Why Dirigibles?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

You could also go with wood alcohol (methanol), but that would kill the slaves who stole it to drink. Or, at least, make them blind.

Of course, the ASNs may see that a long-term net positive, since it teaches the other slaves the consequences of theft.

Only slaves that have individual initiative and creativity, which they will use loyally on your behalf, are any loss when they die. Otherwise, you can just make them Kadavergehorsam and they'll keep working, except that they are stronger, don't need to stop and don't need feeding. It will tend to make them useless for anything other than repetitive and simple physical labour, but the average slave is already pretty weak in that department, as they tend not to apply any of their intelligence or creativity to work done unwillingly.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Hydrogen is the biggest bottleneck, here, unless they brought a powerplant with them, or they have access to rock salt, iron (II) sulfate, and zinc.

If they have the salt and sulfates, they can mix those with water and get hydrochloric acid. Toss in zinc, and they'll get hydrogen and zinc chloride. This was discovered in about 800 CE, so it shouldn't lie beyond the capacity of the ASNs.

Alternatively, make the hydrochloric acid from sulfuric acid and common salt (lifting NAZI dirigibles with condiments...). Still need the zinc, though.

I've found sources of zinc and rock salt for them. Pyrites too, if that way of making iron (II) sulfate is better than having it be made as a byproduct of their steel works.

The sources are all within 350 km of the main settlement on Germania Hypperborea and you can travel by river for most of the way for many of them, with no individual leg longer than 50 km away from a river. Canals or roads will be needed there.

As for the condiment loaded airships...

The PCs rescued Sky Pirates being chased by Antarctic Space Nazis on a zeppelin. The Sky Pirates may or may not have acquired a shipment that belonged to the ASNs. Part of the shipment, and the part that the PCs liked, were Nazi gold, some jewels, two MG42 machine guns, a 2 cm Flak 38 (mountain version) anti-aircraft gun and some pallets of ammunition.

The bulk of the shipment, however? 30 tons of salt.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

To deal with any of that safely in bulk, they'd need sealed vats able to resist the hydrochloric acid and (possibly) the sulfuric acid, attached to a compressor that would allow them to pull the hydrogen out and put it in a gas bag. Given that NAZI Germany had the best zeppelins around, the ASNs probably got their hands on whatever they needed.

The Antarctic Space Nazis were actually in control of the old Zeppelinwerke in Friedrichafen when the colony project started and until they left, almost two years later. Sure, the factories were making V-2 components, not zeppelins, and they were badly damaged in bombing raids, but I see pretty much no way that there wouldn't have been plenty of specialized equipment to loot and the ASNs could take all of it that they could have carried through the gates, which means that few pieces should be heavier than 400 lbs. or bulkier than what could be carried on the back of a super-powered Chewbacca (actually, more like his bigger, scarier uncle) with a TL7 cargo harness designed for it.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

For the gas bag, they'll need lots of cattle. Given how important cattle were to Bronze Age cultures that had them, the price will be dear (at least, as far as the natives are concerned...) in either treasure or blood.

One of the ideas I had was to use RPM rituals and/or alchemy to take ordinary fabric or other materials that the TL2 natives could easily make and magically give them Sealed.

That's absolutely doable and should be a lot more economical and quicker than slaughtering literally hundreds of thousands heads of cattle and then having to process their innards for goldbeater's skin.

It's still expensive, in terms of opportunity cost, as any magic-user or group of magic-users who can do that can also do a whole lot of other things you'd really like done, but I think that this might actually be one of the easiest, while simultaneously most useful, things to do with RPM magic in an industrial sense that would help the ASNs in any kind of strategic way.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

EDIT: Just read the "ASNs Across the Multiverse" latest post by John Dallman. Looks like the use of sulfuric acid would allow them to double-dip. They need it for smokeless powder, and can use it to get to hydrochloric acid.

Yeah, that's nice.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Definitely. Simple refining is not hard, although it is not especially efficient.

That's fine. Until the ASNs truly achieve TL6+ in all infrastructure, I expect they view petroleum fuels much as we see rocket fuel today, as fuel for specialized vehicles that is only used for them and not intended for ordinary, day to day uses.

They'll use coal, coal gas and Elemental Furnaces for most of their energy needs.

Maybe they'll even pursue steam tractors, just to make use of all the coal and coal gas they have. Maybe that's not worth doing and they ought to wait for more infrastructure to be built before they make tractors at all.

Maybe electronic cars and tractors? Especially if they have Elemental Furnaces for large farms and are converting the mechanical power into electricity already. And Ferdinand Porsche had already made electric and hybrid cars and they'll have both him and his son.

Though I guess that the lead-acid batteries might require too much of valuable resources that they have military uses for.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Though I guess that the lead-acid batteries might require too much of valuable resources that they have military uses for.

Cars are not much use without good roads, and building those is a big project. Making lots of lead-acid batteries needs to wait until lead and sulphuric acid are both in large-scale production.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Cars are not much use without good roads, and building those is a big project. Making lots of lead-acid batteries needs to wait until lead and sulphuric acid are both in large-scale production.

Bugger cars, it's the tractors that are desirable.

If every village or large estate has some form of power plant, whether that's dirty fossil fuels or clean Elemental Furnaces, electrical tractors might start to get interesting. Provided, of course, you could make the batteries, which I don't know if you could.

Without knowing, I can imagine that electrical tractors are a fancy new thing in Year 51, something rich SS Junker estates or their Germania Hyperborea farming magnate equivalents, are starting to use instead of good honest draft horses and seasonally hired farmhands.

After all, both free and unfree labour is pretty expensive these days, with all the new industries that require intelligent workers capable of doing more than replacing animal power.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm guessing that by the time they' could use the Fischer-Tropsch process, they can also refine diesel or other petroleum fuels from crude oil?

Yes, it would be much easier to start with crude oil if they have it.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Bugger cars, it's the tractors that are desirable.

If every village or large estate has some form of power plant, whether that's dirty fossil fuels or clean Elemental Furnaces, electrical tractors might start to get interesting. Provided, of course, you could make the batteries, which I don't know if you could.

Our they could just use steam-powered tractors, burning those dirty fossil fuels.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Our they could just use steam-powered tractors, burning those dirty fossil fuels.

That's allowed, if frowned upon in some places, in most of the worlds that the Antarctic Space Nazis colonize (three so far, with small mining , trading or other resource-gathering settlements on a couple of dozen other worlds).

Any kind of pollution on an industrial scale is absolutely forbidden in what is still the center of the ASN agricultural breadbasket world of the Zentrum der neuen Welt, a magical demiplane of ideal Westphalian farmland and nature around the SS stronghold Wahr Wewelsburg. There, you better have decently clean energy, nothing worse than highly refined 'natural' gas (I don't think they'd care if the gas was synthetic, as long as it burned equally cleanly and without much pollution).

So steam tractors can exist among the ASNs, but if they were to be used on their best farmland, they'd need to be a lot more sanitary than coal-burning steam tractors would be.

The industrial areas are located in another world from the ideal farming demiplane around Wahr Wewelsburg and due to the magical gates, it's only a skip and a hop to walk through, but while the SS leadership do not care overly much if the factories and mines of Jötunheim make it hard to breathe for anyone living there, they'll not have unsightly black smoke anywhere near their own fields and meadows.

There isn't much farming on Jötunheim, but there is a lot of it on Germania Hyperborea. I expect steam tractors could be used on both, for various different tasks, but before they'd become popular among the SS Junkers with the most productive estates, on the fertile magical soil around Wahr Wewelsburg, they'd have to use some sort of clean power supply.

Elemental Furnaces are clean, but the first furnaces were a couple of tons, at least. I haven't decided what the smallest possible engines are, about a generation since they were invented, but from a magical point of view, anyway, there's no reason such engines couldn't be compact. As long as the mechanical parts that take a reaction between fire elementals and either (or both) air or water elementals and turn it into power can be miniaturized at TL5+, then the Elemental Furnaces can be miniaturized. Of course, as magical items of great power, they are extremely expensive and mass-manufacture doesn't affect the part of the price that is for binding powerful elemental beings.

If Elemental Furnaces thus remain either too large or too expensive to be practical for tractors, then, as I said, maybe battery-powered tractors, many of which could be charged with each Elemental Furnace, would make more sense.

[dcarson]

In the early days of farm machinery they had stationary steam engines that pulled the planting/harvesting equipment via cable. So a bulky elemental furnace that sits on the edge of the field and powers the cable mechanism could work. Similar to the way factories would have a steam engine and a series of belts and pulleys to power each machine.

It can also serve as the power for pumping water, threshing and grinding grain, sawing wood, etc.

[Rupert]

Or slowly and marginally mobile engines.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by dcarson

In the early days of farm machinery they had stationary steam engines that pulled the planting/harvesting equipment via cable. So a bulky elemental furnace that sits on the edge of the field and powers the cable mechanism could work. Similar to the way factories would have a steam engine and a series of belts and pulleys to power each machine.

It can also serve as the power for pumping water, threshing and grinding grain, sawing wood, etc.

Yes, that's how I imagine the first ones working, at around a generation after the first ASN settlement in their new worlds. Well, only around Wahr Wewelsburg is the engine an Elemental Furnace, everywhere else it is either a steam engine or some other practical engine design that uses coal or coal gas to make power.

Another generation later, however, I'm wondering if the richest farming magnates might be having electrical tractors built. Steam tractors might have been used even earlier. The average farmer would still use draft horses and/or oxen, but more and more, the richest farms with the best position vis a vis gates for obtaining coal or other products from the coal fields and therefore also a good market for everything they could grow just a short distance away, would be ahead of the technological curve in terms of farm mechanization.

In real history, there was a period at late TL5 and early TL6, before the petroleum industry became so huge and diesel and gas so comparatively cheap, where steam engines were more common than electrical engines for vehicles and both were more common than petroleum-burning internal combustion engines.

In Year 51, I imagine the ASNs are perhaps starting to reach that level of technological infrastructure, even if they started with more knowledge than that and have had the capability to build and maintain some TL7 things in small quantities from the start.

That might also mean that the newest military airships are powered with Elemental Furnaces, but have either electrical or internal combustion engines they can turn on for shorter periods, if a burst of tactical speed is called for.