[IW] What does the world of Cyrano look like?

[warellis]

Originally Posted by patchwork

We have a mention of "Carnot lines". Carnot did a lot of fascinating things with engineering in his short life, but one of his major preoccupations was the idea of moving energy around as heat through solid and liquid networks. It looks like we have a power grid of sorts. A very dangerous one. But it implies a level of development for ordinary people, with household thermionic appliances but no computers, that says, yeah, 1956 to me.

A great deal depends on where in Cyrano you are, or course. It looks like the Americas, Han Eurasia, Mars and Venus all have VERY different lifestyles, and there was not a word on Africa.

But yeah, the Jansenists have pushed this world onto an extreme version of safetech. Highly restricted access to computers, medicine intertwined with psionics, computers and high-tech freight for the powerful but 1950s household tech and riding animals for the commoners.

I do note that one of those holocrons is sophisticated enough both to translate languages and to serve as a teacher for children. They'd be quite the heirloom. Grandad being worthy could change your family forever.

The lack of computerization strongly indicates to me that a lot of people still work in factories; at TL5+4 they're extremely efficient and productive but still fairly labor-intensive. One technology that I expect would be unrestricted would be the vapor farmer. I also note that you can have some really sophisticated sight, sound and smell equipment that is reasonably portable, you just can't hook it up to a network. Popup raves may not be Louis' thing but I bet they happen. And people trade songs and books As was done in the 80s.

So an average peasant lives in a 50s style house with a Carnot line powering appliances but an independent water-vapor system, rides a horse or hadrosaur into their factory job if they live in the colonies or catches the steam bus if they live in an urban core, and trades book and movie files after church with their fellow churchgoers (after taking the ones "provided and suggested" by the priest, or course). Burgers, divines and nobles will have more access to that sweet Jansenist psi crystal tech.

Judging from what is said about Carnot lines here, what do you envision appliances using energy via Carnot principles to look like here? Like how do you cook here in your mind, for example?

And what info do we have on life in North America, Han Eurasia, Mars, & Venus? I haven't really seen anything about Cyrano besides the entry itself in Lost Worlds and the bit of entry about Louis himself in Basic.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by warellis

Judging from what is said about Carnot lines here, what do you envision appliances using energy via Carnot principles to look like here? Like how do you cook here in your mind, for example?

the closest thing I can think of to Carnot principles is "municipal steam"......

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Yo...y_steam_system

It wouldn't lend itself to the saute-ing and most of the things we do in ovens but it could simply heat things and if combined with the principle of the pressure cooker it might even do some sorts of cooking (stews, boiled potatoes and so forth) relatively fast.

[ericthered]

Carnot lines could power steam boilers in people's houses. I don't know that it would allow for a vacuum cleaner, but a single rotating shaft mounted in the kitchen with various appliances (mixing, blending) that you can place on it would be cool. Washing and drying machines are possible.



Carnot line technology also sounds like it might be good for refrigeration.

[warellis]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Carnot lines could power steam boilers in people's houses. I don't know that it would allow for a vacuum cleaner, but a single rotating shaft mounted in the kitchen with various appliances (mixing, blending) that you can place on it would be cool. Washing and drying machines are possible.

Carnot line technology also sounds like it might be good for refrigeration.

Maybe you could potentially have a small steam powered vacuum, one powered by outside steam via Carnot lines?

It makes me imagine either a vacuum (mostly a head, long flexible tube, and storage space) that is hooked up to a steam boiler, and to move it around to various parts of the house, you simply hook it up to different connections to the boiler in the home, or it's a sort of small portable steam boiler you wheel around in the home.

As for cooking, interesting...microwaves may be Jansenist crystal tech, I've no idea what the kitchen range here might be like, refrigerators & freezers no idea either.

Hmm...I guess here, power, or steam(?) generation is mostly via those psi-crystals...I guess that means air pollution here may not be a big issue?

Also thinking on food...god now I wish we could potentially see how cooking tech here changed cooking for the locals. Or food/cooking across the timelines, in a book someday.

Because food tastes between cultures on Homeline Earth vary. Let alone from other timelines that are divergent enough they're not echoes

[fchase8]

The reference to Star Wars is great!

I had already imagined the "rosamarinas" of the Dutch East Indies Company as looking like Jabba The Hut's barge from Return of the Jedi - "The rosmarinas are floating whale-island fortresses and refineries for the chemicals and sera the Dutch derive from oceans and spices." The description is of floating over the oceans, but could also float over the "Spice Desert" [Outback] of "New Holland" [Australia].

Jansen Order obviously like the Jedi, though not as heroic (like what the Jedi actually would be).

Dutch East Indies Company corporate state could be akin to the corporate alliance of the prequels & Clone Wars animated series.


Obviously Bourbon France influence is paramount (in non-Han areas), but there are others: Dutch East Indies Company corporate state, militarized dictatorship of the Kingdom of New England, a more relaxed Brazilian Empire, neo-Papal States Holy Mexican Empire.

[patchwork]

Cyrano is TL 5+4, meaning it's able to produce effects a bit beyond what our society can do. Even so, hand-held thermionic devices would seem to be a bad idea, particularly for safety-minded Jansenists. Basically anything that sits on the floor and against a wall to avoid exposed power lines is fine; oven and range, refrigerator, dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, air conditioner. Light fixtures, not portable lamps. Food processor and garbage disposal might be built into the kitchen, but they're built in, not easily movable. Similarly, my grandparents had a vacuum cleaner that lurked, squamous and rugose, in the garage with a network of ducts throughout the walls, with a port in every room, typically below eye level. Plug a hose into the room's vacuum-duct, press the button on the wall, it all gets vacuumed into the garage-thing which you should empty weekly or at least biweekly. The tool-happy parent probably has lathes and drill presses and table saws in the workshed. You get a heavy 'in order to do task X, you MUST be in the Task X Room' mentality. Homes and offices are not modular, they're built to a purpose and adapting them to a new purpose is major work.

Audiovisual stuff is where we have some head-scratching and hand-waving. Computers are restricted (in a half-assed manner caused by the collision of a strong desire to prevent social change and an almost-as-strong desire to affirm the judgement and authority of the nobles, divines and elect to do as they like), and there is clearly no fixed computer network, (and comms would be wired, not wireless) but everyone has a portable device that can read book files and play music and movie files, and when you get down to it that's a computer that was deliberately rendered Turing-incomplete. A clever person should be able to study such a device and 'expand' it into a true computer, but apparently this didn't happen. Even if you decide they don't have portables and the home theatre/vidphone is another fixed appliance in the home, it's still something a person could tinker with in unacceptable ways. I don't have a good example for how Cyrano file readers work, so I'd lampshade it and say that's one of the things Infinity is interested in, starting with whether or not they work according to standard physics or some local wrinkle. Heat-sensitive proteins as memory/display devices that nevertheless can't be made in some rando's garage, they require a very complex biomechanical plant to produce, anchored around a very small Complexity 1 crystal computer? Still only half a solution, could buy seventeen file readers and perhaps cobble them together...hm. Maybe the heat-sensitive proteins require a sealed environment you'll break if you disassemble the thing? In terms of 'we're really not in Kansas anymore' I particularly like the fact that this means in an emergency you can eat your file reader and files, perhaps...

[warellis]

You know, with the kind of weird tech Cyrano has, especially for household tech, I suspect servants would still be a big thing in wealthy homes.

Because labor saving devices here are not nearly as portable or ubiquitous.

Do you think settlements & cities in Cyrano are less polluting due to a different source of power generation?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by warellis

Do you think settlements & cities in Cyrano are less polluting due to a different source of power generation?

<shrug> The divergnece point is slightly before Newcomen engines revolutionized coal mining. That could theoretically be changed.

Even if coal isn't completely wiped out there could be other changes. I read some "futuristic" predictions from the 1940s that in the future power would come from coal burned at the minehead in sealed chambers with no thick black smoke billowing into the air. You could search for "clean coal" to get some more modern schemes for how this might be done.

On the other hand, Cyrano might get by with much less conventional energy used. Big crystal pyrokinesis engines might be boiling the steam.

[Pursuivant]

Architecturally and stylistically, I've always imagined it as being a mash-up between Mad King Ludwig's castles, fin de siecle Paris, and the 1927 Metropolis and the 1980 Flash Gordon movies.

The nearest RPG game world equivalents might be Castle Falkenstein or Space: 1889.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by patchwork

Similarly, my grandparents had a vacuum cleaner that lurked, squamous and rugose, in the garage with a network of ducts throughout the walls, with a port in every room, typically below eye level.

It was scaly and wrinkled?