankton die off.

and that was only a few months, and at a level of darkness nowhere near as bad as what we get in Chaos Earth. continued for years, it would be extinction worse than the Permian-Triassic 'great dying' (which saw the extinction of nearly 96% of life on earth)

since earth comes out the great cataclysm looking more or less, ecologically speaking, as it did before it started, with pretty much the same species present, with a few added alien standouts, rather than having been completely replaced by alien flora and fauna, as it would have been in the kind of extinction event your scenario would cause, we can say fairly certainly that we did not get such prolonged darkness.

you then go on to talk about 'supply chains' collapsing.. and i never actually said otherwise. of course supply chains have collapsed. civilization is gone. but you can support people locally off farming easily enough if people are willing to put in the effort to develop such.

i was talking about [b]food chains[/i]. that is, the whole 'plant is eaten by herbivore is eaten by carnivore" thing? the catclysm is going to screw those up, between the natural disasters and the alien critters competing.. but since they are still recognizable 300 years later, clearly they were not destroyed completely, as would occur with a period of prolonged darkness. hell, we barely see any extinction at all. certainly no loss of entire genera like you'd usually get in a mass extinction.

guardiandashi wrote:to expand on what glitterboy said, I could totally see a year without a summer, being a thing IE it never really warms up for a year (or more), with that said, actually greenhouses have higher yields per area than traditional open air farming, the biggest issue is that they are expensive.
with that said it all depends on what is actually happening leading up to the cataclysm if a lot of the farming had gone to greenhouses, hydroponics and airoponics to increase yields then the disruptions while bad, may not be anywhere as bad as people assume.

the Year without a Summer scenario is almost a given. i suspect the 20 to 30 degree drop in temp seen right after the start continued for several years.. though worth noting that you'd not get completely frozen the whole time (in chicago for example, spring usually ranges from 50-70 degrees.. meaning in CE it would be 20-40. late spring would see some of the snow and ice start to melt. in summer it runs 78-92 degrees on average, which would result in 58-62 degrees.. cool, but actually not that bad. fall goes from 70's to 40's normally, so you'd be looking at 40's to 10's..
summed up, long cold winters and short cool summers. classic mini-ice age conditions. like the Little Ice Age of 16th-19th centuries, just somewhat colder.
i suspect that after a few years (when the sulfur aerosols start to work their way out of the upper atmosphere( things would warm up a bit.. but we know that an extremely long cold period occurred. Russia for example experienced an 80 year mini-ice age, though we don't know if that was longer or shorter than the rest of the world.

guardiandashi wrote:as I see it the biggest issues might be to the distribution systems rather than actual production.

distribution of food would certainly be a problem, regardless of how it was obtained. thankfully there is some useful stuff from FEMA towards that end, and i have some family members who were involved in the response to the Flood of '93 (i was just a kid at the time).
biggest hurdle is getting stuff organized to start with. you need centralized distribution points, and a way to get your supplies from storage to those points. this is where NEMA would play the biggest role.. setting up camps for the survivors that are not only defended from monsters, but also allow for setting up communal kitchens to feed people, medical centers to help with injury and sicknesses, and so on.
(one reason i kinda wish that First Responders had included a bit more on that.. Dead Reign sourcebook 6 "hell followed" actually had some useful stuff in regards to Relief centers that would, with some adjustment for setting, be very helpful to CE GM's)

guardiandashi wrote:look at it this way, ok you have Yellowstone erupt, this may(likely) will literally throw megatons (as in millions of tons) of debris into the air., now the big stuff is going to essentially follow ballistic arcs up, out, and down so you could have multi ton boulders coming crashing down miles away (even hundreds or thousands of miles depending on various factors)
the ash from Mt St Helens fell in Minnesota, and Oklahoma, with some of it drifting around the earth in 2 weeks so the devastation to the "local" environment is going to be cataclysmic but to give you an didea ash from mt st Helens landed up to ~1900 miles away, new York city is ~2200 miles from the yellowstone caldera which means that it would be reasonable for ashfalls to go that far or further.

yes but the ashfall that far out would be fairly thin. couple inches at most.

At this point I feel like you are not even reading my posts just to disagree, I am also worried that we have gone way off topic.

Warshield73 wrote:I chose my wording precisely from the article. The ash will not blacken out the sky for years at a time but it will noticeably darken them for years as the cycle you mention continues.

I am really specific here so I don't understand why you say this.

glitterboy2098 wrote:lets say you are right, and we get the kind of complete darkness described in the pages of CE for years on end. not really physically possible, but i'll humor you.

You don't have to humor me, because I never said complete blackness, I said darken.

Now from your own link

USGS Volcano Hazard Program wrote:another explosive caldera- forming eruption such as those that occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago. Such an eruption would produce ash columns that exceed 10 km (6 mi) and cover much of the United States with some ash. Once entering the stratosphere (higher than about 10 km or 6 mi), the ash particles would circle the globe and, in combination with the sulfur dioxide emitted during an eruption, could cause global temperatures to drop.

Now it also says this

USGS Volcano Hazard Program wrote:However, the probability of such an eruption in any given century or millennium is exceedingly low — much lower than a hydrothermal explosion or lava flow eruption.

Admittedly I am taking a near worst case scenario but that is because it is the Apocalypse.

BTW, I worked the '93 Flood as a college student from Pekin, doing sandbagging and even briefly helped on a rescue boat. I could only do this for three days because that is all I could get off from work, it was OK though because there were plenty of volunteers behind me. I have lived in Houston for the last 20 years where I have helped others after storms and been helped during storms. When Katrina hit I tried to volunteer early but was turned away because they had too many volunteers. Do you know why I and others were able to do that? Because our homes and families were safe. FEMA in ever disaster relies, no not right, is dependent on volunteers who can leave there homes to help others. Can you tell me who these people are and where these people are coming from that their homes are safe. What area is unaffected enough for volunteers to come from?

Ultimately my biggest problem with the way you describe the coming of the Rifts, it's boring. A "disruption", you make the end of the world sound like an average hurricane season.

This should be epic. When Kevin first talked about CE, at I forget which open house the 1st or the 3rd probably, he described it as nearly the end of humanity. Erin Tarn's description in RUE, is listed as folklore yes, describes decade of winter and cities swallowed by the sea. A sudden end to the world as we know it. She also says that we came very close to being wiped out. In the First two CE books we see General Sawyer cut off from all help, forced to retreat from Atlanta writing the whole area off as a loss.

The coming of the Rifts should be something that we in 2018 could not survive. If everything in CE happened today we should be gone, except for the few humans who become slaves or food cattle. It is only the technology of the Golden Age that saves us.

Now if this is being changed in the new books in favor of a new, less apocalyptic apocalypse, then I stand corrected.

As I said in my previous posts my biggest complaints with your position is not real life. I bring in the information on super volcanoes just to show it is possible. Something that your sources agree with. My problem is story. CE is supposed to be the end of the human world and the beginning of Rifts and you seem to describe a disruption that just delays my Amazon delivery for a few days.

Again we are way past the OP, I hope some answers to food rations and how people survive make it into First Responders and if we want to continue this maybe we should start a new post on the larger story progression of CE.

Depending on how prepared you were before SHTF, you could be pretty well off. Hydroponics gardening isn't all that difficult. While it does require power for the water pumps, this can easily be accomplished with a small solar panel, or an old car alternator paired with a "windmill". Gathering the plant food/fertilizer you would need I imagine would be pretty easy, as most survivors would not be thinking of growing over scavenging.

Anyways, a lot of food plants we commonly use are capable of regrowing after being trimmed back. Things like lettuce, and the green shoots from onions, most herbs we use for cooking. Potatoes can easily be grown in tubs (if you want small red or white potatoes) or even a 30 gallon plastic garbage can. Foodstuffs like beans and most grains can be dried and stored. If you have sufficient power generation, and are prepared enough to have a home freeze drying unit (couple thousand bucks, about the size of a small college dorm fridge) and a vacuum sealer, you can set yourself up quite well in the long term.

Depending on your specific situation, you could raise chickens, rabbits, and/or quail. You would want to use the chickens for egg production, only eating your hens after they have been productive layers for about three years. Rabbits would be your primary meat source, and since your greens would grow back from cuttings, you could supplement their food, or rely on that almost completely to raise them. In turn, collecting the droppings from both could go into a compost system, and later be used to fertilize your growing system.

A hydroponics system can take up little space. Using cheap shelving from Walmart, you can take advantage of a corner in a basement, and use gravity to keep water moving by pumping it to the top shelf. My mother, who is elderly, was bemoaning not being able to have a garden out back anymore due to her age and inability to work it. I will be setting up a system in her basement, in order to grow many of the things she enjoys eating, and it will be easy to care for. I am also looking at getting a freeze dryer, because they lost a lot of stored food when the deep freeze in the garage went out. Plus my mother buys a lot of fruit for my sister's kids, and then half of it goes bad because they may go several days without visiting. Being able to freeze dry it, and then store it in a ziplock, would save her tons of money over a year.

Anyways, the goal is to preserve food that we grow, in a way that will not need power for the long term. There are a LOT or "preppers" out there that have the same mindset, so it would not at all be outside the realm of possibility for this game.