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Even without a full programmable mechanical computer, there could be a reasonable trade for people familiar with various machines to design new cards to do new patterns. (You could have automated cutters, to have machines that help build machine parts...)

!Automata

Svargan made, no soul gems.

You can't have steampunk without steam. So we have steam engines.
Text refers to the newest engines being compact, oil-powered models.
This is technologically reasonable since gasoline and kerosene
generate more heat energy per pound than coal.

Depending on the how plentiful oil is and how hard it is to extract
(building a rig to get at deep deposits is non-trivial. Coal is less
troublesome, particularly if you're willing to just throw people at it
and don't mine if they die unpleasantly in large numbers.), it might
not be economically feasible, however.

Steam engines are specifically referenced as being used for airships
(the compact, oil-driven ones.) We should have a rail system, or at
least lines between the more major, technologically developed cities
(the Serendipity-Muon Express, say.)

Steam cars are quite possible if you have compact steam engines,
however to actually provide any advantage over trains, you need a
network of good, paved roads all over, which I don't see us as
having. Rail lines between major cities and draft animals from the
rail to your final destination seems much more likely given our
current state of infrastructure.

It is almost certain that steam engines would also be used as motive
power in factories, particularly in areas that don't have a natural
source of water power. Even if you do have water power, you could
have an advantage, since it would have allowed you to serve as a
manufacturing base before the invention of the steam engine, giving
you a competitive edge when it comes to building factories that do
lots of things from a single drive.

Since coal is likely to be less expensive than oil, oil-based steam
engines would almost certainly be confined to airships, steam cars,
and other areas where lower weight is required. For trains (where
you'll be hauling freight anyway) and stationary engines to run
industry, coal would be much better.

There are two ways we could have steam engines.

!!!Cargo Cultism

The citizens of Loka do not know how steam engines work, at least not
completely. They can build them, perhaps they found several working
prototypes that they adapted. For this to be a possible origin, they
would have had to find working prototypes of the compact versions,
rather than developed them.

However, even manufacturing such things presupposes a certain level of
development. You need to be able to do very precise metal-working and
tempering. if you can build a steam-engine that doesn't blow up, you
can build a gun that shoots straight and you can build really awesome
cannons. You can also fit pipes that don't leak, and seals that don't
fail. Even if you don't understand steam engines completely (for
example, why the Watt engine is better than its predecessors), you
should be able to build hydraulic and pneumatic devices. (That is,
you should be able to build jacks for lifting heavy objects, hydraulic
presses and cutters, and it should be possible to build a series of
tubes linking buildings or offices within major cities, though not
necessarily (and not likely) linking between cities at a distant.)

!!!Knowing Creation

This assumes that, in addition to finding steam engines of some sort,
you should know how they work and be able to make new steam engines
using the same principles. In this version, the citizens of Loka
understand thermodynamics and gas laws. If they understand both, they
could build engines that use the Stirling cycle. They could have
experimental refrigerators (if they can crack petroleum they should be
able to get ammonia, which makes a nasty but quite serviceable
refrigerant.) None of these things need necessarily be in common use
(given the endless winter, there probably isn't that much call for
refrigerators), but it also means that they should be at a point where
they can do experimentation with internal combustion engines. The
theory to make one should be known, but in practice they might be less
efficient than oil-based steam engines even though they could in
principle be made much lighter.

The technology should be available to build various pneumatic systems
(you could even do an elevator if you wanted, though I'd be surprised
if anyone would.) This is something of a natural follow-on from steam
power. Pumps for liquid or gas should be commercially available.
In areas where Naraka or some other organization has an interest in
improving the infrastructure, pneumatic message tube networks might
be installed.

Let us resolve that this is, in large part, cargo cultist.

Someone suggested in an RP that Ohm's Law was just being discovered in
the academy and people were treating it with suspicion. Therefore, I
propose the following knowledge:

* The identification of static and current electricity as the same
force. The Loka know that lightning is a spark, and they have
theories about an "electric fluid" moving from one body to another.
* Coloumb's law. They have only a rough estimate of the coupling
constant, but if they know gravity, and they have access to
electricity, finding an inverse square law should be reasonable.
This would let them play with electrostatics.
* Capacitors. Big, fat ones. The kind you make big sparks that kill
people with (you know, Leyden jars) not the kind you do actual
useful stuff with.
* Electrostatic induction. This is the means by which, when you move
a charge toward a conductor, the electrons in the conductor
rearrange themselves. (They would think of it in terms of the flow
of electric fluid.) You can build Van de Graff generators and
Wimshurst machines andother fun toys that are great fun for
researchers wanting to shoot sparks through stuff to see what
happens.
* There is a relation between current electricity and magnetism. If
you give them a battery and a coil of wire and a nail, they can make
an electromagnet the way any school-child can. And they have taken
apart Svarga generators and seen magnets inside. But "Magnets and
electricity have something to do with eachother." is the extent of
their knowledge.

I believe that should make it interesting and realistic while also
being suitably limited.

I believe we would also have the legacies from the Svarga:

* Simple generators, hand cranked say. They would not generate much
power even if they were adapted to work with a steam engine, but
serve as something they are determined to figure out. They can also
provide a medium source of electric current for soem purposes.
* Power source boxes. (Fuel cells, really good batteries, maybe a
heat sink.) Something of unknown operation that provides a
continuous, good quality direct current of small scale. These would
be of little practical use except for:
* Electronic doohickeys of some sort. Simple things: LEDs (it might
be funny if finding LEDs would retard the development of the
electric lightbulb by a century...since they'd be thinking LEDs are
how you're supposed to make electric light.), calculators, music
synthesizers. (Big Advanced Things might also be found, along the
same lines as the automata. Computers, say.) These would be too
complex to understand, in any recent time.
* Motors, little toy ones. Perhaps larger ones in scavenged machines,
but in a worse state of repair.

One practical consequence of what I outlined above is that even if
Serendipity DID have a Big Power Source underneath it that COULD run
an industrial system, they wouldn't know enough to do anything with
it. It might power experiments and Svarga artifacts, but for any
other purpose it may as well not exist.

In this schema, electricity wouldn't be used for much of anything
practical. You could have experiments over a sharp range with
Heinrich Hertz style spark-gap transmitters and receivers, but due to
the short range these would be more useful in demonstrating how little
is known.

What you could have is a telegraph. If they can copy the simple
generators and have an engine in the back of the telegraph office,
build an electromagnet, and run a copper wire, they can signal.

Not that I'm proposing we have a Loka-wide telegraph network, but we
could conceivably have one between two cities, and a Loka-wide
telegraph network would be a technologically possible thing that
people could actually expect to take on as a Grand Project and start
to see increasing rewards from with every new city added.

The Bessemer process has been recently discovered. I would be
inclined to think this was a pre-requisite for the most modern
'ultra-compact' steam engines. There would also be means to get pure
supplies of copper, silver, gold, and tin. (If you can make steel,
you can refine the 'classical' metals.)

Nobody knows how to make aluminum or stainless steel, but there might
be artifacts of both. (And they would likely be very precious.)

More useful would be particularly hard alloys useful in cutting,
engraving, and machining parts for machines. Since nobody knows how
to make those alloys or even work with them, you could have the
tremendous usefulness and scarcity of modern alloy cutting bits be a
driving force of something.

We have the capacity to make things out of metal to our
specifications. We can cut very accurate gears and very accurate
screws. We can make cams, build chains, and have pantographs and
other tools to allow very delicate engraving. Since we can make
engines, we can make all the things you need to make engines (pipes
and fittings and valves.) all very well.

If we can make hydraulics (which, I think, we should be able to in
some capacity) we could have dye presses.

But that doesn't mean we have mass production. We would have the
technological capability to start doing mass production, but we may
not have come upon it.

The description of the Naraka corporation on the website implies that
we do have it, and that things they make are somewhat ubiquitous
in the world.

Essentially, it's a question of how easy you want it to be for Joe
Schmoe to have a bicycle or for a small business owner to buy an
engine and a loom. if we have manufacturing with standardized parts,
we get mechanical devices being a part of people's lives. If we
don't, we have the very rich ordering bespoke machines but most people
not coming into contact with them. (Plus, with mass manufacture comes
interchangeable parts, and I love the idea of the Naraka Man coming
out to replace a piece in your engine. The alternative is having to
build an all-new engine.)

My intuition is that the bread and butter (steam engines and guns)
machines and a whole slew of parts (standardized gears, screws,
brackets, springs, and so on) would be built en masse identically.
The latter would be especially valuable since it would mean people can
build bespoke machines without having to have an entire foundry and
machine shop.

More exotic stuff could still be quite rare by virtue of pulling in
experimental technology that either isn't well understood or that they
don't know how to mass produce. (Permanent magnets come to mind as
something that would be difficult for them to produce in quantity
but.)

Good quality glass blown or poured. Some enterprising soul might
invent the plate glass process and make windows cheaper. Flint glass
is an awfully nice thing to have and we can get it, so long as you
don't mind people playing with lead.

Given a lack of plastic, fiberglass and celluloid would both be very
useful. (And celluloid is reasonably easy to make with basic
chemistry. It was the plastic of the 1800s.)

I don't think we would have natural rubber (because it's too cold) or
synthetic rubber (because we don't know how.) which might become a
problem at some point, like when you want tires. (I've been trying to
think of substitute and the best I can think of is you just wait and
hope for someone to get luck playing with the coal tar and petroleum
and make sticky gunk you can smear on cloth and build a bicycle tire.)

You can have steam engines and not have any mechanisms worth turning
with them, but it's not nearly as much fun. And gear assemblies and
springs and so on are among the easiest things in the world to learn
by taking apart devices and just looking at them with your eyes.

Therefore, in keeping with the above, and the building of a difference
engine, mechanical devices of great complexity should be possible,
affordable, and common.

An example of something I would expect to exist and be in use would be
a steam powered Jacquard loom weaving complex patterns mostly by
itself (so long as people feed in the thread, do maintenance, make
sure it's not gummed up.)

Even without a full programmable mechanical computer, there could be a
reasonable trade for people familiar with various machines to design
new cards to do new patterns. (You could have automated cutters, to
have machines that help build machine parts...)

!Chemistry

They are still in qualitative rather than quantitative analysis, which
leaves them messing about with nonsense like phlogiston. But they
have a notion of chemical elements, acids, bases, properties of
various substances. And with all the petroleum fractions and coal
tar, they likely have the ability to make lovely dyes, aspirin, and
similar useful things.

!In Common Use

!!Steam

and don't mine if they die unpleasantly in large numbers.)

have an advantage, since it would have allowed you to sever as a