NPCs Buy Ammo
Parallel non-Drug Drugesque Economy

Ammunition is manufactured by players with similar mechanics and limitations as drugs are, but while drug manufacturing has an off-ramp for supply in the form of a wide network of NPCs who will buy and use them, ammunition only has players and the supply is vastly, vastly greater than the amount of gunplay the game has. One of several reasons munitions suffers as a skill to build an archetype around.

It would make a lot of sense to me if some NPCs (I am thinking specifically of the guard NPCs topside which have similar numbers and factional distribution compared to the gangs) would buy ammunition every week from players in the same style as others buy drugs. The two systems aren't identical (there's several types of drug creation tools and only one ammo tool, ammunition creation can't explode as far as I know) but I think these are basically a question of tuning and you could start the payout values lower and scale them up until there was some kind of equilibrium.

One of the cool aspects of having something like this is, while it increases the potential for income generation of munitions characters a lot, it doesn't actually increase the size of the economy at all because the total amount of automated income that can be earned from all players remain the same.

Today I Learned! Even simpler. Could this be as simple as a script to empty their ammo supply every week?

If something were to be introduced to empty ammo supplies every week for guard NPCs, I'd like to see factions that actually do hire PCs to make deals with ammo producers to help resupply their comrades in arms. Not a mechanical thing, just would be a nice initiative for RP on top of the automated running.

I have no idea how many NPCs are already set up this way, and how much just a weekly script to empty ammo from pockets could flip this mechanic light a lightswitch, but because of what has already stockpiled my feeling is that we'd want a lot of NPCs buying (I'd say at least 15) and tune around payouts rather than how many buyers there are.

IMO we already have all the data to know how markets like this will play out based on drug production and sales and it makes it an extremely safe change to implement despite its impact.