Tfw your country has a 3 trillion dollar debt we cant afford to upgrade 1920s technology for the subway

Ok gotcha.

>thing works and does its job very well
>we must replace it
Never quite understood this attitude.

The people with the real knowhow to make/maintain the old stuff may be dead.

I know this is a problem with our banking systems which no one really know how works in detail anymore so they just leave it alone and pray.

I mean, in the sense that nobody is saying we should demolish the Empire State Building because it's 86 years old.

>The people with the real knowhow to make/maintain the old stuff may be dead.
What specific old stuff are we referring to? That's pretty vague.

pretty much anything. How many people do you know how to work on points ignition? have you ever used a rotary dial in your life? Do you know anybody that can work on mechanical relays?

That shit isn't exactly made of magic pixie dust, you know. Anybody can figure anything out with enough effort.

I'm vague because it's true among many fields.

You can't find the extremely specialized expert welders to make the engines for the Saturn V today because the industry doesn't need to weld shit like that together anymore.

The people who honed that expert skill through their lives are all dead or nearly there.

Knowing how they work and knowing how to fix it are two completely different things. Getting the troubleshooting know-how comes from experience. We're lucky that modern machines have computers in them that tell us what's wrong with them. I had a check engine light come on a while ago and I had no idea where to start with the issue, so I plugged in a code reader and found the solution in 5 minutes. $100 later and my car runs fine, easy fix

>You can't find the extremely specialized expert welders to make the engines for the Saturn V today because the industry doesn't need to weld shit like that together anymore
>nobody builds rocket engines today
Well maybe not the burgers because they all have to use Russian engines.

Maybe the old engines, new ones are American

>oil prices tank
>chinas GDP plummets
>call in the debt
>the dollar tanks
>entire world goes into economic collapse
oopsie daisy maybe we shouldnt have disconnected the dollar from a gold reserve and let the federal government print money all willy nilly

Elon Musk builds his own rocket engines. And to be fair, if nobody builds anything like the Saturn F-1s today, it's because there's no need for them and they were a highly specialized engine made for one particular application.

And then you woke up and realized that real life is not InfoWars.

>nobody builds rocket engines today
That's not what I wrote. (First Norwegian rocket engine reached suborbital flight today) You just don't need to do it the old cumbersome way anymore so the knowhow is gone.

The Saturn V engines could very well be recreated today, we're talking 50+ year old technology. It's not as if there's nobody today capable of welding or building a rocket engine. In fact with today's tools and equipment, it would be easier. You're talking a time when they did not have computerized tools and all draft work was done by hand on paper and slide rules were used for computations.

The main problem would be more that a lot of it was unwritten, intuitive knowledge gained through experience. This happens in the aerospace industry every time the old guard of engineers retires--the new guys who replace them don't have their experience and often end up repeating old mistakes learned through past experience.

So you could do it, but it would also take experienced technicians at the height of their craft who've had a lot of intuitive knowledge to draw upon.

Would you even need engines that huge today? I'm sure you could build ones that are smaller and more efficient.

Perhaps not.