LogFAQs > #929637011

Sahuagin posted...

his life was no longer in danger so he was able to focus on R&D and managed to come up with some further discoveries; (he invented time-travel and he knows that hover tech is possible (and he has the board to work with)) (though he doesn't need to invent hover-tech in 1885 either, he just has to get to the future).

The real problem isn't "Does he know how to do X?", but "Where the fuck is he getting the necessary supplies for X?"

You could take the smartest physicist or engineer in the modern world, and somehow manage to send them back to medieval times, and they're going to be completely incapable of building things like computers or nuclear reactors. They would basically have to reinvent science and technology from scratch for a lot of more advanced tech - you basically have to create the tools necessary to create the tools you need to create the tools just so you can get to the point where you can start working on the actual tech.

There's a reason why most time travel fiction tends to draw the line at things like guns/cannon and gunpowder as things a future traveler can introduce to destabilize history - because the recipe for black powder is relatively simple, it can be reproduced from fairly common ingredients, and the metal casting methods necessary to make rudimentary gun barrels and cannons has been around for ages (and cannon/guns had a massive transformative effect on real world history). But you'd have trouble duplicating anything electronic prior to at least the 20th century.

The original time travel tech in Back to the Future was built with 1980s resources, and the hover tech was even more advanced. Both presumably involve at least things like transistors and capacitors that don't even remotely exist in 1885. If the movies were hard sci-fi (which they obviously aren't), Doc would have pretty much no chance in hell of replicating the tech in the Wild West.
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