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Huh, that's a really interesting question. I've never really considered the idea of "technological prepping" even though I might - to a small degree - self iden
by mindcrime 5y ago
Huh, that's a really interesting question. I've never really considered the idea of "technological prepping" even though I might - to a small degree - self identify as something of a "prepper" in the general sense.
Part of it depends on that threat scenario you are prepping for. For example "disintegration of global supply chain" absent some more generalized sort of disaster resulting in the collapse of advanced society (eg, rise of the zombies, meteor strike, etc.) is one thing, where the more generalized disaster "SHTF" scenarios might call for different tactics.
For example... if you're worried about a more general "collapse of society" model, then it seems clear that simply having access to electricity at all would be a key thing to consider. So one might want to focus on batteries, solar cells, wire/cable, power electronics, etc., that would be required to get some juice available at all.
But something like a further decline of today's (largely pandemic created?) supply chain disruptions, where society is mostly intact, the power grid is up, etc. is a different question. What's the goal, commercial production of products for profit? The ability to repair commonly used household devices if they break? The ability to create innovative new devices from scratch?
The "repair parts stash" scenario seems to me as maybe the most likely one to be useful. So it seems like you'd want plenty of commonly used passives in wide range of values, a ton of "jelly bean" IC's, transistors, etc., probably transformers, fuses, etc. Microprocessors get tricky because there are so many out there. One might also want to tailor a stash based on doing tear-downs of the exact devices they own and pre-identify what parts would be needed.
Wow... I dunno. The more I think about this, the more it seems like a huge rabbit-hole to go down. In a good way, of course. It's just that there are so many parts that could be useful, it starts to get hard to figure out how to filter the list down.
- fuzzfactor 5y agoAssuming you have an electrical source like chemical batteries, mechanical generators or even solar cells, With copper wire & iron you can have a telegraph. With vacuum tube transceivers you get wireless. You just have to stockpile a lot more tubes than radios. Just in case you want to go big, telegraphs would require a huge pile of copper compared to what you could do with a single truckload of radios & tubes. If it does turn out to take a really long time for certain doom to finally arrive, rest assured it's proven this technology can reliably be built to last a century, and still operate even if it gets hammered by nuclear EMP. From a safe enough distance of course. If nothing else stockpile the tubes, everything else could be much more easily recovered from scratch.