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A perched patch of grasslands and savanna in Brazil acts as a sponge to recharge groundwater and feed natural hot springs.

The Mad Max Warfare Model

We want to start by laying out what I am going to call the ‘warfare model‘ of the setting. When I say ‘warfare model’ here, what I mean is how a fictional setting imagines warfare to be conducted across all of the different levels of military analysis. Put simply how does warfare work in this setting? So the ‘warfare model’ is a big collection of smaller models, like a ‘strategic model’ (what aims are pursued by war in the setting and how) or the ‘tactical model’ (how does battle with these weapons actually work) and so on. For this post, we’re really interested in the tactical and logistical models, but I want to start by outlining in a basic way the whole ‘vision’ and how within the fiction it fits together.

This is, I think, a particularly handy framework to think about in science fiction, because while fantasy works often implicitly borrow a lot of their warfare model from pre-modern history, science fiction settings do not. They may feature radically alien war aims, logistics or tactics, predicated on equally unusual technologies or conditions.

Fortunately for us, the Mad Max warfare model is not so alien, though it does have quirks. Warfare in these settings is waged principally over resources, primarily four: water, food, gasoline and ammunition. The primacy of those resources is most clearly demonstrated in the two most recent Mad Max films (Fury Road and Furiosa), where each wasteland ‘fortress’ is clearly tied to one of the resources and the central economic function of the setting is moving those resources between the three fortresses. In practice, a wasteland warlord would likely have other resource concerns as well, but for a setting that due to the brevity of film, must dwell in simplicity, this more or less works: those are the most substantial logistical demands of any modern war machine.³ Warfare is fought either to control production of those resources, or to scavenge them, as stronger groups cannibalize smaller ones.

The one oddity here of note is that the nodes of resource production (or substantial storage) appear in Mad Max setting specifically as points, rather than zones of control. The Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm and even the fuel refinery from Mad Max 2 are also single points of production, in a single settlement. In practice, in the real world, resources tend to be a lot more spread out than this, demanding military powers – like the warlords of the setting – to disperse their forces much more widely to enable production and extraction. Reducing resource production to a handful of ‘strongholds’ surrounded by ‘wasteland’ allows these warlords to concentrate their military forces a lot more than they otherwise would, which we ought to keep in mind.⁴ Warfare is thus about either raiding groups moving between these fixed resource points, or efforts to seize control of one of the points itself.

From Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), the ‘Bullet Farm,’ one of three major fortified settlements in Immortan Joe’s wasteland empire. It seems to be a large mining operation and factory which, we are to understand, produces the War Boys’ ammunition and explosives. In practice, of course, you aren’t going to have a single giant pit mine which produces all the things you would need to make modern ammunition even for small arms, but this is an understandable simplification of the setting.

To that end, we see variations on a single military system developing, both in Mad Max and derived settings. Tactically, these systems anticipate primarily vehicle combat: even when attacking a fixed point, the ‘road warriors’ (as it were) are never far from their vehicles. What is distinctively missing are motorized or mechanized infantry – troops that, whatever their transportation, expect to fight primarily on foot. Instead, a lot of the fighting is done while moving at speed and vehicles are present even in static engagements. We’re thus dealing, effectively, with ‘vehicle armies.’

From Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the central war-rig of the film, moving with vehicle escort. You can see it has three fighting positions: two on the main tanker-hull (front and back) and one on the smaller auxiliary fuel-car at the rear. In practice, these fighting positions would be of limited utility: those car shells are almost certainly not thick enough to stop small arms fire, so a single stationary machine gun along the route could sweep the top of the vehicle and disable most of the defenders.

The centerpiece of these vehicle armies is what we may call (following Fury Road and Furiosa) the ‘war rig,’ large improvised vehicles that serve as both transports and fighting platforms. Obviously the most memorable of these are Immortan Joe’s war rigs⁵ from Fury Road and Furiosa, but we see other smaller factions employing smaller war rigs, like the spiked and armored tractor-trailer of the ‘Buzzards‘ in Fury Road. These show up in other takes on the setting concept too, like the big centerpiece vehicles in the convoys of Rage 2. As noted, the recent Badlands Crew, set in what I can only describe as a ‘legally distinct’ Mad Max setting is all about building and fighting with these sorts of war rigs.

From the game Badlands Crew (2025) an example of a ‘battlewagon,’ which is basically the game’s term for a war rig. You can build your own in this game, so this is my current, fairly basic design. Using a bit of super-firing design, all three turrets can fire effectively at any target basically anywhere except dead-ahead (where only the front turret can reach); even firing directly aft, the turrets are elevated so at ranges other than point-blank, they can all fire.

War rigs appear to serve a few functions. On the one hand, they are larger, more heavily armored platforms capable of absorbing punishment and holding a substantial number of combatants and heavier weapons. At the same time, a lot of them are built also for carrying cargo and could – on longer campaigns – serve some sort of logistical sustainment function, refueling the smaller vehicles.

From Rage 2 (2019), a convoy leader, which is also similar to a war rig as a large, heavily armored and armed vehicle. The player can attack these convoys during gameplay, in the unlikely event that anyone other than me plays Rage 2 (I played it at release, it was fine?).

Supporting the war rig are what we might call ‘outriders:’ smaller combat vehicles that are more maneuverable but often function principally as escorts for the war rigs. Notably, there’s a consistent tend in these settings that these tend to be cars or sometimes buggies, with the two recent Mad Max films favoring a range of muscle-car and antique car bodies, albeit often with the trunk space opened up to create a fighting platform in the back. These vehicles are much less heavily armored, but faster and more agile and make up the majority of most army’s combat power.

From Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), a selection of Imortan Joe’s outriders moving as a large force. We can see here an emphasis on weaponized muscle-cars, with the combatants riding in trunks converted into very small truck beds.

Finally, we see the heavy use of motorcycles and motorbikes, both as raiders and as escorts. Often this is by ‘factions’ in the setting implied to be poor (like the ‘Rock Riders‘) or roving gangs like Dementus’, but we also see them employed by large factions: there are motorbikes in the escort of Immortan Joe’s war rigs in both Fury Road and Furiosa. Notably, these function in a lot of cases as primary combatants: both Dementus and the ‘Rock Riders’ attack war rig convoys with bikes, so these aren’t just personal transport or scouts, at least for some of the factions that use them.

Another shot of Immortan Joe’s army on the move, where we can see clearly the mix of cars and bikes, along with a few larger vehicles, like the semi-trailer in the background converted into a troop-transport. But notably, there are about as many motorcycles here as cars, despite them being quite bad choices for this kind of operation.

And of course we should note that as fiction these vehicles have an important role in signaling things to the viewer. A faction that mostly uses dirt-bikes and lives in the mountains feels rugged and almost half-civilized, while Dementus’ giant hoard of motorcycle-mobile raiders visually evokes the way Steppe nomads get presented in media, complete with massive dust-cloud (fitting, as Dementus is presented as a nomadic warlord). Cars covered in spikes might not be very effective as weapon-systems, but they visually communicate something fairly primal and direct to the audience.

Because most of the fighting in the setting involves either overrunning thinly garrisoned fortresses or attacking motorized convoys moving resources, a lot of the fighting is done ‘on the move,’ with vehicles moving continuously at full speed while exchanging fire. In the Mad Max setting, its clear that proper firearms (or perhaps more likely, their ammunition) have become relatively rare, reserved for key combatants and vehicles: instead, improvised weapons using cruder explosives or gasoline are a lot more common, so thrown explosives are a key component in this sort of fighting. That varies by setting, of course and in some settings we see a lot more guns (or non-gun missile weapons made mechanically equivalent to guns through the magic of video game rules).

Road War Tactics

In practice, I see two problems with this combat model, one tactical and the other logistical. We can start with the tactical problem, which comes down to two fairly simple points: first, without complex modern stabilizers (and often even with them) it is extremely hard to hit a moving vehicle firing from a moving vehicle and second, armoring most of these vehicles to resist even small arms fire would be difficult and involve prohibitive increases in weight.

We can start with the accuracy side of the equation: these settings very often feature combatants firing (or throwing weapons) from moving vehicles on to moving vehicles and that’s just very hard to do, except at very close ranges. After all, not only does a shooter on a moving platform have to account for their relative velocity with the target (which may be rapidly shifting) but a moving platform isn’t going to be perfectly level either, with bounces and bumps throwing off aim, potentially in all sorts of directions for a vehicle moving at high speeds on rough terrain.

You can actually get a sense of how hard a problem this is with even a brief look at the development of stabilizers for the main guns of tanks. The first attempts at tank gun stabilization come in the 1930s, but the initial capabilities were really limited, requiring tanks to basically stop to engage in accurate fire. The United States, for instance, didn’t think stabilization was really worth it in the 1960s and an add-on stabilization kit for the M60 main battle tank didn’t come until the early 1970s. On-the-move accuracy without a stabilizer – or even with an early stabilizer – was remarkably poor. The consensus to my understanding, for instance, of WWII-era tanks, was that none of them had much chance of hitting a tank size target at any range that mattered while moving, even tanks like the M4 Sherman which included very early stabilization technology.

Indeed, the Allies ran accuracy tests (because of course they did) on the M4 Sherman the Crusader Tank and their stabilizers and Tank Archives was good enough to dig up the reports. You can really get a sense of the problem from the table on p. 12 of the report, the table labeled “Stationary Fire, Firing from Halt, Moving Fire with and without Gyrostabilizer.” It records accuracy against a stationary 49 square foot (7×7) target “under the most favourable conditions,” as a ‘probability of hit’ at a given set of ranges:

Type of Fire	200 yards	500 yards	1000 yards
Stationary	99+%	99+%	99+%
From Halt	99+%	99+%	88%
Moving, with Gyro	82%	46%	19%
Moving, without Gyro	46%	18%	6.5% (est)

And the problem should just jump right out at you: under conditions where a shot fired stationary or ‘from halt’ (slam the breaks, wait for the tank to stop and stabilize, then fire immediately) could be accomplished (in training field conditions) with basically perfect accuracy, firing on the move with a basic stabilizer was a crapshoot and without a stabilizer, the chance of hitting anything collapsed to almost nothing beyond extremely short (for tanks) ranges. As the report notes, in combat conditions – with all the stress and confusion that implies – these figures must be substantially lower. After all, WWII era tanks did not, in fact, have perfect accuracy at 1000 yards in actual combat – far from it! The report goes on to note that the ammunition cost of firing on the move “is largely wasted in view of the evident lack of advantage gained over firing from halt.” In short: the chance of hitting anything firing while moving was so low it wasn’t worth wasting the shots and you instead ought to stop the tank if you needed to fire (‘fire from halt’).

Of course you might try to square the accuracy problem with volume of fire: simply get something fast-firing and put a lot of rounds in the air. But that runs into the second problem: these are societies with pretty sharp limits on ammunition production. Spraying thousands of rounds into the air to maybe-or-maybe-not disable an enemy vehicle is probably not viable. Of course one option would be to drive much closer and engage the enemy at very close range. But the far better answer in most cases is going to be stop and fire when stationary. Once you stop moving, you have a stable firing position (no bouncing around) and only need to lead the target based on their motion, which is not a trivial task at long ranges, but a far easier task – human soldiers with nothing more than iron-sights and the Mk1 Eyeball are regularly able to put bullets on speeding automobiles at non-trivial ranges.

The other tactical complication, once your war-vehicles are being shot at by stationary enemies, is that armoring large vehicles against that small-arms fire is actually pretty challenging.⁶ It takes a non-trivial amount of steel plate to stop even standard rifle calibers (5.56mm, 7.62mm, etc), as you can find any number of YouTube tests demonstrating. The upshot is that for a steel-plate defense, ‘safety’ looks to be more than a quarter-inch (closer to half an inch) and that’s quite a lot of armor, which substantial weight implications. In practice, a number of modern armored vehicles, like the M2 Bradley and the M113 APC use aluminum armor (on the Bradley, enhanced by laminate plates) at an inch thickness or more (aluminum is almost three times less dense than steel).

From Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the smaller war rig used by the Buzzards, along with its own escort car, which features spikes, but no actual firing platform at all. In practice, this armor wouldn’t stop small arms fire; it was heavy enough to stop small arms fire, a vehicle like the one on the lower left would be too heavy to operate.

But the weight premium for ‘can resist small arms and not much more’ over an entire vehicle is substantial: the M113 APC is 13.6 (short) tons, the BTR-80 is 15 tons. Not only is that vehicle going to need a much more powerful engine, that engine and weight is going to have logistically significant impacts to fuel efficiency (to say the least!) which we’ll get to in a second.

But tactically, the implication here is quite bad for our ‘war rigs’: as moving, fighting platforms, they can’t fire back effectively, but they’re so big that a stationary enemy can probably put a good amount of fire on them as they pass by. Worse yet, there’s simply no feasible way to protect the rig or its combatants from much of that fire. You probably can slap armor on some key elements (the tractor cab on the front is the obvious choice), but there’s really no way to offset the vulnerability created by size (and less ability to maneuver) by just slapping on armor. In particular, the ‘tanker’ components of the Fury Road and Furiosa war rigs, simply due to the size, are going to have to be far too thin to actually repel rifle fire, which could be particularly awkward if fuel or ammunition is being moved.

So while I can imagine throwing a couple of light-weight fighting positions on to a large cargo-carrier simply to provide an extra amount of deterrence and firepower, you really wouldn’t want to take it into a fight. You might be slightly more willing to risk the outriders and bikes, but even then, these are going to be thin-skinned vehicles that can’t do much more than demonstrate with fire unless they stop. Of course I am assuming no one has a functional stabilizer here, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Because first we need to talk about…

The Logistics of Road War

The logistics of this kind of warfare, like nearly all modern logistics, centers around two considerations: fuel and ammunition (and, as we’ll see, also spare parts). But we need to distinguish between operational logistics concerns and strategic logistics concerns, both of which matter here. Put it this way: a given faction in the wasteland may have a certain stockpile of gasoline and bullets, but any given raid or convoy is only going to carry some much smaller amount of that larger stockpile. Once they leave base, they have to accomplish whatever their mission is with that smaller amount, so there a concern with how much can a given force carry in the field (operational logistics) and a concern with how much do operations in the aggregate consume against production and stockpiles (strategic logistics).

From Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), Dementus’ biker hoard. On the one hand, this is really effective visually in evoking something similar to the Mongols or another Steppe confederacy, raiding into settled cultures. But as an exercise in fuel logistics, this is a disaster, as each bike is a terribly inefficient way to move a single rider.

In essence the operational question revolves around matching up consumption (of fuel and munitions) against the carrying capacity of the vehicles involved, which determines operational endurance. By contrast, the strategic question revolves around matching the consumption of many operations against the productive capacity of the faction as a whole to determine how long operations can be sustained and at what tempo.

Both considerations would shape the actual conduct of ‘road war,’ albeit in different ways.

From Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), ‘Gastown,’ the major oil production and refining settlement in the setting. Clearly, given the amount of defenses employed here (a single entrypoint, with a curtain wall, with towers, protected by a *flammable moat*), gasoline is a pretty important resource, a point stated repeatedly during the films.

We can begin with the operational limits: any given raid or convoy can only carry so much fuel and ammo for itself. Spare parts are less of a concern here, because only relatively minor repairs are going to be possible in the field. Of course not only can vehicles move fuel in their fuel tanks, if they have cargo capacity, they can also store spare fuel (and spare munitions). Now, I have to confess, I am not a ‘car nerd’ – nothing against car nerds, it just isn’t my brand of nerd – but we really do need to benchmark here against some numbers, because the actual fuel mileage, fuel tank size and cargo capacity for actual vehicles matters for this question. So forgive me if I have made any errors here, but here are some relevant figures:⁷

Vehicle	Fuel Mileage (mpg)	Fuel Tank (gallons)	Op. Range (miles)	Cargo Capacity	Notes
Yamaha WR250R (motorcycle)	c. 54	2	108	Not Much	295lbs total mass
BMW R18 (motorcycle)	c. 50	3.5	175	Not Much	761lbs total mass
1973 Ford Falcon	c. 7.4 – 13.8	21.2	225
Toyota 1995 Hilux	22-27	13.7	335	1,820lbs
Toyota 2025 Tacoma	21-26	18.2	428	1,700lbs
Semi-Trucks (estimate)	6-8	c. 300 (in two tanks)	2,100	c. 45,000lbs on road	Not designed for off-road
Deuce & 1/2 (Military Truck)	8-11	50	475	5,000lbs (off road)	12+ passengers diesel
Humvee (HMMWV)	8-11	25	237.5	2,500lbs	~4-6 passengers diesel
M2 Bradley IFV	0.75(-1.6?)	175-197	80 (300 on-road?)		6 passengers diesel
M1 Abrams MBT	0.19-0.52	504	Road: 265 Off Road: c. 100		Uses JP-8 jet fuel

And from that we can make some observations. First, the relative weakness of motorbikes and motorcycles comes out pretty clearly. Sure, they have very high gas mileage, but for almost no cargo and an extremely low passenger count. Cargo payload and passenger count matter here because that is where our combat power – mounted weapons, munitions, or combatants beyond the driver – go. A motorcycle delivers a combat power of one human with small arms. By contrast, the pickup trucks have half the gas mileage, but if you are willing to load up the bed can deliver half a dozen or more combatants, making the fuel-to-combatant ratio actually very unfavorable for motorcycles. Indeed, given how light some of these motorcycles are, you could load the motorcycles and its drivers on the back of a truck (either a pickup or the heavier Deuce-and-a-Half) and gain operational range without losing mileage efficiency. Heck, putting ten Yamaha WR250R’s in the back of a Deuce-and-a-Half might appears to end up as significantly more fuel-efficient than driving the bikes, plus you also get a truck out of the arrangement.

As a result, the usage of motorcycles, so common in these settings, would in practice probably be extremely limited. They’re not effective combat platforms – too unstable for effective fire and bad at carrying additional combatants – and they are terrible as a means to move combatants to a combat area as compared to just loading the same troops in a truck. Where one might imagine them used is as couriers or scouts, where a ‘minimum vehicle to move one person’ is valuable. I could thus see a raiding party loading a bunch of motorcycles on the back of a truck precisely to be able to use them as scouts and flankers, particularly if they can communicate back to the main force via radio (thus allowing for over-the-horizon scouting). But you wouldn’t want to try to use them for any actual fighting.

We can also see, both operationally and strategically, why even if a Wasteland Warlord had access to military combat vehicles, they might not keep using them: the fuel consumption on armored vehicles is extremely high. The HMMWV obviously has battlefield mobility advantages when compared to a Deuce-and-a-Half, but as a pure tool for moving combatants, supplies (or heavy weapons – we’ll come back to this) it is a flatly inferior system: the same fuel mileage, with a smaller tank and half the cargo or passenger capacity (and still in most cases too thin-skinned to really function as an armored vehicle).

Meanwhile, the actual armored vehicles are staggeringly resource expensive to even use, getting gallons-to-the-mile rather than miles-to-the-gallon. Running an actual tank or infantry fighting vehicle with your wasteland convoy is going to burn up a lot of fuel: both operationally (because that tank may need refuel from other vehicles in the convoy) but also strategically: keeping that thing on the move is going to rapidly overtax whatever fuel-production capabilities your faction possesses. Which goes back to their design: military vehicles were designed by and for modern industrial militaries. They assume a supply chain that reaches back from the front line through rail and shipping networks to the massive production of large-scale industrial economies; if any of our wasteland factions had such an economy, it wouldn’t be a wasteland anymore.

Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup. So while I can imagine a wasteland warlord maintaining a few actual military vehicles as prestige objects and perhaps for emergency use in siege contexts, these things are impractical for regular use by wasteland factions who simply cannot afford their sustainment.

Instead, in an operational context, the wasteland warlord is interested in platforms that combine favorable operational range with carrying capacity, either to move combatants, cargo or heavier weapons. At the same time, at the strategic level, the concern becomes less about operational range and more about combining favorable gas mileage with carrying capacity, in order to be able to regularly move combat power around. We haven’t talked much about mounting weapons to these vehicles yet, but carrying capacity here too matters: armor and weaponry are basically going to ‘come out’ of the payload capacity of any vehicle, so vehicles with a lot of spare payload can potentially be armored and can carry more combat power, be that a bunch of combatants with improvised weapons or perhaps a single more traditional heavy weapon. Finally in both contexts, simple, robust machines are likely to be prioritized over custom or exquisite systems: you want something you can repair easily which shares lots of parts with everything else you have.

In that context, the frequent appearance of ‘muscle cars’ and indeed, cars in general, is strange. As you can see, glancing up at the chart there, Mad Max’s own 1973 Ford Falcon is the worst of almost all possible worlds: limited cargo capacity, terrible gas mileage, highly limited range. It does nothing the wasteland warrior cares about well.

So we have a film combat system of war rigs, outrider muscle cars and motorcycles. Except that the war rigs are too large and vulnerable for combat: big enough that they can’t avoid all of the fire they aren’t heavily armored enough to stop. As you can see above, big trucks make sense as pure cargo carriers, but you’d want to keep them out of the fight if at all possible. Meanwhile, motorcycles work as scouts but not as combatants, while outrider muscle cars perform almost no task particularly well, given their cost. If we strip most of the weaponry, beyond perhaps token deterrence protection, from our war rigs (making them pure cargo carriers) and only use motorcycles as scouts and messengers, we’re closer to a system that works, but we lack a primary combatant vehicle, for both combat and combat-transport.

What we actually want is a platform that is robust, easy to repair, fuel efficient when compared to its payload capacity, which can move lots of cargo and people and which can be fitted with heavier weapons.

And behold, providence offered forth the perfect vehicle of its wrath and fury: the Toyota Hilux.⁸

Technically Speaking

And now, just 5,000 words into this post, we actually get to the meat of it, which is that we can be relatively what sort of combat vehicles a faction or warlord under Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic conditions would use because those tactical and logistical conditions already exist and they resulted in a distinctive kind of military vehicle: the Technical.

From Wikimedia Commons, technical (in this case in Niger) in a fairly classic configuration, with a heavy machine gun mounted on welded bars in the truck bed and dismounts riding alongside.

‘Technical‘ here is a term for a militarized civilian vehicle, usually a pick-up truck with some sort of heavier weapon mounted on the roof or in the bed, to be operated by a combatant standing on the bed. In this sense, the technical is simply an improvised version of a gun truck. As far as I know, there isn’t a clear consensus on where the term ‘technical’ comes from, but in English it has stuck as the term for this sort of vehicle.

An open-bed pickup truck is reasonable fast and agile and capable of rough-road and off-road (within reason) driving, but at the same time the bed can take payloads of upwards of 1,500lbs. That’s enough to mount not just machine guns (although that is the most common armament), but all sorts of heavier weapons: improvised multiple rocket launchers, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), autocannons, rotary cannons, mortars, etc. and still be able to carry a small number of ‘dismounts’ either in the cab or the bed. That means a pickup truck technical can be modified – weapons permitting – to function as an unarmored (or very lightly armored) version of basically any of the armored fighting vehicles we discussed back when we talked tanks: it can move troops (like an APC), offer heavy weapon fire-support for infantry (like an IFV), mount heavy direct-fire guns (like a tank) or indirect fire weaponry (like a self-propelled gun), depending on what weaponry is mounted in the bed.

Now of course these platforms are vastly inferior to their specialized military variants. While there certainly are up-armored technicals, that armor – for the reasons we discussed above – is generally very modest. Most remain ‘thin skinned,’ offering no real protection to crew or passengers from even small arms. Moreover, absent stabilizers and sophisticated optics, the weapons on the backs of technicals, aimed using the Mark 1 Eyeball, are going to have limited accuracy – and effectively no accuracy on the move. Like WW2 tanks, technicals need to halt to deliver fire effectively (though fire-on-the-move can still deliver some suppression). Technicals also can’t mount the heaviest and most sophisticated weapons, which is a particular problem against opponents with modern air forces, since there’s basically nothing you can put on a technical that can engage a modern multirole combat jet.⁹

Via Wikipedia, a Somali technical, (c. mid-1990s) in Mogadishu. Note that it carries not only a front-mounted machine gun but also a rear-mounted heavy weapon. Technicals are often used this way to move the closest thing poorly resourced groups have to artillery and heavy weapons and enable them to be repositioned with remarkable mobility.

But in a context where purpose-built military vehicles and combat aircraft are rare – be that a post-apocalypse or simply civil wars in developing countries with limited economies – the technical has some remarkable advantages. Looking above, we can see, in particular, how it solves a lot of the logistical problems our wasteland warlord might otherwise face. As a front-line combat vehicle, it is remarkably fuel-efficient, out-performing even purpose-built military mobility vehicles (like the HMMWV) in terms of delivering combatants and light vehicle-mounted weapons.¹⁰ Of course for moving heavy loads and reserve troops, a heavier truck (like the deuce-and-a-half or more modern Medium Tactical Vehicle or a similar modified civilian platform) is going to be even more effective. It’s easy to imagine then front line and escort forces employing technicals, supported by a logistics backbone and mobile reserve in trucks of various kinds – alas, no place for our iconic ‘war rigs.’

The other major advantage the technical offers is maintenance and repair. In the real world, groups using technicals tend to prefer simple, robust, easy-to-maintain models with minimal ‘frills’ – famously the Toyota Hilux and Land Cruisers have often been the models of choice. Remember: modern purpose-built military vehicles are built by and for militaries that sit at the tip of vast industrial systems capable of mass-producing precise, interchangeable spare parts at scale and maintaining expensive, complex, sophisticated systems. Like any group using technicals, our wasteland factions do not have that background: what they cannot scavenge, they must, at best, hand-craft. That means simple and reliable are the watchwords, followed by common: the more common a platform is, the easier it will be to source or scavenge replacement parts as things break or wear out and the easier it will be to find or develop the mechanical expertise necessary to maintain them in the field.

And ho boy are these platforms common. The United States has built, for itself and its allies, some 281,000 vehicles of all models of HMMWV as of 2015 (production started in 1985), just under 10,000 vehicles per year. By contrast, Toyota started making the Hilux in 1968; by 2017 they had sold 17.7 million units, more than 350,000 per year. That is, a popular consumer pickup truck might produce more vehicles in a year as a purpose-built military vehicle might produce in three decades. Now I should note, depending on where you are, the locally available and popular pickup truck might be different: Land Cruisers and Hiluxes dominated in the technical-centric warfare in Africa over the last several decades because they’re popular models there. By contrast, the Hilux isn’t even sold in North America – instead the heavier (and for these purposes, notably less capable) Toyota Tacoma is. But a post-apocalyptic faction isn’t going to get to choose: if your wasteland warlord is operating in Nebraska, the core of his technical fleet is going to be Ford F-Series trucks, simply because they’re the most common in Nebraska (even though a somewhat lighter, more robust and simpler model might be better in some ideal sense). Simply being common makes these vehicles easier to repair and maintain; that they tend to be built to be robust under heavy use is a further advantage.

Technicals of this sort are a standard feature in warfare in parts of the developing world and have even shown up in industrialized peer-warfare (for instance, in the War in Ukraine). Perhaps most famously, in 1986-1987, Chad was able to defeat a Libyan invasion of their country using an army primarily composed of technicals (mostly the Hilux and Land Cruiser, of course), even though the Libyan army had large numbers of conventional military vehicles, including tanks and aircraft, in what has become known as the Great Toyota War. One wonders what Toyota’s PR arm thinks about that. The use of technicals gave the Chadian military a lot of operational and tactical mobility in sparsely populated regions and the Chadians benefited from French air cover which kept Libyan aircraft largely out of the fight. That said, I should note the victory of technicals here was unusual: generally technical-based armies that find themselves fighting conventional armies lose, badly and quickly: technicals are not survivable against modern armored fighting vehicles.

Via Wikipedia, a Chadian Toyota Land Cruiser in 2008, with a heavy machine gun mounted on the top. The image gives a real sense of how you can move quite a lot of infantry by crowding them abroad such vehicles.

A New Model of Road War

With that, we can return to our original topic: the shape of post-apocalyptic wasteland ‘road war.’ Now I should note that, as is the case with any fictional setting, an author that wants to can tweak the world almost endlessly to produce a specific vision of warfare. If the resources of the wasteland were less concentrated, or its industry more advanced, or less advanced, or the laws of physics altered, we would have a different result. But proceeding with the ‘rules’ of the setting – Mad Max-inspired wastelands – as they are presented, we can posit a more grounded model for ‘road war.’

Wars in this setting are fought over resources – food, water, fuel and ammunition primarily – which are concentrated in very small geographic spaces, linked together by travel routes. Large factions control the resource nodes themselves, while small factions attempt to survive either scavenging over the wasteland or by raiding the routes between the major settlements. That raiding threat in turn requires resource shipments to move in guarded, road-bound convoys. Large factions thus need military force which can both secure the key resource nodes and also guard convoy transit between them, while smaller factions aim simply to raid transit routes.

‘Leg infantry’ is out except as stationary garrison forces on the resource nodes: the expanses of distance and difficult terrain essentially rule out foot-mobile infantry. At the same time, the sharp limits on fuel and spare parts rule out a modern mechanized military, so we would expect to see a force composed of militarized civilian vehicles. We might see motorbikes and motorcycles used in scouting and courier roles and larger trucks used for bulk freight or to move troops, but the front line vehicles are probably going to be armed pickup trucks, because they offer the most favorable combination of reliability, firepower and fuel-efficiency.

For a small, raiding faction, you might imagine a handful of gun-armed technicals to represent the ‘high end’ of their military power, since ammunition is rare in the setting. By contrast, a big time warlord like Dementus or Immortan Joe might have fleets of technicals. Because the technicals themselves are the basic unit of military power, their display becomes an important element of prestige, a way of demonstrating the power of larger warlords. At the same time, it seems like in a lot of these settings proper firearms and ammunition are rare enough (and gasoline-based explosives common enough) that we might also see ‘low end’ combatants using improvised grenades (like the ‘firesticks’ of Furiosa and Fury Road) or flame-throwers as close-combat tools, probably also from the back of militarized pickup trucks.¹¹

So we might imagine a convoy raid conducted ‘to doctrine,’ being a bit of a multi-stage affair, primarily using technicals. Initially, the convoy is spotted in movement by scouts, perhaps using motorbikes, and communicated to a main raiding force, split between higher-end technicals armed with firearms or heavy weapons and low-end vehicles (again, probably also militarized pickups) with combatants armed with those incendiary grenades or flamethrowers. The mobility of the technicals enables the force to reach the convoy and engage it (probably setting up ahead of the convoy on its route). The ‘gun-technicals’ aren’t going to accomplish much firing on the move – they’re almost certainly not fitted with even very basic stabilizers, so they wouldn’t hit anything – so we’d imagine them maneuvering to a firing position and them firing ‘from halt’ and stationary as the convoy passed.

That fire would be intended to take out convoy escorts, but also to ‘suppress’ the convoy – composed of heavy trucks and armed technicals – by forcing it to keep moving, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of its return fire. Those high-end gun-technicals could also be carrying ‘dismounts’ to both protect the vehicles, but also to dismount and offer additional fire from small arms or crew-served weapons. In that context, you might create enough fire superiority for the low-end vehicles, filled with combatants using cheaper, shorter-range weapons (because you haven’t enough guns or bullets to go around) to close in, force the convoy to halt and seize its vehicles and resources.

Of course a big warlord running those convoys wants to prevent this and one way they might do so is by deploying more threatening escorts. By having more technicals with heavier, longer-ranged weapons, a big warlord might be able to deter such attacks by having enough firepower for their escorts to also halt to fire (remember, no one can hit anything while moving) and proactively engaging opposing vehicles or dismounts. Rather than a gigantic war rig – which is every bit as vulnerable to long-range fire from technical-mounted heavy machine guns as anything else – the fearsome assets of a warlord might be technicals carrying heavy weapons, like recoilless rifles, anti-tank guns, autocannons or mortars which could rapidly destroy enemy technicals even at longer ranges. As noted, I can imagine such a warlord carefully hoarding a small supply of actual purpose-built armored fighting vehicles, but I have to imagine these would be employed rarely, not regularly on convoy duty – they’re too expensive to fuel and maintain to use frequently.

Via Wikipedia, a Libyan technical in 2011, used as a platform for a ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft autocannon (normally deployed in a towed configuration, but here mounted on a technical to create a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun).

That leaves capturing these key resource nodes. The work of capturing a larger, resource-producing settlement is going to be mostly done by infantry unless the defenses can somehow be compromised, which means the incentive here is for vehicles which can deliver the most infantry and supplies for the minimum of fuel and maintenance costs. Technicals actually square up well here – you can load a lot of armed combatants on the back of a pickup – but I suspect you’d also see larger trucks loaded with as many combatants as they could carry. That said, given that very few of the settlements we see in these settings are fully self-sufficient, a siege approach would also be viable and probably mandatory for factions too small to mount a large clearing operation of a fortified settlement.

All of that is a kind of warfare that actually supports the fractionalization of power, producing the sort of smaller-scale warlordism that the fiction tends to want in these settings. But rather than display their power with massive (but very vulnerable) war rigs, such warlords would likely attempt to overawe foes with impressive displays of their large stock of technicals. And, this being a Mad Max themed setting, by large spikes placed on everything.¹²

https://acoup.blog/2025/05/23/collections-the-logistics-of-road-war-in-the-wasteland/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-the-logistics-of-road-war-in-the-wasteland

https://acoup.blog/?p=29521

petra

Rudest tag I have seen in a month of Sundays:
( Life on Mars (UK) spoiler for the finale )

Compare with ( The Untamed spoiler for the first episode )

Which is kinda like ( Shakespeare spoiler )

When it could've been ( Bigger Shakespeare spoiler )

( Greek myth spoiler )

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Every language easy, easy as the recipe for making Jell-O

hrj

But first, a word from our garden...

Summer squashes are always hit or miss with me. I plant at least one every year and then take what comes (or doesn't). Today I had two good sized squashes and picked one. (There's also a clump of volunteer squash in a bed I'm not actively using, but they're from seeds that were in the compost heap, so who knows what the genetics are!)

I'm getting a good handful of blueberries at least once a week and there will be a solid gooseberry crop in another month or so. The currents are taking the year off, but are healthy. Artichokes are done for the year. Tomatoes are setting but not yet ripe.

This week started off with spending a couple days at my dad's place to take him to a couple appointments and do some shopping. (My brother, who lives there, is currently waiting on cataract surgery and isn't driving.) He has other options for rides, but I want to get over there more often now that I have time, so it works out.

Wednesday the electrician came over and got all set up for replacing my electrical panel. The replacement happened in a single day on Thursday, and since I was off biking and having a routine medical check-up for the first half of the day, the lack of electricity wasn't as much of a bother. (There was a pre-appointment survey about my exercise habits, so it was a nice touch to show up sweaty in my biking clothes.)

Replacing the electrical panel meant temporarily moving the not-built-in-but-fastened-to-the-wall shelves on that wall where all my bins of fabric and crafting supplies live. So in addition to taking the opportunity to wipe down the shelves and bins, I'm also doing a sift-through of the contents. This is reminding me that when I moved in I did a fair amount of "let's just stuff this in a plastic tub and put it on a shelf."

I've been meaning to do a second round of "let's invite people over to take away things I'm not likely to use". The first round was SCA camping gear. The second round will be craft supplies. So I need to go through everything and identify what I want to keep, what I want to prioritize actually finishing, and what I'm happy to re-home. I can probably combine it with a little "come over and see if you want these books I'm getting rid of." My goal is to boil it down so that "tools and small supplies" will fit in the cabinet in the craft room, while "fabric and large supplies" go on the garage shelves. Part of that will be actually completing some projects that currently take up space.

atlas_obscura_places_feed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tynemouth-priory-and-castle

Tynemouth Castle.

On a promontory overlooking the North Sea near the village of Tynemouth is Tynemouth Castle and Priory. Founded in the 7th Century by Edwin of Northumbria, the priory and the castle, built in the 11th Century, were destined to have a turbulent existence. It was to become the resting place of three kings of ancient Britain, face destruction by the Vikings, and receive mention in a play by Christopher Marlowe.

After the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 4th Century, Britain was not a unified country. It was divided into regions, each presided over by its own “king” or tribal leader. In these often violent years, commonly known as the “dark ages,” where much history went unrecorded, there were frequent changes of allegiances and armed conflicts between the kingdoms of Britain. Tynemouth Priory, situated in Northumbria, was one of the largest regions in Britain.

Oswine and Osred II were the first kings to be buried at Tynemouth. Later revered as a Saint, Oswines burial place became a pilgrimage laying the foundations for Tynemouth’s later notoriety.

In the last three centuries of the first millennia, the Northeast coast of England faced constant raids by Vikings from Scandinavia. Tynemouth, priory home to many monks living there, was attacked five times between 800 and 875, when it was destroyed. The final destruction also involved the murder of many nuns from St Hildas convent who were sheltering in Tynemouth.

After the destruction, Tynemouth priory was not re-founded until after the Norman conquest. William the Conqueror sought to bring all of England under his dominion. Malcolm III was the final king of Britain to be buried at Tynemouth after being killed at the battle of Alnwick in 1093 during the Norman conquest. William built a simple castle at Tynemouth consisting of a wooden stockade and ramparts; this was added to in the 14th Century with a stone wall protecting the priory, later followed by a Barbican and Gatehouse.

By the middle ages, Tynemouth Castle was described as the strongest fortresses on the Anglo Scottish borders. Both English Kings Edward I and II stayed in the castle during their campaigns against the Scots. The latter took shelter there in 1314 with his favorite Piers Gaveston after the battle of Bannockburn before fleeing to Scarborough by sea.

Tynemouth priory remained prosperous until 1539, when, under the order of Henry VIII, it was destroyed during his campaign of the dissolution of the monasteries. Only a small church was left standing. The castle remained in Royal hands and came in useful during the English Civil War when it was captured by soldiers loyal to the parliamentarians. In 1646, Charles I was held prisoner in nearby Newcastle Upon Tyne while negotiations went on over his fate. A Dutch vessel landed near Tynemouth Castle to rescue him, but Charles was unable to reach Tynemouth in time to effect an escape. Even during the first World War, the strategic location of Tynemouth Castle was used a a gun battery defending the entrance to the River Tyne against German attacks on shipping.

Today, Tynemouth Castle and Priory are maintained by English Heritage. Under the remains of the church there is a small oratory or chapel dedicated to St Mary, which contains a simple altar and beautiful stained glass window that magically projects vivid colors onto the sandstone walls, even on the greyest North East days. Parts of the castle dating back to the 11th Century can also be seen along with the restored first World War gun battery and the remains of the Priory.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tynemouth-priory-and-castle

dhampyresa

This artbook is the "collection of pretty pictures by various people" type of art book rather than the "includes tutorials by a single artist" type of artbook. I like both these types of artbooks and own multiple of each, as well as "collection of pretty pictures by single artist" and "includes tutorials by various artists".

It's published by YBY Éditions, with text in both French and English. The text is titles for the illustrations and sometimes a few sentences about the content.

My favourites were (featured here as pictures of the pages):

I like the use of light to portray intimacy.
Eros and Psyche, by Robbuz
( Eros and Psyche )

The minimalist use of colour here is really neat.
Doctor Faustus, by Couple Of Kooks
( Doctor Faustus )

The green and purple work so well together!
Blind Love, by KME
( Blind Love )

I love the multiple light sources.
Moonlight, by Sara Deek
( Moonlight )

Transmasc/transfem yin/yang is so cool!
Yin and Yang, by Mathilde Périé
( Yin and Yang )

The book contains 46 illustrations total and I enjoyed all of them.

volkameria

I got this idea from

tozka , who in turn got it from Tracy Durnell's weeknotes! This seems like a really good way to blend my journaling and fandom posts into one and give more space for other random thoughts; we shall see how this goes!

Interesting Articles
https://aftermath.site/grand-theft-auto-vi-games-industry - What GTA6 represents for the video game industry as it exists in 2025. Really solid, in depth examination of why the hype cycle is what it is right now.
https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/ - More AI slop nonsense, this time as a reading list published in several major newspapers. I cast blame here on both the person who cut corners and did not check his research, and the systems of work that prioritize content generation above accurate and good information that *lead to* behavior like what the writer did.
https://aftermath.site/darumi-amemiya-the-hundred-line-last-defense-academy-emo-cringe-punk - An essay on why Darumi of Hundred Line fame is a love letter to cringe.

Fixation of the Week
If I said Hundred Line would anyone be surprised? No? Okay moving on... ( Minor spoilers (Day 40) )
(I'm also working on a patch for my jacket that looks like Eito's - if anyone wants the cross stitch pattern I'm happy to share!)

Media Stuff

Accomplishments of the Duke's Daughter - Vol. 4-6. All volumes came in from the library at once, so I'm catching up on 7 right now. The manga seems to end at 8, which is a cliffhanger! But it looks like the novels pick up where we leave off, starting around Vol. 4, so I think I'll buy those next time. I love how it switches from fun otome isekai to economic seminar in the blink of an eye, and Iris is such a complex and competent lead. It makes her sweet romantic moments with Dean all the better! (Also Dida best boy.)
Bocchi The Rock! Ep. 1-4 - Started the show, it's really good and I'm enjoying the music. It's that right blend of angsty rock and poppy female vocals that I love.
Star Trek: Lower Decks S5 E09 - So close to being done with the series! Makes me sad; this was the most fun I've had with Star Trek since Voyager, but I'm glad it's ending on a high note.
Liturgy of the Ordinary - Ended up starting and finishing this book within 3 days. I love how this book illustrates the importance of practices, and how to connect the joy of living with acts of worship even - and especially - in the mundane. She lost me a bit in the middle, and I think the criticism of this book that one could easily become paranoid and overfocused on doing the right things or believe they can become holy by shopping at farmers markets rather than Wal*Mart is absolutely correct. However, the book helped me mentally connect the dots between daily practices like brushing teeth, sleeping, and doing tech work, and how they shape my spiritual life.
- Quote: The contemporary church can, at times, market a kind of "ramen noodle" spirituality. Faith becomes a consumer product - it asks little of us, affirms our values, and promises to meet our needs, but in the end it's just a quick fix that leaves us glutted and malnourished. ... Christian worship, centered on Word and sacrament, reminds me that my core identity is not that of a consumer: I am a worshiper and an image-bearer, created to know, enjoy, and glorify God and to know and love those around me.
RinRin - a new female metalcore producer who I found on Spotify. I've had FCKNRUN on loop an embarrassing amount of times this week.
NYT Crossword - either I'm getting old, the USA is about to enter a recession, or both, because I've been having a shocking amount of fun with the NYT crossword. I've yet to fully solve one (I've been a letter or 2 off a few times though!) but there's something very satisfying about it. Even if I have to constantly google the sports trivia or wonder who thought rebuses were OK...

Food Stuff

Hubby weightlifts and is looking to enter strongman competitions and, as such, needs a very high protein diet. We have so many protein powders at this point, it's kinda funny.
Cooked Kung Pao Tofu + Chicken - pretty good!
Baked raisin scones twice this week, now that I have finally learned the magic of the pastry knife and how to work with cold butter. Someone stop me.

Website Stuff

Made an account on LibraryThing, and am learning how to use it! So far it's lovely. It feels very much like browsing a library catalogue with all its quirks.

Looking Ahead

Looking forward to a long weekend! Hoping to spend some time outdoors and some time crafting.
Work promises to bring its own share of ridiculous problems, but what week doesn't it? I'm just hoping that some of the weirdness can stop and it can go back to being really *busy* and not odd.
I'm quite eager to make Tinga de Frijoles this week! Might even make it this Sunday.

marycatelli

Some fantasy patron saints are already given. St. Cyprian against witchcraft. St. Anastasia Pharmakolytria against evil potions.

( Read more... )

dreamshark

lauradi7dw

Instead of a memorial service per se, the stepdaughter of one of the members of the knitting group (who actually didn't knit - she did fantastic needlepoint galaxies, for example) is hosting a tea party to share memories (and tea, probably, but I'm not going to take off my mask). How formally do I dress? Black skirt and white blouse? It will be my 4th activity tomorrow, after Tai Chi, ringing, and a Pumgmul session (which I will leave early), so I need something that will not be messed up by packing it.

bill_schubert

This is Teddy:

He was picked up off the road and obviously had been there for a bit. He's got parasites and probably heartworms and who knows what else. He's also not yet nutered yet. But he is sweet and SO happy to be at the Ranch.

He's obviously been in a fight likely with a racoon or something like that. Muzzle and paws scared up by small teeth.

But he's fairly young and got lots of energy so he should be OK. The next most recent dog, Babs, is doing well. She came to the Ranch in about the same condition not too long ago and is getting better every day.

And, just to end on a better thought:

The inscrutible Khaleesi says hello.

damninteresting_link_feed

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/23/tom-cruise-stunt-hawk-uses-pedestrian-crossing-target-prey?utm_source=DamnInteresting

Like a Tom Cruise stunt: hawk uses traffic patterns to target prey (from theguardian.com)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/23/tom-cruise-stunt-hawk-uses-pedestrian-crossing-target-prey?utm_source=DamnInteresting

atlas_obscura_places_feed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cappella-sistina

Interior fresco on the dome section of the chapel.

Vatican City isn’t the only place home to a Sistine Chapel. A smaller, yet similarly beautiful Cappella Sistina, which was also commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV, lies in the heart of the Italian City of Savona.

Unlike the more-famous Sistine Chapel, Pope Sixtus IV’s purpose in ordering the construction of this chapel was to build a suitable final resting place for his parents, Leonardo della Rovere and Luchina Monleone. In 1481, work began to alter and amend aspects of the pre-existing Franciscan Convent, where Sixtus IV’s father had already secured a spot for his family’s tomb.

The chapel has had a number of beautiful paintings depicting various religious scenes added over the years to the interior, and it’s directly next to the larger cathedral, Duomo di Savona. The exterior of the chapel is also painted in a faux-architecture style fresco.

Sixtus IV’s parents were from Savona, and although it was renovated in the 18th century by Francesco Maria—who was a descendant of the Della Rovere family—their tomb within remains one of the only aspects of the chapel which has remain unchanged over the previous six centuries.

The Cappella Sistina remains one of Savona’s most beloved landmarks, and is currently used as a place of worship, as well as for concerts and events.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cappella-sistina

garryowen

Hey, is anyone watching Brilliant Minds? Just wondering about it. Seems up my alley, and not just because ZQ is in it. I haven't watched any yet.

Please tell me what shows you are excited about right now. I want to know.

susandennis

Dixie said she went to Value Village (the local reuse shop) and they only had about 3 sweaters and none were the right color. It's so not the right time of year for sweaters.

But, I had been wanting to check out the Goodwill in Redmond and ... why not now? So I just grabbed my keys and went. Stopped to get Biggie's drugs first. They had them ready this time and charged me more :( but stil l way cheaper than another surgery!

It was morning rush hour so Google took me the back way to Redmond and it was a beautiful drive. I mean really spectacularly, if-I-didn't-live-here-I'd-move-tomorrow beautiful. Lush green tree canopy over the road and nearly no traffic. The Redmond store is easy to get to with good, easy parking. It's big and bright and well organized. Probably about half the size of the Seattle store, maybe less. But lovely and well staffed. I found way too many clothes. I do not need clothes. I bought them anyway. Now I have to go to the storage area and get more hangers. I promised I would not do that. I am such a liar.

The clothes are in the wash now.

But, more importantly, I found Dixie's perfect sweater. Exactly the right color and a good size of yarn for kinky unraveling. I took it to her when I got back. She had left me some buttons in my mail room cubby and I picked those up and they are DARLING. Little toy's and shapes. And there are a bunch of them.

The woman at the title company who calls me from a different phone every time and rarely to tell me anything new, called again today from still another number to tell me exactly what she told me in her reply to my email earlier in the week. I asked her to quit calling. And to please communicate via email. And so she sent me an email saying the notary would be scheduled for Tuesday morning at 10. Then the notary sent me an email saying she's coming Tuesday at 10. Wonder when the signing will be?? I'm thinking maybe Tuesday at 10.

How glad will I be when all this shit is over? Very.

I did not get to the grocery. Maybe tomorrow. I would like some ice cream but I can get some down at the Bistro.

Now I'd better go get those hangers.