Landship info

[Graylorne]

Would anyone have information available on steampunk landships? Not the military kind, but ships on wheels you can use for exploration and trading.
Especially the (not too) technical side: propulsion, wheels, etc.

 

[CupofJoe]

Not the highest of brows here but the film Wild Wild West has a lot of steampunk vehicles. especially a huge walker...
For the technicalities I'd look at Traction engines for how things work...
As for real steampunk how about...
Ruston crawler
I just love looking at it!

 

[Telcontar]

Propulsion: Massive steam engines.
Wheels: Huge, metal. Maybe tracked.
Size: Ridiculous
Speed: About as fast as a human can jog, but it can keep moving 24/7.

I didn't look anything up, I just made it up. You can too. Steampunk sometimes gives the illusion of actual engineering, but it's just an illusion. In other words? There is no technical side - invent whatever you want your story to have!

 

[Graylorne]

Problem is, my world is absolutely not suited for landships, and still I need one. I'll sketch the situation:

Through a misfiring scientific experiment the timeflow of several parallel universes disappeared. With it, all life on the alt.earth, even the topsoil is gone. Clouds make a permanent twilight. Water is still available, though sterile. Ruins abound, often in the condition they were left (there's no deterioration through weather etc).

My MCs are dropouts from 'occurrences', fragments of history that replay themselves for some minutes and then disappear again. Sometimes, a youngster is left behind, slightly altered. These are dropouts. A group of these found a landship, dropped from another alt.earth. There are several more of those ships around and they are very valuable.

Only how should it work?
- windpower is possible, but none of the youngsters is a sailor
- steampower is out, no fuels
- atomic power would be possible, but the ship is a Jules Verne-invention. Still, it is an option
- batteries - the Naurilus batteries needed chemical industry to be recharged: not available
What other possibilities are there?

NB Thought of automated sails, but that's perhaps a bit too sophisticated.
The ship is steered by a robot-like Steersman who lost his vocals and only communicates over a small wp3.1 monitor, (text-based), in French.

 

[Telcontar]

If you want the steampunk aesthetic, keep the generalities - lots of large piping and such - but blackbox the power source. If any of your characters have engineering knowledge, have them be mystified by the workings of the machine. You can reveal stuff later if you think of something, or just have it be a nice mystery. After all, these things are dropping in from alternate dimensions, a bit of mystery is fitting.

 

[Svrtnsse]

This ship was at the Burning Man festival last year. It's wind powered, but can also be man-powered for when the wind isn't blowing.

 

[Graylorne]

If you want the steampunk aesthetic, keep the generalities - lots of large piping and such - but blackbox the power source. If any of your characters have engineering knowledge, have them be mystified by the workings of the machine. You can reveal stuff later if you think of something, or just have it be a nice mystery. After all, these things are dropping in from alternate dimensions, a bit of mystery is fitting.

That's a possibility, but I wanted to give them some obstacles, things that have to be repaired to make the ship ready. The latest dropout is the boy Mac (from my Showcase piece), who served in Napoleon's Russia campaign. Just enough to understand simple mechanics.

This ship was at the Burning Man festival last year. It's wind powered, but can also be man-powered for when the wind isn't blowing.

That's nice! It would have made a nice boy scout-project in my physically active past.
It's not exactly what I had in mind though.

 

[CupofJoe]

If you want to keep away from a "black box" engine...
How about Clockwork and/or Compressed air?
Both are fairly easily understandable technologies for someone from the early 19C.
All you would need is muscle or possibly windmills to wind or rotate compressors...

 

[Graylorne]

Ahh, CupofJoe, remember I was born in 1600...

I vaguely see pictures with compressed air. Pneumatic engines? It seems a French project, thus eminently fitting. Now to search for technical details I understand.

NB
Been looking around and it starts to solidify. Windmills on deck to power air compressors. Large expansion engines use the compressed air to drive the ship. Exactly like a steam engine, only with cold instead of hot air. It almost sounds like something I can sell my readers.

Were I to combine this with regular sails, and have the Steersman produce diagrams with the various commands, I only have to team my people sailhandling (and French) and they're on their way.

It's starting to look like a 19th century steam frigate...

 

[Daichungak]

A complicated perpetual motion device using gears, springs, etc. At least that is what popped into my head.