#speculative engineering

More speculative engineering. In the autistic tradition, I am learning everything I can about trains; in the ADHD tradition, I am doing it as fast as possible before the mood passes on to something else. The topmost drawing is based on a locomotive from the Paris-Orleans railway, built for low-traffic passenger transport. It looks like a bizarre half-trolley, half-caravan-trailer chimaera and I love it.

I was interested in the idea of two rows of pistons visibly moving up and down behind a pair of chimneys. Alas, the horned chimneys seem to be actively counterproductive (just let the smoke rise without heating the top of the engine), and I know vertically-oriented pistons were phased out early on but I haven't actually found out why yet. My guess is that the force is distributed more evenly when the cylinders are aligned with the centres of all the driving wheels, and there's no real reason for the shafts to be that long, but I'm not sure. Maybe it's something I'll decide to handwave as "not an important problem to them".

Mostly this was for thinking about the infrastructure of Griss, though I'll have to keep it in mind for other worlds also. Aesthetically, my ideal goal for ghoulish engineering is 'elegant graveyard deco that also leaves the functional components exposed' — whatever they have for vehicles, I want it to look a little too much like driving an autopsy. But that means all the mechanical parts have to look right to me, so any time I get annoyed by having to draw all the pipes and wires and give up, I did this to myself. (It's also very tempting to justify "they do things the difficult and expensive way on purpose just because someone in charge insisted it looks cool" when that's thematically appropriate for the proto-fascist autocracy.)

(The title, assuming I've translated it correctly, means "Our Lady of Pipework".)

...I wish "speculative engineering" were a thing in the same way speculative biology is.

E.g. not just "cool machine but with a decorative aesthetic" (which is really all that this is, not a good example), but, in the same way as imagining a species' evolution in response to environmental selection pressures, imagining how a people would invent unique technologies within a cultural context to accomplish a particular function using available materials and knowledge and institutions. What circumstances might have connected every home to a hydraulic power network? What would people have come up with to travel swiftly over long distances if domesticating horses hadn't been so convenient an option? What if the need to pump water out of coal mines hadn't created a niche for experimenting with steam power to be a useful adaptation?

I'm not actually sure why Hallownest would want a dirigible, but if they did...

It's a "(mechanical pencil) skirt" a skirt resembling a mechanical pencil, and also a "mechanical (pencil skirt)" a pencil skirt that uses a lever-operated zipper mechanism just because