battles of the cultures was: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3552

There is extensive industrial documentation on how this stuff is designed and built, all the way back to first principles of metallurgy and foundry techniques. As long as the documentation can be read, committed effort will achive a lot. Basic fairly small-scale iron and aluminum casting is about as complex as making old-fashioned gunpowder. buttuming the wreckage of an industrial economy around you, scrap metal will be readily available which saves problems mining and refining the ore.

True, but the revolutionary fervor starts to flag when theres no running water and you have to grow your own food. My point is comprehensive knowledge of basic industrial practice is so dispersed that its unlikely to be eradicated via local political upheaval.

Besides, the usual flag-wavers that get people end tend to only be worked up over religious & political issues- procedures for making cast iron just don't excite the pbuttions. Besides, even the bloodthirsty fundamentalist luddites want their toilets flushing and lights to work so would be more likely to enslave than liquidate a foundryman or machinist- particularly as ammo gets scarce, luxury cars for the leadership stop working and the power starts failing on a regular basis.

Metal alloys? Quite a few- nowadays metallurgy can supply very refined alloys with closely specified properties that make them well suited for particular clbuttes of tasks. Without a wide selection, then you have to fall back to more general materials, with corresponding reductions in efficiency, size increase, more weight, wear problems, etc..

I'd say the short list would include the major steel & aluminum alloys, they are extremely useful. Stainless is also important, copper is vital.

If all you're doing is making a steam engine to pump water, then what you need is cast iron, steel, bronze and smaller bits of other metals like zinc, tin, phosphorous. But you have to have several grades of oil- tallow isn't going to cut it.

AFAIK gold is basically worthless from a mechanical standpoint for this kind of thing. Its probably most useful as medium of exchange for other stuff you need- buttuming the other guy wants it. OTOH the religous gov't who's presumably imposed Morality by putting everybody back to the iron age will need pretty metal to decorate the altars, so gold will have an automatic political advantage.

Gregm