A Gymnomi Slime Advanced Steam locomotive. This is similar to an Earth design called a Golwé. The entire locomotive is a rigid frame with two independently swivelling wheelsets, as on a double Fairlie. This loco has a unique return-flue boiler, where both the smokebox and firebox are at the same end of the boiler. This keeps the smoke away from the crew cabs at either end.
Advanced Steam locomotives were introduced during the pan-Gymnome Oil Crisis of the 2330s as an alternative to diesel locomotives. They include modern technology such as electronic control stands, automated firing, climate controlled cabs, gas producer combustion systems to fully burn their solid fuel, feedwater heaters, superheaters, water recondensators, compound expansion of steam--the works!
The conductor-brakegoo, Limerenayde, is a centauroid Gymnomi. They're a little bit of a tight fit in the cab of the locomotive, but they're made out of goo after all so that's not too big of an issue.
It's a (not) quick and (very) dirty drawing of a train.
It's an advanced steam garratt :D (advanced steam locos are from Train Misconductor which is very cool and awesome!!!).
Instead of burning solid coal it refills an on board tank of flammable gas (wood gas, mulched biofuel etc)
It's basically an EAR 59 Class with a diesel cab and slightly different tanks (because I could not design a completely original loco for the life of me). The valve gear is shoddy at best but it's at least recognisable as a Walschaerts (I hope). The plumbing also goes nowhere, it's an exercise in making something that looks fine at a glance.
I would draw some crew but I'm not exactly confident drawing people right now (soon hopefully!) so lets just assume it's in the yard.
Ex-Licc Railway No. ||...|||..|| (Three four byte four three hex four three), built 2278, running on the Waogli branchline of the Licc Network Rail Line in the year 2331 during the Pan-Gymnome Oil Crisis. She's been modified with modern Advanced Steam technologies:
fully automatic pneumatic couplers for the modern coaches and tram stock
gas producer combustion system (making that onion smokestack essentially decorative) for efficiently burning, in this case, fire wood (made plentiful by the local forestry industry and proliferation of automotive woodgas producers).
electronically aided firing
positive train control antennas
dynamo
steam driven turbofan for inducing draft in the fire, because...
finally, and most noticeably, the steam recondensator has been added to an elongated tender. She doesn't chuff anymore, so she needs that extra draft.
she looked something like this before the refit, though this sketch misses some important details like the sand dome and should not include the dynamo it has.
A little "Waguwak" S4-0/20/4 class advanced steam industrial switcher. It's the same 3.04 glip narrow gauge as the S20 Foresight, already a small engine on a narrow gauge, but it's even smaller!
Despite the various similarities with the Foresight, this locomotive was built by a different manufacturer. It features a round cyclonic coal burning gas producer combustion system firebox, a high and a low pressure cylinder for compound expansion of steam, remote operation, automated control of throttle, sander, and cutoff, and air conditioning.
"Foresight" class S20-332 Advanced Steam Tank Engine no.11513₆ of the South Lymer Railway (the SLYM) on the planet Gymnome, circa 2335 AD. One of hundreds of Foresight-class locomotives built by General Fluidics, this one was built to a 3.04₆ љ narrow gauge. (three and one ninth glip, or roughly 1096mm). It is seen here with its Gymnomi Slime crew, the conductor to the left and the engineer to the right.
More information, drawing process, and alternate liveries under the cut:
More Details on the "Foresight" Class
Advanced Steam Locomotives were the result of a global oil crisis that began on Gymnome in the late 2320s that made Diesel engines first uneconomical, then almost unusable. After a period of bringing museum steam locomotives out of mothballs and modifying existing designs, the Foresight class is among the first "third generation" steam locomotives, designed with modern engineering principles from the ground up.
Advanced Steam engines, including this class, are designed with ease of maintenance and operation as well as high efficiency. The controls are electromechanical with an electronic control stand in the cab, similar to what you'd find in a Diesel, and it can be hooked up to other locomotives as a multiple unit. Some are even equipped for remote control running.
The engine is a compound Mallet, which uses the steam twice in pairs of low pressure and high pressure cylinders to make better use of its expansion. The firebox is a gas producer combustion system which breaks the fuel (either coal or biofuel, stored on a hopper atop the saddle tank) down into gasses, which are then burned at high efficiency. This produces more ash, but much less soot.
The locomotive runs at a high boiler pressure of 25 bar, and uses a superheater, since hotter, higher pressure steam expands more efficiently. However, this produces arguably too much pressure for the locomotive to use given the size of the cylinders. If it could use all of its tractive effort, it would be able to exert a whopping 243 kN of force. In practice, it would wheelslip long before thin. Although the onboard computer would identify and attempt to prevent a wheelslip, it would reduce in a lower throttle setting, which reduces the effective pressure.
Instead, the Foresight's cylinders are deliberately oversized so that it can be run with a higher cutoff, that is, closer to neutral gear. When running near neutral gear, steam is put in the cylinders only briefly during each stroke, which does less work per stroke but more work per unit of steam, therefore making the engine run more efficiently. To facilitate this, the expansion link on the valve gear has been cut short, limiting the cutoff to 30% in either direction, although starting cutoff is nominally 26%, which means it is over twice as efficient as an engine with the same tractive effort but working at full cutoff.
The useful tractive effort is about 60 kN.
Process:
This locomotive's story starts in July 2024, when I drew this image:
💬 5 🔁 24 ❤️ 79 · A mellanoid Advanced Steam tank engine, for use in shunting, industrial shortlines, and branch lines. This particular cla
of a Gymnomi Advanced Steam locomotive based loosely on the Argentinian LVM800 (Modern Steam Locomotive 800) concept by one of the biggest (and most successful) late proponent of steam, L.D. Porta.
My original version of the Gymnomi Advanced Tank Engine took the hopper-shaped covered coal bunker on top, and the basic design of the platforms on front and back, but adapted it to an overkill 0-6-6-0 Mallet design in true Gymnomi articulated loco design fashion. In retrospect I probably should have made it an 0-4-4-0, oh well.
In December 2024 I learned how to use Blender with the help of my friend @msasterisk, and produced this model:
By January that model was used in our new game, Train Puzzle dot exe (title then pending).
MsAsterisk later made this pixel art animation depicting the locomotive scrolling through lovely pixel art scenery based on that found in the original drawing.
And at some point I drew the inside of the cab.
This (quite self indulgent) art was done by placing the engine's game model next to my model of Thomas and tracing the result. It let me refine the look of the engine somewhat and include detail that wouldn't have fit into the game model. It's at this point that the loco gained Southern Valve Gear.
This alternate version was made showing the engine crew characters from the game. I now realize that the characters are grossly under-scale here. (The game's name was briefly Railway Misconductor; it is now Train Misconductor).
During the development process for the most recent milestone version, the resolution was slightly raised, which let me add a little more detail to the basic car frame model, including a 3D modelled truck rather than a box with a photo of wheels on it. But then, the box-with-wheel-drawings original 3D model was looking pretty archaic, so a few days ago the loco was redesigned. This let me fix some proportion issues I was annoyed by, and add a little more detail.
And I liked it so much I raised the game's resolution even more.
That brings us to the drawing at hand:
I started with this render of the new game model of the engine, and traced it, adjusting a few proportions to fit a realistic style and adding lots of detail.
I made heavy use of FireAlpaca's perspective tools. The wheels were done by first drawing two wheels on a circle, and then copying and squishing them to fit the elliptical shape they present to the viewer. The brake pump was given lots more detail, and the dynamo was added (previously I had assumed the dynamo might be hidden away because it's so noisy, but there's not really a good place for it.)
Then came brake rigging, sanding gear, and a blastpipe on the front engine, and the connecting rods, crosshead, and main rod on the engines. Cab detail taken from the old cab view drawing was added as well.
Here's the more or less final line art:
Note the holes in the side of the firebox. These are to let in air above the coal grates, as part of the Gas Producer Combustion System design. (although not the one from the LVM800).
There's also number boards on the headlamps. They were suggested on the previous drawings, but now they have an actual number (11513).
The LVM800 ancestry is a little more visible in this version, with the modified coal hopper roof doors and the sloped cab walls.
Then came the scenery, which was made in layers to replicate aspects of both MsAsterisk's pixel art scene and the original drawing it refers to, as well as a few of the other tree assets currently in game.
It was here where I went to sleep (at 5 AM last night). I got 4 hours of sleep and got back up to finish the drawing, so as you can imagine I'm a little tired as I type this. :P
By 11:30 today the solid colors were done.
And at 1:20 the rendering for the first variant, the clean yellow livery, was done:
Clean and factory fresh! Time to make her TIRED! The SLYM-11513 has only been in use for a few years by this point, but it does dirty work and the maintenance department is too overworked by all the new steam engines (which are harder to maintain than Diesels, even with Advanced Steam) to reliably clean the darned thing.
So the weathering was added, and the loco was finally complete!
But it was still missing one thing:
Can't have a Gymnomi train without a Gymnomi Slime crew!
Finally, some livery variants were prepared, which can be seen here:
There's some more livery variants I want to draw but they would be more complicated to pull off, so they can wait.
Here's some transparent versions
And finally a lineless version. The drawing wasn't designed to be seen this way but it's kind of interesting how close it is to looking good.
What's next for this engine? Well in addition to being part of a very fun shunting puzzle video game, I want to model essentially this drawing in blender, as a future project. Essentially going from traced blender render to high quality drawing back to blender render, but this time with a ton more detail. This would mostly be just a for-fun project, but it's possible I could mod it into other existing train games.
Finally ready to start showing off the project we've been working on for a few weeks.
TRAIN PUZZLE (dot exe) (title pending)
me and @msasterisk are working on a switching puzzle game set on slimegirl astronaut Eaurp Guz's homeworld. You operate an Advanced Steam switcher to move cars around. The prototype implements a single level, a model railroad Inglenook layout, but there will be other original levels as well.
MsAsterisk has done all of the programming and game engine work, I've done the game design and art assets.
more screenshots and development photos below the cut:
Until the last couple of days, the game has used plain colored boxes for its cars. The first playable version, shown here, was just a pixel art train toy, with no actual game mechanics, but with an external list randomizer you could still run the inglenook game.
The physics was apparently a monumental undertaking to get working, but now it works great!
i don't remember what this was about. Truncated the vertices to the unit cube or something.
@thefallencomet's playtesting of the first prototype revealed a severe bug with couplers where switching cars coupled at a distance between three tracks at once would completely break physics. MsAsterisk fixed it by simply breaking couplers when they're too far apart.
car concept art
u.i. concept art. The tracks are bonafide pixel art here, but they've since been replaced with all 3D assets. The loco here is a pixelated render done in blender of the advanced steam tank engine model that i made about a month ago.
control stand model, WIP. We're not sure if we're going to go for this kind of detailed control stand. Why does a steam engine use a control stand that would look more at home on an EMD diesel? It's the magic of Advanced Steam Technology! The actual engine is controlled with actuators and microcontrollers, they're merely operated from the safety of the control cabin. The gauges are for brake cylinder, boiler pressure, steam chest, and speedometer--but no promises about whether these will be functional.
My high res model of the Gymnomi Slime S20 Foresight Advanced Steam Tank Engine is nearing completion, at least in terms of the external geometry. The plumbing is mostly figured out, and there's just a few missing details. A lot remains to be done in the cab, and then there is the matter of UV mapping and texturing.
Here's some beauty shots of the thing! See also:
-Freight Misconductor, the video game that this engine is from.
-Full color illustration of the locomotive.
-Animation of the valve gear working in forward and reverse.
I made a big list of names for the project formerly called Train Puzzle dot exe (title pending) including various proposals from myself and some of the people who responded to my call soliciting names for the game. Thanks to all those on tumblr and various discord servers who contributed names. Then me and @msasterisk (and @wisdomsavingthrow too since you can't vote with a small even number of participants) ran through a double elimination tournament bracket, discussing each of the options.
The winning name is Railway Misconductor. (For the record, the runners-up were Shunt Everything!, Go Shunt Yourself, and Train Puzzle dot exe (title pending)).
For those just joining us, Railway Misconductor is a game under development by myself and @msasterisk, based on several model railroad switching layouts, including Inglenook Sidings and Timesaver, as well as various other inspirations and original puzzles. It takes place on Gymnome, an alien planet inhabited by amorphous agender bipeds, the Gymnomi Slimes, and more specifically, on the South Lymer Railroad (the SLYM). You operate SLYM No.11513, a modern Advanced Steam tank engine on various yard switching duties of increasing complexity.
There will be minimal story, but the characters--the orange Conductor, who relays the orders from dispatch or the yard manager to the player and has to go throw the switches, and the blue Engineer, who runs the locomotive itself--will have dialogue tying into the player's progression.
