It's funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes.
No. There will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep tech stacks.
Conversation
The industrial age has made us (falsely) believe that an "industrial base" has to necessarily be a nation-state scale at minimum. No. A complete industrial tech stack can be built as a fairly narrow single-billionaire pillar.
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A traditional "industrial base" has steel, sulphuric acid, power plants etc. at the bottom, and space programs and aircraft carriers at the top. This kind of stack can now be replicated with a *very* narrow footprint. I think you could do it for $3-4 billion in a small city.
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Anything up to early 20th century should be doable on a budget of millions and a population under 20K. The Wright Brothers built their own engine. It's when you start trying for semiconductors that you run into problems, and some things require a large resource base to achieve.


