Everyone knows what WAS when it comes to Technology, but the entire genre of Steampunk was built on What Might Have Been. A Jules Verne version of the 19th Century rather than the one that actually existed.

I am a huge fan of Traveller (a Space Opera RPG in the spirit of Honor Harrington or Serenity). So I like to push the envelope on “what if” when it comes to technology.

STEAMTECH: My version of Steampunk without the Punk. So what happens if you assume complete access to modern information, but a 19th Century manufacturing technology base? Since it is a Space game, what if we start with a community living on a Mars like world in Earth’s orbit. There is little air, so survival depends on cities built under glass domes like the Crystal Palace with food grown in greenhouses using fish ponds and hydroponic gardens. Animals become expensive to support for transportation, so cable cars and electric vehicles (19th century versions) become the norm.

We still need a good source of power for an industrial revolution, but burning wood and coal is impossible, so let’s substitute giant solar mirror farms to focus sunlight on an iron boiler to produce steam power.

Trains would be nice to travel between cities, so with minimal (super tech) we can concentrate radioactive isotopes to produce a heat generator that has fuel to last years. Now trains only need to take on water to flash boil over a RTG and power a steam engine.

The next question becomes how many modern devices can be built with 19th Century tools?

One of my first thoughts, on reading through this idea, is the question of how people got there in the first place, and what became of that? If they're native, how did they survive before inventing glass (or did some catastrophe somehow thin the atmosphere over the course of a few generations?), and if not, how did they lose (or why did they abandon) the spacefaring technology?


As the atmospheric pressure falls, the boiling point of water also falls; I don't know what effects that fact might have on steam power on a thin-atmosphere world.


Trains could perhaps be powered by solar-generated steam instead of positing any form of nuclear power: have the train carry lenses to focus the sun on its boiler.

If one went with a world more like Lewis's Malacandra of Out of the Silent Planet, with thin-air highlands over most of the planet but most of the population living in (if you follow Lewis and his inspirations) narrow thick-air lowlands, one could posit reasonably plentiful trees, and so wouldn't have to come up with replacements for wood and charcoal (except where our world required coal because wood and charcoal didn't burn hot enough) ...

There's quite a few pieces of literature that deal with this question of taking Victorian technology to space, in different ways.

And yes, it will boil in space. Here's an article that addresses what happens in space-vacuum: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... d9a91d5f91

Now, on a planet like Mars, you'd have to do some calculations with pressure and such, but beyond that, you would be able to boil water at much lower temperature than on Earth, but it might be more difficult to pressurize it enough to power much.

As for glass, that could be possible. My first question, yeah, is how did they get there? The reason we run into problems is that water is incredibly heavy and we don't have a way to transport a massive amount of it to jumpstart a colony yet.

The Traveller universe is a Space Opera setting with a Star faring history stretching back millenia. Star Empires have risen, been conquered, and fallen into long "dark ages" where worlds became isolated and had to slowly rebuild from technology collapse to regain interstellar technology and build a new Star Empire. The ultimate fate of the Third Empire is a cataclysmic civil war for succession that leaves "pockets" of starfaring worlds surrounded by a "frontier" of worlds struggling to survive without vital trade and a "wilderness" of worlds completely isolated and relearning how to survive on their own. The last "dark age" lasted for 1000 years between the fall of the Second Empire and the birth of the Third Empire. So as advanced technology wears out, the people must either adapt using locally sustainable technology and resources or face extinction.

This tends to be the rough backdrop for my assumptions.

I love this idea! I think the beauty of steampunk--and sci-fi in general--is the ability to play "mix and match" with technology and culture, and I would love to see a Victorian space colony.

You mean, like a Victorian space station reached by ships that sail through space? :innocent:

Are we still gonna do that thing...? Or like, is that a thing we can revisit...?

I'm still working on it. So yeah, it can certainly be revisited.