JacobCoffinWrites

Hi, I just wanted to say thanks for all your help on my previous question planning art of a more flood-compatible city! I've tried to include everyone's suggestions from last time, plus everything from here, and discussions on reddit and discord.

I don't plan to clutter up the community with any drafts after this one, but I was hoping to get one more pass with my current sketch since its based mostly on your ideas. Is there anything you'd like to see added or changed in a depiction of a city that's built to flood? Thanks again!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13032570

One of my ongoing goals is to emphasize reuse in solarpunk media – both through my own projects and whenever I get the chance while helping others through suggestions or editing.

There’s a wealth of stuff all around us which could be repurposed in creative ways, and solarpunk art and fiction has a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that ingenuity and thrift.

A lot of that stuff is in cars. So here’s some notes I’ve pulled together from various online discussions and from many people’s recommendations in solarpunk spaces. It’s not exhaustive, its probably not all good advice, but it should be good enough for a writer to casually drop into a description of a room or workshop, or for an artist to include in the background of a scene. Something that shows that this isn’t a scratch-built future, that they’re repurposing existing stuff wherever they can.

Think of all the weird ways postapoclyptic movies dress the sets with misused items from the present – here’s a somewhat practical guide to solarpunk set dressing with the guts of cars:

The big stuff:

• Depending on the vehicle, its frame (if it has one), axles, and wheels can be used to make a trailer, cart, or similar. (I’ve definitely seen trailers that were just the back half of a pickup truck with a tongue and hitch welded on.) Bonus: the bearings in car wheels tend to be better than those used in regular trailers.
• The transmission from a vehicle could be rigged up to a wind/water mill to adjust rotational velocity of a sawmill or other industrial application. Some power tools, like lathes, use vehicle transmissions: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/truck-transmission-for-lathe.240574/
• Steel leaf springs can be removed from their bundles (they’re long, flat pieces of steel stacked and bound together with strips of steel) and are favorites of blacksmiths for making swords and knives because of the type of steel used.
• Earthships can be made with stacked tires packed with rammed earth: https://earthship.com/systems/garbage-management/

The Electronics:

• Alternators can be used to generate a wide range of amperage and voltage, suitable for different needs, including (in a few specific cases) welding: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/diy-low-cost-generator-from-vehicle-alternator-alternating-generator.1843/
  • The terminology here is a little confusing – early cars had DC generators (sometimes called dynamos), then they switched to AC alternators. But modern ’emergency generators’ still use alternators hooked up to an engine. So if you’re looking for something to convert motion to electricity, perhaps to attach to a water wheel, a vehicle alternator (and some belts to adjust the speeds) could do the job.
  • Some caveats: suitable vehicle generators and motors will likely work better, and to get an alternator to work you may need to either include a power source of 12v to excite the alternator, or to to replace certain internals to include permanent magnets. You'll need to mess with the gear/pulley ratio to get the right (high) speed too.
• The electronics in most cars are usually all designed to run off 12 volts, which can be very convenient for a household with solar panels depending on their setup. If a household has a low-voltage DC battery bank (some do, some don’t) then dropping the battery voltage a few times to power car parts comes with a smaller efficiency loss.
• These 12 volt electronics include things like the cab lights, headlights, radio/entertainment system, backup/surround cameras (perhaps for a security system?), all of which could be placed in a home on a circuit providing the same power they’d get in a car.
• LED headlights make for decent grow lights. Different models hit different parts of the spectrum, but generally they’re sturdy, run cool, and don’t take much power. They might not be as fine-tuned for plants as a dedicated product but they’re common and probably not being used for much in a solarpunk society.
  • Alternative use: outdoor lights, indoor spotlights, light on a wagon, rickshaw etc.
• A car air conditioner could cool some small storage room decently. With big living rooms, it would have difficulty https://permies.com/t/177638/Convert-car-air-conditioner-home
• Cars have lots of small electric motors with various advantages and disadvantages: you can pull motors from the blower, power windows, and windshield wiper motors have a fair bit of torque and can be decent actuators for some projects (I’ve seen them included in robotics projects).
  • The blower and motor could be used for ventilation elsewhere.
• Starter motors are tricky – they’re designed to provide a lot of sudden torque to briefly turn the engine, and not to run for a long time. So they don’t fit a lot of our usual use-cases for electric motors. I’ve seen forum posts that describe using them for hoists (like to lift heavy things) but that’s about it so far.
• There’s plenty of wiring in a car which can all be reused as long as the gauge is correct for the new use.
• Automotive Relays are used to enable a low amperage circuit to switch a higher amperage circuit on or off, making the control systems safer. One example given was switching on heaters in a thermal storage water tank. There’s a fair number of forum threads where people link arduinos to automotive relays to control things the arduino couldn’t handle on its own.
• Car batteries have long seen alternative uses – they might be the one car part used most outside of cars. As vehicles go hybrid and electric, their bigger, more powerful batteries become more common. Even when they weaken overtime, the lower power density doesn’t matter much for fixed installations where weight isn’t a factor, so old electric car batteries show up in homes and local grid storage systems: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/11/old-ev-batteries-solar-power-grid-backup-b2u/

Moving fluids:

• Various pumps and tubing can be used for moving fluids (though the original purpose/contents will restrict what you can use them for).
• The tubing, tanks, pumps, and other parts used for windshield washer fluid are probably the safest car-fluid-handling components to reuse for non-car things (with a lot of rinsing and cleaning): https://www.mountainbuzz.com/threads/reusing-wiper-fluid-jugs-for-drinking-water.97053/
  • Possible uses could include aquariums and hydroponic setups (This may stand out to fish keepers though, who are very cautious around how they handle the water for their aquatic friends and who would be leery of traces of methyl alcohol wiper fluid contaminating it. https://www.nano-reef.com/forums/topic/376583-windshield-wiper-water-pump-as-ato-pump/)
• Car radiators work well for heat exchange, their intended purpose whether they’re in a car or not. This can be part of systems for heating or cooling.
• Copper brake line can also be used in heat exchanges.
• Fuel and brake lines should definitely not be used for things like potable water. But you wouldn’t be using potable water for heat exchange anyways, so contamination from the radiators, tubing, or brake line won’t make much difference there.

Odds and Ends:

• Inside the rubber squeegee part of windshield wipers is a long thin strip of good quality spring steel. Lockpicking folks like it for making tools.
• Catalytic converters might be useful for other kinds of filtering? Maybe not in wood stoves though: https://permies.com/t/96864/Misusing-car-parts-cleaner-cooking
• Certain vehicle exhaust parts can be used to make rocket stoves: https://permies.com/t/15611/Auto-exhaust-muffler-pipe-parts
  • https://permies.com/t/129517/Homemade-Wood-Stove-Propane-Tank

Cosmetic stuff:

• Seats: couches, chairs, porch swing, etc, fabric, foam stuffing for stuffed animals.
• Windows are tricky because the shapes are weird, which can make framing them difficult, but they could be set into clay or concrete or similar building materials.
• Hoods, roofs, and body panels offer some large sheets of metal which could be used for sheds.

Last but not least, there’s always conversion to run on woodgas (something I’ve depicted in a photobash) for some limited uses, or conversion to electric. And if all else fails, you can always melt them down for your society’s steel manufacturing needs – electric arc furnace smelters running off a green grid, recycling, are about as close to zero emission steel as you’re likely to get, and the metal is already refined so I think you could get pretty tight control over the quality on the output.

But I hope you’ll consider some of the above possibilities too. The parts are out there, we might as well use them.

Thanks for reading! Like I said, this is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you know of something I’ve missed, or see something I got wrong, I’m happy to edit it!

Also available here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/using-every-part-of-the-car-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/

Hi, I've had some good discussions here in the past, so I thought I'd reach out with an idea for a resource I'd like to try to put together for solarpunk writers and artists.

I was talking with A.E. Marling about a story he's working on, and one of the things he was looking for was uses for old cars.

I think the obvious answer you'll get from solarpunks (aside for limited use where it makes sense) is to melt them down for your society's steel manufacturing needs - electric arc furnace smelters running off a green grid, recycling, are about as close to zero emission steel as you're likely to get, and the metal is already refined so I think you could get pretty tight control over the quality on the output.

But I think reuse offers some much more interesting opportunities. I'm only just starting to learn about fixing cars, but I've already been struck by the fact that at least some parts in cars can go into other things. For example, it looks like certain old alternators can be used to generate a wide range of amperage and voltage, suitable for different needs, including welding: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/diy-low-cost-generator-from-vehicle-alternator-alternating-generator.1843/ so perhaps one could be hooked by belts (adjusting speed) to a waterwheel or something?

I feel like a solarpunk society with a really strong library economy might start cataloguing parts of more complicated machines (even salvaged from machines like cars).

And looking for parts commonalities and alternative uses strikes me as a really cool step towards building an open-source manufacturing sphere. Perhaps starting with a database of hardware/parts so they could be identified and repurposed, and alternatives identified.

So the actual proposal:

I'd like to try and put together a list of common car parts which can be reasonably used in other (more solarpunk) contexts. This doesn't have to be specific down to the model number or include a how-to guide, (though I recognize that some reuses might only be possible with a specific model) just something solarpunk writers could casually drop into a description of a room or workshop, or an artist could put in the background of a scene. Something that shows that this isn't a scratch-built future, but that they're repurposing stuff where they can. Think of all the weird ways postapoclyptic movies dress the sets with misused items from the present - we could offer something like that to solarpunk, but grounded in at least some practicality. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

edit: I've built out a list and it's located over here: https://slrpnk.net/post/13032570

I've been thinking about trying to depict some of the ideas from this conversation: https://slrpnk.net/post/12735795, using a sort of flat, diagram-like style similar to this old photobash:

Though a bit more complex. The obvious answer is 'don't build cities in swamps' but we already have a bunch of them, and though I don't live there I recognize that they have a lot of unique cultural and historical value and are peoples' homes, so I'm interested in what a solarpunk-adapted version of these would look like.

At the same time, I know basically nothing about New Orleans or similar areas, have no background in civil engineering, and no qualifications to make this except for the capability to do so using an old version of GIMP. So I'd absolutely love to identify issues, places to make improvements, and things that are missing now rather than once I've spent days chopping up images and finessing them into something coherent.

So what'd I get wrong? What's unworkable, out of scale, or dangerous? What style of buildings or cultural touchstones would you like to see? What kind of plants are missing?

This is basically my most traditional bookbinding project. I used regular fabric cloth for the cover, and followed the traditional steps. The interesting (to me) change is the use of a CO2 laser cutter to mark the fabric. Here's the steps to making it:

I think it's fair to say that this book is extremely rare. The author has told me that the one physical copy I've made is the only one in the world, aside from an 'ugly stapled proof [he has] in a drawer somewhere.' The book was released on patreon as serialized fiction, with each of the six sections being made available as early drafts to a certain tier. The plan was that he'd put them up briefly, take them down again, then compile the drafts and eventually release a full published version. For life-happened reasons, the last step never got done (though the author was kind enough to repost the six sections on a discord channel when I asked).

Just the same, it was one of my all-time favorite stories, so if it wasn't likely to end up somewhere I could buy it, I was at least going to make a copy of my own.

So I took the six pdfs and started editing them using whichever online tools seemed like they'd do the best job. I started by cropping the files so they'd fit the correct aspect ratio for 8.5x11" letter paper folded in half, but started getting fancier as I went. I removed pages of bonus content from the back of each one so it'd flow better as a book. I merged them all together into one file (to reduce the number of mid-book blank pages from turning it into folio signatures). I even added a second set of page numbers to the bottom because the ones in the top right restarted in every section. I manually added some blank pages front and back.

By the time I was done, I had something to feed into https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/

I used that to create letter page folio signatures (with sets of 4 and 3 pages per signature). Now I had something I could actually print. We did so on a regular office photocoppier, and I can't recommend printing each signature separately and organizing them with paperclips enough. I would have lost my mind trying to sort them otherwise).

We start off the actual bookbinding in a pretty familiar way, taking each signature, folding each page of it in half with the bone folder, nesting them, and adding that signature to the stack.

Then I used my template from the previous bookbinding project to punch holes through each signature. One really nice thing about not having to trim whitespace from my pages is that the overall page size (and thus most dimensions of the cover except the spine) will remain the same no matter what is printed on the page or which printer I use. So I can reuse things like this template.

Here's my template with its measurements in case you want to reference it:

Eventually this left a nice stack of signatures ready to sew together:

As before, I sewed it together using waxed thread, following the Penrose Press Pretty Perfect Paperback Guide. I know there are a bunch of ways to do this, but I quite like this technique.

The next step is to clamp and glue the bookblock together. My clamp is pretty crude, it's just a 2x4' screwed to a piece of particleboard, with a couple ragged sheets of wax paper keeping the book from gluing to the clamp.

The goal is to get it as tightly pressed as possible while keeping the book block nice and square.

I didn't take a picture of this step for this project, so here's one from the last book. Note how the signatures are jumbled along the edge. I've gotten much better about lining them up recently.

I usually use my finger to work the glue into the gaps these days, it's faster and makes less mess than the brush. I think it gets into the gaps better too. I do three coats of glue on the spine. For hardcovers like this one, I then glue on a strip of mull or cheesecloth which is a couple inches wider than the spine on either side (front to back), and like an inch or so shorter than the top of the spine (heightwise).

Then I glue on a strip of watercolor paper (it's supposed to be manila paper but I don't have that).

Now it's time to start on the actual cover. I size the bookboard so it'll overlap the book block by 3mm on the top, bottom, and open edge. You're supposed to make it 3mm wider for that overhang, but then remove 6mm for the hinge by the spine (so that's actually -3mm) but I haven't had good luck with that, the open edge always seemed too close to the book block, so I just leave it the same width as the book block and slide it out 6mm. Somehow that works.

To get the spine width, you're supposed to measure the spine of the book plus one thickness of bookboard, but my spines often come out a bit thicker than the rest of the book so I'm sure about that guidance either.

That's the basic layout but I wanted the color to be darker. I was reusing fabric I bought for a halloween costume, but I was picturing more of a maroon color. I didn't want to buy new cloth when I had a bunch on hand I wasn't using, so I decided to dye this piece.

I started off trying to use some very old, expired, dark roast, decaf coffee, but the cloth just wouldn't take the stain, likely due to not being natural fibers. So instead I switched to using some old rit dye I had. I took lots of pictures for the coffee and almost none for the rit dye, so just pretend it's slightly blacker and in a different pot. And that I'm using a stick instead of a wooden spoon.

The nice thing is the rit dye isn't really going to go bad, so I just poured it from the old pot I used (we stopped cooking with it because the nonstick lining had started to flake) into an old jug. I've actually reused it since and it worked fine!

After a lot of hassle, the rit dye finally made the difference.

I ironed the cloth to smooth it out:

And glued the bookboard down onto it. Make sure the gaps between the spine and the front and back is 6mm and that they're square/in line with one another.

The next step is to trim 45s off the corners (leave one bookboard's thickness between the corner of the bookboard and the cut edge) and to clean up the edges.

Then I applied glue to the bookcloth and bookboard and wrapped each edge over:

My attempts at this look kinda crude, but you don't really see this once the endpapers are glued on, so it doesn't bother me yet. Someday I'll probably look back on it and wonder why I thought this was good enough, but for now, it works just fine.

(You might notice that I glued the cut-off triangles to a scrap of bookboard, that'll come into play later)

When you apply glue to the endpapers they'll kind of liquify a little and stretch, so trim a couple mm off the leading/open edge. It'll look better.

Okay, final assembly. This is where it all comes together or goes horribly wrong.

To do this you place the bookblock inside the cover and get it positioned how you want it. Open up the cover again, slide a piece of wax paper and a piece of scrap paper in between the topmost endpaper and whatever's underneath it. Make sure the scrap paper is on top.

Get your brush soaked with glue and then dab it on some scrap until its not really soaking where it hits. Use little vertical jabbing motions (Psycho style) to stipple the top paper so its completely glued. Apply glue under the mull/cheesecloth, then put the cloth in place, then apply glue on top of that.

When there's a good layer of glue everywhere take a deep breath and close the cover onto the page. Open it just a crack, look for wrinkles and smooth them out as best you can. If you open it too far the paper will pull away from the cover.

When you think you've got it as good as it's going to get, remove the scrap paper but leave the wax paper. Close the book, put something heavy on it, and hope for the best.

When its dry, flip it over and repeat the whole process.

We've now hit all the usual steps (except the end ribbon thing but I don't see the point of that). I was honestly very pleased with the results.

But lets get fancy with it. I had some time on the CO2 laser cutter at my local makerspace, and I'd seen online that people had managed to etch bookcloth, so I wanted to try finishing things that way.

We started with some tests, on very low power and working our way up. We weren't sure how well the poly-blend fabric would handle the laser, or what kind of damage it would cause.

We started with the settings for printer paper (95 speed, 10% power) and worked up by 5% increments, finding that the quality improved each time.

Once that was done, I banged out a quick cover layout by measuring the book, drawing a vector rectangle in those dimensions, and positioning the raster title in the middle.

We ran it with the lid open (runs as a test with just a visible dot) and made sure the rectangle followed the edges of the book.

I had to prop the cover open a little so it'd be more level (I used one of the little connector things we use to pin warped things to the work surface). Then it was just a matter of hoping for the best and rerunning the file with the lid closed.

It was kinda high stakes but I'm very pleased with how it tuned out.

#diy #bookbinding #lasercutter #etching

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12735795

Hi! I'm hoping to hear people's thoughts on what my city, New Orleans, would look like in a perfect solarpunk world.

Most solarpunk art (which I love to see!) Seems to be praire/plains or forest inspired, and definitely one of the issues we have that I want to avoid is people bring environmental and ecological policies and thoughts from those two biomes to other ones (because they're seen as kind of default).

So, New Orleans! Lots of interesting challenges to address, including:

-tornados (so we need safe rooms and to withstand them

-hurricanes (there's probably no way to withstand these, instead maybe something that's kind of designed to be refixed once a year, since that's what happens anyways)

-flooding, both hurricane-associated and flash-flooding throughout the year (definitely no basements, honestly maybe no first or second floors either).

-extreme heat (feels-like gets to 120F/50C at least a couple days a year)

-extreme cold (not nearly as bad as the heat, but can be brutal enough that they turn schools into extra shelter for our unhoused for about a week each year)

-end of the river (we're at the end of the Mississippi, so we're definitely more silt than soil)

-swamp (New Orleans is sinking, our ground isn't particularly stable)

-agriculture (I'm really not sure farming is a great idea. It's hard to find local crops that grow in the wetlands--even lists of indigenous foodways focus more on upstate, where traditional planting would work. Can we farm in the wetlands without turning it into a farm?)

I recently started making solarpunk postcards again, and I had a lot of fun with a quick scene of a solarpunk cargo ship (a steel-hulled, four-masted barque) in a storm. I'd like to do more but don't yet have any strong points to make or designs I'm excited to feature.

So what would you like to see? What scene is missing from solarpunk art of humans interacting with oceans, rivers, lakes, canals? What weird idea, or old, practical design should make a comeback?

I can't promise that I'll make everything but I really do try to include as many suggestions as possible.

So far suggestions from reddit and discord have included:

• Showing more of the mooring ropes and foundations festooned with underwater life (perhaps in another storm or low tide?)
• Boats or ships with soft wing sails which are apparently good (in theory) when it comes to performance as they maintain their shape regardless of wind conditions.
• edit to add: a clipper ship

I'll state up front that I'm not a nautical kinda guy. I like to pick up terminology and learn but I've never sailed anything larger than a sunfish and I see the ocean maybe once every five years. So feel free to spell out practical considerations and realism stuff because I probably won't think of it.

And thanks!

I’ve been wanting to do scenes of solarpunk ships and shipping for awhile now. I love reexamining old technologies and seeing if they could work again, mixed with modern advancements, especially in a society with different values, or one that uses more metrics than just money to make their decisions.

I’ve read about the various attempts to make container ships more green with massive sails and kites and alternative fuels, but I never really loved any of them enough to make art of them. At best, they seemed to promise that they might use somewhat less fuel in the future, but they seem committed to the basic container ship format because its so efficient (in cost) and because everything is optimized around it.

I was talking with some of the folks from Fully Automated! about future weather changes, megastorms and tsunamis (and the potential for tsunamis to set off undersea avalanches that cause more tsunamis) and the damage those could all do to ports. How all that carefully-optimized equipment, even the depth of the ports themselves, could be damaged suddenly.

I started to think about solarpunk ocean scenes again, and about smaller vessels (which could perhaps use the shallower ports) could operate largely by wind, more or less traditionally.

Can the concept of container ships fit solarpunk? I genuinely like the optimization and logistical advantage of using standardized, stackable shipping containers which fit on ships, trucks, and trains without the need to load and unload the cargoes by hand at each transition in their journey. That’s great stuff, no complaints. What I wonder about is if that cost efficiency has caused other problems. We ship cargo all over the world but much of the time, we do it because it’s so cheap to do so. We ship raw material from one continent to process it on another, we ship that material again so we can shape it into parts, which are shipped back to the second continent for partial assembly, and then for final assembly on a fourth. Is that efficient? It’s cost efficient. But we burn terrible amounts of fuel each time we do it, and we do it for so many things.

So I’m skeptical.

Alright, my complaints out of the way, what’s actually in this scene? We’ve got an offshore windmill and a steel-hulled, four-masted barque with what’s hopefully an open-source variant of DynaRig sails.

So what does that mean? I’m very much not nautical – as with most of my postcards I’m doing my best to combine a bunch of concepts I’m only newly familiar with, so I’ve tried to make sure they’re at least based on reasonable starting points:

Cromlyngames in the FA! team mentioned DynaRig sails, these kind of funny-looking sails that taper towards the base, with thick masts and curved yards. They’ve seen some limited use on expensive yachts, there’s some proposals/plans to use them on container ships, and do seem to work well from what I’ve read. Their main advantage is in labor-savings and safety – the sails apparently slide out from inside the masts following tracks in the yards, so nobody has to climb the rigging to raise or lower them. And the entire mast rotates to best catch the wind. This allows for a smaller crew, and less of the traditional risks.

Crom suggested that they could work with any square-rigged ship, and a quick perusal of some nautical and sailing forums agreed with that (and taught me what those were). I started reading about traditional maritime shipping, and eventually found a forum discussion about the potential return of sail to modern day shipping. A poster on there mentioned the Passat, a German Flying P-Liner, and I was delighted to learn that a whole set of steel-hulled sail ships were hauling cargo well into the 1950s. Heck, one of them was captured by New Zealand during WW2 and put right into service hauling construction supplies.

So I borrowed the hull. IRL, I’m sure there’s a ton of quality-of-life improvements ship designers and sailors could suggest for a modern barque, and I’m sure I’ve included some stuff that doesn’t belong, but I’m just happy to have found a sail ship that was still effective in fairly modern days. In fact, it looks like staffing (both the difficulty finding qualified crew, and changing laws requiring more crew than traditional) was a big factor in the end of their service, and that’s something I suspect the modernized sails could help with.

I’d like to do more nautical scenes, so if you have improvements or alternative designs, let me know! I think I might do one with an offshore windmill substation, a clipper ship, or anything else you think would be worth showing. I know there’s been a ton of tech and safety features invented and added to ships since the P-Liners were modernized, and I think those things could help shorten their journeys and improve their safety at sea.

Art stuff: usually, unless I already have a strong plan for the visuals, part of my research is looking up various real life postcards and other art of similar content for inspiration. People have made postcards of almost everything.

There’s no shortage of paintings of ships at sea – I started this as a peaceful, sunny scene, but eventually gave in and went for a dramatic storm instead. Maybe showing the ship in a storm weakens the point a little, but ships run into bad storms even now, with all our modern day early warning systems – you can see plenty of videos online of even massive container ships losing cargo from being heaved around by the weather.

And one of my goals is to show weather, seasons, and locations that Solarpunk art doesn’t often feature. Bad weather is a fact of life, and it’s likely to get even more wild as our climate changes. I’ve done a couple scenes of blizzards, but none of terrible rains yet.

Given the premise that this is a postcard from a solarpunk future, it might be a historical scene of a famous ship that survived a hurricane, perhaps in the moments when the storm blew it dangerously close to an offshore wind farm.

This image (and all the other Postcards from a Solarpunk Future) is CC-BY, use it how you like.

This was another of those still images, where I wanted to capture a specific kind of place, the old farmhouses you find all throughout my hometowns, and a specific time of day in November when the sun has set and everything is this almost monochrome purple but the grass and crops look almost tan. In a few months, on cold grey days like this, when there’s a layer of snow on the ground, it almost mirrors the sky with just dark trees between them. But for now it’s this very specific color.

I used to go for walks or snowshoe trips most afternoons, and would often find myself hurrying to get back as night settled in. On those early evenings, I loved the yellow lights in the distance, the warmth and human routine they contained.

I wanted the farm in the comic to be a little more active than some of the ones back home. I did a fair bit of reading about agriculture UAVs and autonomous tractors, and I very much liked the used-future feel of the brand new stuff from those articles being kind of old and hacked-together at this point. Something these folks bought second- or third-hand, probably after it was already hacked by a previous owner to remove the manufacturer’s ability to remotely disable it. I like the idea that they have a sort of workshop/hangar for launching drones and inspecting their crops set up in the loft of the barn.

The standing figure is based a bit on my grandfather.

If want to read the rest of this silly rural cyberpunk webcomic about a stolen secret service prototype and the endangered deer it thinks is the president, you can find it here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/president-deer-adventures/

If you’d like to read the related-but-mutually-non-canonical short story version, you can find it here: https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/harbour it’s in the first edition, on page 3!

Earlier today, I saw this thread on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@[email protected]/112965146817661555

In it, the poster wondered what solarpunk cars would look like, and speculated that we already agree that they'd be lightweight small cars with electric drive. I wrote up a few posts in response, and gathered up some reference images, and I think they might be useful for folks looking to add detail to streets in Fully Automated.

I'd argue that in a solarpunk world, most personal travel should be feasible with public transit in one form or another, and with bikes or other similar pedal/electric contraptions filling much of the last-mile needs. And FA! offers a wide range of vehicles from ropeways and airbus to trains and streetcars and ferries that fill those various public transit niches. Likewise, most cargo should be being moved by train, airship, or ocean vessel.

But that still leaves a lot of gaps: last mile transit, especially for heavy cargo, and personal conveyance for people with disabilities and other needs spring to mind. FA! has some wild/exciting stuff like personal rotorcoptors and gliders here, but what would some of the more mundane vehicles look like?

I think with most transportation handled by public transit, car-ready streets are likely going to be de-prioritized, if only as a matter of cost/resource allotment. I picture a lot of them shrunk down to make room for parks, gardens, and sponge-city permeable surfaces and basins, leaving something wider than a bike path, but narrower than our current default.

I think we'd see road networks used mostly to reach local destinations, and public transit hubs, and that the vehicles on those roads would generally travel much slower, and could be held to much lower safety standards than modern cars.

In real life there are a dizying array of contraptions people come up with in alternative vehicle competitions - hybrid electric, solar, and pedal-powered machines sort of partway between a bike and a car. If the roads are no longer the sole domain of cars and high speed limits, and bikes weren't restricted to narrow bike lanes and paths, I could see people building all sorts of things to suit their needs for local transportation and cargo capacity.

Ideally they'd be open source, DIY things which reuse as many existing parts and materials as possible. I've gathered up a few of my favorite examples here:

The vhelio modular electric/pedal hybrid vehicle looks pretty crude, but it offers a crazy variety of configurations, I could see some descendant of it, a bit more developed, being common on streets.

Here's another take on the design:

Electric rikshaws are a practical city vehicle, small but with large carrying capacity:

I'm not even sure how much taxonomic difference there really is between them and ebike tricycles:

I think the four-wheeled, cargo-hauling, recumbant velov armidillo bicycle cart is especially cool.

We might even see mini-car-like things like the UD MUUV Velocar:

I think the closest fit to modern day vehicles would actually be trucks (albeit often smaller and more utilitarian than many of the giant pickup trucks we have now). But for moving heavy items for the last few miles trucks are a good form factor.

I photobashed some art of one using a streetcar pantograph rig, set up to haul heavy stuff for a library of things:

Full post here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/01/16/library-economy-heavy-items-delivery-collections/

As for what they would look like - if we didn't need every vehicle to be able to fly down freeways and survive 180-mile-per-hour crashes, they could be much simpler than what we have now. Something along the lines of electric kei trucks, small cabs, large beds, not intended to double as a mini van or daily driver. This article had a kind of cool example: https://slrpnk.net/post/11465754

Another potential truck answer is Woodgas conversions of old Internal Combustion Engine trucks. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-vehicles-firewood-in-the-fuel-tank/

I think these make sense for rural areas, for specific tasks, by farmers, forest managers, and others whose work takes them impractically far from public transit. Woodgas conversions emphasize reuse of existing machinery instead of new manufacturing. It doesn’t require high-tech electronics like electric vehicles.

These are less practical for the kind of quick trip to the store or daily commute which has shaped our current society. A woodgas vehicle takes awhile to start up, and because the fire needs to burn down, doesn’t make much sense for short trips. They might be used for hauling produce to town, supplies out to forest management camps, research sites, and other remote locations. And perhaps for road trips by campers and other people who might borrow one for awhile. I could also see hobbyists having a lot of fun with them.

The wood could be sustainably sourced, using scraps from sawmills, harvested invasive trees, brush, and even dedicated coppiced plantations of especially fast-growing trees like paulownia elongata. though its important to note that while this can be done well, the last time these vehicles were used in massive numbers (during WWII) they led to deforestation. They make sense in small doses, and with some careful management of their inputs.

One last bit of art - I featured a bunch of big woodgas trucks, smaller electric kei trucks, electric rickshaws, cargo bikes, and a modernized chinese wheelbarrow in this scene of McMansions being deconstructed and the materials salvaged in this photobash:

Full text here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/05/02/deconstruction-crew-disassembling-abandoned-mcmansions-so-the-material-can-be-reused/

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12129345

I’ve been working on writing a campaign(?) adventure module(?) For Fully Automated for the last couple months now. It’s the first piece of solarpunk fiction I’ve written, and it includes almost every setting concept I’ve been playing with in my Postcards from a Solarpunk Future series.

It’s a sort of treasure hunting adventure, where the players are on a quest to find several tons of illegally-dumped industrial waste, which is useful in the production of geopolymers. Through their investigation they’ll explore a mostly-abandoned town which is in the process of being deconstructed and rewilded, talk to locals and work crews, and hopefully unravel a cold-case murder mystery lost to the region’s chaotic past during the setting’s Global Climate War 60 years before.)

Writing this has been really fun - I think partially because I love worldbuilding, so I'm happily writing all the locations and options I can think of, knowing the players will only visit a subset of them.

I’ve gotten far enough along that I think I can start photobashing together some art for some of the locations the players might decide to visit (starting with this bike kitchen in the village where the game begins).

In my postcard about deconstructing McMansions to reclaim the building materials and rewild the land, a few people brought up simply repurposing the buildings. I’d been batting around the concept in my head for awhile before then, but had struggled to figure out how to render a scene that showed everything I wanted it to.

I ended up using pretty much every idea I had for those scenes in the campaign’s starting village (a planned community which has repurposed an abandoned wealth enclave and its golf course as communal housing, workshops, and a food forest. That means I can put together photobashes of specific spots within that village, which I think is more achievable.

So here’s the first of the set. It shows a little bit of a repurposed discount mansion, but focuses mostly on the old back yard. The concrete patio has been removed, the large lawns and nearby golf course have grown into proper forests, and public paths have been brought right up to the house. The pool house has been turned into a bike co-op, and the swimming pool has been converted into a sunken greenhouse or Walipini.

Generally when you end up with an old swimming pool you don’t want, your options are to tear it out and fill in the hole, just fill in the pool, convert it into a natural pond, or (perhaps the least common answer) build one of these. Which one you pick will likely depend on your goals, the quality of the structure, and how far down your water table is. If it’s too high, it can lift an empty pool like a concrete boat, or cause other structural damage. But if circumstances are right, and the pool is intact after being abandoned and empty for a good many years already, it might be worth repurposing.

There are some beautiful and solarpunk photos online of real life versions of these, which have a far grander scale than what I’ve depicted here. This is more like the old pineapple pits, or a fancy version of the citrus trenches. Who knows, maybe they even cut away part of the floor so they could plant into the ground below.

The above-ground portion of the greenhouse is backed with an earthen berm/raised bed meant to help it maintain a consistent temperature. The retaining walls of the tiered bed are made from repruposed, broken-up concrete (sometimes called urbanite), likely sourced from the concert patio which was replaced with wood chips for better water permeability. Some full-shade plants like rhubarb and mint have been planted on the back slope, and a grape arbor has been built over it. Sweet peas are growing along the side where there’s more light. Raspberries and wildflowers grow around the rest of the smaller yard space.

In the background of the scene, an old pool house has been converted into a bike kitchen, one locations where the players will be able to obtain transportation.

A network of paths have been built all throughout the village, the food forest, and the region beyond. Even the town the players will explore is riddled with small trails and paths which the locals have built in lieu of trying to maintain a full network of paved roads. This was inspired by my hometowns' network of backwoods trails, and the downsizing to achieve a maintainable transportation network described in this article. Some roads obviously still exist because they're useful, but others have been washed out and never repaired because none of the current residents need them for anything, while new trails cut straight through properties nobody has lived in for decades.

The buildings are painted with colorful murals. This is always a challenge for me in these photobashes. I love the idea of a society that makes art everywhere for its own sake and I'd hope a solarpunk society would abandon some of the obsession with property values and would decorate everything from buildings to machines, in all kinds of styles. That might mean folk art with historical roots, like the zapista murals, it might mean carved panels on cabinets, or etchings on tools, metal sculpture, or who knows what. Embellishment not for commercial value but as self expression and messaging. So the topics and content would vary a lot.

I think there's a bit of punk in that, in refusing to paint or decorate with an eye on the resale value, like your house is a product for others rather than your own home.

So I try to include murals, carvings, and other decorations in my solarpunk art. Unfortunately I've also found that in my postcards, where the buildings are usually part of a cluttered background, murals can kind of act like dazzle camouflage, making it hard to tell what exactly is happening. So I'm still figuring out what works and what doesn't. (Ideally, I want the contents of the mural to be clear while also allowing for the building and the assorted stuff attached to it (plants, solar panels, other tech) to be easily recognized and understood. It's challenging and something I might revisit someday. I did try a version where the bike kitchen's mural was made out of silhouetted bike parts, but it looked less obviously like a paint job on a building, so I went with the mandala for clarity for now.

Overall I think this'll work for now, and get us closer to a playable version, though I am still messing with it, looking for something that'll hit that adventure story vibe visually. I'm going much more line-art-and-flat-colors for the character portraits, so we'll see if that works here.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12129345

I’ve been working on writing a campaign(?) adventure module(?) For Fully Automated for the last couple months now. It’s the first piece of solarpunk fiction I’ve written, and it includes almost every setting concept I’ve been playing with in my Postcards from a Solarpunk Future series.

It’s a sort of treasure hunting adventure, where the players are on a quest to find several tons of illegally-dumped industrial waste, which is useful in the production of geopolymers. Through their investigation they’ll explore a mostly-abandoned town which is in the process of being deconstructed and rewilded, talk to locals and work crews, and hopefully unravel a cold-case murder mystery lost to the region’s chaotic past during the setting’s Global Climate War 60 years before.)

Writing this has been really fun - I think partially because I love worldbuilding, so I'm happily writing all the locations and options I can think of, knowing the players will only visit a subset of them.

I’ve gotten far enough along that I think I can start photobashing together some art for some of the locations the players might decide to visit (starting with this bike kitchen in the village where the game begins).

In my postcard about deconstructing McMansions to reclaim the building materials and rewild the land, a few people brought up simply repurposing the buildings. I’d been batting around the concept in my head for awhile before then, but had struggled to figure out how to render a scene that showed everything I wanted it to.

I ended up using pretty much every idea I had for those scenes in the campaign’s starting village (a planned community which has repurposed an abandoned wealth enclave and its golf course as communal housing, workshops, and a food forest. That means I can put together photobashes of specific spots within that village, which I think is more achievable.

So here’s the first of the set. It shows a little bit of a repurposed discount mansion, but focuses mostly on the old back yard. The concrete patio has been removed, the large lawns and nearby golf course have grown into proper forests, and public paths have been brought right up to the house. The pool house has been turned into a bike co-op, and the swimming pool has been converted into a sunken greenhouse or Walipini.

Generally when you end up with an old swimming pool you don’t want, your options are to tear it out and fill in the hole, just fill in the pool, convert it into a natural pond, or (perhaps the least common answer) build one of these. Which one you pick will likely depend on your goals, the quality of the structure, and how far down your water table is. If it’s too high, it can lift an empty pool like a concrete boat, or cause other structural damage. But if circumstances are right, and the pool is intact after being abandoned and empty for a good many years already, it might be worth repurposing.

There are some beautiful and solarpunk photos online of real life versions of these, which have a far grander scale than what I’ve depicted here. This is more like the old pineapple pits, or a fancy version of the citrus trenches. Who knows, maybe they even cut away part of the floor so they could plant into the ground below.

The above-ground portion of the greenhouse is backed with an earthen berm/raised bed meant to help it maintain a consistent temperature. The retaining walls of the tiered bed are made from repruposed, broken-up concrete (sometimes called urbanite), likely sourced from the concert patio which was replaced with wood chips for better water permeability. Some full-shade plants like rhubarb and mint have been planted on the back slope, and a grape arbor has been built over it. Sweet peas are growing along the side where there’s more light. Raspberries and wildflowers grow around the rest of the smaller yard space.

In the background of the scene, an old pool house has been converted into a bike kitchen, one locations where the players will be able to obtain transportation.

A network of paths have been built all throughout the village, the food forest, and the region beyond. Even the town the players will explore is riddled with small trails and paths which the locals have built in lieu of trying to maintain a full network of paved roads. This was inspired by my hometowns' network of backwoods trails, and the downsizing to achieve a maintainable transportation network described in this article. Some roads obviously still exist because they're useful, but others have been washed out and never repaired because none of the current residents need them for anything, while new trails cut straight through properties nobody has lived in for decades.

The buildings are painted with colorful murals. This is always a challenge for me in these photobashes. I love the idea of a society that makes art everywhere for its own sake and I'd hope a solarpunk society would abandon some of the obsession with property values and would decorate everything from buildings to machines, in all kinds of styles. That might mean folk art with historical roots, like the zapista murals, it might mean carved panels on cabinets, or etchings on tools, metal sculpture, or who knows what. Embellishment not for commercial value but as self expression and messaging. So the topics and content would vary a lot.

I think there's a bit of punk in that, in refusing to paint or decorate with an eye on the resale value, like your house is a product for others rather than your own home.

So I try to include murals, carvings, and other decorations in my solarpunk art. Unfortunately I've also found that in my postcards, where the buildings are usually part of a cluttered background, murals can kind of act like dazzle camouflage, making it hard to tell what exactly is happening. So I'm still figuring out what works and what doesn't. (Ideally, I want the contents of the mural to be clear while also allowing for the building and the assorted stuff attached to it (plants, solar panels, other tech) to be easily recognized and understood. It's challenging and something I might revisit someday. I did try a version where the bike kitchen's mural was made out of silhouetted bike parts, but it looked less obviously like a paint job on a building, so I went with the mandala for clarity for now.

Overall I think this'll work for now, and get us closer to a playable version, though I am still messing with it, looking for something that'll hit that adventure story vibe visually. I'm going much more line-art-and-flat-colors for the character portraits, so we'll see if that works here.