A Guide to Steampunk Space Travel. (Please add your thoughts!)

[Bill Phil]

21 hours ago, CaptKordite said:

In 1779, Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather) made a sketch of a design for a rocket engine using inflammable air and dephlogisticated air. (We know those things today as hydrogen and oxygen.) In 1804, John Dalton wrote of "the reducibility of all elastic fluids of whatever kind, into liquids." The theory was all there, after that, all you need is the materials technology to actually accomplish that. That came about just after the turn of the 20th Century but, in steampunk, it's pretty easy to push that back in the timeline.

The stirling engine was developed in the early 1800s. If they figured out that it's a heat pump when run in reverse, you could get a decent cooler, maybe a cryo one, by the middle of the century.

[MaxwellsDemon]

I'm surprised that the game Space: 1889 hasn't come up in this thread...

[CaptKordite]

Then let me reference Space 1889. . . . . Heliographs or signaling lamps instead of antennas.

A heliograph, for those who don't know, is pretty much a mirror used to reflect the sun's light using Morse code. Simply, one might have a small mirror in your hand or a slightly larger on on a tripod. Of course, in space, one would need a much larger mirror to collect enough light to reflect it in a beam that could be seen across interplanetary distances. Here is a orbital heliograph station.

You can see the large parabolic mirror to collect the sun's light and the smaller mirror to catch that reflected light, focus it further and redirect it to where the message needs to go. You can see a smaller one on the ventral side of the ship.

These might be analogous to the larger dish antennas. Though, because they are so large, using a relay (RemoteTech) would be more important.

Smaller signaling devices, like those commonly seen on WWI naval craft, would stand in for smaller, shorther range, antennas. I think it would look pretty cool in KSP to have those flashing out a message.

[Nikolai]

18 hours ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

I'm surprised that the game Space: 1889 hasn't come up in this thread...

I've been deliberately trying to avoid it, since I didn't know whether or not suggesting things that have been dropped from our ideas about space (like the luminiferous aether) would be well-received.

FWIW, I enjoy Space: 1889 immensely.  (I recently assisted with a translation of the core rules from German to English in the Ubiquity version of the game.)  IMHO, it has basic respect for science as a method (if not necessarily for its findings), but not so much that it gets in the way of fun stories that sometimes have to be woven off-the-cuff.  And it appeals to my own personal nostalgia in wonderful ways.  But I can easily see how a different individual's feel for where that balance should be would be different and/or wouldn't have or care for that kind of nostalgia, so YMMV.

Edited August 11, 2016 by Nikolai

[MaxwellsDemon]

Oh, I'm not saying we need a 'luminiferous aether' mod or anything like that... but some of the concepts 1889 plays with (solar boilers, heliograph communication) would fall neatly into the steampunk category.   (AFAIK, 1889 was rather in advance of the 'steampunk' concept-- I don't recall hearing that term till later.)

[Nikolai]

4 minutes ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

(AFAIK, 1889 was rather in advance of the 'steampunk' concept-- I don't recall hearing that term till later.)

Oh, yeah.  It was steampunk a good quarter-century before "steampunk" (as a word) was coined.

Once the rule books have an in-universe solution to accomplishing interplanetary travel, they seem pretty content with hand-waving details of that travel away completely.  There's no sense of what kinds of accelerations or velocities are involved in using an "ether propeller", for example, and vague allusions to the difficulty of navigating the "ether wake" of planets properly (but not what ether wakes do when they're improperly navigated).  They bump Mars' surface gravity up to Earth levels to simplify weapons handling.  They also seem to think meteor storms are more common than the actual population of asteroids in the Solar System would seem to suggest.  I agree with your notion that solar boilers and heliograph communication and solariums for atmospheric recycling seem to work well as things to facilitate steampunk-type space travel, but the source material doesn't give much more than that on its own.  I'd happily engage in trying to suss details out with some of the excellent minds here, but that might not go over well... I don't know where the line lies for role-playing on the forums, exactly, and don't want to approach it.

[MaxwellsDemon]

I never found anyone to play it with  

I do still have a copy of 'Ironclads and Aether Flyers,' as part of my collection of 19th-Century naval combat rules systems, though.

[Nikolai]

56 minutes ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

I never found anyone to play it with  

I was working on putting a campaign up on rpol.net when I was interrupted by the death of a family member.  I should be able to wrap that up shortly.  Moderators, is it all right to invite people here to an RPG on a different server?

[MaxwellsDemon]

Oh, I don't have the core rulebook anymore, nor the time (especially with KSP considered)!

[Nikolai]

1 hour ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

Oh, I don't have the core rulebook anymore, nor the time (especially with KSP considered)!

The missing rulebook wouldn't have been an issue; since it's hard to get a hold of, I'm putting a synopsis of the rules up along with my campaign.  But if time is a constraint, there's not much I can do about that (especially now that my flux capacitor is on the fritz).

[Peter Balholm]

Do not give up on liquid-fuel rockets! The first liquid fuel rocket engine was built in the Victorian era by Pedro Paulet in about 1895.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Paulet Honesty compels me to point out that NO corroborating evidence has been found for his claims, first made in 1927 (Believe me I have searched! I'll send you the documentation if you want). However, his engine should have worked, and would have an ISP of maybe 120-160. Of course, my hybrid (below) is much better.

You do not need turbopumps, a liquid fuel rocket engine can be pressure-fed. For a great example, see the Sea Dragon rocket. It was the largest rocket ever seriously proposed; please note that it was to be built out of steel, by a shipyard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

Also, the first ion-drive rocket engine was built by the Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland in 1912, and tested in an vacuum chamber.

I have been developing a thorough story, and have hundreds of inventors, characters, and methods. In my story, people go to Mars in 1917. I find that it would be very difficult to move this date back much more than ten years (twenty, tops), though, because so many enabling technologies were invented around this time.

I use a hybrid rocket engine using nitrous oxide and paraffin.

 

[Kryten]

 There's a RAND corporation report on spacecraft design from 1946 here, a lot of the information is useful for extrapolating to earlier time periods. Plus, it's pretty interesting just in itself. It's a pretty important document in space history, it's what set off the WS-117L satellite program a few years later.

[Whirligig Girl]

I feel like showing some of the steampunk space drawings I've made. I've done more before and since, but am just now getting around to showing them here. Most of these are older images.

So the story behind this is that some rocketship pilot crashed her spaceship on an alien planet. Because of the superior and futuristic alloys used, most of the ship survived, (in pieces, but still pretty good) so she teamed up with an industrial-era inventor and engineer to rebuild the missing parts of her rocket. Unfortunately the rocket was still too heavy to get back into orbit, as you might be able to read at the bottom. Not very realistic or anything, it was created from a joke.

An early Kerbal Astronomer's observations of the planets.

Kerbals don't have good handwriting, apparently. I mean, it's kind of a miracle we can understand anything of theirs, considering their alien nature. "I observed that Duna was not a single planet, but rather two!" "I was able to discern the striped appearance of the green planet Jool. It has green and white stripes, with a few grey dots marking the green bands." "I was also able to dsicern three dots moving around Jool. One of them a dark blue, two of them white. They cast shadows on the face of Jool as they go around."

What if you want to have a steam train on the moon? Well, have the space program ship you a lightweight, "cheap," multipurpose, space-rated space train. The design is loosely based upon the Shay Geared Steam Locomotives that were primarily used on logging railways. Some were even built to run on log tracks instead of metal rails.

A colored picture of the steampunk space airship.

So if a real world space shuttle is an airplane in space, a steampunk space shuttle would have to be an airship in space.

This is probably extremely impractical and there's probably not enough boosters. But this is what I imagine the launch vehicle for the airship looking like.

Most of the body of the station is directly inspired by the ISS, except with the rectangular solar power wings replaced with big parabolic solar boilers.

A rocket to launch things into orbit, probably.

These three ships are part of an American Union convoy to set up a base on the fictional planet Sputnik, which orbits at Earth's L5 point. This was from a short-lived fictional universe I was writing in where humans had nuclear bombs in the 1870s, and they built Orion Nuclear Pulse Rockets with them. Not strictly steampunk.

 

From the Sputnik Universe as well, these were the first nuclear pulse rockets built by the Confederate States of America, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The British pioneered the field of nuclear propulsion, followed by USA and then finally CSA.

This one isn't even really steampunk to be honest, it just looks really cool.

Edited September 23, 2016 by GregroxMun

[TheSaint]

On 8/11/2016 at 7:24 AM, Nikolai said:

Oh, yeah.  It was steampunk a good quarter-century before "steampunk" (as a word) was coined.

Once the rule books have an in-universe solution to accomplishing interplanetary travel, they seem pretty content with hand-waving details of that travel away completely.  There's no sense of what kinds of accelerations or velocities are involved in using an "ether propeller", for example, and vague allusions to the difficulty of navigating the "ether wake" of planets properly (but not what ether wakes do when they're improperly navigated).  They bump Mars' surface gravity up to Earth levels to simplify weapons handling.  They also seem to think meteor storms are more common than the actual population of asteroids in the Solar System would seem to suggest.  I agree with your notion that solar boilers and heliograph communication and solariums for atmospheric recycling seem to work well as things to facilitate steampunk-type space travel, but the source material doesn't give much more than that on its own.  I'd happily engage in trying to suss details out with some of the excellent minds here, but that might not go over well... I don't know where the line lies for role-playing on the forums, exactly, and don't want to approach it.

IIRC, Space:1889 pretty much invented the concept of steampunk. I remember when it came out I was very intrigued by it, but I was already waist-deep in GURPS so I never really pursued it.

I'm not surprised that they didn't go into a lot of technical detail. Their source material was Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and those guys didn't really get bogged down in technical detail either. They had Venus as a swamp world populated by lizardmen and John Carter's Mars, so they weren't really weighing themselves down with a lot of scientific facts, LOL. 

If you're really going to do steampunk space travel I would suggest taking the same approach. There are any number of reasons why it would be completely impossible for Victorian-age technology to put a man into space. So since you are already creating a setting where the impossible is being accomplished, don't worry so much about being 100% scientifically accurate. Focus more on creating a plausible set of rules for how your technology behaves and applying it completely and consistently across the entire spectrum of your setting. That alone will make your setting far more believable than much of the so-called science fiction out there today.

I think the prohibition on roleplaying is more about setting up roleplaying scenarios on the boards, like fictional companies or joint missions with character personas, not discussing roleplaying games in general.

Edited September 22, 2016 by TheSaint

[Whirligig Girl]

1 hour ago, TheSaint said:

Their source material was Jules Verne and he didn't really get bogged down in technical detail either.

Bwahahahahaha!!

Have you ever read From the Earth to the Moon? Half of the book is purely technical details! Many of them now know to be wrong, but still. A great portion of the book was setting up the capsule size, the properties of the gun, and the means and location of the launch. H.G. Wells may not have gone into much detail, but Verne certainly did from what I've read.

[Nikolai]

Just now, GregroxMun said:

H.G. Wells may not have gone into much detail, but Verne certainly did from what I've read.

Verne was much more interested in the plausibility of what he was talking about than Wells.  Wells was happy to handwave away inconveniences to make them sound plausible -- a man could become invisible by making himself have the same refractive index as the air; ships could be propelled from Mars to Earth with a green mist; and a time machine could be accomplished by moving at right angles to the three dimensions of space.  After that, on with the story!

Likewise, Space: 1889 was made for swashbuckling adventure more than scientific treatise.  In much the same way as I'm happy to go along with Wells' tales with something that sounds vaguely plausible (with the understanding of Victorian science), I'm happy to play or host a good adventure after the rules by which something works are outlined and everything else follows logically enough.

[Bill Phil]

20 minutes ago, GregroxMun said:

Bwahahahahaha!!

Have you ever read From the Earth to the Moon? Half of the book is purely technical details! Many of them now know to be wrong, but still. A great portion of the book was setting up the capsule size, the properties of the gun, and the means and location of the launch. H.G. Wells may not have gone into much detail, but Verne certainly did from what I've read.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had quite a bit of detail, too, from what I recall.

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had quite a bit of detail, too, from what I recall.

Though 20000 is electropunk and rejects Steam in the name of Electricity.

[TheSaint]

15 hours ago, GregroxMun said:

Bwahahahahaha!!

Have you ever read From the Earth to the Moon? Half of the book is purely technical details! Many of them now know to be wrong, but still. A great portion of the book was setting up the capsule size, the properties of the gun, and the means and location of the launch. H.G. Wells may not have gone into much detail, but Verne certainly did from what I've read.

Yes, all the while ignoring the fact that any person shot out of a cannon would wind up as a thin pink paste on the back wall of their capsule. He may have filled his story with technical details about his scheme, but he didn't let the fact that his scheme wouldn't actually work stop him from telling his story. That's the point of my statement.

[Whirligig Girl]

5 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Yes, all the while ignoring the fact that any person shot out of a cannon would wind up as a thin pink paste on the back wall of their capsule. He may have filled his story with technical details about his scheme, but he didn't let the fact that his scheme wouldn't actually work stop him from telling his story. That's the point of my statement.

It is true that the cannon launch doesn't make any sense in real life, but to say it was the technical details that were lacking is hardly appropriate. It was the lack of all of the broader details. (like the acceleration problem)

Edited September 22, 2016 by GregroxMun

[magnemoe]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Though 20000 is electropunk and rejects Steam in the name of Electricity.

Electricity was the new big thing, nobody knew the limits of it. Some experiments indicated you could use it to raise dead, this gave Frankenstein. 20000 was very realistic in this setting.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Electricity was the new big thing, nobody knew the limits of it. Some experiments indicated you could use it to raise dead, this gave Frankenstein. 20000 was very realistic in this setting.

In Five Weeks in a Balloon they even crossed Africa with one battery without a recharge. Using it even for electrolysis.
Old batteries were much better than current ones. :``(

Edited September 23, 2016 by kerbiloid

[c.harlieclarke]

On 7/13/2015 at 3:59 PM, GregroxMun said:

Teslapunk may be what you're looking for. Teslapunk is basically high-voltage steampunk. It could easily fit into a steampunk universe, especially at higher technologies.

 

Tesla punk also including technologies from the late 1800s will allow for technologies such as basic radio communication, also radio altimeters which is good for landers and other technologies such as the telegram, telephone and if you want to stretch to some of Tesla’s more theoretical work wireless transmission of energy which could be used as a way of making crafts lighter and smaller. Tesla also created the first radio controlled boat in 1899, this could allow for you to incorporate some kind of probes into your settings and maybe even add live video (if you want to stretch it) due to Edison’s work at the time in phonograph and video technologies, both of which could be incorporated into the telegram/ radio technology to create a live projector feed from another location. 
 

If you are going to lean more on teslapunk this means you can use higher levels of electrical technology such as better lighting and you may even be able to stretch it a bit and use a plasma based form of propulsion as he did invent the plasma globe so the electrified gas would be at your disposal.

if you want to think about power sources, steam could be an option but the main problems come from the storage of the smoke that comes from the engine, as the steam could be cycled back round maybe to help heat some of the interior sections of whatever spaceship/station/base you may need heating, however the smoke can either be stored in some kind of exterior tank or with some effort and time you may be able to recycle some of the components (hydrogen, soulful, oxygen and nitrogen to be used either in the engine or as fuel due to the oxidiser and also hydrogen and nitrogen that occurs in the smoke.

transport around other bodies such as the moon, if you want to keep it realistic, could better be achieved by some kind of powered transport than horses as these eat up your life support and also your food and would be extremely hard to put in a spacesuit and ride around. We have had stem powered cars since1769 but these would only move quite slowly if you want to keep them at a minimal size but gasoline powered cars have been around since 1879 so these would probably be more viable as they are more efficient and also faster. If you are more inclined toward trains, sure they are a workable solution but the smoke problem comes up again, therefore a more efficient method would be the use of a tram like system as non horse drawn trams have been around since 1873.

rocket propulsion is often where people get stuck when it comes to steampunk space travel, if you look up first rocket you will get a variety of dates which can seem confusing but the first true chemical rocket, the type of rocket used for space travel today was made in 1926 which is a bit late but the first real use of rockets was in 1232, this is because they are using solid or powdered based fuels, this is viable but it isn’t the most efficient as once you light it you can’t stop it and there are multiple risks of combustion. There was rocket fuel materials in the 1800s but the scientists had never considered space flight in such a way so if you can conjure a sort of drive for research into space flight you could definitely have somewhat efficient rocketry decades earlier.

With flight calculations you can use rangefinders and other technologies but you still need some pretty advanced maths to be completed to be able to fly a spaceship, Charles Babbage anylitical engine which he worked on in 1838 was intended to be able to complete any calculation set before it, so even if you did incorporate this technology there would still need to be a person aboard with a solid knowledge of astrophysics to be able to handle formula and actually make sense of the calculations.

life support can be a challenge as oxygen is limited, water could be recycled or made through fusing oxygen and hydrogen but air, not just pure oxygen would be a challenge, you can have large areas filled with trees and such if you want to retain o2 and co2 levels but that only works in larger areas. Electrolysis could be harnessed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen as this process has been used since 1800 but this requires power.

Power doesn’t just have to be generated through steam, gasoline was in its early stages at the time but also you can use the method of causing a liquid to boil by heating it due to the sun, this would be easy if on an atmosphere-less body or just in space this expansion of gas can be used to pump a motor creating electricity.