[TML] Does "Operation Reset" Make Sense?

[Richard Aiken]

On Dec 1, 2007 12:49 AM, Timothy Little <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:
> OK, so maybe someone
> was stupid enough to deliberately cripple both sides - that can
> happen.

I'm suggesting he update the timeline to "Twilight: 2017."  Maybe not
a nuclear war, but a "natural" disaster.  Such as what happens in "Ill
Wind" by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason; an oil company releases an
oil-eating microbe on a massive oil spill which propogates by air and
within days all oil-based materials either evaporate or dissolve.
Civilization basically ends.  But before it does, paranoid Russia
tries to nuke everybody else.

> Disconnected semiconductors are vastly more resistant to EMP. [snip]
> It is also not unlikely for some large stocks of semiconductors to be
> in locations with substantial shielding from such long wavelengths -
> warehouses with metal walls and roof would do an excellent job.  The
> gaps (indeed, warehouses as a whole) are vastly smaller than the
> wavelength.

So the location of the huge stash becomes the critical info.

> So there is really only one possibility that makes sense with the plot
> and setting: the inventor came up with some fundamentally new way of
> engineering such a processor.  This would indeed be worth capturing
> and analysing!

Or then again . . . using something like the (GURPS) Science! skill?
This would certainly fit the "Fast! Furious! Fun!" mantra of Savage
Worlds.  Remember those old Asimov stories where the robot brains were
allowed to grow there own "positronic circuits" after manufature?
Maybe this invention does that, allowing the manufacture of new chips
without the usual infrastructure?

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein