SurvivalOps

What is inside

Real manuals, stored on the device.

This is a reference collection, not a set of articles somebody wrote about a reference collection. The documents are the documents, they install onto the phone as files, and when an answer cites page 41 there is a page 41 you can open.

01Contents

What the collection covers

The subjects below are what the library is organised around today.
  • Medicine

    Field and wilderness medicine, first aid, wound care, burns, fractures, and what published guidance says about treating people when a hospital is hours away or unreachable.

    Reference only, never a substitute for care
  • Water

    Finding it, moving it, filtering it, disinfecting it and storing it. The part of preparedness that goes wrong first and matters soonest.

  • Food preservation

    Canning, curing, smoking, drying, fermenting and cold storage, including the tested procedures where the exact numbers are the whole point and guessing is how people get hurt.

  • Homestead systems

    Wells and pumps, septic, wood heat, generators, batteries, solar, plumbing and the practical wiring of a place that has to keep running on its own.

  • Growing and livestock

    Gardening and field crops, soil, seed saving, and the care, feeding and common ailments of the animals a smallholding actually keeps.

  • Mechanical repair

    Small engines, pumps, vehicles, tools and appliances, plus the equipment handbooks that tell you what a specific machine wants rather than what machines in general want.

  • Communications

    Radio: the bands, the licensing, antennas, propagation, and how to actually make a link work between two points when the phone network is not an option.

  • Navigation and fieldcraft

    Map and compass, terrain reading, shelter, fire, signalling and moving through country on foot.

  • Encyclopedias and how-to

    Offline copies of large general references and repair and how-to collections, so the questions that fall outside every category above still land somewhere.

  • Maps

    Vector maps for search and routing plus topographic sheets with terrain contours, both stored on the phone and positioned by GPS. See how it works offline.

02Method

How the collection is built

The boring parts that decide whether it is trustworthy.
  1. Documents are kept whole

    Each source is stored as the document it is, with its pages intact, so a citation can point at a specific page and that page can be opened and read in full.

  2. Every source is recorded

    Each document carries its title, its origin and a checksum of the file. That is how the app can prove the copy on your phone is the copy that was indexed, and not something that got truncated on the way in.

  3. Exact procedures are quoted, not paraphrased

    Some subjects have no safe paraphrase. Canning times, dosing tables and toxic identification are the obvious ones. In those areas the app is built to quote the source or decline, rather than reword numbers that were chosen carefully by someone who tested them.

  4. You choose what to install

    The full collection is large. The subjects are separate downloads, so you can take the whole thing or take the parts that match your situation and your storage.

On the size of it

A library of real manuals is not small, and we are not going to pretend a phone swallows it for free. The install is measured in gigabytes and it scales with how much you choose to carry. The full picture, including what each subject costs in storage, will be on the download page when there is one.

03Continue