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Originally Posted by gmw
I find it slightly amusing reading the posts here that suggest that simply having access to the knowledge (even assuming you have the means to access it) will be enough. Anyone here care to reproduce the work of the Wright brothers from Wikipedia articles alone?  Apprenticeships can be long and hard for some of the skills (as opposed to raw knowledge) to be acquired, and they will be longer and harder if there are no masters to learn from. |
My husband could rebuild the Wright brothers' plane, but he says (I'm quoting):
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Why would you want to? It was a terrible design, almost unflyable. The engine was low-power and heavy; the chain drive system was worthless. Wing-warping as a method of roll-control is ridiculous. Much better to use the Curtis "barn door" aileron system; it gives better control of roll and gives a much more stable airframe. On top of that, the pitch and yaw axis (pitch is "elevator;" yaw is "rudder") is so short-coupled to make the machine incredibly unstable; it's a miracle they got the thing to fly at all.
Much better off to use the later Bleriot designs; if I were to build an airplane today, I'd be much better off using more modern materials and build along the line of a modern "ultralight" or "microlight" airplane. And, as a modeler, I could scratch one up from found materials in less than a month.
(I could directly copy the Wright brothers' airplane but it's such a terrible design only a fool would do it. The only thing impressive about it was that it was the first viable propeller design; we still use their theories for low-speed propellers.)
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Any of his flying buddies would say the same.
I worked at a RenFaire for several years, and was peripherally involved with the SCA. I'm surrounded by people who know how to build the basic technologies of survival and transportation from scratch with limited materials.
There is no shortage--even in the nongeek communities--of people who are good at putting things together. There are plenty of "junkyard engineers" and other craftspeople who would love to have a whole city's worth of spare parts to build steam-powered cars, long-distance gliders, restart a phone system (the wires are already in place) or bypass that and make ham radio communications.
Husband says: "Give me a semi-urban setting, a group of a few hundred survivors, and in ten years, I could give you steampunk level technology for the whole community." And he's not unique in his skills & interests, nor at the top of any field of mechanics or engineering. (Although he is ridiculously talented with vehicles.)