Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?

Granted that the burning of some fossil fuel is going to be necessary, but in our time line, the majority of fossil fuels are burned either for transportation or to generate electricity. When the proscriptions are overturned, then it will be possible to shift over to an electric based society, and the burning of much of the fossil fuels will cease. The period for this to happen will be much shorter than in our time line in part because there will not be much in the way of personal transportation for quite some time, and no need for electricity at all. Therefore most of the problems that we are suffering from should never arise, except very locally (Howsmyn has the problem at Delthak, but that appears to the the only place so far).

Weird Harold wrote:I don't think anyone is suggesting that Steam be replaced by Stirling Engine technology contemporary with any given Steam tech. What they're suggesting is skipping over the low power, inefficient Stirling engines that lost out to Steam and Otto Cycle IC engines, to Stirling Designs that push the bleeding edge of Safehold's materials tech but avoid many of the drawbacks to Steam -- like the need for frequent water replenishment.

That's certainly what I think I'm doing.

There are four kinds of engines you need to worry about (since "aero" and "rocket" aren't really germane; no one's going to be launching communications satellites any time soon...): marine, traction, stationary, and portable.

Marine engines power ships; traction engines move by exerting force on the substrate (so tractors, cars, railway locomotives, it's all traction engines); stationary engines power the thing they're associated with (factories, big pumps, cable cars, the ship-parts winch at a shipyard...), and portable engines can be moved around to provide power where needed (the classic donkey engine or the naval portable pump come to mind).

Safehold, or at least the Empire of Charis, are going to need something for all four of these types. It doesn't need the same thing to meet all four requirements.

Marine engines are going to be steam; the Navy has gone with steam, that's where the trained personnel are going to come from, there's an established production capability. There's going to be a shortage of all the skills associated with steam, and those skills are going to be prioritized for marine uses for awhile because Charis is a maritime empire and needs its commerce to move expeditiously.

Traction engines can be steam -- many, many locomotives, plus various steam tractors, road locomotives, and steam cars culminating with the Stanley Steamer in our history -- but could also be Stirling because, hey, this is totally new on Safehold and simple matters. Many early cars had a driver and an engineer; that's worth avoiding, and they won't get to the Model A or the Stanley Steamer in one go. Especially since traction engines are a relatively low priority on Safehold, which has draft dragons. It's probably worth building a railroad and using dragon traction, if the things can pull twenty five ton loads on roads they should be able to pull two hundred and fifty tons on rails. (1:10:30, road, rail, canal, is the historical horse-traction ratio.) You need a good locomotive to beat a four dragon hitch.

Stationary engines might be steam, but stationary engines are an area where cost and reliability tend to be dominant concerns. Little ten-employee shops want power tools, too; they might convert their water wheel to run an air compressor, or they might not have a water wheel because they're being newly set up in Chisholm. So a Stirling engine is a sensible possibility there; you need someone who can manage a fire, rather than who can manage and maintain a boiler. (Stirlings, like a steam engine, can burn almost anything; this is an external combustion advantage, you don't have to have an oil refinery the way you do with internal combustion engines.)

Portable engines are an area where a quick start matters; your portable pump in a marine application isn't something you want to have to raise steam for half an hour to use! (Nor the pump on your possibly still dragon-drawn fire engine in an urban setting, for that matter.) So this is an area where a Stirling engine, with its quicker start time, might be useful. Eventually you might have flash-tube boilers for your steam engine but you're going to need welding for that and quite possibly electric welding, which is a bit of a trouble with the Proscriptions.

Diesels could also be useful but you must have the oil refineries and distribution first; the historical route to that is via lighting oil, kerosene, but on Safehold it looks like it's going to be marine engines and then both lighting oil and plastics. (Bakelite got invented when the RN started using oil and needed to get rid of the byproducts.) Oil refineries have this ghastly tendency to explode; even with all the help available via Owl, it's going to take time and learning experiences to get oil refining set up effectively.

Graydon wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:I don't think anyone is suggesting that Steam be replaced by Stirling Engine technology contemporary with any given Steam tech. What they're suggesting is skipping over the low power, inefficient Stirling engines that lost out to Steam and Otto Cycle IC engines, to Stirling Designs that push the bleeding edge of Safehold's materials tech but avoid many of the drawbacks to Steam -- like the need for frequent water replenishment.

That's certainly what I think I'm doing.

There are four kinds of engines you need to worry about (since "aero" and "rocket" aren't really germane; no one's going to be launching communications satellites any time soon...): marine, traction, stationary, and portable.

Comm sats are no problem - Merlin has been placing them using his recon skimmer for upwards of 5 years now.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Granted that the burning of some fossil fuel is going to be necessary, but in our time line, the majority of fossil fuels are burned either for transportation or to generate electricity. When the proscriptions are overturned, then it will be possible to shift over to an electric based society, and the burning of much of the fossil fuels will cease. The period for this to happen will be much shorter than in our time line in part because there will not be much in the way of personal transportation for quite some time, and no need for electricity at all. Therefore most of the problems that we are suffering from should never arise, except very locally (Howsmyn has the problem at Delthak, but that appears to the the only place so far).

No need for personal transportation or electricity? Hardly. There's likely going to be a explosion of electrical demand and personal transportation (cars and trucks) once the OBS is taken down. Why wouldn't there be? A part of the plan is to get people used to more modern technology and to get them thinking of developing their own. It would be very odd to jump straight from a pre-steam/steam age to nuclear power or beyond when most of the people in the world are still in the pre-steam era thinking. They can't just start hauling stuff out of OWL's cave and rebuilding the Federation level technology right away. It's going to be generations to advance Safehold to the Federation level of technology even when the OBS and Proscriptions are removed. And it's going to take generations to develop the technological processes and progress for the rest of the world to eventually get to the Federation level of technology.

If I remember right, Merlin is attempting to have Safehold develop its technological progress as much on its own as possible. A detailed and documented transition from the pre-steam days to newer and more efficient technology and knowledge. A step by step change that slowly introduces the newer tech and more importantly, the thinking process to understand it to the rest of Safehold. That is going to take time. Generations. Think of it this way: in our own world, someone born at the beginning of the last century (1900s) would have if they lived to be 100 years old, the development of airplanes, tanks, radios, to jets, computers, to the internet, the birth of rocketry and the landing of people on the moon, probes leaving our solar system and landing on other planets, an entire cultural evolution, and more. That is an immense amount of change in 100 years. And that's just to our current level of technology. It seems like people are wanting to jump right from the early pre-electric tech to after the OBS is taken down, right into the Federation level of technology because they don't want to wait 100-150-200 years of cultural development that will be needed for the majority of the planet to understand HOW to use and work the technology without thinking it's from Hell.

That's not to say that they can't use technology to make the process as clean as possible (cleaner burning vehicles and such), but one way to make the idea of modern technology accepted is by letting it spread, letting ideas like automobiles be used and spread to a lot of people. Widespread use of technology. Given time they will develop nuclear reactors, but I wouldn't expect them in less than 80-100 years after the end of this story arc. So there will likely be coal and nat. gas burning powerplants just to provide for the demand of electricity to everyone.

One note on Delthak, Howsmyn has the pollution problem he does because he can't go to electricity, but also because he has the largest smelters/foundrys in the empire located there. Even if he could go to electricity, he'd still have a pollution problem since it would likely take a coal burning powerplant to generate the needed power his smelters/foundrys and factories would demand. Industry and manufactoring sucks up a LOT of electricity.

Castenea wrote:

Randomiser wrote:I'm just not seeing that your contention that the IC engine was instrumental in removing smog, was actually valid anywhere I know about. I suspect that even for the USA you are going to have to argue that sourcing fuel for the IC engine drove the oil industry which produced gas heating etc, which is dubious given some of the posts about kerosene up thread.

Instrumental, no, but it was a part (primarily in transportation). Probably contributed to the research that gave improved injectors, atomizers and alloys that are parts of the improved cooking and heating systems.

The heart of my argument is that the smog problem was never caused by IC engines in the first place.

No, but it is undeniable that IC engines changed the nature of Smog ("photochemical" smog is almost entirely due to IC byproducts;) in cities like Los Angeles the Smog problem was/is entirely due to IC Byproducts.

All of the dithering about whether IC engines alone cause pollution is besides the point that Fossil Fuels are A) the prime cause of Smog whether from coal fires or gasoline engines, and B) a limited resource that get ever more expensive to find and produce until it runs out completely, and C) has for more and better uses as feedstock for Plastics and the chemical industry, and D) can't be recycled if burned.

Steam power will fill any needs Safehold might have until the Proscriptions are lifted. Once they are lifted, electricity, and fusion become possible, bypassing the need for IC engines entirely. Electrical generation can be steered away from fossil fuels and into hydro, tidal, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. Railroads can be electrified via catenary or third rail power -- as "Bullet trains" are powered now.

Zakharra wrote: No need for personal transportation or electricity? Hardly. There's likely going to be a explosion of electrical demand and personal transportation (cars and trucks) once the OBS is taken down. Why wouldn't there be?

Personal transportation:

FFT didn't say anything about personal transportation, he just specified "transportation."

That would include rail (light and heavy), maritime, canals, etc. Currently on Safehold, personal transport (as we know it in the US) is a foreign concept. If it is never introduced, it will never be missed.

US cities used to, and many European cities still do, rely on light rail, subways, and other mass-transit options for personal travel.

Electricity:
Once the Proscriptions and OBS are dealt with, Electricity becomes an option for most of the transportation modes; electrified rail lines, subways, and other mass-transit modes. Even "personal transport" can be electric -- there were several electric-runabouts on the market around the turn of the last century.

Electricity doesn't require fossil fuels. It can be generated in many different ways, and the heat provided by coal can be replaced in most steam plants in a wide variety of ways -- including nuclear fission or fusion. It really wouldn't even require replacing the steam turbines or generators to do away with coal and/or natural gas fired generation.

Zakharra, you are correctly describing the slow step by step process Merlin wants now. However he and the rest of the Inner Circle feel a moral imperative, and they are moral people, to expose the lie behind the current religion on Safehold as soon as soon as safely possible. Once the great reveal happens lots of people are going to get access to TF technical knowledge not just a handful and the rate of change will go through the roof. Given how deeply the proscription against it is built into that religion they are just not going to be able to use electricity openly until after the great reveal, by which time the need to justify every incremental change to the inquisition will be over and done with.

Graydon wrote: It's probably worth building a railroad and using dragon traction, if the things can pull twenty five ton loads on roads they should be able to pull two hundred and fifty tons on rails. (1:10:30, road, rail, canal, is the historical horse-traction ratio.) You need a good locomotive to beat a four dragon hitch.

The "engineers" at the Delfrac site are already talking about doing this.

Zakharra wrote: Think of it this way: in our own world, someone born at the beginning of the last century (1900s) would have if they lived to be 100 years old, the development of airplanes, tanks, radios, to jets, computers, to the internet, the birth of rocketry and the landing of people on the moon, probes leaving our solar system and landing on other planets, an entire cultural evolution, and more.

You mean like our parents and grandparents lived from the last days of sail to men on the moon? From abaci to calculators to computers, from telegraphs to telephones and email? From our grandmothers and mothers shopping everyday for fresh food to cook on coal or wood stoves to fridges, freezers and electric stoves/cookers? From beating carpets in the back yard to vacuum cleaners? From boiling water on the stove/cooker to hot water heaters? From outdoor toilets, chamber pots and tin tubs in front of the fire to luxurious salles de bains with showers, soaker tubs, flush toilets and bidets? From walking to nationwide bus and train services and electic cars to IC cars, jet planes, and electric cars (oops, not exactly new)

So what are we going to see that comes anywhere near what changes they lived through, and in many ways the changes that Charis and Safehold are about to go through as this stuff leaks out.

Weird Harold wrote:Personal transportation:

FFT didn't say anything about personal transportation, he just specified "transportation."

That would include rail (light and heavy), maritime, canals, etc. Currently on Safehold, personal transport (as we know it in the US) is a foreign concept. If it is never introduced, it will never be missed.

US cities used to, and many European cities still do, rely on light rail, subways, and other mass-transit options for personal travel.

Personal land transportation on Safehold includes carriages and horses, currently limited to the wealthy and for the non-wealthy, their feet. Does anyone think that the non-wealthy do not aspire to getting somewhere where only personal transportation of the not-feet variety can take them?