Steam

So will the inquisition do if each attempt at an engine is always imperfect, that any that even partially work, are in efficient, low powered, lasts only for a short term or possibly just simply hazardsus to human safety and life.
WIll they simply accept poor engines and just deal with them as they are? I can see it being very costly, as upkeep and maintinence for the systems, and the quality of their goods will suffer.
Or will the workers and artisans be punished for their failures and secret sabotage of the project.
I doubt that they could make riverboats capable of using steam, but the big ocean going ships could potentially be converted for use, but will never match a charis ship.

n7axw wrote:

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.

I don't think the church has the ability to build useful steam engines. That requires precision machine work and other such things as high grade steel in quantity, tools to make the tools and so on, none of which the church has.

What it comes down to is that the church still is in a manufactory consisting of artisans and Charis has undergone an industrial revolution with all that implies.

Don

Charis has better material and greater precision in machining them, but if you can make cannon, you can make steam engines. The CoGA will be making bulkier and heavier engines than Charis for the same or less power and likely lower reliability. There is no requirement for steel to make a steam engine, I believe that most early steam engines (pre 1860) used a mixture of cast and wrought iron, along with a lot of brass fittings.

Castenea wrote:
I don't think the church has the ability to build useful steam engines. That requires precision machine work and other such things as high grade steel in quantity, tools to make the tools and so on, none of which the church has.

What it comes down to is that the church still is in a manufactory consisting of artisans and Charis has undergone an industrial revolution with all that implies.

Don

Charis has better material and greater precision in machining them, but if you can make cannon, you can make steam engines. The CoGA will be making bulkier and heavier engines than Charis for the same or less power and likely lower reliability. There is no requirement for steel to make a steam engine, I believe that most early steam engines (pre 1860) used a mixture of cast and wrought iron, along with a lot of brass fittings.[/quote]

Making a steam engine is an order of magnitude harder than making a cannon (particularly a smooth bore) as cannons are rough cast then just drilled to a 1/4" accuracy. Making a steam engine requires as a first step a lathe with a machine rest as opposed to the hand held tools used for making a smooth surface on a cast cannon. It also requires numerous screwed fasteners for high speed operation (the Watt engines got away with pins and push fits), and these require a screw cutting lathe (if for no other reason than to make the taps and dies) for bulk manufacture. These skills and tools are just being explored by the breach loading rifle manufacturers but in much smaller scales .
The church is in for an even bigger shock when they get their hands on a triple expansion steam engine with its multiple precision interchangeable fasteners (not the least on the steam pipe flanges and tube fittings). The high pressure fire tube boilers with dozens of precision machined holes and tubes, precision rolled boiler plate and forged ends would further baffle them (a 300psi fire tube boiler is either a precision machined piece of equipment or an extremely high yield conventional bomb). (High pressure water tube boilers are MUCH safer but harder to build).(The blast yield is approximately the same as the same mass of gunpowder). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_explosion
Gas firing introduces another problem - furnace explosions - which is why you can fire a coal furnace with a shovel and a gas furnace only with automatic controls (oil firing is in between for risk (However I've had a gas fired boiler explode on me (due to a poorly selected fuel valve), I haven't had a either a gas or coal fired boiler do the same...). A number of coke furnaces have been erased off the map due to energy recovery boiler explosions.

Air Tech, I may have been a little late with my 1860 qualification, as I see the CoGA building equivalents of 1830's steam engines (likely hand built with no interchangeable parts), while Charis when they build a railroad will likely start with a 4-4-0 American or similar as the proof of concept. It is the lower speeds and lower pressures that will cause the CoGA to have much lower output than Charis for a given mass of steam plant.

The CoGA will have problems as the skilled labor needed to build a steam engine will overlap with those needed make rifles. While the legends about musket barrels as boiler tubes may be incorrect, gunsmiths are going to be one of the primary sources of the skilled labor to build the boiler tubes, although safehold may have much greater production of metal pipes than Earth did in 1840.

I originally posted the following in the STEAM ENGINES topic, but I think it belongs here also:

"If you're not very engineering-oriented, a very good book on this subject is THE MOST POWERFUL IDEA IN THE WORLD, by William Rosen (Random House, 2010). It traces the development of the steam engine from the earliest day to the 19th-century locomotive, marine, and stationary Corliss engenes, describing every step along the way and every problem overcome.
It will give you a very good idea of the problems the Temple mechanics will have to surmount to develop anything remotely useful.
It's a great read. Enjoy!"

AiTech wrote:

Gas firing introduces another problem - furnace explosions - which is why you can fire a coal furnace with a shovel and a gas furnace only with automatic controls (oil firing is in between for risk (However I've had a gas fired boiler explode on me (due to a poorly selected fuel valve), I haven't had a either a gas or coal fired boiler do the same...). A number of coke furnaces have been erased off the map due to energy recovery boiler explosions

As an aside - in my early days in the power business I fired a pair of 250 psig 50K/hr boilers that burned gas. The boilers sat facing each other with an aisle about 10 foot wide between them. the gas pressure to the burners was controlled by an air operated valve that was manually operated through a Bailey controller. One sat in the center of the extension of the aisle, about 5 feet away from the ends of the boilers with one's back to the boilers. The reason for that position was so that one could hear the fire. When there was a hiccup in the gas pressure, and since we were partially fed by coke gas that was made in another section of the plant, they were not all that uncommon, one could hear the change in the fire and take measures to shut the gas off and purge the boilers. The reason for sitting with one's back to the boilers was so that when the furnace pressure went haywire and that could happen for a variety of reasons, and blew the inspection doors open one would not be exposed directly to the fire and debris that accompanied those. Needless to say, long pants and long sleeve shirts were a requirement of the job. All load changes were handled by hand as was the water level and one could see the drum levels by looking at a pair of mirrors placed so that one could see them from the sitting position between the two boilers.

The boilers fed steam into a common header that led to a 3 MW condensing turbine built in 1908. One also had to keep the load evenly split between the two boilers by adjusting the firing rate.

Ahh, the good old days, I don't miss them although they were quite interesting and one had to know the systems intimately in order to be a competent operator since things could go to pot in an incredibly short period of time. The last power plant I visited as a break from the routine was a combined cycle plant where everything was controlled by the computers and one pushed a button to tell it which unit you wanted to start up but even unit selection could be left to the computer.

There were also two 400 psig boilers that had been converted to oil from traveling grate coal firing. and there was an 800 psig top fired boiler also. Nothing in the plant was automated. The plant was slated for demolition in the near future so no money that was not absolutely necessary to keep it running until retirement could be spent.

That was just the start of my life long adventure in various aspects of the power industry from production to bulk power system operations. It is absolutely mind boggling how far technology evolved in my 37 years in the power business!!!!

Dutch46 wrote:AiTech wrote:

" . . . . .That was just the start of my life long adventure in various aspects of the power industry from production to bulk power system operations. It is absolutely mind boggling how far technology evolved in my 37 years in the power business!!!!

But was it PROGRESS ?
Or merely "Change"/

chrisd wrote:

Dutch46 wrote:AiTech wrote:

" . . . . .That was just the start of my life long adventure in various aspects of the power industry from production to bulk power system operations. It is absolutely mind boggling how far technology evolved in my 37 years in the power business!!!!

But was it PROGRESS ?
Or merely "Change"/

Having been at this myself for 33 years, boiler have gotten much more efficient as the controls have permitted the amount of excess air to be reduced whilst maintaining safety. This has been possible due to the introduction of exhaust gas analyzers (the same technology reducing fuel consumption in your car) and better controllers. Improvements in boiler mechanical design have helped too but this is now small increments rather than orders of magnitude.
Having black fired a 1952 600psi gas fired boiler (fill boiler with bucket, put burning rag in boiler, open gas pilot valve, start emergency compressor when pressure gets to 150psi (bringing the pneumatic boiler controls on line), wait for 300psi, bring emergency generator online (which give you gas valve shutdown controls and emergency lube oil pumps), bring the oil firing on line, wait for 600psi and roll the 50MW main generator), I much prefer automated one button starts. That said, there are a lot of museum piece boilers still in service.
Charis at best will be limited to pneumatic controls which makes online gas analyzers hard to implement reliably (but not impossible, Foxboro built an all pneumatic gas chromatograph in the mid 70's, and Taylor built mechanical oxygen analyzers in the 1940's, so its possible) but this limits response times.

Hi Philip Stanley,

Kudos for the recommendation.

I did get it and of course read it and recommend it as background to a lot of tech development issues on Safehold.

Yup. it's pretty good.

Thanks, if I didn't thank you before.

L

Philip Stanley wrote:I originally posted the following in the STEAM ENGINES topic, but I think it belongs here also:

"If you're not very engineering-oriented, a very good book on this subject is THE MOST POWERFUL IDEA IN THE WORLD, by William Rosen (Random House, 2010). It traces the development of the steam engine from the earliest day to the 19th-century locomotive, marine, and stationary Corliss engenes, describing every step along the way and every problem overcome.
It will give you a very good idea of the problems the Temple mechanics will have to surmount to develop anything remotely useful.
It's a great read. Enjoy!"

I just read William Rosen's "The Most Powerful Idea in the World". It presents itself as the story of the development of steam. The book however is at least as much about the history of invention and the development of the industrial revolution. That's fair since the development of steam is so closely tied to both that they scarcely be separated.

I got a chuckle out of James Watt's frustration over the difficulty of coming up with a perfectly round hole to match a perfectly round piston. I bet the artisans in Zion won't be able to do it at all with their 16th century equiv. tech.

Don