My interests in this, beyond the obvious of growing food, has always been the issue of restoring technology. A sort of Minecraft exploit. How do you go about locating useful ores and materials, how do you process them into their constituent parts, and how do you construct accurate tools to accomplish these jobs?

Basically, coming from the Battletech universe… How does one prevent the concept of lostech?

I'll have to compile my work on the subject, as well as my ongoing research/projects on the matter. Part of the challenge is all of the fundamentals. Working in a factory and seeing the look of utter confusion on some younger people's faces when handed calipers or mentioning some engineering concepts that used to be common tradecraft…. We gotta go back to things like "what is a bisector" and "what does tempering do" as we get into metal matrixes and why an aluminum casting can be stronger than a mild steel but will cut like butter.

Of course, such a goal of preventing lostech is insufficient to just describe how it has been done in the past. Certain things are nearly impossible to replicate without today's interconnected trade systems and equipment. Hundreds of chicken-and-egg conundrums face people attempting to create even the simplest of transistor amplifiers or hydraulic actuators.

Some of these are just heavy industry - there is no replacement for a primary melt furnace that can handle a hundred tons of material. Even if one could manufacture the control circuitry and hydraulic coupled servos of an automated panel bender, the equipment and tooling for creating the various dies and heavy frame is a completely different story (as is the equipment to assemble and move such a thing).

As such, the goal is the preservation of knowledge of how to create such industry in the first place, while consolidating as many technologies into 'garage space' as possible. There is no reason why a process to develop integrated circuits couldn't be implemented on an 'at home' scale with a power budget that could be found from generators or other 'off grid' sources. Should some manner of apocalypse sweep the world, the knowledge and ability to create much of our high technology should be able to survive in the hands of individuals and communities.

Of course, if it doesn't - the power of tinker has a way of solving things that large budget programs fail at.