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

[Whirligig Girl]

Steampunk is a genre beloved by many. It has many forms. The Post-apocalyptic return-to-steam, the Victorian England or Aristocratic American story, even the Wild Western. It can be fantasy, a love story, or even hard science fiction. The latter is what we're going to talk about (or write about if you want to be technical.)

We here at the Kerbal Space Program forum certainly love our space travel and our hard science fiction. So how do you get steampunk rockets that can loft things into the Earth Orbit and beyond? This post aims to describe some of the possibilities to make rocketry and space travel in your steampunk world. If you have anything you would like to bring up to change or add, please do mention it.

Where to Start?

First, for general info on rockets in sci-fi, read Atomic Rockets. There's some cool sections on the decks of a ship, how an astronavigator crewmember would do their job.

A good source of inspiration are rockets and spaceships drawn up in the time period between 1910s and 1950. They tend to be surprisingly low-tech (when they're not using nuclear power plants.), and use things like mercury boilers instead of solar panels. Lots of spheres and structural beams, usually with circular holes in them to save mass.

Inspiration

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Fuel Types

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Gunpowder Rockets

Obviously, the Victorians didn't have access to the liquid-fueled engines. Gunpowder rockets were used in fireworks, sure. So that is where we will start. You could just aimlessly start filling big barrels with gunpowder, igniting it, and seeing how high it goes, but surely there must be a better way.

In the late 1930s, the British Interplanetary Society was designing a rocket that would be able to travel to the Moon and back. Now, it wasn't made to be completely steampunk, but it was designed with gunpowder rockets and steam-fed RCS (fed from a hydrogen peroxide tank, not a boiler).

The British Interplanetary Society web page said:

In 1938, the BIS Technical Committee decided to go the full distance and produce a conceptual design of a vessel that would carry a crew of three safely to the Moon, permit them to land for a stay of fourteen days, and provide for a safe return to the Earth with a final payload of half a tonne. The object of the exercise was to demonstrate that, within the capabilities of propellants that could be specified (at least theoretically) at the time, such a mission was not merely possible but would be economically viable in so far as the vehicle lift-off mass from the Earth would be no more than one thousand tonnes. The conceptual design that resulted came to be known as the BIS Lunar Spaceship, and for all its flaws and misconceptions it must be regarded as one of the classical pioneering studies in the history of astronautics.

It wouldn't take too much to redesign this to be your steampunk moon-boat. (Of course the launch vehicle would probably have to be as big or bigger than the super-Saturn-V "Nova" rocket designs.)

 

 

Gunpowder Rockets have an Isp of 100-200 seconds at best, so you're gonna need a big rocket to get to orbit.

Other Solid Fuel Rockets

Despite KSP having SRBs as the lowest technologies in the tech tree, advanced solid rocket fuels were not developed until the cold war required storable propellants, which hypergolic fuels did not tend to do so well (they would eat the tanks over time.) That said, I would imagine that working with solid fuels would be easier than trying to find more ways of liquefying gases. Perhaps the chemists would be able to create more efficient fuels.

Advanced SRBs have Isps from 190s-270s.

"Coal Oil" and Liquefied Oxygen.

Oxygen was first liquified in small amounts in 1877 and in much larger amounts in 1883. Hydrogen wasn't liquefied until 1898, near the very end of the "steampunk" era. Coal Oil is another name for Kerosene, because it came from processing coal. Mix Coal Oil and Liquid Oxygen, give it a light, and BAM!

This seems to me to be the only viable bipropellant rocket fuel (aside from using other oxidizers) for the Victorian time period. Isps of 280s-310s or so.

"Blast Coal" or other Fictional or Magic Propellants.

Recently I came up with an idea to get around the abysmal Isp of steampunk rockets. I call it Blast Coal. Read the full post at /r/worldbuilding.

Quote

So recently I was thinking about how much I really want steampunk space warships and how impractical conventional rockets are. And so I said. "Screw it, I'm gonna make my own propellant, with blackjack, and hookers!." The original idea being that it can produce energies between rocket fuel combustion and direct nuclear power. A Candle-Drive, in sci-fi terms. More specifically, what I needed was a propellant that would produce high thrust with low propellant flow. That turns out to also be a very efficient engine as well, which is nice, because Victorian rocket parts are much heavier. The idea has evolved since then.

The mineral known as Blast Coal was first discovered in 1807 by American geologist and chemist Kurt Murray Laurenz. Only around three kilograms of the material were found, but the properties of the material were well documented while the supply lasted. Granted, it only lasted a couple seconds after the first round of experiments, and the laboratory went with it, but at least one of Dr. Laurenz's assistants escaped to tell the tale. The combustion of the Blast Coal seems to have totally vaporized it.

Sample Rocket Engines: 

RV-4s Solid Propellant Rocket Motor

• Fuel: Solid Blast Coal Charge (shaped for variations in thrust throughout the burn time)
• Oxidizer: Built-in to the Charge
• Height: 45 meters
• Diameter: 4 meters
• Fuel Feed Method: Solid
• Thrust: 12,500 kilonewtons
• Specific Impulse: 397 seconds
• Burn Time: ~5 minutes
• Dry Mass: 129,183 kilograms
• Description: A dense, cheap, always-on solid propellant rocket engine.

LBCO-01 Type 4 Liquid Blast Coal Oil and Oxidizer Rocket Engine

• Fuel: Type 4 Liquified Blast Oil
• Oxidizer: Liquid Oxygen
• Fuel Feed Method: Propellant Pumps
• Height: 5.6 meters
• Diameter: 3.75 meters
• Thrust: 8022 kilonewtons
• Specific Impulse: 462 seconds
• Mass: 10,353 kilograms
• Description: A powerful beast of a rocket engine, using liquified Blast Oil and Liquid Oxygen for propellant. It's so powerful it might blast itself apart if used continuously. One of the major advantages to this engine is that it can be turned off.

Blast Coal rules and info:

• If Blast Coal is reddish, it is a rare and highly dangerous self-combusting kind. Otherwise it will be a more brown color. Red Blast Coal can be manufactured from Brown (normal) Blast Coal.
• Blast Coal requires an oxidizer to burn. (Red Blast Coal already has an oxidizer)
• Blast Coal can not effectively be used to generate power, it burns too hot and too violently to do anything other than just explode. There's nothing in physics that says it's impossible, it's just much easier to work with different sources.
• Blast Coal can be liquified in refineries into various types of Blast Oil.
• Type 1 Blast Oil is the least refined, highest viscosity, and least powerful form of Blast Oil.
• Type 5 Blast Oil is the most refined Blast Oil for conventional usage.
• Type 6 Blast Oil is the most refined Blast Oil that has ever been refined as of 1910.
• In standard atmosphere, Type 5 Blast Oil has a melting point of -10 C and a boiling point of 120 C
• Blast Coal and Blast Oil are toxic. Drinking Blast Oil will definitely kill you, breathing in Blast Oil fumes, significant amounts of Blast Coal dust, etc will make you sick and you will need medical treatment. Skin contact is safe, however, as long as you wash it off. Some Blast Coal can give you mild chemical burns with skin contact, but you won't get poisoned from it.
• Blast Coal is very rare on Earth (this is because it would likely burn off or react as
• Blast Coal is moderately rare on the Moon.
• Blast Coal is relatively common on Phobos and Deimos (along with water ice and dirt and the stuff that they likely are common with irl), but rare on the surface of Mars.
• Frozen Blast Oil can be found on Metis, Amalthea, and Io.
• Blast Oil is not actually that much like regular Oil can also not be used in internal combustion engines. It's too reactive and would quickly break any engine.
• Blast Coal is meant to be like a sort of an analogue of Uranium, Plutonium, and other radioactive elements. Just, without the radioactivity.
• Blast Coal's active ingredient is the (fictional) element Igntium. It has an atomic number of Tau, because I don't feel like re-writing the periodic table. It has an atomic mass of 13. If anyone wants to provide some insight into the chemistry of Ignitium or Blast Coal, do share.
• With atomic number Tau, that means it has a non-integer, irrational number of Protons. That's fine, it's just an exotic and completely bullwaste fictional atom with quarks or something making it up. But since people in the 19th and early 20th century don't know about quarks, I don't actually have to care.
• Shorthand/slang for Blast Coal or Oil is just "Blast." (as in, "Pump in some Blast so we can get this rocket moving!") This is to separate it from normal coal and oil.

The Problem of the Turbopump

Accelerando said:

However, a caveat for kerolox bipropellant engines: they may be restricted to relatively low power, if you want to go full 1800s tech. TWR > 1 engines for large liquid-fueled spacecraft and the turbopumps that make them possible did not start appearing until the mid-20th century, to my knowledge.

The problem comes from the material science and metallurgy available at the time. These technologies could not possibly handle the immense speeds at which turbopump machinery rotates.

It is worth noting that the absolutely gigantic Sea Dragon rocket would have been pressure-fed. We need not abandon the liquid fuel rockets just because of the turbopump.

Steam, heated from stored water in a boiler

No. Yes it's very tempting, but in practice, it is very hard to make a convincing steam rocket work, especially when doing the classic firebox-heated boiler. If you really really really want a steampunk rocket, then use Solar heating for your steam.

Steam, fed from a Hydrogen Peroxide tank

Yes. You can use the peroxide as an electricity fuel cell, as a water and air source, and as a propellant. I think it is best used for Reaction Control Systems, but it may be useful in a low-gravity lander of some kind. Its low Isp would make it fairly terrible for interplanetary or cislunar space, though Peroxide can be used as an oxidizer.

 

Faster Than Light?_(really?)

Faster Than Light is okay in some cases in somewhat hard sci-fi, because, to paraphrase Atomic Rockets, "everyone's doing it". If you use FTL, your science won't be as hard, but as long as everything else you do makes up for it in realism, you can use an FTL drive.

It would be seriously hard to imagine, however, that steampunks would be able to produce the energies needed to go FTL on their own. They might piggyback on more advanced species, or use ancient stargates or naturally occurring wormholes.

Or maybe your planet's religion can take care of it. In a fictional story, you may feel comfortable introducing a magical element into it, but I would imagine that would seriously start to contradict the hardness of the science. However, if the faith/magic and the science/technology are split neatly enough, so that your rocketships are all realistic and your magic is a background force that only wizards and priestonauts can use, then it may be excusable. For instance, my Kerbal-universe Vernians that worship the Luna 3 Probe.

Interstellar Travel Handbook of the Kerbal Cosmos said:

Their interstellar drive is a sort of a religious prayer that can only be done in a massive crew tank that might be described as a church or temple inside the spaceship. If the Philosopher Vernian of level 5 is inside and enough other Vernians are observing him, the chance of a prayer succeeding nears 90%. The ship then is able to increase its outside-perceived acceleration by a very big number (inside they feel the low acceleration that the ships engines normally would) so that it is able to accelerate faster than light. This isn't a problem as the Kerbal universe has no speed limit. [Of course in the real world the speed limit is a very real thing.]

I would imagine your best bet for FTL is some form of magic. There's plenty of steampunk fiction that uses magic alongside technology. Why not use magic at the limits of what technology can do?

Just as any good FTL in normal sci-fi (and indeed any good magic in normal fantasy) you will have to make sure that your FTL is defined to the reader through what it can do, not how it works. Make some rules about how your FTL works, stick to those rules, and that should be good enough.

Launching to Orbit

Steampunk rockets would have to be built out of heavy materials. The old joke about Russian rockets being built like trains is especially true here. There was simply not enough electricity available to create much aluminium. To minimize launch costs and keep in the steampunk style, dirigibles or balloons might be used to reduce delta-v to orbit. I believe this is the only way to launch anything heavy into orbit.

Colony Construction

If your other planets have a breathable atmosphere (or if your colonies have enough pressurized volume to hold massive greenhouses), perhaps the best building material is Bamboo. It grows fast, it grows strong, and it grows too much. It can be used for structural support for your metal habitat walls, as rails for steam trains to run on. (in real life there were designs for logging locomotives that ran not on rails, but on logs.) They could even be used as structural support for various machines and devices. Bamboo may not be aesthetically very steampunk, but it is practical. Certainly much more practical than towing along all the building supplies with you, as more than ever in a steampunk universe, "every gram counts."

On the subject of trains and railways

Steam locomotives and railways could be very valuable on a steampunk colony, just as they would be anywhere else when you don't have mobile cranes and road vehicles. Railways would necessarily be narrow gauge, so that the engines can be light enough for individual transportation. Steam engines would probably be transported to a colony in pieces, and then assembled on site, with a majority of structural parts coming from bamboo. That way only the most difficult parts to produce in-situ would be sent across the vacuum of space from planet to planet. No need to waste precious payload mass on running plates, cabins, and fuel bunkers. Rails would be, as discussed earlier, bamboo tracks. Switch tracks would probably be somewhat difficult to produce, however, but no doubt possible. Locomotives could be used for mechanical power and towing, using a system of pulleys to lift things. They could be used to carry supplies and materials around a base. If the planet has multiple colonies relatively nearby, trains could pull passengers and supplies between the colonies.

...And Horses

If your destination planet has a breathable atmosphere(or maybe if you have proper space suit technology), horses could be a valuable tool. Compared to trains, they repair and maintain themselves and they replace themselves in the form of baby horses (as many multicellular organisms tend to do) and are decently powerful. They don't need rails (not they they would hurt). Problem is that their fuel efficiency compared to trains (which can be solar-boiler heated or hydrocarbon+oxygen heated) is abysmal, and they eat up your colonists' life support. An important thing to consider if the air and water isn't free.

Other People's Thoughts

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Other People's Thoughts

Scotius said:

Since it was too early for radio, steampunk space travellers would have to use mirrors/heliographs for communication with Earth, other ships or stations via Morse code.

I had a funny idea about using a long-range power cable that you would shoot at the other ship to talk to them in Morse, sort of like the classic cups-and-string telephone.

Accelerando said:

I've been thinking about this for a while, as I'm currently building a world wherein rocketry and interplanetary/translunar space settlement was achieved without electricity. Critically, I think, the setting I chose is an extraterrestrial society on a super-Mars sized exomoon, so (I assume) this greatly eases the issues of engineering a viable rocket using non-electrical technology, because for the characteristics I chose, achieving low orbit with any given mass of payload should only require about 1/4 the propellant that it would take to lift the same payload from Earth (which also eases delta-V saving acceleration requirements, and thus the forces the rocket has to be built to withstand).

However, a caveat for kerolox bipropellant engines: they may be restricted to relatively low power, if you want to go full 1800s tech. TWR > 1 engines for large liquid-fueled spacecraft and the turbopumps that make them possible did not start appearing until the mid-20th century, to my knowledge.

In general, depending on how far back you want to go, or especially if you want to (like me) remove electrical technology from your setting, you'll have to consider changes across the board in spacecraft design. In general, anything using electricity is likely going to need to be designed pretty differently from modern spacecraft, at least masswise - photovoltaics will be replaced by solar boilers, of course, and there's more. Before I start, I'd like to reiterate Gregox's request for input, and further ask anyone with technical knowledge in any of these sectors to please contribute - steam/diesel/non-electric space tech is an interesting concept, but concrete information on the matter is understandably scarce.

Communications

As Scotius mentioned, your spacecraft may need to use heliographs, or some bright light source, to communicate with each other and with Ground Control. Electric lightbulbs could be used on the nightside; an alternative, if you want to shy from electricity (like me) may be to use some sort of bioluminescent flora in a transparent container, with a door to flash the light "on" and "off". Given that amateur telescopes seem to be able to resolve meter-scale details on the ISS, I assume that you may not need very powerful telescopes to keep track of communications, either, as long as you have sufficiently large mirrors. Foil aluminum may be a viable material for lightweight, foldable mirrors; or perhaps your society has developed something like Mylar.

However, if you are willing to incorporate turn-of-the-century technology, radio communications was a thing by the mid-to-late 1890s - Maxwell had predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves from the 1860s-1870s, and the first proven intentional transmission of radio waves occurred in the late 1880s, so you can probably fudge radio into a steampunk setting.

Command and control

Electrical control may be another issue, although likely solvable. Tesla developed the first teleoperated, radio-controlled "robot" in 1898, and according to Wikipedia DC electric motors began appearing in commercial service on electric trams in the early 1880s, while commercially viable AC motors were developed in the late 1880s by Galileo Ferraris and Tesla, and were implemented in a mining operation in 1891. Electric power distribution systems were also developed and deployed by the 1880s, so a system to control motors aboard a rocket for various purposes including RCS systems seems to have been viable.

If you want to use as little electricity as possible, hydraulics, pneumatics, and cables/pulleys stand out to me as the most readily viable control systems. However, these are going to be heavy. I'm not sure what exactly a non-electric spacecraft control system would look like, in terms of mass and overall layout, and it's something I've been wondering for a while, so again, if anyone could help that would be lovely!

As is noted on Atomic Rockets, computer systems will be heavy. Vacuum tubes were known by the late 1800s, coming into their own more after the turn of the century. Mechanical computers are possible - the Babbage engines spring to mind, which would have been programmed with punched cards (wooden, although perhaps paper could have been used as well, especially with electricity). These would have been enormous, of course, but would have been possible with early-to-mid 1800s technology, and may have been employed at ground control or aboard space stations, or particularly large vessels. Miniaturization and cutdowns on mass could perhaps be achieved using smaller parts, and/or plastic parts, which could be developed as machining techniques advanced. It is also possible to build a binary digital mechanical computer, as demonstrated both by modern hobbyists and by Konrad Zuse in the early 20th century with the Z-1. Both Babbage-computers and binary computers could store discrete quantities of data (iirc), making them useful for general-purpose computation, as it is easy to precisely store discrete quantities of data. Analog computers, in the vein of artillery firing solution computers, may be more common on spacecraft for astrogation and for other specialized purposes. The Soyuz has used an analog mechanical computer called Globus.

Feeding astronomical data to the astrogation computer may have to be done manually, if your setting does not use much electrical tech, as I am only aware of photoelectric means to transmit optical/infrared/etc data to a computer. Perhaps it could be done by some chemical means, but I am not sure how. This page gives some history of photoelectrics; the photoelectric effect was known in the 1800s. If you plan to have steampunk space warships, this may significantly alter the mechanics of space battles, although I'm not sure if it would be ruled out altogether; the pace of space combat (time between maneuvers) seems overall fairly slow. The requirement for manual data input may complicate firing solutions. However, it may be possible to perform space combat by saturating a trajectory with lots of unguided projectiles, such as iron spheres. Such a technique is mentioned on Atomic Rockets' Space War pages.

Power systems

As you mentioned, all of these systems will likely use solar boiler power for the long term, using mercury, or perhaps water or ammonia-based liquid. For rechargeable long-term power storage, you may have several options: some sort of batteries, compressed gas tanks, springs, and flywheels come to mind.

Compressed air could achieve specific energies/energy densities somewhat smaller than those of batteries (~100-400kJ/kg), with compressed air tanks ranging from steel to carbon composites able to store perhaps 40-100kJ/kg. However, developing an air motor to provide constant power from the changing pressure in a compressed gas cylinder may be a challenge. I haven't been able to find ready data on spring energy density, aside from carbon nanotube springs, which are probably not going to be available to steampunk societies; although this isn't to say spring power isn't possible (I recall reading about it before, and only briefly searched Google this time). Flywheels may be able to reach energy densities up to 400kJ/kg, although modern flywheels for energy storage mostly use magnetic bearings, which do not seem to have been employed much until well into the 20th century. Mechanical bearings could be used, but have the issue of rapidly losing energy due to friction and change of orientation, so these may not be very useful for power storage in a spacecraft, nor rotational correction. This page provides a table of some energy densities of specific storage media to compare against. I'm not sure what the figures would be for steampunk-era batteries, but it's probably safe to err on the side of low-density for any of the media I mentioned.

For short-term power solutions, APUs powered by peroxide as you mention, or by hydrazine or some other hypergolic fuels may be used.

If you're going with as little electric technology as possible, power transmission may also be an issue. Mechanical power, to my knowledge, will either have to be transmitted either by solid elements; via hydraulic/pneumatic systems; or by piping some hot fluid around the ship. This fluid will lose energy as it travels down the pipe, although I'm not sure how fast power would be lost. This is another area in which any help with numbers would be greatly appreciated. I do know that district heating systems have been employed since at least the late 1800s, particularly in New York. Whether these would have been viable for power transmission, I'm not sure. It's definitely worth looking into, since any sort of large vessel, space station, base, or habitat will require pretty long "power lines", and may complicate the coordination of RCS thruster firing.

It's perhaps also possible, if your steampunk society were to for instance stumble upon the remains of a natural nuclear reactor, for them to work out how to build one themselves, which would in turn provide boiler power for the ship's systems, thus enabling your steampunk astronauts to venture far from the Sun.

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There's a lot more to cover, which I may do later. Life support systems are of definite interest; especially filtration systems. The ISS uses a combination of various types of filter to make sure that the air up there doesn't stink, for instance.

I see no reason that you can not use electricity, as long as you keep it on low levels. No doubt there will still be many many mechanical control systems. Perhaps you might require all aerodynamic control surfaces to be mounted near the command pod, so you could actually turn them using the control stick. For RCS, you would be opening different valves in a hub of tube to throttle the RCS.

Gun Launches

Accelerando said:

A gun-style launch might work, although you would need some way to severely dampen the acceleration. Chemical-based gun propulsion is limited in projectile velocity by the speed of sound in its propellants, so one of the only ways to achieve orbital velocities without railgun technology is by using a pure molecular hydrogen-based light-gas gun, which has been proposed for the Quicklauncher concept. To my knowledge, firing the gun would produce accelerations of hundreds of gees on the projectile.

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Another issue I've realized is that if your setting doesn't have radio, you also won't have radar altimeters, in which case you won't have a precise altimeter for landing on airless bodies. This may call for an increased fuel budget on vacuum landers, and/or restrict spaceflight more to extremely low-gravity bodies such as asteroids, and to bodies with atmosphere. However, for extrasolar settings, this may not be as much of an issue - at least one study indicates that extrasolar gas giants in the liquid water zone may harbor multiple waterlogged super-Mars sized moons.

More Fuels and Control

Idobox said:

Nitrocellulose was invented in 1862, so definitely fits the steampunk theme, and is an actual rocket propellant. The sprint antimissiles are fueled by nitrocellulose with zirconium layers (that one isn't very steampunk) and gellified nitroglycerine, and accelerates at 100g.

SRB is the steampunk way of doing rockets. Guns, despite what Verne wrote, can't work with that technology. Ram accelerators and multi-charge guns are an actual option today, but the technology is more dieselpunk/atompunk.

Hybrid or liquid fuel rockets without turbopumps are a decent option for circularisation and other orbital maneuvers, with their good isp and low TWR. Cold gas RCS and gyroscopes are also available technologies.

A story about a space race between Great Britain and France in Victorian times (I can't think of any other power willing to invest the absurd sums required at the time, but if you feel like adding USA, Russia or Austria, it's your choice) would be amazingly enjoyable.

Fighting in the colonies to get suitable launch sites, oversized steam boats carrying giant SRBs, engineers devising mechanical "flight computers" to keep the rocket pointing the right way, discovering hypersonic aerodynamics, reentry heat, cosmic rays, that natural rubber is crap in a vacuum, that copper and glass don't like 400°c thermal cycles, etc...

I imagine it could start with single stage suborbital rockets with simple aerodynamic stabilization could be used in the beginning, with mechanical scientific tools on board, like pressure and temperature loggers. Steel would be the material of choice for most of the rocket.

Explosive bolts and electric systems might be possible, but coolness requires hydraulic or wire systems for the control surfaces and stage separation. In particular, for the stages, I imagine two concentric rings, with a number of cylinders in the radial direction, a bit like the big bank safe doors.

Once shock heating is discovered, transpiration cooling using water would probably be one of the first proposed ideas. Ablative heatshields could also be made of a variety of low tech materials, including cork or leather.

Thermal amplitude and airtightness would be trickier. Dewars were invented in 1892, and are a very good option for insulation. They would just require one airtight capsule surrounded by a thin metallic shell and a few spacers between the two. The lower tech option is to increase thermal inertia, IE bring a big chunk of ice. The best material for the capsule would be metal, since they knew how to make boilers. Riveted steel sheet would be a material of choice, but copper or brass might be viable options. For joints, I would have them use resin or asphalt first, before discovering they're crap for space, and moving to soft metals like lead or tin, and designing the capsule so that internal pressure keeps the joints tight. And also, I'd expect a few catastrophic failures before they give up on glass windows, and even doors.

For insulation, I thought you might use wood instead of your golden mylar foil, and also cork wood for your heat shield. So all of your boilers and heat-sensitvie tanks might look like barrels!

My steampunk story assumes a chatastrophic failure, maybe the windows and doors is how that happens! The story also involves Britain and the United States in a space race after a gold meteorite from the Moon lands in North Carolina. This is what kick-starts the space program.

Accelerando said:

Lovely! I assume you'd have the astrogator calling out the distance to the ground to increasing precisions as the pilot kills velocity - a telescope or light pipe through the floor would be designated for the landing rangefinder. It is really neat how you can tell the distance to something by matching images...

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This is one reason why I personally tend toward low-gravity planets and moons as the settings for steam/diesel/non-electric rocketry. The BIS lunar lander would have relied heavily on extreme staging, jettisoning small pods of black powder while igniting the next groups, but I'm not sure how well this would work. Perhaps a really beefy black powder rocket could do the job, but if a powder rocket to Earth orbit is possible, I assume that it will need to be either a real titan, or will need orbital assembly to get significant payload beyond Earth.

Speaking of orbital assembly, in my understanding it may be possible - although you'll most likely need crewed vehicles to do the actual assembly, unless you want to try radio teleoperation, for which you will need some way for a spacecraft's systems to actively track its own position, and thus a camera. Gemini 8's crew made the first successful dock with Agena with the help of the Gemini Guidance Computer for rendezvous; perhaps an analog computer like the Globus could be used for similar purposes. Launching to orbit and rendezvousing with a vehicle without electronic computer guidance does seem to have been considered at least somewhat feasible by designers of the Lunar Escape Systems, which would have included an "escape chair" aboard the LEM for astronauts to return to and dock with the CSM in case of a failure in the LEM; they would have relied entirely on manual piloting.

--- UPDATE ---

Additionally, on the subject of

Computers

If your steampunk rocketeers are going to have general-purpose computers of any sort, then they may also want to incorporate some sort of user-friendly interface, if sufficiently powerful. Early implementations may incorporate a Teletype-style user interface, with a ream of paper serving as the "screen" upon which output is printed; pack lots of rolls! However, it may also be possible to have a refreshable display, perhaps using CRTs (especially if you're willing to stretch 1800s technology a bit) which according to Wikipedia were first used to display images in 1907; but if you want to stick to mechanical technology, there are several options at your disposal.

 

The rollsign may be reliable option. Commonly used in our world to display destination names on bus and train routes, the rollsign uses a flexible roll of material, pre-printed with characters and/or strings, that is turned by a motor to change the current displayed character/string. Although it may be slow to update compared to electronic displays, the rollsign may be advantageous over the other mechanical display options due to its low complexity, requiring only a single roll of material and turning mechanism per "pixel" (letter). Along with your writing system's characters, one could even perhaps print colored squares onto the rollsign, so as to serve purely as graphical elements. Perhaps your steampunk computer nerds could play roguelikes?

On that note: I assume that mechanical pixels will probably be large, as each unit of a mechanical display will need its own separately controlled motor or drive system; they may also be particularly power-hungry, especially if you don't have electrical tech. I'm not sure how small a purely mechanical motor/engine can be made; if anyone can help, please do. From what I'm seeing on Google, it does seem to be possible to make very small (centimeters-scale) purely mechanical/Stirling engines, and perhaps purely mechanical servo/stepper motors? I'm not sure what kind of production technology it'd take to make these small motors, but I know there are model kits with extremely small gears and other machinery, so perhaps...

At any rate, it may save your display designers a lot of headache to cut down on the number of pixels they need to build.

 

The split-flap display is another possibility. It's relatively compact, and can display many characters like the rollsign, but its clacky flap-display elements may perhaps get snagged, stuck, or loosened. Similar to the rollsign, it flips through a series of different pre-printed characters/strings to show the one(s) you want.

 

The flip-disc display is the lowest density option of the mechanical display technologies. A disc is colored black on one side, white/green on the other (or any other color combination) and the disc is flipped to show an "on/off" pixel. I assume this would be less favorable for purely mechanical setups, but electromechanical displays might use something of this nature.

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On a side note, programmable computers with accessible user interfaces might be a boon to musicians even in the steampunk era, although I assume some decades would need to pass before the concept would become practical. Automatic instruments go back a long way - and programmable automatic instruments, "player pianos" and barrel pianos, had been in development and use throughout the 19th century. If connected to a computer, player pianos could serve synthesizer/sound module roles for prospective musicians.

My steampunk computers will be solely restricted for space stations, because Every Gram Counts.

Accelerando said:

Indeed. The main reason I mentioned electric propulsion and nuclear thermal is because they're relatively "simple" ways (at least, from our perspective) to cut down on propellant requirements, but chemical could perhaps be enough. And even lunar regolith could be used to build hybrid rockets, with aluminum and oxygen isolated from the dirt.

---

Also, another consideration: If you don't have radio, bulk communications in space will take place via sealed envelope. This will probably just make up some of the boxes in a cargo hold in the early days, but if your space traffic gets sufficiently heavy, you might end up with dedicated mail courier-ships.

An angry communique from Mars to Earth might begin something like this, transmitted via heliograph relays:

spoiler: bad language

Spoiler

 

Followed days or weeks after by the aforementioned strong letter, arriving in the cargo of an Earth-bound rocket.

For deep-space heliograph communications, you'll require big mirrors and big scopes. Large relay stations may pop up in orbit, especially at advantageous spots such as the Lagrange points, to spot signals from spacecraft, and could have enormous mirrors to communicate long-range. Spacecraft may carry smaller mirrors, but I assume they will still need powerful telescopes in order to resolve different relay stations/messages from one another at extreme distance. (Though perhaps this would not be a concern? Since the message reaching the ship would depend on the orientation of mirrors, so one ship's message may not be visible to another.)

Perhaps cycler stations could be incorporated into the concept, serving as heliograph relays as well as travelers' hostels.

Life Support and Pressure Vessel Development Considerations (from this post by author M.E. Brines)

Quote

Editor Note: In the story, the author uses a propulsion method of antigravity designed by Tesla. This is the only thing the author requires a suspension of disbelief for, the rest is meant to be as plausible as possible.

 

...But how to generate electricity in the vacuum of space? And with steampunk technology? You can't run a steam engine on coal in a vacuum.

A solar boiler is just a sealed vessel containing water with an external mirror to concentrate the sun's rays. The solar heat boils the water. After that, everything works pretty much the same as if you'd made the steam boiling water over a coal fire. You channel the steam through a generator for electricity, then either a radiator to cool it down and reuse or just add additional water to keep the process going as long as desired. This is not as efficient as solar electric cells, but it's quite within the bounds of 19th century technology. But could Victorians build a pressure-sealed craft that could operate in space? 

The late 19th century was a hotbed of submarine development. Numerous inventors in many countries developed undersea craft: Holland, Lake, and Nordenfelt to name just a few. The same design principles that keep high pressure water out also keep air in. Any shipyard that could build a submarine back then could make a vessel sealed against vacuum. But the main objection seems to be the idea of maintaining life support in space. After all, those Victorian submarines didn't remain submerged for months at a time. 

NASA determined for the Apollo missions that 1.8 pounds of oxygen were required per man-day of operation in space, plus an additional 4.8 pounds to replace losses due to leaks and such. The actual oxygen usage for the Apollo 15 mission was only 2.94 pounds per man-day, only 63% of their estimate which had been refined down after six previous Apollo missions to the moon. (NASA estimates were notoriously conservative.)

If we assume our hypothetical steampunk aether ship is the size of a contemporaneous armored cruiser (say the British Orlando class) it would displace 5600 tons and require a crew of 484, probably much less, assuming it's an unarmed exploratory vessel. This is roughly equivalent to the proposed size of the aforementioned Project Orion ship. Even supposing a crew of 484, and the actual oxygen usage of the Apollo missions (about 3 pounds per man-day) the oxygen requirement for a 100-day journey to Mars is only 72.6 tons. For a round-trip (assuming we can't resupply on the Red Planet) we'd need at least double that, plus a reserve for time spent exploring, so let's triple that amount: 218 tons.

Water requirements are close to that of oxygen. NASA provided 25.4 kg for the Apollo 15 mission, a usage rate of 2 kg per man-day. At that rate a 100-day mission to Mars with 484 men would require 106.48 tons, tripled gives 320 tons. This is assuming no recycling. 

The Orlando-class cruisers were designed to carry 900 tons of coal, which we need only enough to lift us out of the atmosphere, leaving plenty of room for the extra oxygen and water supplies needed for the trip. And remember, this is assuming a ridiculous size crew. A civilian vessel of the same size would have a crew about one-tenth that of a warship.

But a major problem with long-term operations for both spacecraft and submarines operating on life support is the build-up of carbon-dioxide. Without constant removal the respiration of the crew will increase the concentration until it becomes toxic. Somehow we'll have to renew our air supply, and just pumping in more oxygen isn't enough.

Some have suggested greenhouses, and while that's certainly within the limits of Victorian technology, a greenhouse big enough to do the job would have to be larger than our ship. So, maybe we do add a greenhouse to the design, but more for aesthetics than practicality - always a big steampunk consideration. 

NASA used filters impregnated with lithium hydroxide to remove CO2 from the air of the Apollo capsules. When exposed to CO2, lithium hydroxide sucks it out of the air forming lithium carbonate and water. One gram of lithium hydroxide can remove 450 cubic centimeters pf CO2. The process actually made so much water the Apollo crews actually had to dump the excess overboard. A lithium hydroxide filter with simple electric fans to circulate the air would make an effective life support system for our aether ship and reduce the amount of water our expedition would have to carry.

Lithium hydroxide is not a high-tech material. It was first obtained by electrolysis in 1821 by William Thomas Brande. The process was improved in 1855 by Robert Bunsen, the inventor of the Bunsen burner. So the life support system of our modern moon missions employed essentially Victorian technology...

Pessimistic view of Steampunks In Space.

Beowolf said:

I worked with a semi-pro author on a similar concept. He wanted to stick with as much hard science as possible, and the big problem was with material strength and tolerances. The available steel wasn't strong or consistent enough to handle the demands of heavy rocketry. Even in steam engines, the stuff was always developing hot spots and cracks. Different parts of pistons, cylinders and linkages expanded at differing rates from heat, resulting in rapid wear.

Looking into the history of steam power, I learned that all the early engines used "suction" rather than steam pressure. They'd dump hot steam into the cylinder with the piston fully extended, and as the steam condensed, atmospheric pressure slowly pushed the piston down. And that was because their steel cylinders would fail under higher pressures. Plenty failed even using this negative pressure technique. Well, if it has trouble at 15psi, it sure isn't going to last as a rocket nozzle!

Turbopumps would be even worse, as 19th century manufacturing tolerances didn't come anywhere close to what's required. AFAIK, before WWII no device more complex than a bullet could spin at turbopump speeds (30,000 rpm!) without tearing itself apart. The first gas turbine that produced more power than it took to overcome the friction losses of spinning it wasn't developed until 1903. The modern micrometer appeared around 1844, and the new, improved standard for super-precise machining became 1/1000th inch. There was a cool pic of a jet turbine weld on Reddit the other day. An aeronautics engineer said tolerance on those welds is 3/100,000ths. Nearly two full orders of magnitude tighter.

Then, for the icing on the cake, look at how reactive LOX is, and consider how they could possibly control the stuff with Victorian tech. Victorian gaskets are natural rubber and leather and that stuff explodes with LOX. Silicone and fiberglass weren't even words yet. LOX fed by nitrogen-pressurized tanks I could believe, but that doesn't seem like enough thrust for liftoffs. On the bright side, they did have access to the hydrofluoric acid used to clean LOX tanks and pipes of all organic material before filling. Though I bet they'd kill lots of techs while they figured out how to handle the nasty stuff in such large quantities. Teflon safety-suits and SCUBA weren't things yet, either. They'd have to use brass deep-diving suits, plus a hose to carry the used air back outside. Those suits are almost no protection at all against HF spills, and will only protect them from fumes for a short time. So while they learn nearly every accident will be a fatal one.

I'm not saying you can't have an alternate history where such things are dealt with. I imagine a 20-year Manhattan Project-style all-out effort by a major power could have solved a bunch of these problems. I'm just saying they'd need one heck of a good reason, because it's going to lay waste to their existing economy.

How Victorians Thought of Space Travel

On 1/21/2016 at 5:51 PM, CaptKordite said:

I have been involved with steampunk for a number of years, have been playing Kerbal Space Program for just a year and have been playing the Professor Phineas Kerbenstein's wonderous vertical propulsion emporium mod for about a month so it was probably inevitable that I would come across this thread. One of the things I do in the steampunk community is present at conventions on Victorian spacecraft. And, in my research for that topic, I found the the 19th Century's ideas of how they were going to get into space, both in scientific romances and in science, was NOT rockets.

In 1779, Erasmus Darwin, the famous grandfather of the more famous Charles, made a sketch of tanks of compressed inflamable air (hydrogen) and dephlogisticated air (oxygen) mixing in a chamber and being ignited to make a liquid fuel rocket. He understood the principals involved (that had been generally known for millennia) and understood that compressing (liquifing) the gas would make a better rocket but it would take until the end of the next century with the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky to put it all together into what we would recognize as a space craft.

In between, rockets sucked. People used them for fireworks. The military used them for signalling. They tried using them as artillery but that's where they really stunk. So much so that no one even made the leap that, if improved, they could take people into space. Even Verne, who imagined the technological steps necessary to take the submarines of his day to create Nemo's Nautilus, didn't consider rockets when taking his protagonists to the moon.

By far, the most common way that Victorians got into space, at least in the fiction of the day, was some variation of anti-gravity. Or, perhaps more accurately, non-gravity.

Based on new discoveries in the fundamentals of light and electricity, it was not uncommon for scientific speculation to imagine that gravity was something similar. A wave or a ray travelling through space to act on other objects. So, if you were able to make an object opaque to gravity, that shadow would protect things behind that object from the effects of gravity, thus rendering it weightless. While the Cavorite sphere in H.G.Wells "First Men in the Moon" is probably the most famous of these anti-gravity machines, I want to talk about a much earlier, and perhaps the first such presentation.

In 1847, John Leonard Riddell published a story titled "Orrin Lindsay's Plan for Aerial Navigation." He called his spacecraft the Electric Balloon and through an amalgam of steel and mercury plus an application of electromagnetism, his spherical ship became opaque to gravity and thus floated above the Earth. To direct the craft in one direction or another he would open a window, thus allowing a ray of gravity to enter the craft, act upon the inside, and thus pull the craft in that direction.

His story was ten pages long with five additional pages of footnotes.

At the end of the Victorian Era, Wells recognized that, were a sphere like Riddell's to be made suddenly opaque to gravity, it would already have the centripital force of the Earth's rotation and would be suddenly hurled into the sky. (Actually, it would be travelling tangentially to the Earth's rotation, 600mph in England, but would appear to leap into the sky at 150mph.)

Do Not Give Up on Liquid Fueled Rockets

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.

If you have anything to add, please feel free to comment, and I will add it to the O.P.

 

If you have anything to add, please feel free to comment, and I will add it to the O.P.

Edited September 21, 2016 by GregroxMun
Added section about Blast Coal, and

[Scotius]

Since it was too early for radio, steampunk space travellers would have to use mirrors\heliographs for communication with Earth, other ships or stations via Morse code.

[kerbiloid]

This looks more like atompunk, than steampunk.

Steampunk would mean something like a steam catapult throwing a powder-fueled rocket with a steamputnik.

[Accelerando]

I've been thinking about this for a while, as I'm currently building a world wherein rocketry and interplanetary/translunar space settlement was achieved without electricity. Critically, I think, the setting I chose is an extraterrestrial society on a super-Mars sized exomoon, so (I assume) this greatly eases the issues of engineering a viable rocket using non-electrical technology, because for the characteristics I chose, achieving low orbit with any given mass of payload should only require about 1/4 the propellant that it would take to lift the same payload from Earth (which also eases delta-V saving acceleration requirements, and thus the forces the rocket has to be built to withstand).

However, a caveat for kerolox bipropellant engines: they may be restricted to relatively low power, if you want to go full 1800s tech. TWR > 1 engines for large liquid-fueled spacecraft and the turbopumps that make them possible did not start appearing until the mid-20th century, to my knowledge.

In general, depending on how far back you want to go, or especially if you want to (like me) remove electrical technology from your setting, you'll have to consider changes across the board in spacecraft design. In general, anything using electricity is likely going to need to be designed pretty differently from modern spacecraft, at least masswise - photovoltaics will be replaced by solar boilers, of course, and there's more. Before I start, I'd like to reiterate Gregox's request for input, and further ask anyone with technical knowledge in any of these sectors to please contribute - steam/diesel/non-electric space tech is an interesting concept, but concrete information on the matter is understandably scarce.

Communications

As Scotius mentioned, your spacecraft may need to use heliographs, or some bright light source, to communicate with each other and with Ground Control. Electric lightbulbs could be used on the nightside; an alternative, if you want to shy from electricity (like me) may be to use some sort of bioluminescent flora in a transparent container, with a door to flash the light "on" and "off". Given that amateur telescopes seem to be able to resolve meter-scale details on the ISS, I assume that you may not need very powerful telescopes to keep track of communications, either, as long as you have sufficiently large mirrors. Foil aluminum may be a viable material for lightweight, foldable mirrors; or perhaps your society has developed something like Mylar.

However, if you are willing to incorporate turn-of-the-century technology, radio communications was a thing by the mid-to-late 1890s - Maxwell had predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves from the 1860s-1870s, and the first proven intentional transmission of radio waves occurred in the late 1880s, so you can probably fudge radio into a steampunk setting.

Command and control

Electrical control may be another issue, although likely solvable. Tesla developed the first teleoperated, radio-controlled "robot" in 1898, and according to Wikipedia DC electric motors began appearing in commercial service on electric trams in the early 1880s, while commercially viable AC motors were developed in the late 1880s by Galileo Ferraris and Tesla, and were implemented in a mining operation in 1891. Electric power distribution systems were also developed and deployed by the 1880s, so a system to control motors aboard a rocket for various purposes including RCS systems seems to have been viable.

If you want to use as little electricity as possible, hydraulics, pneumatics, and cables/pulleys stand out to me as the most readily viable control systems. However, these are going to be heavy. I'm not sure what exactly a non-electric spacecraft control system would look like, in terms of mass and overall layout, and it's something I've been wondering for a while, so again, if anyone could help that would be lovely!

As is noted on Atomic Rockets, computer systems will be heavy. Vacuum tubes were known by the late 1800s, coming into their own more after the turn of the century. Mechanical computers are possible - the Babbage engines spring to mind, which would have been programmed with punched cards (wooden, although perhaps paper could have been used as well, especially with electricity). These would have been enormous, of course, but would have been possible with early-to-mid 1800s technology, and may have been employed at ground control or aboard space stations, or particularly large vessels. Miniaturization and cutdowns on mass could perhaps be achieved using smaller parts, and/or plastic parts, which could be developed as machining techniques advanced. It is also possible to build a binary digital mechanical computer, as demonstrated both by modern hobbyists and by Konrad Zuse in the early 20th century with the Z-1. Both Babbage-computers and binary computers could store discrete quantities of data (iirc), making them useful for general-purpose computation, as it is easy to precisely store discrete quantities of data. Analog computers, in the vein of artillery firing solution computers, may be more common on spacecraft for astrogation and for other specialized purposes. The Soyuz has used an analog mechanical computer called Globus.

Feeding astronomical data to the astrogation computer may have to be done manually, if your setting does not use much electrical tech, as I am only aware of photoelectric means to transmit optical/infrared/etc data to a computer. Perhaps it could be done by some chemical means, but I am not sure how. This page gives some history of photoelectrics; the photoelectric effect was known in the 1800s. If you plan to have steampunk space warships, this may significantly alter the mechanics of space battles, although I'm not sure if it would be ruled out altogether; the pace of space combat (time between maneuvers) seems overall fairly slow. The requirement for manual data input may complicate firing solutions. However, it may be possible to perform space combat by saturating a trajectory with lots of unguided projectiles, such as iron spheres. Such a technique is mentioned on Atomic Rockets' Space War pages.

Power systems

As you mentioned, all of these systems will likely use solar boiler power for the long term, using mercury, or perhaps water or ammonia-based liquid. For rechargeable long-term power storage, you may have several options: some sort of batteries, compressed gas tanks, springs, and flywheels come to mind.

Compressed air could achieve specific energies/energy densities somewhat smaller than those of batteries (~100-400kJ/kg), with compressed air tanks ranging from steel to carbon composites able to store perhaps 40-100kJ/kg. However, developing an air motor to provide constant power from the changing pressure in a compressed gas cylinder may be a challenge. I haven't been able to find ready data on spring energy density, aside from carbon nanotube springs, which are probably not going to be available to steampunk societies; although this isn't to say spring power isn't possible (I recall reading about it before, and only briefly searched Google this time). Flywheels may be able to reach energy densities up to 400kJ/kg, although modern flywheels for energy storage mostly use magnetic bearings, which do not seem to have been employed much until well into the 20th century. Mechanical bearings could be used, but have the issue of rapidly losing energy due to friction and change of orientation, so these may not be very useful for power storage in a spacecraft, nor rotational correction. This page provides a table of some energy densities of specific storage media to compare against. I'm not sure what the figures would be for steampunk-era batteries, but it's probably safe to err on the side of low-density for any of the media I mentioned.

For short-term power solutions, APUs powered by peroxide as you mention, or by hydrazine or some other hypergolic fuels may be used.

If you're going with as little electric technology as possible, power transmission may also be an issue. Mechanical power, to my knowledge, will either have to be transmitted either by solid elements; via hydraulic/pneumatic systems; or by piping some hot fluid around the ship. This fluid will lose energy as it travels down the pipe, although I'm not sure how fast power would be lost. This is another area in which any help with numbers would be greatly appreciated. I do know that district heating systems have been employed since at least the late 1800s, particularly in New York. Whether these would have been viable for power transmission, I'm not sure. It's definitely worth looking into, since any sort of large vessel, space station, base, or habitat will require pretty long "power lines", and may complicate the coordination of RCS thruster firing.

It's perhaps also possible, if your steampunk society were to for instance stumble upon the remains of a natural nuclear reactor, for them to work out how to build one themselves, which would in turn provide boiler power for the ship's systems, thus enabling your steampunk astronauts to venture far from the Sun.

----

There's a lot more to cover, which I may do later. Life support systems are of definite interest; especially filtration systems. The ISS uses a combination of various types of filter to make sure that the air up there doesn't stink, for instance.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Accelerando

[Hary R]

I suggest you to read "From the earth to the moon" by Jules Verne to have an idea of how a steam punk world would have done a rocket. In this novel, the rocket was nothing more than a giant bullet lunched by a giant gun. That's how a world were steam power most machinery (late 1800) think a spice flight would look like.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Hary R

[Accelerando]

I suggest you to read "From the earth to the moon" by Jules Verne to have an idea of what a steam punk world would have done a rocket. In this novel, the rocket wan nothing more than a giant bullet lunched by a giant gun. That's how a world were steam power most machinery (late 1800) think a spice flight will look.

A gun-style launch might work, although you would need some way to severely dampen the acceleration. Chemical-based gun propulsion is limited in projectile velocity by the speed of sound in its propellants, so one of the only ways to achieve orbital velocities without railgun technology is by using a pure molecular hydrogen-based light-gas gun, which has been proposed for the Quicklauncher concept. To my knowledge, firing the gun would produce accelerations of hundreds of gees on the projectile.

---

Another issue I've realized is that if your setting doesn't have radio, you also won't have radar altimeters, in which case you won't have a precise altimeter for landing on airless bodies. This may call for an increased fuel budget on vacuum landers, and/or restrict spaceflight more to extremely low-gravity bodies such as asteroids, and to bodies with atmosphere. However, for extrasolar settings, this may not be as much of an issue - at least one study indicates that extrasolar gas giants in the liquid water zone may harbor multiple waterlogged super-Mars sized moons.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Accelerando

[KerikBalm]

Well, before they had radar and laser rangefinders, they had optical rangefinders.

The type used in WWI battleships (a bit late for steampun, but still very feasible), should be OK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_rangefinder

Even this thing from the 1940's should fit in a steampunk setting:

As to that 1930's study... no more than 1,000 tons? yea... right, the Saturn V was 3,000 tons, and it only landed 2 on the moon... using high Isp engines, and orbital rendevous which you can't really do well without good computers, rangefinders, and RCS... solid fuel won't do.

Granted that the service module was a bit over engineered from the pre-lunar orbit rendevous phase of design... to think that they could do it with a rocket 1/3 the size of the saturn V, using dramatically inferior rockets.... yea... no

[Streetwind]

Well, there's a mod for that

I haven't used it myself, but it looks like it actually does some of the things mentioned in the OP. Steam rockets, gunpowder, airships, SAILS IN SPACE (because rule of cool) and very, very steampunky part design. Perhaps some of you will have some fun with it.

[Idobox]

Nitrocellulose was invented in 1862, so definitely fits the steampunk theme, and is an actual rocket propellant. The sprint antimissiles are fueled by nitrocellulose with zirconium layers (that one isn't very steampunk) and gellified nitroglycerine, and accelerates at 100g.

SRB is the steampunk way of doing rockets. Guns, despite what Verne wrote, can't work with that technology. Ram accelerators and multi-charge guns are an actual option today, but the technology is more dieselpunk/atompunk.

Hybrid or liquid fuel rockets without turbopumps are a decent option for circularisation and other orbital maneuvers, with their good isp and low TWR. Cold gas RCS and gyroscopes are also available technologies.

A story about a space race between Great Britain and France in Victorian times (I can't think of any other power willing to invest the absurd sums required at the time, but if you feel like adding USA, Russia or Austria, it's your choice) would be amazingly enjoyable.

Fighting in the colonies to get suitable launch sites, oversized steam boats carrying giant SRBs, engineers devising mechanical "flight computers" to keep the rocket pointing the right way, discovering hypersonic aerodynamics, reentry heat, cosmic rays, that natural rubber is crap in a vacuum, that copper and glass don't like 400°c thermal cycles, etc...

I imagine it could start with single stage suborbital rockets with simple aerodynamic stabilization could be used in the beginning, with mechanical scientific tools on board, like pressure and temperature loggers. Steel would be the material of choice for most of the rocket.

Explosive bolts and electric systems might be possible, but coolness requires hydraulic or wire systems for the control surfaces and stage separation. In particular, for the stages, I imagine two concentric rings, with a number of cylinders in the radial direction, a bit like the big bank safe doors.

Once shock heating is discovered, transpiration cooling using water would probably be one of the first proposed ideas. Ablative heatshields could also be made of a variety of low tech materials, including cork or leather.

Thermal amplitude and airtightness would be trickier. Dewars were invented in 1892, and are a very good option for insulation. They would just require one airtight capsule surrounded by a thin metallic shell and a few spacers between the two. The lower tech option is to increase thermal inertia, IE bring a big chunk of ice. The best material for the capsule would be metal, since they knew how to make boilers. Riveted steel sheet would be a material of choice, but copper or brass might be viable options. For joints, I would have them use resin or asphalt first, before discovering they're crap for space, and moving to soft metals like lead or tin, and designing the capsule so that internal pressure keeps the joints tight. And also, I'd expect a few catastrophic failures before they give up on glass windows, and even doors.

[Accelerando]

Well, before they had radar and laser rangefinders, they had optical rangefinders.

The type used in WWI battleships (a bit late for steampun, but still very feasible), should be OK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_rangefinder

Even this thing from the 1940's should fit in a steampunk setting:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/American_soldiers_use_a_coincidence_rangefinder.jpg/220px-American_soldiers_use_a_coincidence_rangefinder.jpg

Lovely! I assume you'd have the astrogator calling out the distance to the ground to increasing precisions as the pilot kills velocity - a telescope or light pipe through the floor would be designated for the landing rangefinder. It is really neat how you can tell the distance to something by matching images...

---

As to that 1930's study... no more than 1,000 tons? yea... right, the Saturn V was 3,000 tons, and it only landed 2 on the moon... using high Isp engines, and orbital rendevous which you can't really do well without good computers, rangefinders, and RCS... solid fuel won't do.

Granted that the service module was a bit over engineered from the pre-lunar orbit rendevous phase of design... to think that they could do it with a rocket 1/3 the size of the saturn V, using dramatically inferior rockets.... yea... no

This is one reason why I personally tend toward low-gravity planets and moons as the settings for steam/diesel/non-electric rocketry. The BIS lunar lander would have relied heavily on extreme staging, jettisoning small pods of black powder while igniting the next groups, but I'm not sure how well this would work. Perhaps a really beefy black powder rocket could do the job, but if a powder rocket to Earth orbit is possible, I assume that it will need to be either a real titan, or will need orbital assembly to get significant payload beyond Earth.

Speaking of orbital assembly, in my understanding it may be possible - although you'll most likely need crewed vehicles to do the actual assembly, unless you want to try radio teleoperation, for which you will need some way for a spacecraft's systems to actively track its own position, and thus a camera. Gemini 8's crew made the first successful dock with Agena with the help of the Gemini Guidance Computer for rendezvous; perhaps an analog computer like the Globus could be used for similar purposes. Launching to orbit and rendezvousing with a vehicle without electronic computer guidance does seem to have been considered at least somewhat feasible by designers of the Lunar Escape Systems, which would have included an "escape chair" aboard the LEM for astronauts to return to and dock with the CSM in case of a failure in the LEM; they would have relied entirely on manual piloting.

--- UPDATE ---

Additionally, on the subject of

Computers

If your steampunk rocketeers are going to have general-purpose computers of any sort, then they may also want to incorporate some sort of user-friendly interface, if sufficiently powerful. Early implementations may incorporate a Teletype-style user interface, with a ream of paper serving as the "screen" upon which output is printed; pack lots of rolls! However, it may also be possible to have a refreshable display, perhaps using CRTs (especially if you're willing to stretch 1800s technology a bit) which according to Wikipedia were first used to display images in 1907; but if you want to stick to mechanical technology, there are several options at your disposal.

The rollsign may be reliable option. Commonly used in our world to display destination names on bus and train routes, the rollsign uses a flexible roll of material, pre-printed with characters and/or strings, that is turned by a motor to change the current displayed character/string. Although it may be slow to update compared to electronic displays, the rollsign may be advantageous over the other mechanical display options due to its low complexity, requiring only a single roll of material and turning mechanism per "pixel" (letter). Along with your writing system's characters, one could even perhaps print colored squares onto the rollsign, so as to serve purely as graphical elements. Perhaps your steampunk computer nerds could play roguelikes?

On that note: I assume that mechanical pixels will probably be large, as each unit of a mechanical display will need its own separately controlled motor or drive system; they may also be particularly power-hungry, especially if you don't have electrical tech. I'm not sure how small a purely mechanical motor/engine can be made; if anyone can help, please do. From what I'm seeing on Google, it does seem to be possible to make very small (centimeters-scale) purely mechanical/Stirling engines, and perhaps purely mechanical servo/stepper motors? I'm not sure what kind of production technology it'd take to make these small motors, but I know there are model kits with extremely small gears and other machinery, so perhaps...

At any rate, it may save your display designers a lot of headache to cut down on the number of pixels they need to build.

The split-flap display is another possibility. It's relatively compact, and can display many characters like the rollsign, but its clacky flap-display elements may perhaps get snagged, stuck, or loosened. Similar to the rollsign, it flips through a series of different pre-printed characters/strings to show the one(s) you want.

The flip-disc display is the lowest density option of the mechanical display technologies. A disc is colored black on one side, white/green on the other (or any other color combination) and the disc is flipped to show an "on/off" pixel. I assume this would be less favorable for purely mechanical setups, but electromechanical displays might use something of this nature.

---

On a side note, programmable computers with accessible user interfaces might be a boon to musicians even in the steampunk era, although I assume some decades would need to pass before the concept would become practical. Automatic instruments go back a long way - and programmable automatic instruments, "player pianos" and barrel pianos, had been in development and use throughout the 19th century. If connected to a computer, player pianos could serve synthesizer/sound module roles for prospective musicians.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Accelerando
updated with computer info

[Kaos]

Another issue I've realized is that if your setting doesn't have radio, you also won't have radar altimeters, in which case you won't have a precise altimeter for landing on airless bodies. This may call for an increased fuel budget on vacuum landers, and/or restrict spaceflight more to extremely low-gravity bodies such as asteroids, and to bodies with atmosphere.

You could bring some stuff with the lander, drop it and count how long it takes until it reaches the ground. If you do that multiple times and you know good enough how fast you did accelerate in the meantime you have a good estimation of your own height and speed.

[Whirligig Girl]

Thank you all so much for the responses, I have added most to the OP in quotes, with a short editor response from me. I also added a small section on FTL.

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kerbiloid said:

This looks more like atompunk, than steampunk.

Steampunk would mean something like a steam catapult throwing a powder-fueled rocket with a steamputnik.

Atompunk would require high voltage nuclear reactors. 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.

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Hary R said:

I suggest you to read "From the earth to the moon" by Jules Verne to have an idea of how a steam punk world would have done a rocket. In this novel, the rocket was nothing more than a giant bullet lunched by a giant gun. That's how a world were steam power most machinery (late 1800) think a spice flight would look like.

From The Earth To The Moon is not particularly hard science fiction by any means. At the most basic, the idea of a canon orbitlaunch is absurd simply because of the insane accellerations, let alone a moonlaunch.

EDIT: After having actually read a good part of the story, it was definitely hard sci fi for the time. They do go into the math and orbital considerations for the journey. Just not the cannon acceleration

Edited April 20, 2016 by GregroxMun

[Scotius]

Considering that most interplanetary voyages in contemporary fiction literature was done by astral projection, magic or anti-gravity metal, Verne's novel was diamond-hard science fiction then Sure, he was dead wrong about many things he described, but those misconceptions were widely accepted by scientific community.

[Whirligig Girl]

Considering that most interplanetary voyages in contemporary fiction literature was done by astral projection, magic or anti-gravity metal, Verne's novel was diamond-hard science fiction then Sure, he was dead wrong about many things he described, but those misconceptions were widely accepted by scientific community.

I suppose that is true.

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You could bring some stuff with the lander, drop it and count how long it takes until it reaches the ground. If you do that multiple times and you know good enough how fast you did accelerate in the meantime you have a good estimation of your own height and speed.

Somehow I doubt that would be practical when you have to do the calculations in real time. However, bringing flares could be a valuable measurement tool for taking pictures of the Lunar far side when it is dark. Then again, if you have any sense of planning, you might try to launch your observation mission at a good point in time for the lunar farside to be bright (i.e, arrive at New Moon phase).

[Stargate525]

Or you would have to land in daylight and watch your shadow.

[LitaAlto]

This looks more like atompunk, than steampunk.

Steampunk would mean something like a steam catapult throwing a powder-fueled rocket with a steamputnik.

Atompunk would require high voltage nuclear reactors. 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.

If we're talking about early atomic-age spacecraft, the term I'd recommend is rocketpunk. That of course presumes you're not trying to maintain a neo-Victorian influence. Not all SF "-punk" genres presume that influence--dieselpunk, for instance, focuses on an early 20th Century, art-deco influence.

[Accelerando]

My steampunk computers will be solely restricted for space stations, because Every Gram Counts.

That may be the case for small vessels, but larger vessels (warships, in particular) and deep space missions will likely want some sort of computer for various purposes. Specialized analog computers don't have to be huge like general-purpose digital ones, either. If you're going to be far away from Mission Control, you're probably going to want your own computer(s) - minutes to hours of lightspeed communications delay may simply not do, which would be further complicated if your setting uses heliographs instead of radio.

And besides, this is a worldbuilding guide, so it's for everyone's steampunk-y settings, aye?

As a worldbuilder, I tend to ignore Every Gram Counts to some extent because I think it's a bit overhyped (much like other aspects of Atomic Rockets' ultra-machismo rocketpunk worldbuilding). True, exploratory and military spacecraft are going to be optimized, although see above; but once you get past a certain point - I presume nuclear thermal spacecraft in my setting, for instance, and some sort of ion engine may perhaps be viable for late steampunk - the amount of stuff you can carry is limited more by how much your space travelers, or their backers, are willing to pay to increase your propellant stock and beef up your engine. If you plan to have significant deep-space traffic - and I think it's at least possible - then space travel is going to have to be at least on par with air travel for cost. Asteroid mining, if you can do it, would help greatly. Though admittedly, low cost spaceflight may be pushing the envelope toward dieselpunk and rocketpunk, but this could be an acceptable evolution for a society developing from late steampunk.

Take, for instance, the Spacecoach concept, which is intended to provide a cheap reusable, lower-maintenance, more liveable vessel for exploring the Solar System. Although driven, again, by electric propulsion, one of the critical elements of it is that it uses water, or ice-derived materials, for propellant. Water is probably (relatively) cheap in space; if you can hitch onto a near-Earth comet or mine ice from asteroids, you may have it made. Spacecoaches are additionally designed to use the ship's consumable water as their propellant - why carry your heavy wastewater when you can hook your engine to your toilet - a feature that may admittedly be specific to its electric propulsion design, but is interesting nonetheless as it vastly cuts down on propellant requirements, with a 40 ton ship of 6 crew requiring 54 tons of consumables and yielding 18km/s delta-v. If your steampunky setting can figure out ion engines, it may be worth a look - and I'd reckon that, at a mass ratio of around 2:1, you could afford to carry some extra equipment like a sufficiently miniaturized computer.

I see no reason that you can not use electricity, as long as you keep it on low levels. No doubt there will still be many many mechanical control systems. Perhaps you might require all aerodynamic control surfaces to be mounted near the command pod, so you could actually turn them using the control stick. For RCS, you would be opening different valves in a hub of tube to throttle the RCS.

Again, a worldbuilding guide, though. And the timeline may be important - commercially viable DC and AC electrics and power distribution systems didn't really come to be a thing until the 1880s and 90s, whereas mechanical systems such as Babbage's engines were viable by the 1850s. Perhaps a small discrepancy, and mechanical tech for power applications may also have been relatively underdeveloped, but it's a path you could take since we're writing alternate history, or outright science fiction in my own case. My own extraterrestrial society did not pursue electricity far for a long time, for instance, because their sun is a red dwarf flare star.

For aerodynamic control surfaces, if they aren't driven by electric motors powered by the APU/gas generator, pulleys and cables were used on large aircraft in WWII, so you might be able to have control surfaces situated away from the cockpit.

For insulation, I thought you might use wood instead of your golden mylar foil, and also cork wood for your heat shield. So all of your boilers and heat-sensitvie tanks might look like barrels!

Maybe, although wood might take some engineering. A big problem with organic materials is degradation upon exposure to space; wood contains a lot of trapped water and air, to my knowledge, which could be a problem. It also may not respond well to the extreme temperature gradients.

FTL travel may be possible with some new physics, but as you say, pure-steampunk societies would have trouble working that out on their own without developing other breakthroughs that could make them more modernesque. To my knowledge, wormholes are the only viable form of FTL that allows travel to and from a destination without causality violations; drive-type technologies require causality violations due to the fact that you're making two "jumps" or trips instead of bridging a point in space and time, although any input on this, as always, would be muchly appreciated. The best information on the subject seems to come from Orion's Arm; searching Google for "orion's arm wormhole" is the best I've come up with thus far.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Accelerando

[sndrtj]

Take, for instance, the Spacecoach concept, which is intended to provide a cheap reusable, lower-maintenance, more liveable vessel for exploring the Solar System. Although driven, again, by electric propulsion, one of the critical elements of it is that it uses water, or ice-derived materials, for propellant. Water is probably (relatively) cheap in space; if you can hitch onto a near-Earth comet or mine ice from asteroids, you may have it made. Spacecoaches are additionally designed to use the ship's consumable water as their propellant - why carry your heavy wastewater when you can hook your engine to your toilet - a feature that may admittedly be specific to its electric propulsion design, but is interesting nonetheless as it vastly cuts down on propellant requirements, with a 40 ton ship of 6 crew requiring 54 tons of consumables and yielding 18km/s delta-v. If your steampunky setting can figure out ion engines, it may be worth a look - and I'd reckon that, at a mass ratio of around 2:1, you could afford to carry some extra equipment like a sufficiently miniaturized computer.

Interesting concept. I would think ion engines are rather complicated for steampunk, but there might be a way to utilize water in a more simple way: the electrolysis of water produces H2 and O2. Combine those and we have BOOM again. That of course does require you to generate reasonably large amounts of electricity (perhaps from solar heated boiler/turbine), but electrolysis itself is simple enough. Water electrolysis was first performed in 1800.

[Accelerando]

Interesting concept. I would think ion engines are rather complicated for steampunk, but there might be a way to utilize water in a more simple way: the electrolysis of water produces H2 and O2. Combine those and we have BOOM again. That of course does require you to generate reasonably large amounts of electricity (perhaps from solar heated boiler/turbine), but electrolysis itself is simple enough. Water electrolysis was first performed in 1800.

Indeed. The main reason I mentioned electric propulsion and nuclear thermal is because they're relatively "simple" ways (at least, from our perspective) to cut down on propellant requirements, but chemical could perhaps be enough. And even lunar regolith could be used to build hybrid rockets, with aluminum and oxygen isolated from the dirt.

---

Also, another consideration: If you don't have radio, bulk communications in space will take place via sealed envelope. This will probably just make up some of the boxes in a cargo hold in the early days, but if your space traffic gets sufficiently heavy, you might end up with dedicated mail courier-ships.

An angry communique from Mars to Earth might begin something like this, transmitted via heliograph relays:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2f/19/b9/2f19b909b4cde7e52bdabbb82d306d74.jpg

Followed days or weeks after by the aforementioned strong letter, arriving in the cargo of an Earth-bound rocket.

For deep-space heliograph communications, you'll require big mirrors and big scopes. Large relay stations may pop up in orbit, especially at advantageous spots such as the Lagrange points, to spot signals from spacecraft, and could have enormous mirrors to communicate long-range. Spacecraft may carry smaller mirrors, but I assume they will still need powerful telescopes in order to resolve different relay stations/messages from one another at extreme distance. (Though perhaps this would not be a concern? Since the message reaching the ship would depend on the orientation of mirrors, so one ship's message may not be visible to another.)

Perhaps cycler stations could be incorporated into the concept, serving as heliograph relays as well as travelers' hostels.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Accelerando

[Hary R]

I suppose that is true.

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Well my idea about reading this novel was not to see how accurate it was (in regard of today's science, it's not), but how a victorian rocket scientist would have conceived a spaceflight. ( and they did think it would be like in the novel)

If you want to build a story around steampunk spacefilght, Verns vision will be the dominant vision of the scientist at first, they will try the gun concept, fail miserably and then they will come to a different solution in regards of the available technology.

Verns novel is a starting point where the steampunk world can evolve from.

Edited July 14, 2015 by Hary R

[YNM]

I'm questioning one thing though: life support ? We're talking about men, not kerbals right ?

[ChrisSpace]

As for interplanetary travel, I imagine only low-Dv targets could be reached with available propulsion methods. Newton's physics made knowledge of how to achieve orbit available as far back as the 1700s, so perhaps a space station in earth orbit could be used as a place to build an interplanetary spacecraft. Landing on said planet with enough Dv for return would be even harder, so I imagine we would only have one-way journeys for anywhere beyond the moon. If mars' geological history was different, however, perhaps it could have retained liquid water and a semi-habitable atmosphere, meaning we could have a 'Mars One' type one-way colony.

[shynung]

I'm questioning one thing though: life support ? We're talking about men, not kerbals right ?

Hydrogen peroxide. It decomposes into water and oxygen, generating heat. Also great for RCS.

[YNM]

Hydrogen peroxide. It decomposes into water and oxygen, generating heat. Also great for RCS.

What about CO2 ?

[Idobox]

For insulation:

Wood looks cool, but is very heavy. If you want insulation inside the pressurized capsule, plant fibers or even wool might be a better solution. Astronauts wearing furs! But really, having a second layer outside with a vacuum in between (easy in space), is technically the best option, and completely possible with Victorian technology and science.

I'm questioning one thing though: life support ? We're talking about men, not kerbals right ?

I assumed you were talking of orbit, and thus didn't talk about life support (if the flight is short enough, you don't need it).

We already talked about temperature. Food and water are not particularly difficult to store for a week or two, it leaves us mostly with atmosphere. CO2 is known since the XVII century, and had already been liquefied and frozen by the early 1800s. I'm not sure how well its chemistry was known in the era, but activated charcoal or concentrated caustic soda solutions can be use as scrubbers. I'm sure there are plenty of other simple reactions that could be used.

That leaves us with oxygen. Commercial production of liquid oxygen started in 1895 in the real world, so a simple vat is an acceptable option. Peroxyde has already been proposed, but it is unstable and liquid, and also likely expensive with steampunk technology. Modern oxygen generators often use sodium chlorate, which turns into salt and oxygen when heated above 300°C, and was industrially produced in 1892, although I'm not sure they were aware of the oxygen production properties by then.