Speculative explainer · post-collapse rebuild

The last city's bootstrap problem

A survivor population has tools, know-how, and a garage. Getting from that to one working power grid is a graph problem: every step depends on the last, most steps run in parallel, and one missing rung can gate the whole build. Check what you already have and watch the critical path move.

Inventory — what's already in the garage
overrides tooling/wire/magnet/engine builds with scavenged parts — the from-scratch/salvage toggle
More hands shorten each task, with diminishing returns (Brooks's-law-style — a modeling stand-in, not a sourced throughput curve).
Rebuild graph — smelt to load
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critical-path rebuild time
—
—
tasks on the critical path
(gold, no slack)
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tasks already trivial
(checked off / salvaged)
Citation & documented record
Documented record
Critical Path Method (CPM), developed late 1950s for industrial project scheduling — the scheduling technique this graph runs. Grid sequence (mine/smelt → wire-draw → wind coils → magnets + prime mover → generator → transmission → load) and the "hidden prerequisite" framing (insulation, lubricants, precision tooling gate the visible steps) follow Lewis Dartnell's civilization-rebuild survey.
Caveat
Task durations are order-of-magnitude illustrative ranges, not a sourced construction schedule — treat every number as a band, never a point. ~90% of real dependency edges in rebuild-style projects are finish-to-start (this graph is built that way throughout).
Genre / further reading (published, not scholarship)
Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (2014) — the flagship popular-science treatment of this exact bootstrap problem.
This is an explorable explainer, not a frozen result — it computes over the inventory and crew assumptions you can change above, and ships no canonical hash. When the underlying canon locks, nt_bootstrap_path can be promoted to a deterministic MCP chain (parameters → hashed identity), the way ch_stadium_capacity already is.
SOURCE // Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (2014) · Critical Path Method (CPM). Figures are ✦ illustrative estimates, not sourced schedule data. No golden hash on this page. · Sitemap