Thanks! I’m very much not nautical so take this with a grain of sea salt. I think yeah, able to travel faster and use weaker winds, plus perhaps better handling in whatever conditions the hull was designed for. The person I was talking with mentioned that the original hull from the windcoop looked like ones meant for the north Atlantic where it’d be dealing with short choppy waves. Presumably this one would heave up over them a bit more than the original, so it’d be a less-smooth ride. That might mean more wear and tear? That’d be a trade off they’d have to assess.

I think generally I very much want to depict a slower society, one that’s actually willing to take an efficiency hit if it means protecting animals, or habitats around it. That sort of consideration is sort of unthinkable in our current world, but yeah, I think it’d be worth it. Hopefully looking out for whales is a small piece, indicative of a much larger cultural theme.

Similariy, I hope that this society is configured differently enough, paced slowly enough, that it can tolerate some unreliability without issue. I imagine they have some high-priority, guaranteed-fast shipping for important stuff like aid, medicine, food, but that the rest of their shipping might show up late or early depending on the favorability of the weather, and that people expect that. I think that might be a general theme in a lot of areas of life - they’ve looked at the tradeoffs and decided that the convenience isn’t worth the cost in externalities. Sort of heresy to a modern American (or so it feels in some of my IRL conversations) but plenty of societies, including our own, got by that way.

I dunno, I could kinda see it - they don’t understand a ton of their own tech, and have folded religious belief into even basic maintenance routines until they can’t tell whether lighting incense or chanting as they work changes the outcome. I don’t know about the admech, but the imperial guard types seem to believe every device from a heavy bolter to an ancient and venerable space marine tank are all equally likely to have machine spirits animating them - presumably they got that thinking from their tech experts. There’s also the sort of outlined belief that tech is sort of… naturally occurring? and that it’s heretical to invent new stuff when the correct process is to discover it somewhere.

Add to that the fact that the quality of their tech has declined pretty drastically from their past (aren’t most STCs, which they basically worship as the best of their modern tech, like the crude, sturdy equipment you’d give a colony that was just starting out?) and the fact that some of it is sometimes possessed by literal daemons or other ancient abominations… it sort of seems like they’re in over their heads compared to the others.

Electric Arc Furnaces are probably our best bet for that - they’re an established, proven technology and can be swapped over to a green power source without any other changes (assuming the society has the energy capacity). I think I remember reading that a factory somewhere in Europe had already done that but a quick search has failed me.

Thanks!

I do have thoughts on that! This might be a little jumbled as it’s mostly off the cuff, but I think how much a society can be run only on renewable materials will depend on how much they’re willing to change their whole default framework, and what they’re prepared to give up in the short and long term to do it. Degrowth and library economy concepts would certainly apply. (I really like library economy stuff because I really like reuse).

I think there’s an abundance of resources, from existing usable items to raw materials which have already been extracted already accessable to us out in the world.

Right now there’s this default pipeline from extracted raw material to new (ideally fragile/flimsy/disposable) products to landfill. A library economy on steroids might include both tons of long-term reuse of whatever’s already been made, but also recycling of available materials that have already been extracted. There’ll always have to be new manufacture but ideally it’d be much reduced and anything made new would be designed to last and to be fixable. But that takes a ton of commitment on a societal level to using less and to sorting and distributing everything that already exists. It means mining junkyards and landfills for already-extracted raw materials and generally changing how we do things.

When it comes to energy, I think there’s a sort of hurdle we have to get over - first we need to get most of our energy to renewable, then we can optimize for long term repairability. There’s a lot of interesting recycling processes ramping up for solar panels, and as I understand it, there are less-efficient designs that are more fixable. So for the short term, I suspect whatever designs get the job done we use, and after that, we can start adjusting for long term.

My art tends to be of a society that’s as obsessed with reuse and externalities as ours is with money. They’re a society of scavengers and fixers and makers. That handwaved cultural change is sort of what I’ve chosen for my spec fix suspension of disbelief. Most of the tech I include already exists, but examining what a society that makes all its decisions around reducing harm would do with them is what I really enjoy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6j8jMn2Kcgs

They’ve been doing a bunch of cool solarpunk art for a bit, and they’ve started releasing it CC-BY (I think) including on wikimedia commons, which is great because otherwise the solarpunk category over there was mostly a bunch of AI art and proposed flags. (I’d added some of my photobashes so it wasn’t just AI representing the genre, but I’m very glad to have them contributing art with a lot of intent behind it.) I think a lot of the planning for their scenes comes from the solarpunk prompts podcast these days.

I really enjoy reading about the investigations that follow any big crypto heist, where they track the stolen money through various exchanges etc. The Swindled podcast just did one about a pretty poor attempt to launder crypto (see Razzlekhan) and Darknet diaries did one on the much more competent (suspected North Korean) heist of eth from Axie Infinity and their various laundering efforts including through Tornado cash. It’s surprisingly transparent in a lot of ways. It seems like stealing the money is often the comparatively easy part, and getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder.

There’s conversion to EV, conversion to run on woodgas or possibly conversion to an alcohol engine - I think it depends on what’s readily available locally in parts and energy sources. If you have a sawmill or work construction or deconstruction and can be burning wood scraps for fuel that already exist, gasification might make sense. If you live in a place with lots of sugarcane or another source of alcohol, that might work. Ideally your energy source is a waste product of something that’s already there, and your use doesn’t incentivize more deforestation etc (that’s the hard part).

I also started a list of car parts that can be used/repurposed for other tasks, mostly based on stuff I’d seen on permaculture and tool forums: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/using-every-part-of-the-car-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/ it’s intended more for writers/artists, but some of the links might be interesting.

Just to add, the way I pictured this working was to set up a basic smithee, probably a three sided shed so I’d have a dark place to work (helps to gauge the temp of the metal by color). I’d get some of those gas welder’s goggles with the flip up flip down lens (or use my electronic welder’s hood) so I could safely look at the work in the firepot (solarpot?) then take it inside to quickly work on it. I’d stow the forge inside the smithee (or in an attached lean-to) when not using it. One feature that might be good would be a way to cover the lens and unclip it from the forge so it can be stored in a box or wrapped up, to reduce the risks of it starting a fire.

Sure! Generally they’re just an old coffee can with a thick layer of plaster of Paris and sand or firebox cement on the inside. They cement in some torch parts so they can attach a can from a burnzomatic torch and blow fire into the small, contained space from the side while having a hole on the front (usually with some loose firebrick for a door) to insert the work.

https://makezine.com/article/workshop/making-your-own-tin-can-forge/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xv9nnEhgfuY

I don’t know that the design itself is actually applicable here, just that they’re a good demonstration that even with a small forge, you can do some pretty cool blacksmithing.

In practice I think a solar forge would have to be open from the top, and couldn’t really benefit from the tight space confining the heat, so it’d probably be closer to using a portable ferrier’s anvil like you might see reenactors use at the fair, or something like this:

Though it’d look more like that artist’s smelting rig with the big lens and all.

Thanks! I’m really excited to see what you come up with

This is great!

That’s great! I don’t have specific dimensions in mind (only because I haven’t sourced a lens yet). I’m not sure about the beam width. I think no matter what, it’ll be a narrower heat than you normally get with a coal fire or propane forge, so the blacksmith would probably have to adjust beam and shift the position of the piece to distribute the heat. But people make all kinds of things using little coffee can forges so if it allows for even that scale of project it’d be very useful.

It might not be a drop-in replacement for a traditional forge, but it could be a really cool way to preserve a lot of the practice without burning coal or gas. Let me know if I can help at all!

So I’m not sure this would qualify, it may be too simple. I’d been thinking about trying to build a solar forge (I got to learn forging from a really good blacksmith who worked with coal for a couple years, though I am very much an amateur). I’ve seen videos of people using old fresnel lenses from rear projection TVs to burn through skillsaw blades and if you can melt steel, you can certainly forge it. It might just be slow, or too focused on one spot, requiring some movement to distribute the heat, something I’d have to mess with. It’d also be a bit of a safety hazard overall, but at least it’d be outside on a paved driveway instead of of inside a shed like my old coal forge.

I was picturing something similar to this smelter but with a reused TV lens, and a fire pot where his crucible is. The mechanical parts would be for rotating it to keep the sun shining through the lens, and possibly for adjusting the focus. Stability and safety would be a big consideration, don’t want the wind blowing it around too much.

Again, not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but I’d like you to get some usable answers here. Best of luck with your project, thank you for reaching out to involve the community!

Thanks so much, that’s great to hear! And thanks for all your input! Sorry the text is small, I work on a knockoff wacom-style tablet so I get used to looking at it zoomed in and from pretty close to the screen.

Feel free to post it anywhere, I’m always delighted to find out when these images travel around a bit on their own.

Thanks so much! This was a fun one, I always loved these kind of diagrams/wimmelbilder type pictures and had a lot of fun trying to make one.

Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions!

Thanks!! That’s really good to know about Bald Cypress! That was my first guess for selecting trees. I ended up picking them and black willows, just based on range and look but I’ll take your advice and leave the willows generic. I think these chinampas are kind of overgrown at the moment, but I figure the trees don’t cover the entire thing, just the corners. I was able to find some roots to reference (mostly from washouts or other exposed roots) and tried to get the details right for cypress and willow (but I’m not an arborist and had trouble finding info on depth). Let me know what you think!

chinampas

Hi, I’ve been reading up on chinampas to try to get the details right and I was hoping to borrow some of your tree knowledge. Most sources mention a willow (Ahuejote (Salix bonplandiana)) and a cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) as the trees they used to reinforce/replace the underwater fences for soil retention. I’m sort of doing this picture as if its in New Orleans (for some of the buildings and other details anyways) and I think that’s outside these specific trees current ranges. I was wondering: can I swap in any other cypress or willow since there are some native to Louisiana or would some cause problems?

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

I’m probably not showing enough alternating layers of plant matter and mud, but I’m hoping it gets the point across. I’ve tried to find good sources, so far these diagrams are my favorites:

Some seem to show floating islands or like, a floating top layer with water underneath, inside the reed wall, which seems weird and inaccurate from what I’ve read. At this point, I mostly just want to get all the trees added, make sure they’re realistic, and find some accurate roots to include to show how they reinforce the earthworks. From what I’ve read it sounds like willow and cypress just kind of put roots everywhere (I’m used to being able to find clearer diagrams for trees like pines and oaks, but have struggled to find good drawings for these. Also might add cypress knees in the waterways where they’re really well established, we’ll see. Then I’ll start cleaning up the image and getting everything to match aesthetically.

I appreciate that a significant portion of the 40k universe’s problems aren’t actually humanity’s fault.

Thanks, I’ll definitely include that kind of dock/railings, still figuring out how to add greenery. I might shuffle the buildings around to make some room for a park