Advanced tech without electricity/internal combustion?

Cheopis wrote:

n7axw wrote:Just a comment I was wanting to make about early vintage cars. If they were properly maintained, the would run reliably. Touring cars for long range trips were already there prior to WW1. They did have their drawbacks. Fifty plus thousand miles for most of them and they were worn out. They were inefficient by today's standards. Roads and tires were of poor quality. But the other side of it was that the repairs were usually pretty simple and engines could be overhauled or rebuilt.

My high school and college years were during the muscle car era of the sixties. The drawback here was still efficiency, but the wearability of the cars improved dramatically to well over a hundred thousand miles.

Modern cars really began with computer regulated ignition systems and fuel injection. A well maintained vehicle will now go over a quarter of a million miles without too much trouble. Fuel efficiency is up, probably double on average from 30 years ago.

I suspect that the next step is widespread distribution of the hybrids that run pimarily on battery power but have a small ic engine whose primary role is to keep the battery charged. With the Prius, the Volt and other offerings, different variations on that theme are going on right now.

I suspect that purely battery operated cars that are practical for most applications are still some years in the future.

Don

I just wish that the best vehicles weren't targeted for elimination.

I have a 1998 Ford Ranger with the 2.5L 4 cylinder engine. The factory says it should get 24 or so MPG highway, but if you DON'T drive it like you stole it and keep the tailgate down, she gets 25MPG in city and 30ish on the highway. Always has, through both engines. First Engine died at 200k miles. 150k of those miles were delivery truck and contractor miles. The engine had some issues in the last 50k miles due to wear and tear caused by two instances of overheating due to water loss.

The clutch is original at 250k miles, and when the engine was replaced at 200k miles, the clutch plates were inspected and I was told they were halfway through their usable thickness. I hope to get 500k miles on that clutch if I can avoid delivery/contractor jobs for another twenty years.

And Ford chose to get rid of the Ranger. The hands-down best light utility vehicle they have ever created IMHO.

*grumble*

I had a 97 ranger with a 4 banger I acqired at 110,000 miles an drove to over 200,000. Apart from gas, oil and tires, just 2 minor mainainence slips. It was one of the most cost effective vehicles I ever ownned.

Don

Cheopis wrote:

n7axw wrote:Just a comment I was wanting to make about early vintage cars. If they were properly maintained, the would run reliably. Touring cars for long range trips were already there prior to WW1. They did have their drawbacks. Fifty plus thousand miles for most of them and they were worn out. They were inefficient by today's standards. Roads and tires were of poor quality. But the other side of it was that the repairs were usually pretty simple and engines could be overhauled or rebuilt.

My high school and college years were during the muscle car era of the sixties. The drawback here was still efficiency, but the wearability of the cars improved dramatically to well over a hundred thousand miles.

Modern cars really began with computer regulated ignition systems and fuel injection. A well maintained vehicle will now go over a quarter of a million miles without too much trouble. Fuel efficiency is up, probably double on average from 30 years ago.

I suspect that the next step is widespread distribution of the hybrids that run pimarily on battery power but have a small ic engine whose primary role is to keep the battery charged. With the Prius, the Volt and other offerings, different variations on that theme are going on right now.

I suspect that purely battery operated cars that are practical for most applications are still some years in the future.

Don

I just wish that the best vehicles weren't targeted for elimination.

I have a 1998 Ford Ranger with the 2.5L 4 cylinder engine. The factory says it should get 24 or so MPG highway, but if you DON'T drive it like you stole it and keep the tailgate down, she gets 25MPG in city and 30ish on the highway. Always has, through both engines. First Engine died at 200k miles. 150k of those miles were delivery truck and contractor miles. The engine had some issues in the last 50k miles due to wear and tear caused by two instances of overheating due to water loss.

The clutch is original at 250k miles, and when the engine was replaced at 200k miles, the clutch plates were inspected and I was told they were halfway through their usable thickness. I hope to get 500k miles on that clutch if I can avoid delivery/contractor jobs for another twenty years.

And Ford chose to get rid of the Ranger. The hands-down best light utility vehicle they have ever created IMHO.

*grumble*

Oh, they still make it--a follow up model, actually, arguably better than previous. It is just that Ford has decided that US folks should not have anything smaller than F-150. If it ain't a big V8, it's to be sneered upon or something.

Too bad xenon lights are not available for it, as it would otherwise be an interesting option for me.

How hard it would be to invent and design good diesel on Safehold? It should be possible and only thing which we need to have is fuel, but oil should be discovered pretty quickly so that's not a big problem?

Draken wrote:How hard it would be to invent and design good diesel on Safehold?

Depends on your definition of "good." Deisel engines, both two and four stroke, are well within Charisian tech levels and they would run fine on fire-vine oil or kraken oil.

By Charisian standards, they would be a huge leap forward in technollogy, but by today's standards, they would be horrible inefficient pollution producers.

Weird Harold wrote:

Draken wrote:How hard it would be to invent and design good diesel on Safehold?

Depends on your definition of "good." Deisel engines, both two and four stroke, are well within Charisian tech levels and they would run fine on fire-vine oil or kraken oil.

By Charisian standards, they would be a huge leap forward in technollogy, but by today's standards, they would be horrible inefficient pollution producers.

I doubt "well within". You may need better machining tolerances than they've got yet, and you need more than fuel, you need crankcase oil and injectors and valves and really precise timing. Then you need a transmission, or at least gearing. Howsmyn's worry about steam turbines was cutting reduction gears; the existing steam engines for ships are very probably direct drive. (As might be the turbines on the air compressors.)

So I think Charis would be OK for (probably) alloys and casting the block, all the bits aren't there yet. Going to be there given another twenty years or so, certainly, but there are currently things like the required range of specific lubricants (and thus petroleum chemistry) that is nascent at best in 896. Fuel filters. There's a lot of learning experiences.

Graydon wrote:
I doubt "well within". You may need better machining tolerances than they've got yet, and you need more than fuel, you need crankcase oil and injectors and valves and really precise timing. Then you need a transmission, or at least gearing. Howsmyn's worry about steam turbines was cutting reduction gears; the existing steam engines for ships are very probably direct drive. (As might be the turbines on the air compressors.)

So I think Charis would be OK for (probably) alloys and casting the block, all the bits aren't there yet. Going to be there given another twenty years or so, certainly, but there are currently things like the required range of specific lubricants (and thus petroleum chemistry) that is nascent at best in 896. Fuel filters. There's a lot of learning experiences.

You are probably right on this one, Graydon. But consider, with steam Charis cheated and with Owl's help skipped almost 200 years of development to create a fairly advanced result. There is no reason to believe that Howsmyn, who has access to Owl's files, couldn't do the same with diesel, skipping the worst mistakes and the earlier stages of the IC engine.

Don

n7axw wrote:You are probably right on this one, Graydon. But consider, with steam Charis cheated and with Owl's help skipped almost 200 years of development to create a fairly advanced result. There is no reason to believe that Howsmyn, who has access to Owl's files, couldn't do the same with diesel, skipping the worst mistakes and the earlier stages of the IC engine.

I think this runs into the distinction between what and how. Howsmyn certainly knows what to do in some sense, but even with complete instructions -- and there's information Owl probably doesn't have, because why would someone in the 24th century store detailed operating instructions for a low-tech oil refinery? we know Owl hasn't got the full corpus of Federation knowledge -- that doesn't get you the deployed technology.

For diesel, you need a bunch of people who understand metallurgy, machining, petroleum chemistry, and the underlying mass of design and thermodynamics and can explain what is supposed to happen. That's relatively difficult for Howsmyn because you are past your traditional metallurgy, you had no machining in the "precision interchangeable parts" sense, you had no chemistry at all never mind a refinery, and you had no design. You have to create all that stuff.

In the case of the steam engine, there's a history of pressure cookers (probably big ones), laundry boilers, brass working, burning coal, hydraulics at least as far as pumps for canal locks, and, per the author, "good plumbing"; existing production of seamless tubing seems like a possibility. And steam engines are just relatively simple mechanically. So the roughly 1900-era steam engines are, metaphorically, as high as Howsmyn can reach from where Charis was standing. There's a certain element of being up on tippy-toes, too, but steam doesn't involve anything really novel; it's pieces Charis mostly already has undergoing a novel arrangement. Having Owl as a backstop means it's the correct novel arrangement on the first try, but Owl isn't providing any of the how, just the what. The how was, just, stretching, part of the existing toolkit.

Diesel is out of reach. To get it, where Charis is standing has to rise. That's a lot of work and a lot of people having learning experiences and hopefully a minimum of explosions as people figure out how you distill the volatile fractions. There isn't any way to keep that work for taking substantial time.

Graydon wrote:I doubt "well within". You may need better machining tolerances than they've got yet, and you need more than fuel, you need crankcase oil and injectors and valves and really precise timing. Then you need a transmission, or at least gearing. Howsmyn's worry about steam turbines was cutting reduction gears; the existing steam engines for ships are very probably direct drive. (As might be the turbines on the air compressors.)

You may have a point about a transmission, but early Diesels were very low RPM, direct drive affairs that didn't require much better machining than Steam engines of comparable size.

Injectors aren't really needed for two stroke Diesels -- model airplanes and cars used to use two-stroke Diesels (sometimes with electric glow-plug for starting, sometimes without) that ran on "lighter fluid" and used the fuel for lubrication.

Diesels that are within Charis' capabilities aren't what I would consider "good," but Charis could build them and they would be better than what most of Safehold is currently using. (but not significantly better than the steam power Charis is using.)

Graydon wrote:For diesel, you need a bunch of people who understand metallurgy, machining, petroleum chemistry, and the underlying mass of design and thermodynamics and can explain what is supposed to happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_engi ... el_engines Just for reference.

The requirements you are calling for aren't needed for "primitive" engines. They make mass production simpler, but Diesels predate mass production and interchangeable parts.

The original question still hangs on the definition of "good Diesel."

n7axw wrote:
I had a 97 ranger with a 4 banger I acqired at 110,000 miles an drove to over 200,000. Apart from gas, oil and tires, just 2 minor mainainence slips. It was one of the most cost effective vehicles I ever ownned.

Don

I bought mine new, for cash, with part of the settlement I received for the aftermath of an argument with a hydraulic cylinder (it won handily.) By far the best investment I ever made. I didn't even blink when I had to replace the engine. It was expensive, but worth it to keep the truck. If I ever have to get another vehicle, which I hope I won't, I might have to look into buying a foreign built Ranger if they seem to be as well-built as the US-built ones were.

I won't buy a used vehicle though. I'm strongly convinced that the reason the Ranger has done so well by me is that I know how to drive and cause very little wear and tear on the vehicle. It's not a young/old thing either. My mother has always driven all her vehicles like she stole them. My friends used to tell me I drove like I was 4x my age (until I got too old for that to be plausible in any way, LOL.) I would _never_ buy a vehicle from my mother, even if she only owned it a week.