Steam

SYED wrote:we know the inquisition got plans for an engine, but how developed were they. Also, the boss wants results, will they care about safety issues?

AirTech wrote:

SYED wrote:we know the inquisition got plans for an engine, but how developed were they. Also, the boss wants results, will they care about safety issues?

Textev says they got a description - no plans, so they know it exists but have to invent it themselves (or target the theft of relevant drawings or prototypes). If Charis really wants to mess with them they should engineer a prototype that is right on the edge of safety using high strength steels and then watch what happens when the CoGA tries to replicate it exactly with sub-standard parts. (Leaving out a few details like relief valves, boiler drains and lubrication systems would add to the fun).

AirTech wrote:Relief valves have only been used since the steam pressure got above 50psi ...

Weird Harold wrote:

AirTech wrote:Relief valves have only been used since the steam pressure got above 50psi ...

With the input from Merlin and OWL, I'm pretty sure that Relief valves are part of the designs. For that matter, with a couple millennia of science behind them, I'd be surprised if the Archangels didn't include safety valves in the pressure cookers provided at "Creation."

Charis isn't starting from scratch with Steam power, it has millennia of data to draw on both through Marlin and OWL and through the Writ.

AirTech wrote:The Charis does, the Church doesn't - hence messing with their minds, other options would be give them a ridiculously complicated engine with fine tolerances to copy - we already know that they can't copy the rifles, so copying a precision steam engine should really twist them up.

Midst Toil And Tribulation
wrote:Like the steam engine they’d just observed. Thanks to Owl—and Merlin, of course—Howsmyn had completely bypassed the first hundred or hundred and fifty years of the steam engine’s development back on long-dead Earth. He’d gone directly to water-tube boilers and compound expansion engines, with steam pressures of almost three hundred pounds per square inch, something Earth hadn’t approached until the beginning of its twentieth century. Oh, his initial engine had been a single-cylinder design, but that had been as much a test of the concept as anything else. He’d moved on to double-cylinder expansion engines for his first canal boat trials, but no canal boat offered anything like enough room for that monster they’d just watched in action. Still, the boat engines had been a valuable learning exercise … and even they operated at a far higher pressure—and efficiency—than anything attainable before the very end of Old Earth’s nineteenth century!

The advances he’d already made in metallurgy, riveting and welding, and quality control had helped to make those pressures and temperatures possible, but Safehold had always had a working empirical understanding of hydraulics. That was one reason Howsmyn’s hydro-accumulators had been relatively easy for Wylsynn to approve even before he’d been admitted to the inner circle; they’d simply been one more application—admittedly, an ingenious one—of concepts which had been used in the waterworks the”archangels” had made part of Safehold’s infrastructure from the Day of Creation. But the compact efficiency of the engines Howsmyn was about to introduce would dwarf even the hydro-accumulator’s impact on what Merlin called his “power budget.” So perhaps it wasn’t surprising Wylsynn had been more focused on that increase than on the even greater potentials of the electricity he still understood so poorly himself.

Weird Harold wrote:

AirTech wrote:The Charis does, the Church doesn't - hence messing with their minds, other options would be give them a ridiculously complicated engine with fine tolerances to copy - we already know that they can't copy the rifles, so copying a precision steam engine should really twist them up.

The Go4 has the Writ' precautions for pressure cookers, not the rest.

However, there's no particular need to come up with "ridiculously complicated" steam engines; the steam engines Charis is using are more than complicated enough:

Midst Toil And Tribulation
wrote:Like the steam engine they’d just observed. Thanks to Owl—and Merlin, of course—Howsmyn had completely bypassed the first hundred or hundred and fifty years of the steam engine’s development back on long-dead Earth. He’d gone directly to water-tube boilers and compound expansion engines, with steam pressures of almost three hundred pounds per square inch, something Earth hadn’t approached until the beginning of its twentieth century. Oh, his initial engine had been a single-cylinder design, but that had been as much a test of the concept as anything else. He’d moved on to double-cylinder expansion engines for his first canal boat trials, but no canal boat offered anything like enough room for that monster they’d just watched in action. Still, the boat engines had been a valuable learning exercise … and even they operated at a far higher pressure—and efficiency—than anything attainable before the very end of Old Earth’s nineteenth century!

The advances he’d already made in metallurgy, riveting and welding, and quality control had helped to make those pressures and temperatures possible, but Safehold had always had a working empirical understanding of hydraulics. That was one reason Howsmyn’s hydro-accumulators had been relatively easy for Wylsynn to approve even before he’d been admitted to the inner circle; they’d simply been one more application—admittedly, an ingenious one—of concepts which had been used in the waterworks the”archangels” had made part of Safehold’s infrastructure from the Day of Creation. But the compact efficiency of the engines Howsmyn was about to introduce would dwarf even the hydro-accumulator’s impact on what Merlin called his “power budget.” So perhaps it wasn’t surprising Wylsynn had been more focused on that increase than on the even greater potentials of the electricity he still understood so poorly himself.

AirTech wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:However, there's no particular need to come up with "ridiculously complicated" steam engines; the steam engines Charis is using are more than complicated enough:...

But it would be fun...

Weird Harold wrote:Don't you mean it "will be" fun?

The Go4 and minions trying to duplicate Charisian steam engines should be as entertaining as a fireworks display -- which it may well resemble.

SYED wrote:I bet charis has been using better materials and techniques to make the steam engines, so i can see things going bad for the church.
I wonder if they might attempted the pressure workshops that the empire has started to build. That is sure to cause them stripe, their own efficiency might be inproved, but with the way charis is growing, then they might be forced to upgrade to work.