Dilandu wrote:peke wrote: This thread started with a more-or-less weird subject (steampunk rocketry) and has now officially graduated to full-on crackerpottery.
More or less? Well, more or less, it is possible. It would be VERY hard, but seems that it is really possible to build - without any use of electricity - the unguided multi-stage rocket, that would be capable of launching a few pounds on LSfO (Low Safehold Orbit).
But it would be enormously costly and hard to build. I inclined to think that it would be possible to synthesize effective solid fuel on pure chemical and thermal reactions, but it would be costly, the construction work of the rockets would be unadequate (simply because the non-electric power tools are unsufficient for such accuracy of operations). Also, because we couldn't put any testing equipment onboard, we wouldn't be able to determine what's going wrong with failed launches, and we would be forced to just build a hundreds of this rockets and fire them in hope that at least one would work.
The practical use of this rocket is almost zero. The only thing, that it could possibly do, is to launch some sort of inflatable satellite, made of metal foil, to serve as the low-orbital object for astronomical observations. I really doubt that it would be cost-effective.
You might be surprised what can be achieved with non-electric powered equipment. The late Victorian metal smiths were quite capable of building large & light structures and the tooling used to build the early rockets was all manually operated lathes and milling machines operated by skilled tradesmen (and women in many cases). The limiting factors are more to do with alloys that need electrochemical refining like aluminum and titanium. Iron & Nickel alloys would have to be used in stead (and have historically - including being used for aircraft structures as stainless steel has similar strength to weight ratios).
Numerically controlled machines date to the 1790's, Babbage had a design for a functional programmable computer (but a satellite launcher doesn't need one, analog computers are adequate) and an A-4 (V-2) or Scud class launcher scaled up to Redstone size could orbit an ECHO class mirrored balloon communications satellite (look it up...)(which could produce interesting reactions from the OBS as it pops up in front of it, if nothing else).