Spurious Contraptions & Other Steampunk Oddities

Moderator Action: OT snip

Balthasar said:
Yeah, I finally wised up and took a scientific approach: if Barsoom is largely dry, the trees would be like those you find in dry areas. They would be water-retaining, for one thing, and sure enough, Burroughs says that the majority of Barsoomian trees have stout water-retaining trunks. Many also have rock-hard woods, like some african trees.
Click to expand...
One the things tucked away in my "to do" queue: Amtorian forests (maybe also to use in the Hollow Earth's Pellucidar):
Spoiler :
take some

Adansonia Grandidieri
800px-Adansonia_grandidieri03.jpg

some Pachypodiums in flower (yellow- & white-flowered species as well)
Pachypodium_Isalo.jpg

and some Dracaena Cinnabari
socot.jpg


and mix/adapt them to a suitably humid environment.
 
Looking at that 9-tile Volcano, I have to especially commend you on your patience! Just getting two tiles to line up right together can be a pain in the nether-region!
 
I found it! Major General Tremorden Rederring's Colonial-era Wargames Page has the dreaded Bronze Bunny! What a terror of the sub-continent! What about the images you posted about other battles with Steam-Buns?
 
This spacecraft design isn't steampunk, it's a modern design concept. Read the article. Then put on your thinking caps. The names mentioned below are all historical. I've taken the liberty of shifting people chronologically since I'm using them as analogously rather than particular individuals. No imaginary technologies - just pushing known ones to the extreme. "We steam engine come steam engining time".

Design
The Victorians had the materials technology to handle superheated steam. Watt could have extended his design work to further miniaturize engines while continuing to increase their efficiency & output. Solar-powered devices were demonstrated in ancient China. Practical experiments were going on by the mid-19th c. Surely in a Steampunk AH someone like Tesla could have pursued these lines of research even further. Add an imaginative pair of bicycle mechanics interested in building ultralight vehicles. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Brunel putting together a a team of boffins &engineers. Designing & building such a craft becomes far plausible than the existence of Cavorite. Definitely more maneuverable than anything designed by the Baltimore Gun Club.

The chief difficulty as a practical form of transport would be the extremely slow starting speeds. Picture our solar energy boffin having a conversation with Griffeths about the design of extreme clippers. Fortuitously he had recently been reviewing the work of Carrington, Fitzgerald and Birkeland on solar ejecta & auroral activity. Solar wind! Add sails of sufficient thinness, yet with great tensile strength & dimensional stability. Brunel would probably have to consult Monell on the creation of a special alloy. But a practical design for an aetheric packet ship is achieved.

Docking & Launch Facilities
We have the design & the construction. But such a craft could not launch itself from the Earth. Even Barbicane could not find a way for it to survive the pressure of a ballistic launch. Consult Tsiolkovsky. Add Eiffel (structural design) to the team. Would probably need Shukhov & Fuller to get past the limitations of compression structures. Otis converts Clegg and Samuda's patented system of atmospheric traction to vertical shafts. Have Watt build them a stationary engine to drive the pulleys & the vaccum pumps - probably using a sun & planet gear system.

I. K. Brunel before the counterweight chain used by the freight lift during construction of the 35 km. tower near the hill station at Sigiriya.

220px-IKBrunelChains.jpg


Funding
Brunel could certainly find & mange the brilliant team required. But who could fund a megaengineering project requiring international cooperation? The Morgan-Rothschild Investment Partnership, LLC of course. With Lloyd's as guarantor. If they prove too conservative to invest the author of The Dynamics of An Asteroid would certainly have the imagination, scientific and practical interest & resources.

Now if i can only keep people like Stirling, Jeter & Barnes from hearing about this.
 
Hmmmm.... a spaceship with a structure designed by Eiffel, and built by the Engineers of the day would doubtless look very different from the picture shown. The 'modules' might be designed like pneumatic-subway cars, the water-holding parts like ornate metal bladders. The 'solar array' might look like giant black fins, ribbed to allow the sun to heat the water elements. In the front, perhaps, a huge ornate ball in which the crew would do most of it's work and life, perhaps revolving on an axis in order to create gravity inside. In all, it might resemble a gigantic fish with a revolving ball where the head would be. That impression might be strengthened by the placement of huge lenses near the front of the craft which would, by means of mirrors, send light traveling around and down through tubes into the center of the 'work ball', allowing the crew to 'see' the space around them without the disorientation that the use of windows in the revolving ball might produce, and by the many long thin antennas needed for long distance communication.

On the other hand, once you get Eiffel involved, the design could be modified dramatically:
Eiffel_Tower_Spaceship_Wallpaper_d1khb.jpg
 
The craft is ultralight & uses a combination of solar sails & other solar collection tech, with steam instead of ignited fuel for thrust. I like the fish idea - huge fins like a Siamese Fighting Fish.

All the section about Eiffel, etc. is to construct a space elevator to get the flimsy pieces to orbit for assembly. With side benefits of other uses - such as a resort & permanent Crystal Palace. "Sigiriya hill station" is a tip of the hat to A. C. Clarke. I do like that image you posted.
 
All of these recent links got me veered off into the subject of Magnetic Levitation (don't ask me how). I hadn't realized before just how far the science had come since my physicist friend was playing with superconductivity in the 80's. Now they've got Mag-Lev belts that will lift you off the ground, and are playing with levitating frogs, DeLoreans, and Chinese Mag-lev wind turbines, that can make electricity from soft breezes. The future just arrived and is wiping its feet in the foyer. Diamagnetic materials (e.g., Bismuth, diamonds and Carbon Graphite) are the key - so it turns out that carbon based materials - including living bodies - are especially well suited to using diamagneticism to produce levitation.

Interesting fact: rotating diamagnetic materials have stronger fields, so it seems that once again, those rotating flying saucers of the 1950's have real scientific reasons for doing what they did.

Another interesting fact: in light of this, the specs we worked out for our Time Machine turn out to have more scientific validity than I originally thought - in particular the premise that a revolving magnetic field (produced by the disc on Well's machine and by the speed of the object itself in Bob Zemekis' BTTF DeLorean) is used, in part, to 'lift' the machine into the timestream - or more precisely, separate it from the present time stream.

So those 1950's saucers were diamagnetic time machines. It makes sense: crop circles would be a way to assure that you don't find a tree up your hind-end when you arrive in the current timestream and are easily found on old maps. They must not operate as well over water. Maybe they're after our carbon..
 
I've found and bought a few subterranean works lately.

First : Aventures dans le Monde Intérieur (Adventures in the Inner World), a French roleplaying game released last year. Set in the late 1880, you play some adventurers, chosen and hired by the global Arcadia Fondation to explore the Inner World, discovered less than a century ago and kept secret by the Fondation. It's definitely more a Vernian tone than a Burroughs world. First, it's not a Hollow Earth, with a inner surface and an inner sun. It's "only" a succession of gigantic caves, of inner seas and narrow passages. That's what I like! There are a few underground civilizations to meet and interact with. I can't wait to master it!

Created by Mikaël Cheyrias.
At Ludopathes editions.
19902_ext.jpg


Second : a brick titled Les Terres Creuses (The Hollow Earths) by Guy Costes & Josh Altairac. It's a 800 pages volume indexing and describing [more than] 2211 works of fiction about (or with) subterranean adventures. I'm sure it will add about 2200 books to my reading list.

At Encrage editions.
343.jpg
 
Benoît Blary, Edouard Cour, Nicolas Jamme, Laurent Minart, Nelyhann and Ronan Toulhoat all illustrated "Les Aventures du Monde Intérieur". Unfortunately, all illustrations in the book are in black & white. Several can be found on the authors website and/or with Google Images.

My favorite illustration is probably this one, by Laurent Minart : it's the Triton, the gigantic column where the Great Inner Sea takes its source, true vault of the area.

There is no new illustration in "Les Terres Creuses", but one third of each page is reserved for (b&w) covers and inner illustrations of the commented books.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

KingArthur
  • Locked
ARCHIVED: Spurious Contraptions
3 4 5
Replies
88
Views
25K
Blue Monkey
Blue Monkey
Back
Top Bottom