Having a government in a box when everyone around you is scrounging for food makes you king, particularly if you also managed to save a couple militarized drones through the collapse. That's a pretty enviable position to be in.
The point, as with every capital investment, is to make more efficient the labor of the people who are securing those basic needs, so that you can free them up for work progressively higher on the value chain.
During the collapse itself, the way to do this is pretty easy: you kill the people who have food, shelter, or fuel but are not aligned with you, and give it to people who are aligned with you. And then once you have gotten everyone aligned with you, you increase the efficiency of the people who are doing the work. Saving even just one working tractor can cut the labor requirements from farming enough to support a village from several hundred people to one or two people. You will not have petrol in a post-collapse world, so better hope it's an electric tractor, or drop a scavenged electric motor + EV battery into an existing tractor. Use scavenged solar panels for power, there's plenty of that where I am.
All this requires that you know how things work, so you can trace out what to connect to what and repurpose electronic controls and open up the innards of the stuff you find abandoned on the street, and that's where having a computer and a lot of downloaded datasheets and physical/electronic/mechanical/chemical principles available will help.
> Having a government in a box when everyone around you is scrounging for food makes you king, particularly if you also managed to save a couple militarized drones through the collapse. That's a pretty enviable position to be in.
Come the fuck on. A fucking 8-bit computer (even a fucking 64-bit computer) is not a fucking "government in a box." And where the fuck are you going to get your "couple militarized drones"? Assuming they're not suicide drones (where "a couple" is not much), how long will they last? How useless would they be without spare parts, maintenance, and ammunition?
We live in the fucking real world, not some videogame where you can find a goddamn robot in a cave still functioning after 500 years and lethal enough for a boss-battle.
> You will not have petrol in a post-collapse world, so better hope it's an electric tractor, or drop a scavenged electric motor + EV battery into an existing tractor. Use scavenged solar panels for power, there's plenty of that where I am.
Look: if they don't have petrol, they won't have battery factories either. Batteries wear out. Your fantasy electric tractor will be just as useless a petrol one in short order.
The point, as with every capital investment, is to make more efficient the labor of the people who are securing those basic needs, so that you can free them up for work progressively higher on the value chain.
During the collapse itself, the way to do this is pretty easy: you kill the people who have food, shelter, or fuel but are not aligned with you, and give it to people who are aligned with you. And then once you have gotten everyone aligned with you, you increase the efficiency of the people who are doing the work. Saving even just one working tractor can cut the labor requirements from farming enough to support a village from several hundred people to one or two people. You will not have petrol in a post-collapse world, so better hope it's an electric tractor, or drop a scavenged electric motor + EV battery into an existing tractor. Use scavenged solar panels for power, there's plenty of that where I am.
All this requires that you know how things work, so you can trace out what to connect to what and repurpose electronic controls and open up the innards of the stuff you find abandoned on the street, and that's where having a computer and a lot of downloaded datasheets and physical/electronic/mechanical/chemical principles available will help.