Arsthbt

So the main team of characters is traveling back in time from "modern day" to medieval Europe, arriving around the 1300s.

Assumptions: They Know they are going, they have space and time to prepare, the team consists of 10 people of modern mid-20s people with a variety of skills, and they are not returning to modern times. They are staying in the past.

They are taking back information in a variety of forms. The goal is to get to a stable system for reading From their SSDs and computer drives. What would be the quickest and most reasonable way to be able to read and have this reference material available?

Other materials will be brought along. Books, microfiche, and other reference material. The Travelers have a limited Volume (10M cube, 1000 cubic meters)to bring along. So the obvious desire is to keep information in the densest form. So what information would need to be available before the SSDs to get to them.

If they are just bringing the drives, and not the attached computer, this is pretty much impossible. The infrastructure simple isn't there in 1300 to refine anything to the necessary purities to even begin manufacturing microprocessors. See this answer to get an idea of how hard this is to do: How long would it take to create a Windows 1.0 capable machine from complete scratch? .

If they can bring their laptops, they only need to worry about a power supply. By far the easiest way they could do this would be to bring some small solar panels, a turbine they could hook up to a water wheel, or a bicycle powered generator.

If they have to make their own power supply, they will have to get /make a bunch of copper wire and some permanent magnets and make their own generators to attach to a turbine of some sort (water wheel probably). This won't be easy. See these two related questions:

I was thrown into the middle ages, how do I power my time machine?

How hard is it to build a generator if you've jumped to the distant past?

Basically this will be hard unless you bring everything you need. In which case look for guides for "living off the grid" to get a more thorough idea of what you need.

The main things they have to worry about are, roughly in order:

• theft and confiscation. They have no guild, no home, no patron. They have no servants or guards. For the standards of the time, they're a band of vagrants, surely up to no good.


• weather and accidents.


• power supply (easily fixed: solar panels. This doubles the risks above).


• wear and tear.

Assuming they have prepared, their first step is to become invaluable to some powerful patron by exploiting their future knowledge of history and politics.

I would suggest several redundant tablets (you get the most capability density per volume) and smaller emergency smartphones [obviously in airplane mode ;-D ], at least some disguised somehow - maybe inside wooden slats. Batteries, lots of them.

On that note, tablets have the advantage that getting 5V DC is pretty easy using large and inefficient chemical batteries - it could be done in ancient Sumer if you knew how, and they do. Zinc, copper, iron and oil of vitriol, you don't need much else.

Laptops, on the other hand, require special chargers that are driven by 110V or 220V AC. Or you need to feed them 12V at a much higher amperage (I think it's now usually 65W, five times a cheapo charger and thirteen times its power).

Then, the memories they can bring back, again redundantly, sewed inside clothes or otherwise hidden, using micro SDHC cards. They're way sturdier than hard disks and even SSDs, and you can get them in the hundreds of gigabytes sizes.

They probably shall have to balance carefully the need of being on the front line (perhaps not metaphorically), in order to continue earning protection, and the need to teach and train.