Steampunk Stealth

Until now, the steampunk world is depicted as Victorian with airships and early WW1-era weapons.

But what if we make something better. Can steampunk weapons be (relatively) as advanced as modern ones?
Can a steam tank as good as Tiger? Can a steampunk sniper rifle fire .50 cal projectiles like the Barrett?
Can a stealth aircraft breaks the sound barrier using somekind of advanced steampunk engine?

Thank you in advance!
 
Until now, the steampunk world is depicted as Victorian with airships and early WW1-era weapons.

But what if we make something better. Can steampunk weapons be (relatively) as advanced as modern ones?
Can a steam tank as good as Tiger? Can a steampunk sniper rifle fire .50 cal projectiles like the Barrett?
Can a stealth aircraft breaks the sound barrier using somekind of advanced steampunk engine?

Thank you in advance!

The assumption of "steampunk" genre is that relatively small steam engines could, with further development, become equivalent in efficiency to gasoline and diesel engines OTL, at least WWII era ones.

In Real Life, NO.

But most other "steampunk" tropes gleefully violate the laws of phsyics (iron-clad dirigibles, for instance), so if it's your universe, you can violate the laws of physics as you please.

If you stick to "real world" physics,

1) Power to weight ratio sez 'nope'.
2) .50 caliber is a size. That's a half-inch projectile. Considering there were actually .50 caliber sniper rifles in the American Civil War, I am going with yes. But the question you meant to ask, whether or not the .50 caliber BMG cartridge can be produced in a Steampunk timeline, yes. Smokeless powder is not a problem, it was starting to come into use in the late 19th century. Prior to WWI, the round didn't really exist because there wasn't a NEED for such a cartridge. It was invented to poke holes in WWI tanks.
3) Ummm. . . steam-powered heavier than air flight fails due to power-to-weight ratios. Calculations of the characteristics of radar cross-section and how to minimize them would not be impaired in steampunk universe, and the creation of radar-absorbant materials is more impacted by chemistry than mechanical engineering changes.
 
Steam locomotives were getting highly advanced when they died, and they could have gone further had there been a need. The same of course for steam automobiles. The potential to continue to advance them is there, but in OTL there was no need as they had been superseded.

I would imagine steam pressure could be developed to fire percussion shots at a high level (sorry being spoken too and can't think of the words)

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
So no hyper-efficient steam engine for aircraft able to do the necessary thrust without using ASBium material, maybe like anti-ice in Stephen Baxter's "Anti-ice"?
 
So no hyper-efficient steam engine for aircraft able to do the necessary thrust without using ASBium material, maybe like anti-ice in Stephen Baxter's "Anti-ice"?

I would say IMHO it would be possible to develop an effective steam engine for an aeroplane from a later generation automobile steam engine, but that would be delaying heavier than air flight by some 20-30 years. Such a delay presumably would have one advantage and that would be that glider technology could advance to such a level that the airframe that the engine would sit in would be far more advanced than the Wright brothers'. After all, after a few decades of airship development you would have gliders being launched FROM airships.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
But what if we make something better.


We can't.

More accurately, we can but then it wouldn't resemble anything like the engineering/technological illiterate nonsense known as "steampunk".

A "steampunk" tank as good as a Tiger is going to work a lot like - surprise! - a Tiger. Ditto .50 caliber sniper rifles, supersonic stealth aircraft, and all the rest.

I'm reminded of an old essay on real science to "creature building" in sci-fi stories. The writer starts with a desire to have a monster which works like a 50 foot lobster. He then applies engineering and biological precepts to the problem and ends up with a monster which works more like a 50 foot dinosaur. Just as there are sound reasons why a 50 foot monster cannot work like a lobster, there are sound reasons why Tiger tanks used diesels instead of boilers and those readily reasons are apparent to anyone who isn't busy selling fantasies to readers who can't or won't understand them.

Anytime the phrase "steampunk" is applied to an idea, that idea belongs in the ASB Forum because the precepts underlying "steampunk" ignore reality.
 
So no hyper-efficient steam engine for aircraft able to do the necessary thrust without using ASBium material, maybe like anti-ice in Stephen Baxter's "Anti-ice"?

Yes, you can. One could have a radium (ie. atomic) engine that is used to heat water to power turbines that power electric motors that turn propellors. That would be easier and lighter than using steam turbines and reduction gear propellors - but probably not as 'steampunkish' for some people.

The book 'The Steam Bird' is a fun read about flight of nuclear powered US bomber Samuel Langley. If I recall there is mention of an aircraft of sorts in Harrison's 'Tunnel Through the Depths' powered by oil fired boilers.
 
Yes, you can. One could have a radium (ie. atomic) engine that is used to heat water to power turbines that power electric motors that turn propellors. That would be easier and lighter than using steam turbines and reduction gear propellors - but probably not as 'steampunkish' for some people.


Absent an advanced materials technology which steampunk fanboys studiously ignore because it obviates the need for iron and steel, any such steam cycle will not be "easy" or "light"

The book 'The Steam Bird' is a fun read about flight of nuclear powered US bomber Samuel Langley.

An excellent short story by Hilbert Schenck in a book of the same name. The aircraft he describes are taken directly from the 1950s USAF studies and are not "steampunk" designs. (The companion story in the book about a group of scientists "short circuiting" a hurricane is just as good.

If I recall there is mention of an aircraft of sorts in Harrison's 'Tunnel Through the Depths' powered by oil fired boilers.

Pistons fired with coal dust driving propellers actually. They show up twice. First in a scene where one is being refueled and last soon after Gus Washington's wedding when his friend in the RAF mentions he'll be commanding one as it flies up the Rhine in a show of force after a Franco-German border spat which involved one side or the other shelling a hotel that happened to have British tourists staying at it.
 
Absent an advanced materials technology which steampunk fanboys studiously ignore because it obviates the need for iron and steel, any such steam cycle will not be "easy" or "light".

I believe that most steampunk novels make mention of duraluminum and at least aluminium.
 
Steam Automobile

How about a steam powered car that has a computer that opens the valve and lets out pressure that builds up? Then you don't have " The explodeing problem" You have OTL. Autos become popular more quickley because newspapers arn't reporting about automobile explosions.
 
That would require advanced computing technologies and materials research which not only would somehow have to predate the invention of the automobile (I have a hard-enough imagining them being developed and released at the same time to compliment each other) but would also violate the gears-and-grease spirit of steampunk in the first place. Those in-car computers are complex.
 
How about a steam powered car that has a computer that opens the valve and lets out pressure that builds up? Then you don't have " The explodeing problem" You have OTL. Autos become popular more quickley because newspapers arn't reporting about automobile explosions.

What kills external combustion isn't boiler explosions.

What kills external combustion is the fact that, given early 20th century manufacturing technology, you could make a far more powerful small gasoline internal combustion engine than a coal-fired external combustion engine.

External combustion was more efficient on the level of a locomotive, and people were more comfortable rolling around with a car load of basically inert coal than a car load of explosive gasoline. So big steam engines lasted a lot longer than small ones.
 
OK, you guys are talking about coal- powered steam engines. What if there's other resources that are used to power the steam engines? Maybe not atomic, since that will be ASB.
 
I believe that most steampunk novels make mention of duraluminum and at least aluminium.


Yeah, they mention duraluminum and aluminum while completely ignoring the advances in metallurgy and chemistry along with the advances in the generating large amounts of electricity at high voltages which the production of aluminum requires.

During the period in which these "steampunk" fantasies are set, the production of aluminum was so hard that the substance was rare enough to be treated as a precious metal. Yet the technologically illiterate writers of that horseshit presume a huge aluminum production industry without also applying the advance such an industry requires to the rest of their childish setting.

Ignoring butterflies so that R. Hon. Bertie Wooster can fly his Aerial Steam Velocipede to the Duke of Earl's Grand Ball and foil an assassination plot against King Rootentooten might make for good escapist fiction but it makes for bad time lines.
 
Yet the technologically illiterate writers of that horseshit presume a huge aluminum production industry without also applying the advance such an industry requires to the rest of their childish setting.

Ignoring butterflies so that R. Hon. Bertie Wooster can fly his Aerial Steam Velocipede to the Duke of Earl's Grand Ball and foil an assassination plot against King Rootentooten might make for good escapist fiction but it makes for bad time lines.

Go ahead, tell us how you really feel.:p
 
I would say IMHO it would be possible to develop an effective steam engine for an aeroplane from a later generation automobile steam engine, but that would be delaying heavier than air flight by some 20-30 years. Such a delay presumably would have one advantage and that would be that glider technology could advance to such a level that the airframe that the engine would sit in would be far more advanced than the Wright brothers'. After all, after a few decades of airship development you would have gliders being launched FROM airships.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
http://www.rexresearch.com/besler/beslerst.htm

Already done. A practical (although, by that time uncompetitive) plane using a steam-engine for propulsion.

If steam cars were never overtaken by IC engined cars, the requisite tech for steam planes would have happened earlier, too. Although planes would likely be delayed for most of the 20 years you posit as a low-end figure.
 
How about a steam powered car that has a computer that opens the valve and lets out pressure that builds up? Then you don't have " The explodeing problem" You have OTL. Autos become popular more quickley because newspapers arn't reporting about automobile explosions.
I did a search of the NY Times archives from 1895-1910 for car steam explosion and got 173 results. Two were of steam cars exploding and one was because a rock tore a hole in the gas tank, neither of which resulted in any deaths (though the one had internal injuries, maybe I should've searched the obituaries). I also searched for steam explosion and got 898 results and for auto steam explosion and got 21. These results included numerous accounts of boats, trains, and steam pipes bursting, and along with small stationary engines exploding (2 killed in a machine shop) and steam mangles exploding (3 dead in a laundry) and at least one account of a tugboat almost exploding.

Doesn't sound to me like there was a widespread "exploding problem", so unless you can prove there was one, I'll assume it's common knowledge along the lines of Fulton inventing the steam boat.
 
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