Kord in another castle, 5.45 can't be exchanged

[tenmillimaster]

Summary

Balance "Removes 5.45 from bullet bank, breaks the kord"

Purpose of change

5.45x39 is an ammunition that is laughably uncommon in the US, following the banning of 7n6 ammo, people stopped viewing 5.45 AR uppers as a very cheap way to shoot. What 7n6 remains on the market today is old stock, and there are few consumers of 5.45 save for niche diehard russian AK enthusiasts.

What this means is there are few components to work with for producing the ammunition, especially cases (5.45 cases are typically berdan primed, and steel cased, which are not easy to reload), and the caliber is also non-standard (Midway, for example, has one listing for .221" projectiles). It's not reasonable for anyone to be stocked up to gills on these reloading components, particularly these cases, to barter 5.45 with the survivor for perpetuity.

Also the most reasonable (and quasi legal) path for assembling a Kord in country is the path outlined here: get the parts, not the whole rifle, imported, and then assembly/rebuild in country. This is done all the time. There are North Korean AK parts kits, available.

Describe the solution

Remove 5.45 from the bullet bank.
Add 5.45 (rarely) to the counter, instead. Also .458 WM.
Add a broken kord intermediate item.
Have Jay fix the Kord when you do the follow quest.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Yanking the KORD altogether.

Testing

Ran through the broken kord fetch quest.
Ran through the USB fetch quest.
Spawned a bunch of 5.45 and went through the bullet bank dialogues.

Additional context

[John-Candlebury]

Why remove its ammo from the gunbank when the gunbank is the sole reason this gun exists?

Also dont you have to provide the casings to get the bullets. If thats not how it functions having a special case dialogue function where Jay reloads the ammo if you provide casings seems reasonable.

[github-actions]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

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• Where did you… I- I don't know what to say." Jay takes the rifle reverently. "What did they do to this thing? The receiver's all chopped up!" He turns it over so carefully that you could mistake him for holding a child instead of a gun. "This thing was beautiful. Modern rails, ergonomic furniture, recoil balancing system… At least it's all still here. I know Cody thinks that she did something wrong, but all I remember is being so angry… just blindingly furious. Then I was running. When I woke up, everything was fine."\n\n"Thank you for letting me see this, and for getting Cody and I talking. If you could help me out with something for Cody, I'll make this rifle right, and hook you up with a casket mag and a box of the good ammo for it. Stuff from my reserves.

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.

[tenmillimaster]

Why remove its ammo from the gunbank when the gunbank is the sole reason this gun exists?

The gun bank seems reasonable for other calibers, components for them exist in spades here. For 5.45, Jay must provide the casings if they're not provided by the survivor, and it's not reasonable for him to source so many 5.45 casings.

Also dont you have to provide the casings to get the bullets. If thats not how it functions having a special case dialogue function where Jay reloads the ammo if you provide casings seems reasonable.

That's a slippery slope I did not want to go down. I found this path easier to do. If someone else wanted to support reloading every recipe, the logical conclusion of your suggestion, through Jay, I'd be ok with that with a few exceptions.

[John-Candlebury]

The Kord is "faction weaponry" for the artistans just kinda like 1.23ln is for the exodii.

Its why I think procuring extra of it shouldnt be much of a hassle and why a specific reload from it doesnt stipulate a "slippery slope"

[KnifeFightBears]

The Kord is "faction weaponry" for the artistans just kinda like 1.23ln is for the exodii.

Its why I think procuring extra of it shouldnt be much of a hassle and why a specific reload from it doesnt stipulate a "slippery slope"

Is fabricating casings for ammo with known specifications even really that unlikely for a survivalist who specifically prepared for the apocalypse by building an ammo factory? I understand these would be "difficult" to fab but that doesn't mean "impossible"; Jay also seems like the kind of person who would stockpile rare AK ammo. I understand the "This is rare, it wouldn't be likely!" logic when we're dealing with random houses in random towns but this is a specific survivalist who is the same in all saves

[I-am-Erk]

I think this is a reasonable step. If we want the dude to be able to manufacture casings, we can explore that further, but this sets the stage nicely that this is supposed to be a special faction thing and helps avoid confusion over what we're going for.

[tenmillimaster]

Hey guys, are you sure this ammo is actually banned? I'm finding posts in the US about people buying cases of it at 10 cents a bullet in the last few years. Even the import banned 7n6 is .60-$1.00 a bullet. (https://ammoseek.com/ammo/5.45x39mm)

You can google this right now and find it on most gun marketplaces at roughly the same price as 5.56 ammo, if this game is supposed to be set in the modern day an import ban alone is not going to make this ammo impossible to find, as it seems quite plentiful in the enthusiast market. The supply seems to be far from exhausted.

Yes. https://www.atf.gov/news/pr/test-examination-and-classification-7n6-545x39-ammunition

It's an import ban, so any further importation is quashed.

Ok I can't read you noticed that the steel core is what was banned - this was the ammo that was available in bulk on the market, in my understanding. There are not significant quantities of non steel core ammo available, though that would be legal for import. The banning of the cheap steel core ammo is essentially what killed off interest of the caliber in the US - interest had been picking up due to ammunition costs of other calibers, and some AR owners were purchasing AR uppers and 5.45 ammo to shoot cheaply.

[tenmillimaster]

The Kord is "faction weaponry" for the artistans just kinda like 1.23ln is for the exodii.

Its why I think procuring extra of it shouldnt be much of a hassle and why a specific reload from it doesnt stipulate a "slippery slope"

Is fabricating casings for ammo with known specifications even really that unlikely for a survivalist who specifically prepared for the apocalypse by building an ammo factory?

Very. Case fabrication is difficult even if Jay could afford the machinery. It's a multi step process involving the drawing and shaping of brass into a critical pressure bearing component.

Setting up a brass factory and then just sitting on it without being involved in the business(Jay works in IT.)? That's unreasonably unlikely.

[Alm999]

Just remind me why exactly Cataclysm shall mimic the exact real-world situation including political situation and economic warfare?

It is one thing to remove some high-tech stuff because it should not exist at roughly our current level of technological development, but entirely different thing to remove something from the (in-game) world just because someone in real world has decided to ban things in USA.

Are we re-creating real world to the T, including all current wars, economic tensions and trade bans?

[I-am-Erk]

If you have some better system to address the thousands of questions around how much x there should be compared to y that come up in the game besides "the amount of x that appears irl" then I'm all ears.

The world of dda is not our world but when there's a decent question of scarcity, our world is a good design doc. In this case it opens up fun new avenues, I'm about halfway through a neat option tree stemming from this change.

[KnifeFightBears]

I understand this point of view but the ammo is freely available in the real world today; the import ban came well after most of the surplus entered the market and millions of rounds of the ammo still exist. The market rate of 5.45 bullets is about the same market rate as 5.56 bullets in 2024 dollars. The whole "5.45 is unobtanium!" meme comes from the fact that people were buying it at ten cents a bullet or less until the import ban. It's freely available all over the internet at sixty to seventy five cents a round in cases of a thousand rounds and considering it's import banned those internet sellers have to be living somewhere inside of the united states, right? Milsurp rounds are generally a lot more common than civillian rounds because militaries shoot more bullets than enthusiasts, there is probably (A LOT) more imported milsurp 545 rounds in circulation right now than real commercially produced .454 or .500 or name the bear hunting round, really.