Scampir

Scampir

@Scampir

Be the Choster you wanna read

  • He/Him + They/Them

One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
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Scampir
@Scampir
Scampir
@Scampir
Scampir
@Scampir

Everybody wants to talk about the technology of steampunk but never what fuel is needed to run it. It's coal btw. Might as well call that shit coal-fantasy.

Scampir
@Scampir

many people are replying to this post and stepping into the rake. You are missing the point if you are only focusing on how the technology works. I think you should think about how the facets of coal extraction and pollution are not explored in this branch of sci-fi and ask why. It doesn't matter if the coal-analogue is something else. If it's fuel, then how is it collected and delivered? Who is involved in that process? How is it organized?

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in reply to @Scampir's post:

amaranth-witch
@amaranth-witch

I got an author very, very mad at me for writing a near-future adventure story and calling it "steampunk" when everything was atomic-energy fueled

didn't wanna listen to me when I demonstrated that nuclear energy is a very expensive way to BOIL WATER

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belarius
@belarius

Sounds like that author needs to read the first story Di Filippo's Steampunk Trilogy (1995), which happens to be the original use of the word "steampunk." Without giving too much away, you are exactly correct.

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in reply to @Scampir's post:

smuonsneutrino
@smuonsneutrino

I thought it was b/c Steampunk (like most ---punk) tends to focus on urban centers where our main characters are unlikely to be involved in the extraction of fuel.

Also: Mortal Engines is very much about how the fuel gets got, I feel like it can't be the only one

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noise
@noise

But they will be involved in other consequences: the air in Britain alone was so polluted that the Great Smog of London (fuelled by coal) killed people as late as 1950s.
This is as indirect to steampunk as possible (just domestic heaters, not even any fancy technology) but it still killed a lot of people.

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secrets
@secrets

They may not be in the coal mines and it's not really necessary to draw a diagram of how the giant armored zeppelin works, but the steampunk stuff I can find anything good to say about - Difference Engine, Golden Compass etc. - are cool because they're grounded in a society that's clearly kept up by a colossal amount of unglamorous sweat and blood and fire even if it's not always happening in the protagonists' direct line of sight, where the author put some thought into why they chose to base their setting around Europe at such a fever pitch of extraction that it was on the precipice of exploding like a overloaded boiler into omnicidal war after war. The imitators who miss all that to just go "wow, gears on tophats!" are so goddamned boring.

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queerinmech
@queerinmech

one of my settings is a kind of accidentally steampunk one, where advanced technology is a relatively new concept in a world of magic

technology is in opposition to the established order that uses magic for everything

fuel was really important concept for me, and oil and coal simply do not exist in this world (at least as we know it)

through research on this i learned of real life engines that ran on moss and other alternative fuels

it is a sort of Cambrian explosion time period, so there are a lot of competing fuels

in addition to power sources including hydro and windmills and reflective solar arrays

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weepingbelle
@weepingbelle

i have been trying to find anybody talking about this for YEARS. i once called it "coalpunk" and somebody asked me quite incredulously if i "know how steam power is generated." when i talk about coalpunk, i'm talking about the 13-year-old boys who don't get to go to school because they're stucking working in the mines next to 40- or 50-year-olds whose bodies have been sacrificed to those same mines. its poor folk rural and urban alike cursing at the sky as a fantastical steam-powered flying machine they will never even get close to flies by with a payload of rich, clean passengers. its the workers who lose life or limb in the literal gears of progress and end up being tossed out onto the street as a minor annoyance to the owning class. it is a different lens through which to view the same kind of technological fantasy!!!

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