[Raellus]

Your arguments are quite logical, Lurken. I don't disagree with you per se, but consider the per capita amount of tech left by 2000. As more and more people die off due to nuclear warfare, starvation, disease, exposure, and/or conventional combat attrition, the ratio of tech to people might stay the same or even increase.

In other words, as the population decreases, there are fewer people making use of available tech. So, some tech might not get used up as quickly as it would if there were more people around to use it. This could apply to drones/UAVs, or the parts needed to jury rig one.

We tend to think that tech will get used up, and people killed, at roughly the same rate, but that isn't necessarily the case. I posit that the faster people die off, the more slowly that remaining available tech will get used up. Obviously, as modern manufacturing grinds to a halt, very little, if any, new tech will be produced, but for a time- one could argue that this period would occur around the year 2000- the rate by which tech would be used up by surviving people would be so slow that the amount of tech still left to use might last longer than one would think.

I know it's a video game, but one encounters this phenomenon in the Fallout series, where there are so few survivors left in some parts of the wasteland that an explorer will, from time to time, encounter pockets of forgotten, unused, viable tech.

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