Batteries?

[raketenjagdpanzer]

I just kind of handwave the battery issue. As alternative vehicle fuels were found, post '97 the home-grown battery business found equal purchase. Hollow out a battery, put new chemicals/metals back in (scavenged from elsewhere), et voila.

Maybe that's not how it works in real life...but, hell, by canon a limited nuclear exchange somehow involved countervalue strikes and didn't escalate to the "5000 warheads over the 'Pole" nightmare it should've!

Also: re laptops...when I came on board at my company's IT department in 2000, we had piles and piles and piles of '486 and Pentium I laptops from '94-'96 and were starting to phase out low-end (233-266mhz) Pentium IIs for 333-400mhz Pentium IIs.

Thing is, part of the IT boom (consumer and professional) from '90 onward was predicated on a lot of technologies being freed up from wartime restrictions (and we were on a war footing from '45 onward, trust me). Without the fall of the USSR, I wonder if that pace of development wouldn't have been much, much slower. I mean, sure, more computers in more homes still, but perhaps as much as an order of magnitude fewer - maybe 10-20 million in the US, with 9-10 million utterly destroyed by EMP etc., and the rest either forgotten/waiting to be recovered "someday" or squarely in the hands of MilGov, CivGov or New America.

Phew, sorry for rambling.

Anyway! Batteries! Yes, batteries IMC are manufactured much like ammo and so forth - it can be done locally without too much effort.