#speculative engineering

[nyktomorphia]

It might not matter where I start drawing, it will turn out to be too close to the edge of the page anyway

[nyktomorphia]

More detailed drawing of the charmingly strange passenger tram.

[nyktomorphia]

“Castle in the Sky” is a good movie I haven’t seen before. It is abundant with flying machines.

[nyktomorphia]

More speculative engineering. In the autistic tradition, I am learning everything I can about trains; in the ADHD tradition, I am doing it as fast as possible before the mood passes on to something else. The topmost drawing is based on a locomotive from the Paris-Orleans railway, built for low-traffic passenger transport. It looks like a bizarre half-trolley, half-caravan-trailer chimaera and I love it.

I was interested in the idea of two rows of pistons visibly moving up and down behind a pair of chimneys. Alas, the horned chimneys seem to be actively counterproductive (just let the smoke rise without heating the top of the engine), and I know vertically-oriented pistons were phased out early on but I haven't actually found out why yet. My guess is that the force is distributed more evenly when the cylinders are aligned with the centres of all the driving wheels, and there's no real reason for the shafts to be that long, but I'm not sure. Maybe it's something I'll decide to handwave as "not an important problem to them".

Mostly this was for thinking about the infrastructure of Griss, though I'll have to keep it in mind for other worlds also. Aesthetically, my ideal goal for ghoulish engineering is 'elegant graveyard deco that also leaves the functional components exposed' — whatever they have for vehicles, I want it to look a little too much like driving an autopsy. But that means all the mechanical parts have to look right to me, so any time I get annoyed by having to draw all the pipes and wires and give up, I did this to myself. (It's also very tempting to justify "they do things the difficult and expensive way on purpose just because someone in charge insisted it looks cool" when that's thematically appropriate for the proto-fascist autocracy.)

The city of Sonnambul was inspired mainly by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and everything else as an extension of that (German Expressionism and Universal Horror, Weimar Germany, Romania, New York City, London, and Istanbul). What I'm mostly sure of is that it's a regionally-powerful citystate which is politically loyal to a distant capital but effectively autonomous; that this is relatively common on Griss; that its government is effectively a hereditary plutocracy powered by ownership of a well-placed seaport, whose bureaucracy has historically been closely integrated with the dominant church and has been secularising with difficulty; and that most all of its modernisations have been fairly rapidly implemented over only the past few decades, within the reign of the current Lord Proprietor, to remain ahead of rival cities. Which suggests to me an odd combination: a feudal society that became a mercantile power (implying extensive interaction with other cultures) and then industrialised (involving a mass restructuring of its own people and their traditions) with only limited effects on its own power hierarchy. (Until now, of course.)

...What if Griss just does not have horses?

I think I have a sketch somewhere imagining ghouls riding large equestrian goats, which still seems appropriate but I'm not committed to it. Without a swift species that was both domesticable and rideable, overland travel would be exceptionally slow, and limited to whatever pedestrians can carry. (Or oxen-equivalents. Agriculture obviously happened at enough scale to support large cities and I'm not sure if that's plausible without some kind of ploughing livestock.) That would limit the range and speed with which empires could rapidly deploy troops against internal dissent, and therefore their overall size and centralisation. It would also make naval power and navigable rivers even more important to them. What about the rest though?

The invention of the steam engine on Earth was driven by the need to pump water out of coal mines — using abundant resources and advancements in refining steel — and the locomotive and automobile were designed for roads and tracks that already existed for other purposes. What kind of roads would have already existed if land travel was slower and much less frequent? Maybe locomotives on Griss evolved from dragging paddle steamers onto land, rather than motorising horse-drawn carriages. Sonnambul isn't really a centre of innovation, I'm pretty sure it has abundant natural gas but I've characterised its industrialisation as frankensteining together a modern city by imitating the best parts its architects could find, which raises the question of how much of the resources and expertise involved had to be imported? How different could the resulting implementation of familiar scientific processes become, starting with slightly different institutional knowledge and design requirements?

...I really wish speculative engineering were more of a thing.

[nyktomorphia]

(The title, assuming I've translated it correctly, means "Our Lady of Pipework".)

...I wish "speculative engineering" were a thing in the same way speculative biology is.

E.g. not just "cool machine but with a decorative aesthetic" (which is really all that this is, not a good example), but, in the same way as imagining a species' evolution in response to environmental selection pressures, imagining how a people would invent unique technologies within a cultural context to accomplish a particular function using available materials and knowledge and institutions. What circumstances might have connected every home to a hydraulic power network? What would people have come up with to travel swiftly over long distances if domesticating horses hadn't been so convenient an option? What if the need to pump water out of coal mines hadn't created a niche for experimenting with steam power to be a useful adaptation?

(People do this, of course, but I don't know that it's a named subset of worldbuilding the same way specbio is.)

[nyktomorphia]

I'm not actually sure why Hallownest would want a dirigible, but if they did...

...despite the designers' intentions, the Old Stag hates it even more than the trams

[nyktomorphia]

whatever this is

[nyktomorphia]

@abalidoth Here, it's for you

It's a "(mechanical pencil) skirt" a skirt resembling a mechanical pencil, and also a "mechanical (pencil skirt)" a pencil skirt that uses a lever-operated zipper mechanism just because

(As an added bonus, the levers can be lowered with the sliders fully unzipped to fasten the skirt in Mobility Mode :P)