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Old 11-20-2018, 10:20 PM   #1
scc
 
Join Date: Mar 2013
Default [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

So I need to know what sort of switches and dials I should turn on when designing spaceships for a mid TL 6 (~1920) civilization with advanced spaceflight. Note that technology non-superscience but very cinematic with a bent towards what fits thematically.

Either No Computer OR Electro-Mechanical Computers should probably be used, but I'm not sure which. And Lacks Automation seems like it should be in use.

Another question is if Light Alloy Armor should be available.

Any other thoughts on options I might want to include.
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Old 11-21-2018, 02:01 AM   #2
Gnaskar
 
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

Either one of No Computer and Electro-Mechanical Computers could work, and you could even vary it by ship; expensive military ships splurge for calculation machines while the civilian ships have to eyeball it.

Light Alloy, in the form of aluminum has been producible since well before the 20s. The main limiting factor is usually the ridiculous amount of electricity required in the process. If you do have advanced spaceflight, there is an appropriately steampunk solution: solar boilers. Massive mirror arrays focusing sunlight at a tank of water, which runs a steam turbine to produce electricity. Cooling the steam back down again is an issue (though one you could just sweep under the carpet in a cinematic universe). A possible solution is to build it on the moon; 2 weeks of production during the day, and 2 weeks of cooling the steam back down to water during the night, and lots of earth to absorb the waste heat.
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Old 11-21-2018, 02:45 AM   #3
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

I hadn't considered solar boilers, but I don't think they're practical as the setting is the moon system of a gas giant on the edge of the liquid water zone, and no moon has a day longer then 32 hours. However my thinking is to have nuclear power be replacing coal in the background for electricity (with solar panels for some spacecraft)
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Old 11-22-2018, 02:26 AM   #4
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

Arguably, nuclear power is the definitional TL7 technology, but I've argued against that in my TL5+2 Victorian Atoms setting so you can too. (But this does really make it TL6+1 rather than TL6 with tweaks.)

I suspect I'd allow just steel armour, and might even make it heavier, since while you may well have (expensive) aluminium, "aerospace-grade aluminum or titanium alloys" are really a post-war development. Bear in mind that a historical mid-1920s aircraft is a biplane with an open cockpit, and a 2,000-mile non-stop flight is a record-breaking achievement.

So how are you solving life support? Drives for the craft? I don't mean to put a damper on your enthusiasm, but there are reasons why there weren't spaceships in the real 1920s, and until I know how you're planning to solve them I don't feel I can offer much useful advice.
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Old 11-22-2018, 03:08 AM   #5
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

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Arguably, nuclear power is the definitional TL7 technology, but I've argued against that in my TL5+2 Victorian Atoms setting so you can too. (But this does really make it TL6+1 rather than TL6 with tweaks.)
Can a world where most places didn't shift from coal to oil as it's primary power source and also didn't experience the social turmoil of WW1 and is only just discovering nuclear power not be considered steampunk? In essence the world is in the process of going from steampunk to atompunk and skipping diesel punk.

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I suspect I'd allow just steel armour, and might even make it heavier, since while you may well have (expensive) aluminium, "aerospace-grade aluminum or titanium alloys" are really a post-war development. Bear in mind that a historical mid-1920s aircraft is a biplane with an open cockpit, and a 2,000-mile non-stop flight is a record-breaking achievement.
I'm interested in Light Alloy Armor more as it allows me to build SSTO space-planes smaller then using steel for the armor, probably uses refactory brick for the heat shield.

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Originally Posted by RogerBW View Post
So how are you solving life support? Drives for the craft? I don't mean to put a damper on your enthusiasm, but there are reasons why there weren't spaceships in the real 1920s, and until I know how you're planning to solve them I don't feel I can offer much useful advice.
Lift support hadn't occurred to me. Drives, chemical rockets and mag-sails.
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Old 11-22-2018, 07:35 AM   #6
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

My concern is that if you attach a chemical rocket to even an advanced 1920s aircraft you get, well, a crash and a fireball. Pressurised oxygen systems are in their infancy – they do exist – but pressure suits, pressurised crew compartments, materials that can survive re-entry… all these things basically don't exist. And if you invent them, there's a fair chance you've also invented jet engines and computers and so on, which a steampunk setting mostly doesn't want.

The solutions that I see are:

- advance the tech level, while keeping the culture you want. Saying "no WWI, no WWII" is a great way of doing that - it might be the equivalent of the mid 2000s by the time they're building spaceships. But this gives you other tech anomalies.
- have a "gift" of tech that can be used in specific ways but which the locals haven't worked out how to use to advance their tech level in general. That might be as simple as a Tunguska-type event with really useful minerals in it.
- tweak the world or physics (carefully!), e.g. so that you don't have to worry about carrying lots of delta-V to get to orbit, or so that you can breathe in space. (Banning the semiconductor effect will pretty much stop computers from being useful even if you have other TL7 developments.)
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Old 11-22-2018, 09:49 AM   #7
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

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Originally Posted by scc View Post
Can a world where most places didn't shift from coal to oil as it's primary power source and also didn't experience the social turmoil of WW1 and is only just discovering nuclear power not be considered steampunk?
Use of coal instead of oil does promote a Steampunk quality but feeding that coal into simple and elegant steam turbines rather than extremely complicated recipricating steam engines msolty undoes it and that's just a realistic 1920s.

You can not really have a hard science space program that is advanced beyond our 2018 capbilities in a world that is otherwise in the 1920s technologically. Liquid fuel chemical rockets absolutely require turbopumps and those demand a precision and a level of materials science that is well beyond the 1920s.

Even with a planet/moon with lower gravity the earliest you can build a lift vehicle (and it won't be a reusable SSTO) is the 1960s. A nuclear reactor light enough to launch that won't poison the crew is beyond that.

Get by with vacuum tube electronics if you want to and call it TL(6+3) because of that but if you want hard science it's going to be something that adds up to TL9.
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Old 11-22-2018, 05:32 PM   #8
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

Quote:
Originally Posted by RogerBW View Post
My concern is that if you attach a chemical rocket to even an advanced 1920s aircraft you get, well, a crash and a fireball. Pressurised oxygen systems are in their infancy – they do exist – but pressure suits, pressurised crew compartments, materials that can survive re-entry… all these things basically don't exist. And if you invent them, there's a fair chance you've also invented jet engines and computers and so on, which a steampunk setting mostly doesn't want.

The solutions that I see are:

- advance the tech level, while keeping the culture you want. Saying "no WWI, no WWII" is a great way of doing that - it might be the equivalent of the mid 2000s by the time they're building spaceships. But this gives you other tech anomalies.
- have a "gift" of tech that can be used in specific ways but which the locals haven't worked out how to use to advance their tech level in general. That might be as simple as a Tunguska-type event with really useful minerals in it.
- tweak the world or physics (carefully!), e.g. so that you don't have to worry about carrying lots of delta-V to get to orbit, or so that you can breathe in space. (Banning the semiconductor effect will pretty much stop computers from being useful even if you have other TL7 developments.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Use of coal instead of oil does promote a Steampunk quality but feeding that coal into simple and elegant steam turbines rather than extremely complicated recipricating steam engines msolty undoes it and that's just a realistic 1920s.

You can not really have a hard science space program that is advanced beyond our 2018 capbilities in a world that is otherwise in the 1920s technologically. Liquid fuel chemical rockets absolutely require turbopumps and those demand a precision and a level of materials science that is well beyond the 1920s.

Even with a planet/moon with lower gravity the earliest you can build a lift vehicle (and it won't be a reusable SSTO) is the 1960s. A nuclear reactor light enough to launch that won't poison the crew is beyond that.

Get by with vacuum tube electronics if you want to and call it TL(6+3) because of that but if you want hard science it's going to be something that adds up to TL9.
I always figured that this would be a setting with advanced spaceflight, and quite possibly a TL increase on top of that. And it's going to be very heavily leaning on the 'path not taken' bit of steampunk, with things like analytical engines used instead of computers.

Also if the Apollo Program can be considered an anomaly because of politics, the forces that lead to it have an even greater effect in this timeline (Imagine how much the Nazi's would have spent on rockets if the moon was habitable).

I'll also reconsider nuclear reactors, I threw them in because solar panels didn't feel quite right for a military transport, but given that ships only need a power source to jump start their Magsails, maybe just ignore their power requirement.
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Old 11-22-2018, 06:35 PM   #9
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Design Options For Steampunk Craft

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Also if the Apollo Program can be considered an anomaly because of politics, the forces that lead to it have an even greater effect in this timeline (Imagine how much the Nazi's would have spent on rockets if the moon was habitable).
The Nazis were actually quite resource limited. One reason the V2 got as much as it did in the way of resources was that it's fuel was 75% ethanol distilled from potatos rather than aviation gasoline. If you wonder the V1 ran on what was absically crankcase drippings and even the Messerschitt 262 used a faily low grade of fuel.

By 1944 I think the Nazis might have been wiling to trade gold for avgas on a pound for pound basis.

I do not think you could accelerate the Apollo era with more money. Congressmen when they came to get the big tour would tell Von Braun that if he needed more money he just had to let them know. So while the US spent soemhtign like 260 billion (in current dollars) on Apollo at the height of the space race it was willing to spend more. Of course, this didn't last.

Even if you do make it last magsail is not in the direct line of descent from Apollo. In our timeline even the concept (and so far it is only a concept) is the result of several decades of alternative thinking.

Von Braun would have gone to your nearby moons by launching multiple Saturn-5s. The second one would be carrying fuel to refuel the first one and if you needed a third (and even a fourth) to refuel for a trip home there would have been one of those. This is how you get thinbgs done quickly.
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