so easy to snipe you, burn you out

Your dwelling is a soft, tempting, easily detected target. You have to watch 4 directions, 24-7, and that means that you need at least 8 adults, doing nothing but watch out the windows, in shifts. If you build a protected tower on the roof, you will be exposed while you do so, make a lot of noise, have a lot of movement to attract attention, and the wt of all the sandbags might well cavein your roof. Once you get such a tower, however, you might be able to get by on 2 adults, who do nothing but stand guard and rest from having just stood guard.


Each adult will of course need some sort of effective night vision, with its burning of batteries, especially cold weather. All a guy has to do is get within 300 yds of you, at night, even with a clunker milsurp bolt action, wait until late afternoon the next day, snipe you, leave after dark. He can make a ghillie on the spot, out of his poncho, hammock and local vegetation. It takes only a couple of hours. He can dig a shallow trench to lie in, and you won't spot him, even with binoculars and if you know where to look, at 300 yds. If he knows enough to use cover, all you'll have is a head shot at that range, and if you miss, all you'll have is a dodging torso as a target, and you won't hit that, either. He can return at leisure, bringing friends, etc. You will still be there (unless somebody else has shot you or burned you out in the meantime).

 

That's it, I give up. Anyone want to buy my guns, NV, dogs, termal detection devices, and my Jr. tower building kit? I now see the futility in all this preparedness.

 

Get to a retreat site, away from buildings.

Have a dugout, and avoid making noise or being seen. Costs very little. All you need, really, is some food and gear caches in a hilly, wooded area (near water), with water filter and potable aqua tabs, along with some half dug and covered-hidden covers. You can expand one in one night, enough to let you sleep in it the next day (sitting up) In a few nights, you can have it opened up into a comfortable dugout. Line your dugout with Mylar, and you will need no more heat in it (in daylight, with you up and about) than can be provided with a couple of paraffin-candle buckets (5 mopstring wicks).

Use each bucket to heat a small bucket of water, put out the flames, fan out the fumes. Let the radiant heat of the water warm the dugout. At night, get into your sleeping bag, that's all. You can make an adequate sleeping bag for almost nothing, and cache it nearby, along with the Mylar Space Blankets. Have a heavy duty one for the floor, remove shoes before entering the Mylar blanket area. . All it takes is some old sheets, a sewing awl, and wadded up newspaper.

All any sleeping bag does is provide "dead air" around your body, so that you don't lose the heat your body is producing. Get 4 sheets (or other matherial, even gunnysacks will work, altho not as well, and 2 layers of newspaper, Sew around the edges and in the manner of a quilt, so that the newspaper "stuffing" can't shift around on you. Put the bag on like a giant sock. No, it's not portable, but if you cache it near where you will make your dugout, it doesn't need to be portable, either. One less $200 item you have to have, and you don't need to carry it during the bugout to your cache, area, either.

Prep is fine, if it's INTELLIGENT prep. EACH lookout has to have night vision, or they can't do much. That gets really expensive. People get tired, sloppy, lazy. A couple of trained guard dogs, small ones, cheap, easy to feed, surgically "debarked" are worth more than most men, when it comes to sentry duty.

 

What you don't specify is the immediacy of this? This is great if you know that you are a target and you know when the attackers are going to come. Take into consideration that most of us have wives, kids, and animals. Your scenario is great for a day or three, but when it start running into the months, it isn't going to work. You obviously are not married. About day two, that bucket you have been heating water in will be used up side your head by your spousal unit. You have to define the parameters before you throw up a scenario and then the answer.

 

This whole scenario needs a lot more work. Especially the part about not being able to hit someone weaving or moving at 300 yards or so. Obviously you haven't been up to the northwest...lots of people can do that with deer, rabbits, or anything in between.

The rest of the stuff - nope it's only going to work for a very short period of time. This is not a very thought out plan at all.

 

Can we see pics of your bunker meyah? I want to see how it's done.

 

Living in a hole in the ground, what a great quality of life.

 

The barking dog makes a good alarm system and unless the guy trying to snipe you has NV then he can see no better than you can in the dark so you just avoid ruining your night vision and your as well off as 99.9% of folks includeing the bad guys short of possibly mil units comeing after you, in which case your screwed anyhow. Have 2 or 3 dogs, they can eat the guts and such from the critters that you dont want anyhow along with scraps, that can bark to alert you and just keep a sidearm on you and a rifle close to hand while you go do your work and your pretty likely to do fine as the bad guys are most likely to find an easier target and if you do die for it at least you were living before you died, if you are hideing in a hole someplace then are you really even living? Not to mention whats the plan on that for chow? Hunt/trap and gather? That gets AWFULY slim in the winter and if you are going to make catches for storeing chow then why not just start off by building say an earth contact house to start with or some other defensable home. As far as the idea of fire and being burned out, unless you have just pissed in someones cheerios thats not likely to be to much of a concern. If they are there to take what you have then it would be totaly counter productive for them to burn you out since if they burn the house to take you out then they also burn the contents and are left with nothing for their trouble. Snipers can also be thwarted by things as simple as shrubs, if you are on high ground where no one can see over the shrubs from within say 1000 yards and you have a hedge row say 8-10' tall around the yard then they cant accurately shoot what they cant see and if you have multiple dogs (so they cant shoot the only dog with a silenced gun and avoid the warning) or even gunie hens which will sound alarm calls when there is anything around that shouldnt be. With that and perhaps some other 'perimiter defences' your chances dug in in a well set home stead of surviveing any raiders should be far better than your chances in a dug out and bounceing around of surviveing the lean times of winter.

 

Boy that sounds like a great plan, NOT. By the way, where is YOUR bunker, meyah, brokeback mountain?

 

He evidently already crawled back to his hole in the ground. Welcome back Cleaner.

 

My wife screams when she see's a spider on the wall,,,wait till I get her in the dirt soon to be mud hole when it rains, and pack her with new paper to keep her warm. I'm not expected a very good anniversary present after that.

 

ok rambo where's the bATHROOM????
But; Uh er, trhats a graden trowel...!!!

 

I wonder if Meyah is getting "sniped at" in his new home................

 

You would have to get alot closer than 300 yards to snipe me. In some areas right around my house you would have to be withen 30 feet. But if you were that close the dogs would have your arse and you'd be beggin me to snipe you The best thing that I can come up with if it ever got that bad is to do the following. Ahead of time plant things like blackberries and wild gooseberries in a area out around you house to limit the paths that most people would come from. The pathes that are left open could be boobie trapped or whatched closer. Even wild animals look for the path of least rezitence as they go through the woods, any trapper will tell you that you can use that agianst them. As a family you are going to be hard pressed to keep watch 24/7. So look at ways to make it less that inviting to come into your site.

As far as what Meyah said well I would have likely came up with the same kind of plan when I was 19-20 and had nothing but a pack on my back. But as I try to stair down 40, with a wife and a child to keep safe that is just not much of an option.

OGM