1930s (no longer Steam)-punk suggestions?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

ISTR reading about proposals for giant flying wings that never landed, and served as a tender/carrier for smaller aircraft. They were suposed to be nuclear powered, which is a bit late for deiselpunk, but you could totally replace that with beamed power a la Tesla (cinematic Tesla, anyway).

Having a dieselpunk world with a non-cinematic Tesla would be a crime against humanity!

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by aesir23

Personally, I'd keep the giant walkers--except now with internal combustion engines they have more power and a greater range.

And I'd combine them with HUGE aircraft--Bombers the size of Battleships, Zeplins the size of small cities, etc... Dieselpunk makes a better setting for air-pirates than steampunk does, IMHO.

On the smaller scale, nothing says alternative technology quite like ornithopters.

Alternatively, you may decide to go into Raygun Gothic territory and introduce rocket ships, jet-packs, and heat rays to the mix.

Speaking of airship pirates, here's an old attempt to adjust the tech to enable the tropes.

Also, the non-landing wings are seen in IW Gernsback.

[aesir23]

Also speaking of Airship Pirates, here is a martial art I designed for a world that includes them.

[Sir Tifyable]

I have decided that my word’s iconic tech is the Albert Generator. Research funded by Prince Albert (he lived longer than in this world, thanks to magical healing, but died in an airship crash in 1889) produced a sufficiently efficient ceramic bearing for a wind-powered electrical generation turbine small enough to provide much of the power needed for a normal house. Thanks to charitable Power Co-operatives, even low-income district skylines are now a forest of Albert propellers providing light and heat for the houses and street-lights. Although coal is still used for almost all cooking (reasons available if people want to know), demand is reduced so the air in cities is a lot cleaner.

A mini-Albert was first used on Scott’s Polar expedition, where the small portable generator provided enough power to keep the tent warm in even the fiercest storms. Afterwards, Scott was enthusiastically involved in its marketing.

Albert bearings have also made a huge difference to the efficiency of plenty of rolling and rotating things, including vehicle power-plants and wheels.

[Sir Tifyable]

I like Brett’s suggestion for effectively using a ramjet so that air is the reaction mass – that’s the kind of idea I was hoping for.

Yes, my players will accept walking machines but balk at jetpacks – partly because they don’t like ‘black box solutions’. They want to know how things work so that they can use those principles to re-use the resources around them to solve adventuring problems. Don’t all role-players do that? For example: they rigged up a steam-line and valving from the walkers to create a steam-powered cannon at one point in the middle of Africa when they needed to throw 25lb lumps of meat-and-dynamite a couple of hundred yards to a basking dino-crocodile.

It is easy to imagine a steam-powered walker working: all it takes is clanking hydraulics, which the Victorians had in abundance, and now there are real walking robots on TV to show how they would work. But jetpacks, even though they were a common feature in 1930s pulps, violate so many physical laws that I want to be able to justify them and describe their working even if that justification involves magic.

An example from the earlier campaign: dirigibles need engines to steer, and steam-powered aero engines struck me as impractical weight-wise, even with the improved materials posited in the steampunk genre. So I used the available magic, and said that instead of coal or oil, the boilers were heated by ‘hot rods’, which had to be regularly recharged by fire magicians. Hey presto: no need for heavy coal or oil-tanks, and the heat source can be in the middle of the boiler to most efficiently use the heat. Like a Kelly Kettle, but even better because it doesn’t need oxygen so no heat is lost in ventilation or exhaust fumes. Understanding the physical principle, the players can use that knowledge as parameters for their adventures: they can’t bomb targets with a couple of tons of coal, or build a fuel-oil flamethrower, but should it be necessary they could run around native villages torching thatched huts with the hot-rods.

Now what I need to do is decide whether a Levin-spell will generate the electricity to rotate the fan-jet, or should I use an Air spell to produce the ramjet directly…? The latter strikes me as cheating since it is really just using magic directly and I could equally well use a Flying spell on a belt. I prefer ‘magic-powered tech’ because it gives a more satisfying feel to me than pure magic in an otherwise technological world.

Yes, I know that’s inconsistent. That’s the joy of creating your own world – welcome to GURPS!

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Sir Tifyable

I like Brett’s suggestion for effectively using a ramjet so that air is the reaction mass – that’s the kind of idea I was hoping for.

Ramjets have a stall speed, a minimum forward speed that they have to exceed to force air in through the intake. That's not good for a jetpack. I suggest a high-bypass turbofan.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Brett

Ramjets have a stall speed, a minimum forward speed that they have to exceed to force air in through the intake. That's not good for a jetpack. I suggest a high-bypass turbofan.

There's also combinations that are possible, based on the described magics; use one spell to spin up the fan, and a separate one to superheat the air as it passes through for more thrust.

[balzacq]

Originally Posted by patchwork

A popular bit making the rounds in our circle: "dear steampunks - as you are neither steam-related nor punkish in any way, you are hereby renamed 'sepiagoths'. Thank you."

Yeah, pretty much. Half the Seattle goth community swaps brown for black and goes to Steamcon every year. :-\

Originally Posted by robkelk

Which brings to mind a T-shirt that SJGames used to sell: "If you're a Goth, where were you when we sacked Rome?"

Standing over here disdainfully smoking a clove while you got all dirty.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Sir Tifyable

The trouble is, once you get rid of things like walkers, the world looks like the real '30s. The Luft '46 link has some great aircraft that I'd want to use, but more streamlined (and jet-powered, of course) aircraft are not sufficiently "wow, that's different".

Massive land-trains that rule the savannah- combination tank/train/aircraft carrier/artillery mobile bases. See The Amtrak Wars for a post-apocalyptic version, but I think it would be a good fit for dieselpunk.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Massive land-trains that rule the savannah- combination tank/train/aircraft carrier/artillery mobile bases.

A train big enough to have a flight deck on top is a problem: since trains have to be a chain of separate carriages to let them bend round corners, the number of joints you need in the flight deck becomes implausible, even if the carriages are large.

You'd do better to have a hangars on carriages and a crane that hoists a folding aircraft off the train to take off and land from flat ground near the line, when available. This corresponds to the way that 1930s cruisers operated seaplanes.

An ambitious engineer would use the crane as a docking point between a fast-moving train and a slow-moving aircraft. This would be similar to the way that two 1930s US Navy airships carried small scout/fighter aircraft, except a lot more dangerous because you're so close to the ground.