Stepping backward.. Lower tech.

[ArmySGT.]

What is the likelihood that NATO and Pact governments would dust off the blueprints of lower tech, but proven designs? The loss of manufacturing and more importantly the technicians that made it work is affecting everyone drastically.

The fictional M16EZ comes to mind.

The M40A1 106mm RR can hull most WP armor in side shots...... manufacturing TVS-5s or laser range finders for those would be simpler than Tankbreaker missiles.

Not any specific ideas..... just how much effort and resources would be redirected to get lower tech (still survivable and effective though) designs out? If not on the front, than to rear security, to get offensive power forward again.

[James Langham2]

I'm guesssing that retooling will take too long. However lots of old weapons will be in storage and reissued, even back to WW2 era small arms in the US - the stockpiles were discussed in another thread.

[copeab]

Originally Posted by James Langham2

I'm guesssing that retooling will take too long. However lots of old weapons will be in storage and reissued, even back to WW2 era small arms in the US - the stockpiles were discussed in another thread.

You don't retool destroyed factories, you rebuild them.

[WallShadow]

Originally Posted by copeab

You don't retool destroyed factories, you rebuild them.

One of the"cheap and dirty" methods of protecting industrial machinery was to bulldoze/front-end-load heaps of metal scraps and cuttings around and over the machines. This actually proved somewhat practicable for non-direct hit/non-ground-zero nuclear tests.

I have asked the following question in another thread long, long ago:
Assuming EMP damage has fried the semiconductors of a computer chip factory, what would be the minimum components requiring a swap-out to get the erstwhile dead machinery back to producing microchips? What's the minimum to bootstrap the industry?

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I'm assuming for this scenario that what you'd need to do is replace all the fried chips in the computers/electronics controlling the production machinery and maybe some electrical connections and while I know that sounds "obvious", it's really quite involved.
There's many different devices in use to create the chips from the furnaces that melt the sand to produce the silicon ingots to the saws that cut the ingots into wafers to the systems that layer silicon dioxide onto the wafer, coat the sections to be preserved, control the hot gasses used to scour away the undesired sections of silicon dioxide and so on to the final testing of the chip and its separation from all the other chips layered onto the individual wafer (which obviously requires a very fine & precisely controlled cutting implement!).

These would all take different chips in their controlling computers so I reckon the minimum you're going to need is someone with a good Electronics knowledge to be able to identify what chips are needed as replacements... then you gotta find 'em.
However, any fabrication plant is probably going to have spares and probably a decent amount of them. Assuming the plant didn't take physical damage they'll most likely have spares conveniently on hand because the microchip industry is too important for a fabrication plant to have to sit around waiting for a tech to come along and repair an errant computer that's holding up millions of dollars worth of production.

If you don't have the replacement chips on hand, you're going to have to find them or else you'd be stuck having to reinvent them and that would need a computer engineer so you could figure what you wanted the machinery to do and how to do it etc. etc. then you'll have to hand-craft the replacement chips and all of that's probably going to take more time than locating spare chips!

[James Langham2]

Originally Posted by copeab

You don't retool destroyed factories, you rebuild them.

Quite a few factories seem to be intact - Lima is known to exist for example

I was also possibly thinking earlier in the war - WW2 shows examples where an inferior design was left in service and production as it was immediately available

[copeab]

Originally Posted by James Langham2

I was also possibly thinking earlier in the war - WW2 shows examples where an inferior design was left in service and production as it was immediately available

Of course, sometimes the "inferior" design was better than it's replacement, such as with the Douglas SBD Dauntless or Fairey Swordfish.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by James Langham2

Quite a few factories seem to be intact - Lima is known to exist for example

I was also possibly thinking earlier in the war - WW2 shows examples where an inferior design was left in service and production as it was immediately available

Navy destroyers and Army tanks would be good examples.

I would say a large number of factories are intact in the U.S. and Canada. Most are outside of the commercial centers of major cities. They lack power and raw materials..... the manpower shortage, more importantly trained manpower (machinists, welders, fitters) have either been drafted or are dead from famine or disease. Concentrating the survivors with that skill set in one region to maximize their potential has to be a government goal.

Fix those three..... electrical power, raw material, and manpower and you can have some working plants again.... Some plants can't operate because they rely on components built at another plant hundreds or thousands of miles away.

[Olefin]

I have the BAE York plant operating again after it has power restored from Harrisburg in 2001 working on completing M88's, Bradley's, M109's and Bufords until they run out of parts. And while today you have a just in time environment and low stockpiles back then we used to have a lot of material in stock (let alone made our own harnesses and other items). Even when I was there back in 2008-2014 we used to have enough on hand at any one time to keep production going for a couple of months at a time - back in the mid-90's it was more like four to five months.

and the welders and other techs there all lived nearby - you had a lot of people there with 20-30 years experience - and York was untouched by the nuclear attacks in 1997 - so it may be the one plant that could be put back into at least low rate production pretty easily - and if you want a low tech vehicle then you would love the M88A1 or A2 - and EMP attack wouldnt faze it - about the only thing that wouldnt work on it would be the radio

[LT. Ox]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Navy destroyers and Army tanks would be good examples.

I would say a large number of factories are intact in the U.S. and Canada. Most are outside of the commercial centers of major cities. They lack power and raw materials..... the manpower shortage, more importantly trained manpower (machinists, welders, fitters) have either been drafted or are dead from famine or disease. Concentrating the survivors with that skill set in one region to maximize their potential has to be a government goal.

Fix those three..... electrical power, raw material, and manpower and you can have some working plants again.... Some plants can't operate because they rely on components built at another plant hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Just a nit pic.
What age group do you think the Machinists would be in? In my experience the largest number of Journeymen are in the 35 plus group with a substantial number in the 50 + not as likely to be drafted or gathered up. Also In all prior draft situations they and welders fitters etc have been exempt.
I do agree that a lot more quality manufacturing could be done then is assumed here.
Happy valley here in Colorado in 1990 until 2000 was putting out a lot of aerospace material contracted to larger Saint Louis and Kansas City Parent Companies.
laugh sayen.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by copeab

You don't retool destroyed factories, you rebuild them.

I have a manual from WW1 intended to be distributed to every college, high school, and trade school with a machine shop to instruct on how to produce artillery shells and timed fuzes. Downloaded off of Scribd. Blueprints for Allied artillery and not just U.S. as a way to fully exploit war production.

Some oldster with a copy and my old high school machine shop could effectively had made the mechanical fuses. The Shell bodies would have required a a far larger forging set up than my schools simple gas forge could have done.

Even mechanical time fuse is better than no fuse when the sophisticated VT shells are all used up.

Also I was thinking that the M3 grease gun and the Sten gun would see a effort to produce. If only to get all the M16s and AR-15s back from Police forces to equip Army units standing up.

I don't know if older Radar and Sonar would be worth the effort, but maybe if it set modern units free from harbor defense. The psychological positive boost could make it worth it and only the higher echelons would no it was only a placebo to boost morale in the short term.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I don't think you'd need to produce older tech sonar for harbour defence and so on because I think there would still be many commercial fathometers and civilian fishfinders/fishsounders (which work on the same principle and technology as the fathometer) available to use for that purpose.

By the early 1990s both devices were using LCD screens for their displays and they become much more widely available to the recreational fishing & boating community and commercial marine industry. They are both a type of sonar and probably more recognizable by the name "echo sounder". The commercial marine industries (fishing, cargo, passenger etc. etc.) have been using echo sounding for decades for navigation and Western maritime safety regulations typically require every large vessel (100+ tons) operating in restricted waters to have a fathometer (of the constant recording type).
Older fathometers (e.g. the strip chart recording types) used transistors so would be more resistant to EMP as well.

I reckon there would be plenty of opportunities to plunder fathometers and fishfinders from commercial vessels simply because many of those vessels would no longer be operating. I also think for the 1990s period, the number of recreational fishing boats carrying fishfinders/fishsounders would be large enough to make it worthwhile to recover and use those units for harbour defence purposes and so on.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

I don't think you'd need to produce older tech sonar for harbour defence and so on because I think there would still be many commercial fathometers and civilian fishfinders/fishsounders (which work on the same principle and technology as the fathometer) available to use for that purpose.

By the early 1990s both devices were using LCD screens for their displays and they become much more widely available to the recreational fishing & boating community and commercial marine industry. They are both a type of sonar and probably more recognizable by the name "echo sounder". The commercial marine industries (fishing, cargo, passenger etc. etc.) have been using echo sounding for decades for navigation and Western maritime safety regulations typically require every large vessel (100+ tons) operating in restricted waters to have a fathometer (of the constant recording type).
Older fathometers (e.g. the strip chart recording types) used transistors so would be more resistant to EMP as well.

I reckon there would be plenty of opportunities to plunder fathometers and fishfinders from commercial vessels simply because many of those vessels would no longer be operating. I also think for the 1990s period, the number of recreational fishing boats carrying fishfinders/fishsounders would be large enough to make it worthwhile to recover and use those units for harbour defence purposes and so on.

I agree in that it would work in only the most basic way....... Something is down there... Something large is down there. I just question the utility of something like this due to the limited range and narrow projection.

It might be my understanding is wrong, but any sonar from the 70's should give depth, speed, and an indication of mass (displacement). A system from the 90s can distinguish a whale from a school or fish, from a attack submarine.... comparing recorded acoustic profiles.

[James Langham2]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

I have a manual from WW1 intended to be distributed to every college, high school, and trade school with a machine shop to instruct on how to produce artillery shells and timed fuzes. Downloaded off of Scribd. Blueprints for Allied artillery and not just U.S. as a way to fully exploit war production.

Some oldster with a copy and my old high school machine shop could effectively had made the mechanical fuses. The Shell bodies would have required a a far larger forging set up than my schools simple gas forge could have done.

Even mechanical time fuse is better than no fuse when the sophisticated VT shells are all used up.

Also I was thinking that the M3 grease gun and the Sten gun would see a effort to produce. If only to get all the M16s and AR-15s back from Police forces to equip Army units standing up.

I don't know if older Radar and Sonar would be worth the effort, but maybe if it set modern units free from harbor defense. The psychological positive boost could make it worth it and only the higher echelons would no it was only a placebo to boost morale in the short term.

I did an article about home built weapons and had the Sten and variants being produced. One variant was the Ten gun when it was produced by a certainUS state... I might revisit that article.

[Olefin]

We already know that machine shops are making mortars and mortar shells by 1999-2000 time period - obviously they either had to reverse engineer existing designs or use existing blue prints of older designs.

And you have people scattered around the US who restore older equipment who would have various design drawings (either copies or originals) - those could be used to restart production of older equipment (at very low levels of production - i.e. basically hand built)

and you could go back to things like using rivets to make armored vehicles like they were made in WWI and early WWII instead of modern techniques - again at very low rates

I would think the place you would see old designs coming back the quickest would be either cannons as they were around the 1860's and older weapons that a gunsmith could easily make - muskets and the like - and while that means stepping back into the 19th century those weapons would still be very effective in many cases

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by James Langham2

I did an article about home built weapons and had the Sten and variants being produced. One variant was the Ten gun when it was produced by a certainUS state... I might revisit that article.

You might consider rolling block and dropping block breechloaders. The Remington No. 6, the High Wall, and the Martini Henry....... from .22 to 416 Rigby.

My thought was resources used to make these simpler weapons would equip security forces and allow the government to take back loaned weapons (M16s or SLRs).

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by James Langham2

I'm guesssing that retooling will take too long. However lots of old weapons will be in storage and reissued, even back to WW2 era small arms in the US - the stockpiles were discussed in another thread.

It might be just the U.S. that scraps it all. ......... Does anyone know if other countries (besides Russia) preserve and store the tooling for systems taken out of service?

The possibility that many systems have had their paper schematics converted into CAD drawings for production on CNC systems....... this is certainly true for the M1911A1 and AR-15. Most of the Remington 700 is investment cast or CNC machined as appropriate. One rifle maker (HS Precision) CNC Winchester Model 70 components.

[bobcat]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

It might be just the U.S. that scraps it all. ......... Does anyone know if other countries (besides Russia) preserve and store the tooling for systems taken out of service?

even we scrap surprisingly little. we store everything, there are depots filled with acres of deadlined humvees and other vehicles that although they are too damaged to be put back into service might have a part that can be recovered and used. several of these stockpiles go back at least as far as vietnam era equipment. the stuff that does get sraped is generaly beyond any viable use.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by bobcat

even we scrap surprisingly little. we store everything, there are depots filled with acres of deadlined humvees and other vehicles that although they are too damaged to be put back into service might have a part that can be recovered and used. several of these stockpiles go back at least as far as vietnam era equipment. the stuff that does get sraped is generaly beyond any viable use.

Sorry, I was speaking strictly of the tools and dies for making new. As far as I know... Most are destroyed, sold as scrap, or sold to someone else still using the system... the M14 is an example...... the tools and dies for those were sold to Taiwan when the M16 became the U.S. service rifle. Thousands of M14s were in stock..... (were the Clinton administration destroyed many) for decades with some few in service with the Navy, SOCOM, and some units in Alaska (bear protection along with M1s).

[rcaf_777]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

What is the likelihood that NATO and Pact governments would dust off the blueprints of lower tech, but proven designs? The loss of manufacturing and more importantly the technicians that made it work is affecting everyone drastically.

Many NATO nations still have or use M2A1 (M101A1) 105mm Howitzer. Canada updated their holdings so it could continue its service with reserve artillery units.