I'm confused on a few points

[MFP 2020]

I realize this horse is dead, but I can't stop beating it.

I was thinking about the compound set and it occurred to me that maybe it was built like a typical movie facade—that the front was the most important and visible part, and the back is implied and was never meant to be seen. The weakest point IMO is the bus. Unless it was full of bricks or something heavy, with that straight road right up to the gate it would have been fairly simple to ram the bus right into the compound and then follow with a marauding convoy (or even troops on foot), overwhelming the defenders with speed and violence. But maybe Humungus was a poor tactician (or preferred to wait out the defenders). Or maybe he was just all show and no go. Wez would have been the natural leader for such an assault. Maybe that's what the argument was about.

As far as the marauders go, Gyro says he was up on the hill watching for two days before the marauders showed up, so their siege had been going on for a relatively short time. FWIW.

[Rook3]

I think the bus issue was one of 'implied' strength.

I mean, you see a car hit by a bus and to pick up the pieces you need... lots of time. You hit a bus with a car... and you could likely still drive the bus away. Add in some 'bullet proof' sheets of steel... well, I wouldn't try it.

Besides, the biggest vehicle the marauders had was Humungous' machine, wasn't it? And we saw what happened when he played chicken with Max and the big rig.

[Max_Van]

I'm confused on a few points:

Why don't steam rollers roll steam

If the plural of mouse is mice, then why isn't the plural of house Hice?

In pictures of kamikaze pilots, Why are they wearing helmets?

At a movie theater which arm rest is yours?

Why is it that everyone driving faster than you is considered an idiot and everyone driving slower than you is a moron?

Why is the Lone Ranger called 'Lone' if he always has his Indian friend Tonto with him?

Why is vanilla ice cream white when vanilla extract is brown?

How can something be "new" and "improved"? if it's new, what was it improving on?

There's only two states an oven can be in, heating or cold. So how can you pre heat an oven.....do you heat it before you heat it?

[HUMVEE Driver]

About the bus...

I think they had sand or some kind of weight in it. Even if they didn't, a bus is heavy. The biggest vehicle the marauders had was either one of the tow trucks, or like it was mentioned, the Humungus Machine. The best chance for a vehicle to ram past the bus it to hit it at one of it's axles; preferably the rear one with less weight. Even then, no way would it be able to move the bus much. As it is set up, the bus is centered. A vehicle's only choice would be to ram the bus is a T-bone, and it just wouldn't work. Coupled with the flamethrower right there, and the bus makes an excellent gate.

A little info, an average school bus weighs between 11 & 14 Tons (22,000 to 28,000 pounds) curb weight without passengers. When you add 84 passengers, say high school students, that can add up to 14,700 additional pounds in weight, bringing the total up to about 42,700 pounds. Now imagine sand in there instead of people. The absolute most the Humungus Machine might weigh is 4 tons.

HUMVEE Driver

[MWFV8]

Indeed, there are some videos about on the net showing cars/vans etc hitting buses and they are very solid objects.

[MFP1]

you should see the SchoolBus Figure 8 Demo Derby Races they have here!! That is some cool wasteland style fun!

[aussie muscle]

then follow with a marauding convoy (or even troops on foot)

...and end up like the guy who gets toasted with the flamethrower...

[MFP 2020]

Crossbow defeats flamethrower (operator).

[Redd4]

If you take it far enough back, pretty much everything in science fiction after H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Fritz Lang has been some sort of ripoff, just different ways of telling the stories.
"Star Trek" was supposed to be "Wagon Train" in space, or that's how Roddenberry tried to sell it to the network. I'm no Shakespeare fan, I couldn't get through Shakespeare if you held a gun to my head, but I know that "Forbidden Planet" is "The Tempest". "2001" is a ripoff of "Trip To The Moon"...
After a certain point, everything is a ripoff; it's just discerning the point.
"Firefly" is cool, it combined different elements, just like Lucas combined different elements to make "Star Wars". Mal Reynolds is Han Solo with a crew that he has to worry about, Solo is Commander Adams without the military restraints and crew. Compare the look of the robot in "Metropolis" and C3PO. But each story has different characters with different things and stories, and that's what makes it new. "Serenity" was a great movie and continuation of the series.
"Mad Max" is a ripoff of any lone-man revenge movie that came before it, and "Road Warrior" is "Shane", with cool cars instead of horses.
The whole trick is telling what's been told before in a new way; Shakespeare had the good luck of being one of the early ones, so he gets all the credit. Lucky limey bastard. At least he's dead .

[flightsuit]

I must say I'm amazed by the hostility some of you have shown toward bearcat22. At no point did he insult or criticize the movie; he was simply hoping to have a discussion about some issues which he felt may, or may not, have been plot holes or ambiguities. This is a perfectly valid thing for a fan of a movie to do when visiting a message board devoted to that movie, and I find it odd that y'all have responded with such venom.

Unless there's some history of animosity here which involves other threads that I haven't seen?

Whats the point in having forums if people cant be bothered to use the search function. Every single whine you make here about fantasy vs reality has been debated ad nauseum.

Bearcat22 was wrong to call you an asshole, but I hardly think his original post contained any whining. Furthermore, putting myself in his shoes, I can't imagine which search terms, exactly, would have yielded the answers to the questions he'd raised. If I go on a computer help forum and ask people why Quicktime isn't playing subtitles without first searching "Quicktime not playing subtitles," that's one thing; it would be pure laziness on my part to start a topic without first checking to see if the problem, and its fix, had already been addressed.

A message board like this, however, is a social meeting spot for fans. All I see in the original post is a fan looking to socialize and converse with other fans about some interesting aspects of the film.

Anyway...

Having said all that...

Regarding this issue of whether the water's radioactive, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the notion that, according to what's implied in the films and their novelizations, there are still intact, functioning cities during the time of MM2, and the limited nuclear exchange "pockyclypse" which finally sounds the death knell for civilization takes place some time between MM2 and MM3, yes?

Also, regarding oil and its refining, I've not yet read the novelization of MM2, but I understand it tells us that Pappagallo was a Seven Sisters oil company executive prior to the collapse of society. This makes it far more plausible that he would have known how to refine oil and/or brought with him people who had this knowledge, as well as the necessary equipment; We're not looking at a bunch of refugees who happened to stumble across an oil well, but a community whose original core members were brought there by an oil man who'd seen what was coming and planned accordingly.