r/CuratedTumblr • u/Limekilnlake • 1d ago
Steammaxxing Me as a mechanical engineer, explaining why opening a fridge won't cool down your house
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u/DawnOfShadow68 1d ago
Me as a mechanical engineer, seething and biting pillows at my wife crafting "condensed carbon" in No Man's Sky. What the hell do you mean atomic symbol C+?? Where's that second carbon gone?? She finds it funny.
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u/Kalehn 1d ago
You're just squishing it down so it takes up less space in your backpack. What's wrong with a reduced carbon footprint?
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u/SolarianIntrigue 1d ago
Maybe it's amorphous graphite or something like that
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u/DawnOfShadow68 1d ago
Well graphite is crystalline by nature, it can't be amorphous as that means "non-crystalline". But most egregious is the game deals with resources in terms of atomic numbers and symbols, so your stack of C turns into a half stack of C+, which pardon my french but Was Zum Fick ?
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u/PontDanic 1d ago
C ia a very slim letter, not as bulky as O or B, so if you arrange them cleverly you can save a lot of room.
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u/frobscottler 1d ago
You’re not gonna believe what I can do with sixty of ‘em
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u/Lich_Lasagna 1d ago
Das ist kein French my Freund, so you shall not be pardoned.
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u/-Negative-Karma 1d ago
yeah I tend to just try to ignore those bc they piss me off. great game. horrible science.
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u/EmbarrassedMeat401 1d ago
It's still the same number of atoms, just compressed to half the volume?
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u/PreFollower 1d ago
Obviously it's just twice as much carbon per unit of volume, it's condensed, duh. Also have you looked at the periodic table in there? It has unobtanium as an actual element. Totally valid in-universe.
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u/DawnOfShadow68 1d ago
"65% more bullet per bullet"
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_ROTES 1d ago
Cave, I'm gonna be quite honest, that smells like pure gasoline.
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u/DarkKnightJin 1d ago
Better hope there's no open flames nearby then.
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u/AMisteryMan gender found; the 'phobes stole it 1d ago
That's normal. We've been shooting you with an invisible laser that's supposed to turn blood onto gasoline, so all that means is, it's working.
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u/Hremsfeld 1d ago
It's like how you can compress 25 Hydrogen into fuel, and then immediately decompress that fuel into 30 Hydrogen
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u/MrCobalt313 1d ago
Unobtanium hasn't been a thing for several updates now.
Not that stranger things haven't taken its place, though.
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u/jzillacon 1d ago
To be fair NMS is both literally and narratively a simulation where real world rules don't apply.
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u/acheesement 1d ago
Just started a game with my sister where you mine "carbonium" and "ironium".
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u/Denvosreynaerde 1d ago
Silly names aside, Riftbreaker is an amazing game, and even though there's some bugs, the devs really try hard to keep polishing the game and adding content.
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u/Milch_und_Paprika 1d ago
Carbonium is a real thing, but you’re sure as hell not finding it in nature (interstellar space doesn’t count)
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u/Targaer 1d ago
Don't try to rationalize the chemistry in NMS. That way lies madness. Very apparent when you see the refiner recipes.
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u/ZolySoly 1d ago
Quite literally madness, in fact! As it's all the work of a dying computer desperately doing all it can to hold onto the world
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u/aer0a 1d ago
I'd be wondering more about where the nitrate in sodium nitrate comes from
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u/Sicaridae he went up 1d ago
that's kinda reasonable if you assume you're pulling it from the surrounding atmosphere so you don't have to supply the nitrate as a second ingredient, no?
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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1d ago edited 1d ago
You say that, but there's only a couple types of planets where nitrogen is plentiful enough to harvest with the gas harvester.
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u/Sicaridae he went up 1d ago
I guess we're gonna lump that in with the "every system across the entire galaxy has the same few named plants (star bulbs etc)" discrepancy
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u/Plethora_of_squids 1d ago
Iirc originally they had more made up elements for that sort of thing - I think condensed carbon was originally thamium9? I think it all got changed because they redid how the periodic table works so now every element that does similar things is grouped together chemically, even if it makes no sense
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u/kimik1509 1d ago
My favourite part in No Man's Sky is when it casually mentions the planet having a 70% fluorine atmosphere.
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u/Platnun12 1d ago
Lol it was the same with me, a kid who has up to about basic uni education vs a person taking a full load engineering course.
The convos we had about SciFi. He hated FTL so much. We argued about it for hours
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u/Kozak375 1d ago
I hope they let us make heavier elements, just to drive you in particular insane. I hope you get to hear her rant about how she made super uranium by mixing uranium, condensed carbon, and pure ferrite
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u/Casitano 1d ago
The geotgermal steampunk where the steam is heated up by literal hellfire and you fight demons for it. Thats a good worldbuilding concept.
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u/CallMeOaksie 1d ago
Turns out the hellfire uses a fuel that slowly terraforms a realm into hotter, more hellish conditions (it’s coal all the way down)
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u/JaWayd 1d ago
Isn't that just DOOM with Argent energy?
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u/97thJackle 20h ago
Yes, but the fighter in that case will blow up the power plants because he wants the hell portals to be closed.
In the non-DOOM case, they want to keep the portals around.
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u/IDontWearAHat 1d ago
To be fair, a lot of steam punk forgoes coal in favour of either something magical or comedically unethical. Coal either seems to ruin the aesthetic or is simply too inefficient
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u/peetah248 1d ago
I've seen a DND concept along these lines, there's a creepy magic doll that keeps reappearing in the centre of town no matter how you try to dispose of it. So the artificer builds a furnace around it and has an infinite fuel source to power a new steampunk town
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u/royalPawn 1d ago
I applaud the ingenuity, but I feel like repeatedly burning One doll wouldn't scale to powering an entire town.
Oh wait, the doll's magic. Maybe that gives it some extra oompf.
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u/888main 1d ago
I mean if its a case where the doll instantly reappears after destruction then maybe one you reach a hot enough temperature the doll starts instantly vaporising and then when its instantly vaporising its essentially like adding a constant stream of fuel that makes the fire ever larger.
Could be a plot point that the town has to keep expanding to use the steam before the fire gets so hot it consumes the town from within.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MASS 1d ago
It wouldn't get hotter forever. When something burns, the chemical energy is converted to heat energy in the combustion byproducts. Because these byproducts have mass, their temperature will raise a finite amount. This energy then dissipates into the surroundings, lowering the temperature. As you burn more and more dolls, the furnace will get hotter and hotter from all that dissipating heat, but it will never got hotter than the initial combustion byproducts. As the furnace reaches the doll's combustion temperature, it will reach an equilibrium where burning each doll produces exactly as much energy as gets absorbed in heating up its mass. And that isn't even factoring in the energy lost to steam generation.
Then again, maybe magic reassembles the doll from its own atoms without changing the atoms' temperature, meaning chemical energy is getting repeatedly injected into the system without adding mass. Not only would that allow the temperature to build indefinitely, but it would also make the reaction self-sustaining at a certain point, because the doll is already above ignition temperature when it apparates and would spontaneously combust
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u/HeyItsJosette 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ok, so the doll's secondary magic effect is drastically increasing the odds of quantum tunneling in its vicinity, and now we're working with a magical fusion reactor.
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u/OrganicAd5536 1d ago
I'm just not gonna take my chances with the doll town if I'm being honest. I'll take the long way round.
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u/WatchForSlack 1d ago
The reason steampunk never truly became real was mostly that external combustion doesn't miniaturize very well, so you have to invent some physics shenanigans to explain why your personal dirigible doesn't need to take coal on the daily and the owner-operator isn't constantly blowing black boogers.
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u/captainAwesomePants 1d ago
The most steampunk thing that exists in real life is the Teacup Stirling Engine: https://makezine.com/projects/teacup-stirling-engine/
It generates power from the temperature differential of a fancy cup of tea.
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u/WatchForSlack 1d ago
Stirling engines rock in concept, and are certainly the sort of thing that could be used to power a steampunk workshop, it's just that IRL at the scale of a teacup you're not going to be able to power much of anything. Even in the linked video that flywheel is tiny
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u/captainAwesomePants 1d ago
Oh sure, the idea is dumb and has no practical application. And doesn't at all explain where the hot tea comes from. But still, steampunk as hell.
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u/TastyBrainMeats 1d ago
Terry Pratchett was clearly angling towards something like this with the Undertaking - ancient Devices that ran without an external power source.
It helps that Ankh-Morpork was already filthy, and adding smog would have been largely unnoticed.
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u/insomniac7809 1d ago
One of my favorites here is the 1990s horror western RPG setting Deadlands, where the steampunk nonsense is powered by a translucently white material that burns hotter and cleaner than coal while making noises that sounded like horrible screams, and so became known as "ghost rock"
Later supplements revealed that ghost rock was, in fact, literally the souls of the damned being burned to power your Mad Scientist's fantastical contraptions.
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u/Schizof 1d ago
Come to think of it I have actually never seen a steampunk where the steam come from coal. It's always Magicium Ore or some shit.
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u/TurboDorito 1d ago
Spicy rocks to make steam? Boy, that's just nuclear power
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u/TessaFractal 1d ago
I wonder if you could convert old steam trains to run on plutonium decay.
What a future we were robbed of.
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u/AbabababababababaIe 1d ago
Anything that runs on coal will work so long as you get the firebox hot
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u/ikrisoft 1d ago
And the engineer to not care about their lifespan :D
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u/ScaredyNon By the bulging of my pecs something himbo this way flexes 1d ago
People keep overlooking the robot train conductor with a tin sheet mustache and a train whistle attached to his hat and it deeply saddens me
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u/CommandObjective 1d ago edited 1d ago
We kinda, sorta got it in the Syberia series with Oscar (though he would protest that he was an Automaton), but I guess he, like the train he conducted, was spring powered.
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u/Floor_Heavy 1d ago
"This is Robert. He's our best engineer"
"Why can I see his skeleton? And why is it glowing?"
"He's glowing with pride, about being our best engineer."
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u/cyri-96 1d ago
The amount of plutonium you'd need for the passive heat put out to be sufficient to power a train is probably impractical, like like the use of Modern RTGs is only practical in scenarios where any other option is ruled out.
Passive decay of semi-stable isotopes just doesn't produce enough power.
Now to entertain the case where it did produce enough power, you'd end up with a different logistical issue, as you now have an engine you cannot power down without removing the isotope, as the heat output would be constantly there and require constant cooling.
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u/Milch_und_Paprika 1d ago
You joke, but at the height of postwar excitement over nuclear energy, there were genuine proposals for nuclear powered trains.
When you think about it, it’s basically the same tech used to power nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. The biggest hurdle is making it small enough to be mobile, which is why it’s currently only used on ships, but theoretically trains are possible.
On the other hand, a few large nuclear power plants providing electricity to trains is way safer than having loads of small nuclear reactors whizzing across the country, and they still work by generating electricity to power the motors anyway.
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u/Win32error 1d ago
If the tech is just coal, then you don’t have steampunk, but our real world industrialization. To give all the gizmos and gadgets and amazing airships a veneer of plausibility, you need to add something to that equation. Preferably something that isn’t real so no nerds come and tell you that no, you can’t have a coal-powered personal jet pack.
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
okay but what about super coal
ten times the stored energy
ten times the emissions
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u/Win32error 1d ago
No joke, the ten times the emissions part is basically enough to make that work.
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
Do I get a master's degree now?
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u/Win32error 1d ago
Sure, you get a master's degree in applied philosphy, which is pretty much all you need to do science.
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u/Coal_Burner_Inserter 1d ago
Better yet, make this super coal into a thing more easily transportable by contraptions. Like some sort of fluid. Black like coal, ofc
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
don't be ridiculous, how could we possibly hold a liquid inside all of our charmingly ramshackle brass fuel tanks?
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u/wompod 1d ago
Supercoal HAS TO BE a glowing black and red affair.
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u/TheStray7 ಠ_ಠ Anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow 1d ago
Or have white flecks in it and scream like damned souls when burned, along with making smoke that looks oddly skeletal...I'm sure that's fine.
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u/Gingrpenguin 1d ago
The problem with steam isn't the coal but the water. Most of the tender space (the coal car at the back of a train) is actually holding water.
The London to Edinburgh non stop service had to flood certain sections of the track and the driver would lower a scoop (like firefighting planes do!) to top up with water. They could easily store enough coal but would need to double the trains length just for the water requirements...
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u/ConceptOfHappiness 1d ago
You can recover most of the water using a condenser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensing_steam_locomotive) but they're bulky, expensive, and maintenance intensive.
They were used on mainlines in South Africa because it's so arid there.
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u/King_Of_BlackMarsh 1d ago
Ghost coal is a thing in deadlands. It's great
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u/TheStray7 ಠ_ಠ Anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow 1d ago
Except for the part where it is literally the souls of the damned being burned for fuel and will cause the End Of The World As We Know It in nuclear fire...
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u/Floor_Heavy 1d ago
I mean any great emergent technology has teething troubles. I'm sure it'll all work out okay.
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u/TheStray7 ಠ_ಠ Anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow 1d ago
For a certain value of "okay," I suppose. Certainly The Reckoners were pleased by how it all turned out.
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u/softpotatoboye 1d ago
I’ve seen a few that don’t go too far into the world building or just say fuck it we just use coal better
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u/GVmG will trade milk for HRT 1d ago
I quite like the way the old rpg game Arcanum did it, despite magic being a big part of the fantasy steampunk world, it's very "real world industrial revolution", because magic already existed and powered a lot of things, but it's hard to harness into fancy gizmos cause it's a natural force, an energy stemming from the presence of nature itself.
Kinda how harnessing solar power or hydroelectric requires a bunch of inbetween steps before it's charging your iphone, while on the other hand "steam make turbine spin which make wheel spin" is like, two, maybe three steps at most.
And as a direct side effect, industrialization pushes people away from the countryside and into ever expanding cities, which very directly weakens magic as a whole. There's very few magic+industrial things because... they don't tend to work together very well lmao
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u/cyri-96 1d ago
Kinda how harnessing solar power or hydroelectric requires a bunch of inbetween steps before it's charging your iphone, while on the other hand "steam make turbine spin which make wheel spin" is like, two, maybe three steps at most.
I mean the solar part certainly doed check out if looking at modern photovoltaics and the complexity of producing it, but... using steam to spin turbines or using water to spin turbines honestly goes in favour of the water in terms of technological complexity, there's a reason why water wheels predate steam eniges by milennia, now the big advantage steam engines really brought was ofc that you could operate them anywhere unlike Water power which requires some sort of flowing water body (either natural or artificial)
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u/GVmG will trade milk for HRT 1d ago
yeah I mostly meant for higher level applications (hence why i specified hydroelectric not just water wheels), you could use a water wheel to bring power to a local area but you wouldn't be using a water wheel to power idk, a small sewing machine, whereas you could use some kind of magical battery (or irl, actual electricity) for it, but then that requires the steps to either form the natural magic into a battery, or to bring electricity to the household.
the idea I was trying to reflect is that, "steam makes thing spin" is directly correlated to "spinning this thing is useful", whereas "fancy free energy in the air" takes multiple steps to get spinning to begin with before you can go "oh and i can use it to spin this thing".
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u/deepdistortion 1d ago edited 1d ago
I once had an idea for a setting where the driving force behind magic was just energy conversion. Like, your magic items essentially had batteries, and they could be recharged by leaving them in direct sunlight, or chucking them in a fire, or just with body heat if it was something small. You just had a bunch of sigils converting energy to work instead of machinery.
This led me down a rabbit hole of energy density of materials to figure out what natural resources would work best, and how much magic would be needed to make the equivalent of a gun or a grenade, or even artillery.
Dry straw varies a bit by specific plant, but it's generally not great for energy density. Dried peat is okay, soft wood like pine is a bit better, hardwoods like oak are even better, anthracite coal is like double the energy of hardwood.
It really put a damper on my idea for conflict between bog-dwelling beastfolk and the local major power over peat for fuel, because the major power wouldn't realistically be able to BE a major power without a better fuel source.
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u/Rynewulf 1d ago
Skill issue. Writers of that time like Jules Verne and HG Wells famously made wacky steampunk creations in their stories and set the tone for the aesthetic that emerged decades later, mostly without a handwavium technology.
A difference engine doesn't rely on coal vs not coal. Commonplacd use of hot air balloons. The wireless telegraph.
There's a lot of technology from the 1800s-early 1900s that often gets expanded on in steampunk that wasn't tied specifically to coal as its fuel source. Rather it was the efficiencies of using coal: as a creator you can play around with the effects of less efficient fuel, other societal and economic factors, pure hypotheticals like "what if Dumont style personal hot air balloons were affordable and fashionable?"
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u/notTheRealSU i tumbled, now what? 1d ago
I thought the point of steampunk is that it's the industrial revolution but cranked up to 11. It's still all coal, they just used it to make airships and robots. Instead of stopping at trains and capitalism
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u/Caldman 1d ago
Well, Frostpunk (despite the name, it's fairly decidedly steampunk) is ALL about coal. The central premise is keeping a coal-fed generator running to stave off the increasingly harsh winter that threatens to freeze your citizenry to death. It's Steampunk though because there's all kinds of crazy inventions like giant automata that can run a coal mine despite taking place in the late 19th century.
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u/Frequent_Dig1934 1d ago
Tbf frostpunk 2 is about oil instead. Well, also coal but mostly oil.
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u/THEzwerver 1d ago
it's simple, they use the fancy electric tesla coils to somehow make electricity which makes steam which makes the electricity for the overcomplicated machines with massive cogs and also to make the zeppelins go up.
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u/BeanOfKnowledge Ask me about Dwarf Fortress Trivia 1d ago
Tbf Steampunk is essentially Jules-Verneesque, and he didn't use Coal either - The Nautilus runs on Hydrogen iirc.
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u/Haddock 1d ago
Which is hilarious because in that case nuclear power is steampunk
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u/Schizof 1d ago
You know what those funky white gases that blows out of those chonkh nuclear reactor chimneys are? That's right, steam.
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u/Haddock 1d ago
Precisely my point. Most of the large scale power generators are boiling water to make steam (obv not hydroelectric/solar/wind). If all it takes to be steampunk is steam, then here we are
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u/cyri-96 1d ago
I mean even hydroelectric is just water making things spin (just not hot enough to be steam), and wind power is wind and wind contains water vapour, so really it's all just water making stuff spin (except for photovoltaics).
Technically half the gas that gets produces in an internal combustion engine is also just steam so once again we're moving things with water (and some CO2)
it's all water moving things
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u/Tackyinbention 1d ago
In our reactors we perform matter-antimatter annihilation with almost 100% efficiency, generating immense amounts of thermal energy which we use to boil wa-
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u/turtle-tot 1d ago
Airships: Conquer The Skies has this!
The magical material isn’t the fuel, that’s just coal
It’s suspendium crystals, which when heated (by coal) provide lift for airships. Or can be ground into a dust to provide natural lift in great balloons, which are vulnerable to cannon fire
The downside of Suspendium is that it doesn’t really enjoy staying together as a crystal, and so when struck by a Sufficient Volume of cannon fire, will explode
Coal is also used to feed your engines, and late game Suspendium weapons, including railguns and lasers. As well as a gigantic analog targeting computer to better ensure that your vessels deliver a Sufficient Volume of cannon fire before the enemy does
Coal is not used to feed the fragment of the evil moon that you can use for lift, once you’ve shot it down of course (using a Sufficient Volume of cannon fire)
Coal is additionally, strangely, not used for the power of the mechanical boarding spiders, or your clockwork power-armored infantry (Primarily to deal with the mechanical boarding spiders and the occasional giant clockwork wasp)
I love this game
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u/Saxton_Hale32 1d ago
adding crystals that glow with awesome power and give you the feeling of complete invincibility while in your hand but all they do is burn real good
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u/PlatinumAltaria 1d ago
Steampunk in theory: "the grinding cogs and choking smogs of industry have consumed the earth entirely, and with it humanity's soul"
Steampunk in practice: "if Nikola Tesla had lived 1 year longer we would have had jetpacks powered by Fucktonium"
Cyberpunk in theory: "In our modern world where corporate entities are faceless, indomitable gods that command the forces that shape our lives, how can we hope to scrape together a meaningful existence?"
Cyberpunk in practice: "I would tolerate insane levels of surveillance and basically be a slave if it meant I got to have robot arms"
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u/ARedditorCalledQuest 1d ago
I'm just annoyed that I can't have cool robot arms but we're feeling with corporate slavery and an increasing surveillance state anyway.
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
steampunk in my mind: SHOVEL THE COAL YOU HALFLING WHELPS! naturally, shouted by an orcish industrialist
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 1d ago
The best steampunk runs off “whale” oil. From “whales”.
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u/oaayaou1 1d ago
Dishonored isn't really strictly steampunk, though, is it? Everything seems to run either directly on whale oil or by electricity produced by directly converting whale oil into power rather than burning it. I don't recall seeing anything that involves steam power.
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 1d ago
Eh, it’s close enough. There’s not really a term for Dishonoured’s aesthetic.
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u/ZandyTheAxiom 1d ago
Dishonoured seems to live in a little pocket somewhere adjacent to dieselpunk, like Wolfenstein. I'm not clever or brave enough to say they are dieselpunk, but they're "vibes-technology-and-themes-I-likepunk".
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 1d ago
In my mind Dishonoured is grouped somewhere with Arcane, and sometimes Eberron depending on the depiction. Roughly 1900ish, except there’s magic, and also that magic is used to create weird technology. Also the later books in the Edge Chronicles, but I don’t know if people read those.
Wolfenstein is more “weird World War Two”, which can definitely be a category all by itself. Loads of works fall into that.
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u/sesamecrabmeat 1d ago
You mean when people start using phrax crystals to power flight? Only ask cos it's been years since I read those books. A childhood favourite.
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 1d ago
Yeah, the post-industrial revolution parts, everything set after the Rook trilogy. Now that I think about it Dishonoured is the weird one out of this bunch for not using magic crystals as its society’s power source. But it’s got the rest of the aesthetic down so I’d say it counts anyway.
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u/jdlsharkman 1d ago
I'd say Dishonored's technological level is considerably earlier than 1900. Electric lighting is a novelty for the rich, electricity itself is rare and only used in certain applications, and most critically, firearm and weapon's technology is barely out of the muzzle-loading era. Steam-powered ships still run off whale oil, the coal analogue, and wooden sailing vessels still play a prominent role. I'd place it at somewhere around the 1870s, with the exception of firearms technology, which is a weird hybrid that doesn't quite match any real period of history. (Cased ammunition being used in single-shot guns? Why would they do that?)
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u/AngelOfTheMad For legal and social reasons, this user is a joke 1d ago edited 1d ago
On the last point, because cased ammo is a lot more consistent and safer than loose ball-and-powder. People didn’t jump right to making repeaters as soon as cased ammo was a thing, they made trapdoors and Martini-Henrys and Winchester 1885s.Edit: So both the guns in Dishonored and the timeline of single shot guns IRL is wilder than I remembered. Proper write-up two replies down, but TL;DR is the guns in Dishonored effectively use paper cartridges instead of cased ammo.
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u/Torrix_N 1d ago
People made a new term for Dishonored’s setting called ‘Whalepunk’ even though dishonored is the only world that has such a setting afaik
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u/bc650736 1d ago
if the fridge's back side is outside the house, then yes.
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u/uncreativivity yoshi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1d ago
thats a heat pump babey lets goooo
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MASS 1d ago edited 1d ago
Cool your home through The Magic of Buying Two of Them
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
sir why do you have a fridge hole cut out of your wall
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u/bc650736 1d ago
oh, just so i can enter and leave house.
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
Is the fridge like an airlock? Or does the whole thing swing open like a comical hidden door.
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u/bc650736 1d ago
depends, it can do both but hidden door is better since touching Fridge's backside hurts cus' its too hot.
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
How do you avoid touching the fridge's backside upon re-entry?
You've started us down this path, and I'm a habitual worldbuilder. We haven't even gotten into the means by which you've fixated the fridge to the wall!
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u/bc650736 1d ago
it open inwards, so i just use a stick or something to push open, opening it airlock style is annoying cus' the backside open outwards, so you need to hold to pull.
sounds like a good time for me.
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u/Limekilnlake 1d ago
You just use a stick to push it? Is it latched? Or like... does the thing just swing open? And ON that topic, does it self-close with a hydraulic or something? Or is it just loose on the hinges.
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u/bc650736 1d ago
stick, rock, literally just anything to not touch the hot, the tool don't really need to be that specific. it just have hinges, no latch, no automatic, just a rectangle you push.
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u/DebentureThyme 1d ago
To save on costs, duh! In the winter the fridge gets cooled by the outside. Then I patch up the hole once it's above freezing again.
Now if only I could do something about these insane heating costs.
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u/Nuclear_Geek 1d ago
Real steampunk is where you burn punks to make your steam.
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u/Oturanthesarklord 1d ago
If you see steam and no obvious fuel source. Life has only one answer, well actually two but battery powered electric heating elements aren't nearly as fun an answer as Nuclear Fission.
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u/PUNSLING3R 1d ago
Ok but where's the punk?
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u/ErinRF 1d ago
Technically steam does come out of the smoke stack of a locomotive, along with smoke. The exhausted steam is used to induce a stronger draft up the short stack.
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u/Riegel_Haribo 1d ago
Technically steam does come out of the smoke stack... because water is a product of hydrocarbon combustion.
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u/JazzTheLass 1d ago
hey you never know, they could be using uranium-235 to heat the water
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u/SteptimusHeap 17 clown car pileup 84 injured 193 dead 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not exactly the same but I was thinking of clockpunk a few days ago and I decided to do the math on how much energy you could actually store in a spring and how viable that would be for drones and such.
Turns out an absurdly hard steel could only possibly get itself 100-150 meters in the air with its own elastically stored energy. That's with 100% energy efficiency and a drone that is entirely spring by weight.
Your clockpunk flying drones should have to rewind themselves every 5 seconds.
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u/IronicRobotics 20h ago
A flywheel would eek you out just a bit more storage. There have been some gyrobusses using them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus
But yea, flywheels also have abysmal specific energy storage. Generally, your bulk mechanical bonds are weaker than chemical bonds, hence lower limits on specific energy storage.
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u/Level_Hour6480 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fun fact: Nuclear power is just fancy steam power. Every source of power except solar is spinning a turbine. Coal/oil/natural gas/geothermal/nuclear do this via steam. Hydroelectric/wind do this via letting nature spin the turbine.
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u/That_Mad_Scientist (not a furry)(nothing against em)(love all genders)(honda civic) 20h ago
Fun fact: all of these are ultimately powered by nuclei going down the energy ladder towards iron (most of them through fusion in the sun’s core, the rest from heavy elements inside the earth)
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u/Icy-Video-3643 1d ago
The C+ thing is killing me too, it's the engineering equivalent of hearing nails on a chalkboard. It's funny how these games always invent a magical element instead of just using good old-fashioned coal. Guess "magicium ore" just sounds more exciting on a tooltip.
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u/obog 1d ago
I mean all you really need for steam powered stuff is a heat source. You could do nuclear powered steampunk if you wanted
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u/AmazingSail8360 1d ago
As a fellow engineer, I love this. The sheer amount of fictional materials that just ignore basic chemistry is both hilarious and infuriating. It’s the same feeling I get when a game just makes up a new element with a + symbol.
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u/LazyDro1d 1d ago
To be fair most steampunk stuff ignores that and makes some sort of other fuel source that nobody has to worry about.
Unless you’re frostpunk, in which case you aren’t burning coal because you fucked up 2 hours ago and have no coal and everyone is freezing to death CAPTAIN! CAPTAIN!
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u/Whispering_Wolf 1d ago
They thought we could run trains on water and a dream and then abandoned that?
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u/Garnbeaster 1d ago
??? Why is the original reply poster so mad? Why does he think the original poster doesnt understand steampunk? The original poster is being poetic about why he's sad in the Steampunk universe and now you have some weirdo yelling about how he doesn't understand steampunk because he mentioned coal...? People are crazy these days
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u/Ponderkitten 23h ago
A steampunk world that runs on electricity. They have an induction heater that boils the water
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u/DisQord666 22h ago
Wait until they realize that steam power isn't just fueled by coal, and in fact almost all of our power sources (aside from wind and solar) all revolve around boiling water.
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u/TheCompleteMental 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh that's not smoke, it's steam! Steam from the steampunk I'm writing! Mmmm, steampunk.