* The AK-47. Love or hate guns, the AK was designed with tolerances that encouraged simultaneously good maintenance patterns and using it as a gorram hammer if the need came to it.
* Nalgene bottles. Impact resistant, infinitely screen printable, polycarbonate body, cheap and everything you could want.
* The venerable aluminum drinks can: The sheer amount of engineering that has gone into making a bit of aluminum for canning but with the design constraints of pressure and temperature, it's a very neat design.
* Fluxx, the game. Fluxx has one rule, the only base rule: Draw a card, play a card. There's no resolution order, no many pages of legalese text like Magic. There is Fluxx.
And that's one of the things that makes Fluxx well designed. I can teach someone how to play Fluxx in 30 seconds: "Draw a card, play a card. When the conditions for winning have been achieved, the game ends." The one thing I don't like about Fluxx is the later addition of Creepers, but those are easily one of the most write-off-able types of cards ever created.
The AK-47 is an interesting example because while the base design was amazing it also has had numerous design changes over the years that kept it (somewhat) competitive with "state of the art" designs - the original design was so good that it allowed that to be the case.
In addition to its linear descendants, it was widely copied and some of the copies where arguably better (the Isreali Galil, the Finn RK62, Vector R4).
One of the few guns to appear on national flags.
All of that said, for a professional army there are many better (where better is context dependent as most things are) service weapons but for "was a farmer, now an insurgent" use the AK has few equals.
Also for the pedantic, what most people think of as the AK47 is actually an AKM, the actual AK47 had a relatively (compared to its entirety) short service life, the Soviets started phasing them out in 1959.
The family of rifles has change remarkably from wood furniture in 7.62mm to modern polymers and 5.45mm and while they've rejigged the internals and changed things around an AK<anything> is immediately recognisable and you can see the AK47 in all of them.
The only other platform that I can think of that is remotely as adaptable is the AR-family.
I don't own guns, I think civilian ownership of guns is fine if very heavily regulated and with a purpose - even if that purpose is "I like shooting targets" (UK model of gun control) - I'm just fascinated by the history/engineering.
As a backpacker, Nalgenes are vastly overrated for real trekking. They’re rugged for no real reason - you’ll do well swapping your nalgenes for dead simple 1 liter cheap plastic water bottles from the gas station. When they’re empty they weigh nothing and you can crunch them down. And they’re far tougher than one would think - mine are going on years. Weight and volume are the metrics that matter.
Nalgenes are nice for casual around town use though, they’ve got a great aesthetic and the stickers are fun.
I would add that the Glock 19 might be the perfectly designed handgun. it is intuitive enough for someone who has never used a handgun before to be familiar in 30 seconds with how to clear it, how to load it, and how to shoot it.
* The AK-47. Love or hate guns, the AK was designed with tolerances that encouraged simultaneously good maintenance patterns and using it as a gorram hammer if the need came to it. * Nalgene bottles. Impact resistant, infinitely screen printable, polycarbonate body, cheap and everything you could want. * The venerable aluminum drinks can: The sheer amount of engineering that has gone into making a bit of aluminum for canning but with the design constraints of pressure and temperature, it's a very neat design. * Fluxx, the game. Fluxx has one rule, the only base rule: Draw a card, play a card. There's no resolution order, no many pages of legalese text like Magic. There is Fluxx.
And that's one of the things that makes Fluxx well designed. I can teach someone how to play Fluxx in 30 seconds: "Draw a card, play a card. When the conditions for winning have been achieved, the game ends." The one thing I don't like about Fluxx is the later addition of Creepers, but those are easily one of the most write-off-able types of cards ever created.