The library

The encyclopedia of modernity, in your pocket.

Not everything humans know. Everything a household or a community needs to know to get through a bad week, and then to get back to 1950 on its own while holding the line on 2026 medicine. Twelve pillars. Four levels each. Every page shows where it came from.

Medical and trauma

Stop the bleed, MARCH, tactical and wilderness medicine, illness without a hospital, dentistry, childbirth, pediatrics, dosing, antibiotics, chronic disease, psychological first aid, death care.

Water

Finding it, judging it, treating it by boil, chlorine, filter, sunlight or still. Storing it. Wells, hand pumps, rain catchment, greywater, sanitation.

Food

Storage and rotation, canning, drying, smoking, salt, fermenting, root cellars. Foraging by region, gardening and seed saving, soil, animal husbandry, hunting, trapping, fishing, butchering, cooking without power.

Shelter and building

Emergency shelter, hardening a home, repairs, carpentry, masonry, cob and adobe, roofing, heating, insulation, fire safety, rebuilding structures.

Power and energy

Solar sizing and wiring, charge controllers and batteries, generators and fuel storage, wind and micro-hydro, wood gas, electrical safety, small engines.

Communications

Radio fundamentals, FRS, GMRS, MURS, ham through General, HF and NVIS, antenna building, LoRa mesh, PACE plans, encryption and the law, emission control, Morse, hand and visual signals.

Security and defense

Threat assessment, home and property hardening, observation, community watch, OPSEC, firearms safety, maintenance and marksmanship, use-of-force law by state, working dogs, night operations. Defensive by design.

Navigation, weather, terrain

Map and compass, MGRS and UTM, offline maps, celestial navigation, forecasting by observation, terrain analysis, regional hazards.

Tools, fabrication, repair

Hand tools, welding, blacksmithing, machining, woodworking, leather, sewing, 3D printing, engines, plumbing, HVAC, bicycles, improvised tools.

P10

Chemistry and materials

Soap and lye, disinfectants and bleach dosing, water chemistry, fuel handling, charcoal, salt, lime and cement, tanning, dyes, biogas, safe storage. The useful chemistry, and only that.

P11

Community and rebuilding

Mutual aid, governance models and charters, justice and dispute resolution, record keeping, trade and currency, sanitation at scale, public health, school curricula, childcare, leadership, morale, grief.

P12

Reference

Mathematics to calculus, physics, chemistry tables, biology, units and conversions, materials data, periodic table, star charts, almanac, the history of how it was done in 1890, curated Wikipedia, Gutenberg, phrasebooks.

Four levels

Land at the level the moment calls for.

A subject is not an article. It is a ladder. Nobody is forced through a textbook to find a dose, and nobody is left with only a card when they need the textbook.

L0 · Card	Thirty seconds. Numbered steps, one screen, no scrolling. Prints on a 3x5.
L1 · Procedure	Five minutes. The full protocol with decision points, doses, timers, and what goes wrong.
L2 · How-to	An hour. Background, materials, variations, drills, and the reasoning.
L3 · Source	The manual, guideline or textbook it came from, in full, open to the page the card was derived from.

Provenance

We don't ask you to trust us. We show you the source.

Alphatac is a library, not a medical or legal authority. What it claims is narrow and provable: every page shows the authoritative source it was derived from, the date of that source, the checks that confirm the page is faithful to it, and, where the page is original, the named expert who reviewed it.

Consequential content comes from current US government works. Trauma, dosing, water, food safety, electrical and fuel content is derived only from sources like the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care guidelines, Army manuals, CDC, NIH, FDA, USDA and FEMA. Authoritative, public domain, and revised by their owners.
Time-proven content comes from the historical record. Building, blacksmithing, farming, husbandry, tanning, soap, cement and the whole rebuilding pillar draw on pre-1931 texts that do not expire. Old medicine and old canning guidance are excluded on purpose.
Every value on a card is checked against its source. Doses, concentrations and times are structured data pulled from the source table, not retyped prose. Two articles that disagree fail the build until one cites a newer source.
When a source revises, the page says so. Currency checks flag every article derived from a source that has moved, and the revision ships as an update.