Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Tap for spoiler
Yeah, I think they shouldn't have called them cell phones, they looked like just AM radios, which aren't that complicated. Just need a microphone (membrane attached to a magnet), amplifier (they used vacuum tubes), and an antenna (whose length would determine the frequency). Receiver is the same thing but backwards (with adjusted geometry on the mic/speaker, but they are electrically the same). If they had the vacuum tubes, copper wire, and magnets (which they could make more of once they had one), then I don't think that part was that far fetched (though I could be missing something big tbf). But a cell phone is a lot more than a 2-way AM radio, even if you're talking about a simple phone with no display.
Biggest issue I had with suspension of disbelief was when they used a vehicle without a road system. Roads came before cars in our history and had to be good enough for horses to pull carts. Using a two stroke steam engine to generate enough torque for offroading with those basic tires was a big hand wave IMO.
Oh also the whole using a celebrity impersonation to convince some of the other side that the US was back up and running was a weak tactic. Like I'm glad they had it immediately get noticed, but a better way to do that bluff would have been to just have other "radio chatter" going on to make it sound like they had joined up with others, at which point they could have talked about all kinds of technologies that might have taken the fight out of people from the modern era.