AHC: 19TH century British moon landing

Had the time to look at basalt fibre, very interesting but probably out of league for Victorian industry.

"Credit has to be given to a Frenchman from Paris, Paul Dhé, who in 1923 got a US patent for extruding filaments frombasalt. It is known that in the 1950/60’s in Moscow and in Prague, in today’s Russia and Czech Republic among other places, research in this field started. In the 60’ and 70’ intensive R&D efforts took place in the North-West of the USA – which by the way has large basalt deposits...[more history]

The move from the lab experiments stage to full scale production proved to be a lot less straightforward than anticipated: one thought initially of a simple extrapolation of the production of
glass... Why so difficult ?

First, the melting temperature of basalt is significantly higher than that of glass. Second, whereas molten glass is more or less transparent to I.R., which allows heating from the top (gas burners)while obtaining a sufficiently homogeneous temperature in the melt, molten basalt is black...
Heating molten basalt from the top results in a non homogeneous temperature in the melt with a negative temperature gradient of about 80°C per inch from the bath’s surface down......[more technical stuff]"

http://www.basaltex.com/files/cms1/TUT-49-Basalte%20gb.pdf

But this shouldn't be too much of a problem after all since asbestos-resin sheets did apparently a good job in OTL as this New Scientist article from 1961 explains:

Article

Here is more info on the patent:
http://www.google.com/patents/US3943208

As for the suggestion of using rubber or camphor it would be really intersting if a chart comparing them to OTL fuels exits :).
 
Ok non-serious guys, please remember we are not in ASB forum; fun is fun but the question here is seriously, can 19th century tech that is precociously advanced in only a limited degree* enable a moon landing in recognizably Victorian times (with or with Victoria herself surviving or having even reigned) or not?

I've fallen pretty silent here because I do veer toward the idea that no, it's just too much. In order to send enough mass to encounter the moon for Jules Verne-like technology to enable a landing, we have to assume the rockets are somewhat less efficient--maybe not too drastically so, but the mass budget goes up and given the large delta-Vs even small inefficiencies multiply the masses involved tremendously.

So yes I can visualize late Victorian materials and machining enabling a rocket of some kind, but the cumulative total of mass launched into orbit and beyond would dwarf an Apollo mission, therefore the launching systems would either number in many dozens of launches or involve rockets that would dwarf a Saturn V! (Or a bit of both). It would be a colossal enterprise.

To me the worst, trickiest problem is, how exactly can they land safely on the moon if they don't have radio technology at least up to end of WWII standards, to enable landing radar? Can it be done by eyeball alone?

It would be a great and perilous adventure indeed! And a high chance of a tragic failure of one too.

Nevertheless I've had some fun trying to visualize the hardware they'd be able to make to address the basic problems. I invite others to reply in that spirit, leaving Cavorite or the thingie Turtledove had those Renaissance-level aliens all stumbling on or other such methods that involve either superscience beyond human ken as of this date or outright fantasy for the forum where we can have those things--a forum I'm not ashamed to participate in actively.

But it isn't here. Neither is dismissing the idea that Victorians might perhaps in principle have launched stuff at least into orbit, not out of hand anyway.

I for one think the basic logic of history is against it; human capabilities develop more or less organically, with one strand of developing technology enabling others, so precocious pushing of a chosen few while others don't advance so much seems unlikely to me. Also of course if we have Victorian era launchers and rocket engines etc, we have to consider where else they and the technology enabling them might be applied to transform those societies aside from enabling space missions.

But the thread makes me think maybe it might, in uncommon timelines, be doable, with known science behind it.
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*so it isn't just a matter of fiddling with dates or an ancient POD that results in general levels of technology being about 70 years ahead across the board--which would also, according to the Strong Butterfly paradigm that prevails at the "serious" pages of this site (I protest and have counterarguments but bow to the governing consensus about the rules here) mean the societies of the ATL would have to be completely different from OTL.
 
To me the worst, trickiest problem is, how exactly can they land safely on the moon if they don't have radio technology at least up to end of WWII standards, to enable landing radar? Can it be done by eyeball alone?

Earlier radio/radar tech usually isnt too hard. The usual way is to have Henry Cavendish actually publish his works. This leads to James Clerk Maxwell developing relativity and quantum theory in the 1880s. This then allows Tesla to create point transistors in the 1890s. This could potentiality be accelerated even more.

Only a minor victory for this whole plan, still, the more we chip away, the easier it will be I suppose.
 

Kingpoleon

Banned
Philip I dies in 1060, supposedly poisoned by Pro-William traitors or by those who support his son Louis as King. In 1060, his successor King Louis VI demanded the title Grand Duke of Normandy and marched on William. William agreed to give him the title so long as he remained as Duke of Normandy, so Louis agreed. William conquered England as per OTL except for a few months difference. Louis proceeded to demand he be named King of England with William as Grand Duke of England and Wales.

William refused and began marching to France. Louis attempted to recall his demand, but it was too late. He was captured, and after the Louist forces were defeated at Brionne, William became King of France and England, Grand Duke of Normandy. Eventually, in 1084, Louis managed to seize his prison castle, Brionne, and restore order to the area. He marched on Paris and defeated William, killing the King himself.

The King's son Magnus seizes control of the Norman French army and manages to retreat to Normandy, where almost two hundred thousand pro-Norman civilians and seventy thousand soldiers fled. Almost all except Magnus and the last ten thousand soldiers managed to escape before Louist forces show up. Magnus holds the front until only about five hundred Norman forces are left. Four hundred and eighty-eight manage to reach the ships, but Magnus turns and kills almost eight hundred more men with fifteen men.

In 1352, England begins the Renaissance due to its great population and intellectuals. By 1800, air is the only way to go and expand the population. In 1832, Magnus III, "The Second Great", declares man has reached space. On May 3, 1851, eight British astronauts land on the Moon. By 1900, the Moon is hosting a population of some two hundred thousand people and a developing atmosphere.

In 1958, Mars is hosting a population of thirty-five thousand and will have a developed atmosphere in 2015.
 
I must admit, the "Actual Victorian tech moon mission" idea is pretty damn awesome, however, here's a cheating question: Define "British".

After all, if Greco-Roman civilization doesn't fall and/or industrializes, then all this tech could be achieved well before the 1800s. In which case a "British" (IITL more Brythonic than English) moon landing is both possible, and likely unremarkable by the time.

EDIT: After some research I have discovered that both Kerosene and Liquid Oxygen were commercially available by the 1890s. Oxygen was experimentally liquified as early as 1877. If we can accelerate the process (particularly for liquid oxygen), we could build a Kerosene-Oxygen engine (the same propellant used in the first stage of the Saturn V). If we are feeling particularly generous, given the timeframe, I don't doubt that the technology needed for the production of liquid oxygen can be turned on Hydrogen. Two questions, firstly, could the Victorians reasonably keep the propellant cool enough to stop it from sublimating before launch? I think so, but am not positive. Second, could a less efficient rocket be built using highly pressurized Oxygen and/or Hydrogen gas? That would be technologically simpler. Of course, it means a much bigger rocket, and probably renders hydrogen more trouble than it's worth.

EDIT2: It's also technically possible I believe, for Victorians to produce APCP solid rockets (i.e. solid fuel rockets like the Space shuttle SRBs), however, such would require a great deal of luck to discover the correct chemicals within the timeframe. I suppose that the ingredients of HTPB were well known but I don't know if they have the tech to actually produce it. (I've only been able to find one method of HTPB production, notably an advanced technique from the 70s, and the tech for that wasn't even proposed until 1936. Of Course, there are other methods, but I don't know what they are)
 
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Francis Bacon decides to spend more time playing with magnets rather then frozen food and discovers the basic effects of electromagnetism. Sure he believes the magnetism is caused by the flow of aether through the wire and that this aether flow gives the earth its poles but he does create rudimentary DC motor/generators or as he calls them aether mills. By rotating a magnet in one coil of wire he caused a magnet in a second coil attached to it to also spin.

The next 100 years aether mills remained a curiosity of science or a means to make clever toys for the rich, it was Benjamin Franklin who it from the parlour to the workshop. In 1742 he build large scale aether mill that was turn by paddles in a fast flowing stream the wire then ran to another mill a mile away that turned the blade of a lumber saw.

The problem of the drop in power transmission over long distances held back the spreading of the use of electricity outside of factories until Michael Faraday created the alternating generator in 1816 assuring in age of Electricity.
 
This one is certainly true. Lots of good stuff can be found in old stuff preserved by project Gutenberg for example. In the case of paraffin hybrids however you won't find much since this is a fairly recent invention late 1990s. The last article on the topic can I found, summarizing current development can be found here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/wax-fuel-gives-hybrid-rockets-more-oomph

There is also a nice video of a paraffin/H202 rocket motor test here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYl7Jylubc
(Doesnt seem to really work in the video thou.)

There is also this paper on the subject:
http://spacegrant.colorado.edu/COSGC_Projects/symposium_archive/2005/docs/115.pdf

As it hasn't been mentioned yet, I'd just add that a rather thorough examination of this concept was done in the Mythbusters "Confederate rocket" episode - short form, two guys with a workshop and consciously attempting to limit themselves to mid-19th Century level technology in just two days managed to build a paraffin wax/nitrous oxide hybrid that flew 500 yards - the myth was still declared busted as it talked about reaching 120 miles, but it was still an interesting proof of concept.

If instead of Adam and Jamie and a single episode budget you had Sir William Congreve and the Royal Artillery working on hybrids you might actually start to get interesting results by mid-century.

I suspect though that even then a moon landing by 1900 is going to be out of reach. I can see rocket technology advancing enough to put a man in orbit, but to get him to the moon as well you've got to invent a lot of other technologies - some form of rebreathing tech to keep him alive for the best part of a fortnight in a small metal box for a start - and then you've got to get him back alive. How would 19th century technology stand up to the enormous pressures and temperatures developed during re-entry? Would an asbestos heat shield be up to the job, or do we have to accelerate ceramics technology too?
 
Oh right. Reentry. That... that could be a serious flaw in the plan.

The good news is, parachutes at least might be up to par, but I don't know wether a heat shield could be built.
 
As I'm working on a fictional setting based on Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken", I've spent a fair amount of time of late trying to tackle the question of accomplishing things in space without a proper spacefaring technological base. I can't help but wonder, based on the technical discussions had thus far, if the thread isn't a bit hung-up on the aesthetics of the Apollo program.

For instance, do you need functional radio to reach the Moon? Viscerally it seems obvious that such is required, as you can't have Mission Control without it, and you need a Mission Control to do anything in space. But taking a step back, is there anything genuinely requires radio? Not really: The only thing I can think of is the radio altimeter for the lunar descent, where it emoves the guesswork from trying to land the descent craft. Lack of communication can be an issue, but ship-to-ship -- or even ship-to-ground, with a big enough telescope -- communication can be accomplished just as was with wet navies at the time, signal hoists and light-based signalling. (Zero-G semaphore is the cooler of them, methinks.) It's not terribly pretty, but it worked well enough for the Royal Navy until the advent of wireless telegraphy.

What radio is primarily used for is controlling and directing a flight: Removing it simply changes the character of astronauts. Astronauts would, by their nature, have to be creative, fast-thinking, and comfortable flying by the seat of their pants, as every problem after they hit orbit they'd have to deal with on their own. The Royal Navy offers an interesting parallel from prior to the advent of radio, in the cult of the god-captain, who presided over distant patrols in the South Seas. One would expects that something comparable might evolve to facilitate dealing with the time in orbit, as it would not be dissimilar in effect from being on a ship halfway between Australia and New Zealand.

Interesting discussions can also be had about the strict necessity of advanced electronics (i.e. can bravery and a slide-rule be a good-enough substitute for a flight computer?), but I think it is ultimately moot. You just need too much materials science that just isn't there in a Victorian tech base to build a rocket capable of putting the payloads necessary into orbit to accomplish a Lunar landing. You can nudge a PoD here or there to get some of it, but the only way to get all of it is to: 1) create a timeline that has a civilization with a post-1950s tech base by 1899 located in the modern British Isles but which is otherwise alien to ours; or 2) introduce a form of phlebtonium that removes the issue of reaching LEO but all chucks out the Standard Model as we know it.
 
...moon if they don't have radio technology....

This would actually be easy to resolve. The only question is how "Victorian" the technology would still be. There is a nice scenario on this topic from the google alternate history group, that I already posted in another thread:

“In 1842. Joseph Henry made major breakthroughs in the theory of electromagnets and magnetic induction. It turns out that some of his experimental apparatus was a tuned circuit
and he did make the sparks jump. He duly noted the effect (being a good scientist) in his journal but he did not have a theory with which to make sense out of it. That task was left to James Clerk Maxwell. “
Robert J. Kolker

“You need to know what a tuned circuit is. If Joseph Henry, who was as brilliant as Faraday could not exploit his accidental spark generator as a communication device in 1842, then who? Unless you have some notion that a wave is propagating through space there is no way to come up with a communicator. And in order to concluded there is a propagating electro-magnet wave front moving eternally through space you have to know what a displacement current is. It is not just a matter of generating sparks. You have to have some idea of how to build an antenna so you can send a signal a significant distance.”
Robert J. Kolker

“We might put a slightly earlier date on things here, and a firmer theoretical limit. Maxwell used Hamilton's theories of Quaternions to analyze the equations describing electrical activity, and produced his first voluminous work. Vector equation forms subsequently pared down the number and complications of these equations. However, the mathematical breakthrough to Quaternions wasn't made by Hamilton until 1843. The short bio blurb on him I have available says that he still was poor and his marriage to an invalid unhappy, and from 1845 to 1860, he drank himself to death. WI, in 1844, Hamilton had been invited to tour the US on a sabbatical, and he had met Henry, and been told of his results? Hamilton had already done significant work that helped better define the properties of light. He and Henry might have developed a working partnership,with Henry's experiments verifying Hamilton's work. Perhaps this would have meant a working theory by 1855 or so, and a transmitter in place at the Smithsonian.”
Tom Billings
 
The lack of radar rangefinders is a problem, but not insurmountable. I agree with Juumanistra, we do not need radio.

Now, how about this. Maybe we don't need a heat shield. What if we put a rocket in LEO with the 13,000 Delta-V necessary for a direct landing? When the astronauts come home they can dock with the reentry rocket and bring it down. The final stretch can be handled by dropping the rocket and using parachutes to bring the capsule down into the ocean. The main difficulty I foresee here is, can Victorian metallurgy withstand the heat and g-forces involved?
 
As I'm working on a fictional setting based on Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken", I've spent a fair amount of time of late trying to tackle the question of accomplishing things in space without a proper spacefaring technological base.
I bet you've come up with really interesting workarounds to achieve results with low tech! Either your own ideas or ones you've picked up from others working this quite interesting problem. I'd love to hear about them.
I can't help but wonder, based on the technical discussions had thus far, if the thread isn't a bit hung-up on the aesthetics of the Apollo program.
If by "the thread" you mean "me," you have a point. (There isn't much of a coherent thread happing here yet, just little cliques talking past each other. I point no finger of guilt at anyone without three of my fingers pointing back at me!:eek:)
The reason for my Apollo "obsession" being that Apollo was, OTL, the minimum bare-bones "get 'er done" approach NASA adopted.

Obviously anyone looking at Apollo can point to swathes of "fat" to cut to make it leaner and meaner--after the fact, we could probably do it a bit closer to the edge, with what we know now (not talking about the general advance of technology since designs were mostly frozen in the mid-60s, talking about what we know about the actual challenges the space environment presented and the actual logistics of operating on the Moon--"do it again" in that if we ISOTed some notable experts with some kind of ASB aphasia about actual technology but reliable knowledge about space, Apollo could have been cheaper and faster in the 1960s).

But what some might call fat, I'd call safety margin. Paring it down a lot means an even riskier mission.

In terms of the basic mission profile, I don't think you can pare the essential steps involved in getting x number of human beings onto the Lunar surface and then back home again alive to Earth down more efficiently than the Apollo program arrived at. The conceptual alternatives all boil down to even more mass launched into orbit, at whatever state of the art we are talking about. Disposable stages, Lunar orbit rendezvous, direct return to Earth from lunar orbit--these are the essential features of Apollo, and when the Soviets considered routes to the Moon themselves they either chose a more massive brute-force direct descent and return model (Chelomei) or a mission that breaks down essentially to a pared-down Apollo (Korolev's N-1 launched Soyuz-LK mission).

So it's in that sense that I'm sticking to an Apollo script, because the alternatives are even more costly.
For instance, do you need functional radio to reach the Moon? Viscerally it seems obvious that such is required, as you can't have Mission Control without it, and you need a Mission Control to do anything in space. But taking a step back, is there anything genuinely requires radio? Not really: The only thing I can think of is the radio altimeter for the lunar descent, where it emoves the guesswork from trying to land the descent craft.
Exactly the point I was stuck on! I agree, we can have a knocking good romantic story of steely-minded, steady-handed space adventurers who are also top-notch Newtonian physicists do it all in silence, hopefully living to tell the tale when they get home again. Except for that pesky approach to the Lunar surface!

Can it be done by eyeball? That's not a rhetorical question I'm asking; it's a puzzle. The thing is, the human eye is great for operating on Earth, even doing something as outlandish as flying (and most to the point here, landing) an airplane when no one has ever done it before. But we are used to seeing things in an environment where the atmosphere literally colors everything, diffracting light into shadowed zones, lending gradients of hue and diffusive blurring that give us vital cues as to how far away things are.

If only Earth had a second moon, a much smaller one on the scale of say Phobos, a captured asteroid or something like that. They could do an earlier mission to there, and "landing" would almost be more a matter of "pulling up to;" the point is they'd have lots of time to practice, with trial and error, learning to correctly read visual cues in a vacuum. And when there is confusion of the visual cue the horizon provides, fooling us into thinking we are farther from the surface than we are because the horizon of a smaller body is closer.

Remember, the point of getting a moon landing done is that someone has to do it first. That someone gets no benefit of advice from a seasoned, practice veteran who has done it before and learned by trial and error. The first pilot has to get it right the first time, or they don't live to coach rookies.

And that brings me to another aspect of electronics:

Without it, we have no automated probes. If we did have some sort of clockwork automation but no radio to report findings to ground control, we might as well have nothing. Well, almost.

Consider what the preliminary scouting of the Lunar environment did for the success of Apollo OTL. Until the Soviets and Americans started shooting robots at the Moon, there were some grave unanswered questions shadowing the prospect of a human landing. For instance, what could be the nature of the Lunar surface? We might guess it is a lot of bare rock--but that's not quite the case. In fact the surface of the Moon is some kind of dust, fines--but fortunately they stick together pretty well by various adhesive forces. Until we sent down lander probes, it occurred to some people that the Moon dust might be very slippery, being in vacuum with no atmospheric gases or moisture to mediate chemical bonds. The bottoms of craters might be pools of dust behaving like oil--and any spacecraft that touches down, despite being landed with uncanny skill and smoothness, might promptly sink right into it and vanish beneath the smooth surface!:eek: Well, we know now that air or no air, the gravel, dust and fines do stick to each other after all, giving a powdery surface more like brown sugar than oil. That sure is good to know, isn't it? Without some kind of radio and the potential for automated probes that implies, and automated probes signaling back their findings, only human-piloted vessels can land, and only a surviving human can carry back what they learn when they try. (A wrecked lander might have survivors who can manage to put on spacesuits and go out and set up a heliotrope or something to signal their own epitaphs by Morse code. I don't know that they could see any replies, unless from another spaceship in close Lunar orbit).

What I want to learn is that yes, it can be done by human eyeball, and of course the first lander will be flown by people who know that unknown unknowns, as well as known unknowns, might well kill them--they are called adventurers for a reason.

But I still think it's daunting and we should give respectful consideration to hitches such as this.
Lack of communication can be an issue, but ship-to-ship -- or even ship-to-ground, with a big enough telescope -- communication can be accomplished just as was with wet navies at the time, signal hoists and light-based signalling. (Zero-G semaphore is the cooler of them, methinks.) It's not terribly pretty, but it worked well enough for the Royal Navy until the advent of wireless telegraphy.
Especially because if we don't have an Apollo analog mission, the most likely way to succeed is with a very gradually building space program--first they put up some satellites (crewed of course); then build a proper space station or more; then eventually, over decades, build up the infrastructure in LEO to make the longer jump to Lunar space--then arrive in orbit, stay in orbit, make an orbiting Lunar staging base, and finally attempt landing with not one Command Module astronaut watching them, but a network of several orbiting stations all with several astronauts in them, watching the descent through telescopes and for semaphore or heliotrope signals. Or of course the minimal version is broadly similar to Apollo and so there is anyway the one astronaut left in the command/return craft peering anxiously through his telescope at his companions.
What radio is primarily used for is controlling and directing a flight: Removing it simply changes the character of astronauts. Astronauts would, by their nature, have to be creative, fast-thinking, and comfortable flying by the seat of their pants, as every problem after they hit orbit they'd have to deal with on their own. The Royal Navy offers an interesting parallel from prior to the advent of radio, in the cult of the god-captain, who presided over distant patrols in the South Seas. One would expects that something comparable might evolve to facilitate dealing with the time in orbit, as it would not be dissimilar in effect from being on a ship halfway between Australia and New Zealand.

Interesting discussions can also be had about the strict necessity of advanced electronics (i.e. can bravery and a slide-rule be a good-enough substitute for a flight computer?), but I think it is ultimately moot.
Yep, I agree, they can get along without those new-fangled computational engine doohickys. Radar would still be handy though. Gonna have to make do with a steely gaze I guess.
You just need too much materials science that just isn't there in a Victorian tech base to build a rocket capable of putting the payloads necessary into orbit to accomplish a Lunar landing.
Actually I don't think they need any materials that couldn't be made in the late 19th century, really. It's just that doing things with what they had then would mass more. And it adds up, so since we could hardly get by with 1960s tech at less than say 2/3 the all-up mass of a fully loaded Saturn V, with all the incremental add-ons, with reserve fuel making up for roughly estimated calculations, with heavier materials substituting for lighter, with less efficient rockets requiring more propellant to do the same job and a need to do things in less efficient ways to allow for more margin of error and slower response times...it adds up, then the lower ISPs mean it multiplies and exponentiates--so we wind up needing a monster rocket 4 times more massive than a Saturn V, or dozens of smaller rockets to laboriously build up the moon ship in orbit (using less efficient but more storable fuels instead of the more efficient ones that won't keep for months or years while we assemble the thing), or running the whole Moon mission on the back of a really massive orbital infrastructure....one way or another the project is absolutely more costly than Apollo was, by a factor of ten or so, and in a world that is not nearly as rich altogether as the OTL USA of the 1960s was.

And yeah we might identify a materials Achilles heel yet, I suppose. I still haven't thought of a good way to make pumps to drive a liquid fuel rocket, or even the liquid part of a hybrid, that wouldn't also mean these "Victorians" also have jet airplanes. Pressure feeding might still work but it involves a lot of overhead mass, for the tankage (not as much as you'd think though) and the pressurant (that's still a bit confused in my head.) I still like the idea of boiling liquid hydrogen to get the pressurant, but then we need something like pretty good plastic bags for the hydrogen peroxide oxidant, so...work in progress, and lately I haven't been thinking about it as much, having chased down all the easier leads and being left with some serious engineering questions.

But I remain optimistic on the materials front. It's just a question of, what motivates and enables this colossal expense, on such a risky project?

Where's the payoff?
You can nudge a PoD here or there to get some of it, but the only way to get all of it is to: 1) create a timeline that has a civilization with a post-1950s tech base by 1899 located in the modern British Isles but which is otherwise alien to ours; or 2) introduce a form of phlebtonium that removes the issue of reaching LEO but all chucks out the Standard Model as we know it.

Actually I'm trying to suss out how to do it with as little tech wanking as possible, so the late 19th century society doing it (IIRC by the way the OP never said it had to be Britain...oh wait, yes they did...in the title actually...:eek:...oh well, if any single nation in a world resembling OTL 1890s can do it, it is Britain anyway, though by then the Germans and possibly sufficiently motivated Americans would be in the running too...OP certainly never said neither or even both of them might help)---anyway, a world with as little advanced over OTL and yet still make it possible. Not cheap, but anyway possible.

That's why I want to avoid turbopumps, you see. And electronics, if we can do without it. That's why despite the modest ISP, peroxide-oxidized hybrid paraffin or "candy" rockets may be the way to go.

Still haven't let go of the insanity of peroxide burning hydrogen though.:p I'm pretty sure we need pumps for that; the question is, are they tantamount to having jet engine parts, or can it be done sort of Gothic?

The lack of radar rangefinders is a problem, but not insurmountable.
OK, I said it was an open question--how exactly do you foresee surmounting it, then? Some very clever sighting instrument that takes the guesswork out of visual measurement of rate of descent, or just plain seat of the pants eyeballing it?

The latter can work, I guess, if 1) the pilot is mentally prepared to remember the vacuum of the Lunar surface will look different and the Moon's smaller radius hence closer horizons need to be borne in mind and 2) a good amount of reserve fuel. That's one of the places where we trade off having resources to waste (because we splurged relative to Apollo's mass budget, by paying a huge price in launched mass) for lack of more efficient methods. If we've precalculated correctly, a big burn can bring the lander to a near halt a safe margin above the Lunar surface, then it starts to fall again, but we've got a hopefully throttleable engine of some sort--the pilot turns it up when it looks like they are coming down too fast, and down when it looks like they are taking too long to get down, balancing the whole thing on trained intuition.

Hopefully they can manage some sort of clockpunk simulator for the pilot to play Moon Lander with a lot until they get the rhythm down.:):)
I agree with Juumanistra, we do not need radio.
I hope. As others say, having radio of some sort, at least enough for a crude altimeter (probably based more on frequency shifting than direct measurement of pulse return times, some sort of interferometer) would actually not be that difficult to get, but then the world is less Victorian and more Jazz Age, even 30s-40s vibe.
Now, how about this. Maybe we don't need a heat shield. What if we put a rocket in LEO with the 13,000 Delta-V necessary for a direct landing? When the astronauts come home they can dock with the reentry rocket and bring it down.
Oh dear Lord. Sort of doable, but it is a classic instance of what I was talking about, making the net mission mass exponentially greater.

Look, a big driver of the whole mission mass is the Translunar Injection--that means basically taking something in low Earth orbit and boosting it so it is going just a hair under escape velocity. Doing that once with Apollo's J-2 hydrogen-oxygen engine, a more efficient engine than anything we can hope for in 1900, more than doubled the total mass that had to be orbited. With lower ISP engines, that doubling can easily become a tripling (50 percent all up mission mass rise) or quadrupling (doubling the launch load). This is a price we have to pay to get anything to the Moon at all, there is no way around it and the higher masses in the retro scenario are also inevitable.

In order for explorers returning from the vicinity of the Moon to rendezvous with anything parked in low Earth orbit, they have to do it again. That is the velocity they have to lose, coming down from the Moon, is the same as that they had to gain to go there. And it's a big price item. So if Apollo's J-2 engine allowed them to keep the mass multiplier down to say 2.2 for that stage, their electing to instead return the Command Module to an orbiting space station instead of just letting aerobrake in Earth's atmosphere would mean that the net multiplier goes up to 4.8, to 5 or so. We'd have needed 2.5 Saturn V launches to do it!:eek:

That's bad. Trying to rocket-land from orbital speed to avoid the risks of aerobraking is even worse; it involves needing propellant to achieve a velocity change quite as large as everything above taken together and more.

Meanwhile--achieving reentry the way all spacecraft of OTL have done, by entering the atmosphere and dumping the orbital (even translunar) energy as the form of heat does not require any ultramodern, high-tech materials. We used the expensive high-tech material approach on the Space Shuttle because we didn't want any of it to erode away; it had to be reusable as is, you see. But allowing ablation, the erosion of material by heating it up enough to vaporize and then letting that material blow away in the slipstream, taking the heat away with it, means we can use a much wider range of materials.

Water for instance. Suppose we make the bottom of our capsule a water tank, of strong high-temperature steel, but with the very bottom perforated with little vent holes, plugged by material that melts and softens at high temperatures. Now as the capsule enters the atmosphere, the water is warmed, then starts to boil--this sets the upper limit on the temperature the steel handles; we have steam escaping the tank thus cooling it to maintain temperature; indeed the escaping steam forms a layer between the steel and the hottest incoming plasma.

Or--cork. Cork has been proposed as a serious candidate for heat shield material.

The point is, if it is inferior to say the fiberglass-acrylic laminate used on Apollo, that just means we need more of it by mass, thus raising the launch mass. But not by the ungodly amount we'd need to do it on rocket thrust!:eek:
 
Interesting discussions can also be had about the strict necessity of advanced electronics (i.e. can bravery and a slide-rule be a good-enough substitute for a flight computer?)
And what's the smallest size possible for a viable Babbage Analytical Engine?
:cool:

OK, I said it was an open question--how exactly do you foresee surmounting it, then? Some very clever sighting instrument that takes the guesswork out of visual measurement of rate of descent, or just plain seat of the pants eyeballing it?
how about using the nautical method? As the moonship passes across the lunar surface somebody pays out a weighted line... perhaps even with a preliminary pass during which this is used to collect surface samples so that the suitability of various potential landing sites can be assessed?
 
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And what's the smallest size possible for a viable Babbage Analytical Engine?
:cool:

how about using the nautical method? As the moonship passes across the lunar surface somebody pays out a weighted line... perhaps even with a preliminary pass during which this is used to collect surface samples so that the suitability of various potential landing sites can be assessed?

Err, if the ship is in orbit, the payed out line is also in orbit, and has no particular reason to go to the surface. Also, when ships do soundings, they are moving slowly (often VERY slowly) otherwise the sounding attempts don't work.

A ship in lunar orbit is travelling 1000s of miles an hour. (about 1.7 km/s)
 
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