MoF 01: Steampunk/Clockpunk

This is the first Map of the Fortnight challenge thread. To start off on an easy note I've chosen Legolas's idea:

A steampunk / clockpunk world or region.

The Rules: You have two weeks to construct you map. Due to the late start it will close on the 7th of August 0800.

Any comments/questions/discussion/Works in Progress can be posted in this thread along with the finished maps.

Wow, first entry.

Typical steampunk America.

The Congo Free State, around 1900. King Leopold needs investors if he wants to buy the cutting edge steam-powered mining, logging and military technology of a great industrial power like Germania or the British Empire, and this is an ad published in Belgium, trying to attract investors.

Traffic routes

I decided for a version of Europe that is connected by a network of ironways (trains) and celestonavs (airships).
Dominated by a mighty Holy German Empire this Europe is far more advanced in steam technology, using it for transport and war machines. The Last German-French War in 1855 was fought with steamtanks and celestonavs. The superior technology of the HGE ensured its victory and the dismembering of France.
I really hadn't wasted much time on the POD, but I placed it near Charles the Bold surviving and dying 20 years later. America was discovered by Gustav Elber, a Burgundian explorer.
New Russia is the result from a Russian civil war, having the weaker fraction retreating to 'New Russia' with German help - this is also the reason for the Baltic states as German territory = payment.
For Byzantium - its a restored Empire, carved out from the former Ottoman Empire during a crusade in the 18th century. The basileus of the Byzantine Empire is actually from a Habsburg side branch.

In hopes of encouraging more clockpunk, (rather than winning anything: I gotta move beyond basic paint) a clockpunk 1700.

Thanks to Rudolph II's encouragement of alchemical studies, the eastern Habsburg empire managed to gain a commanding lead in the development of modern material philosophy. With alchemical artillery and clockwork automata, the Habsburgs have crushed the German Protestants, bitch-slapped the Swedes, and pushed back the Ottomans. Recently, the arms of the Dual Emperors have achieved their greatest coup yet: with the aid of Austria's new magnetically suspended [1] Sky-Ships, the French have suffered a crushing defeat, and the aged king, who for decades has struggled to prevent Habsburg mastery of Europe, has reportedly been taken prisoners. French philosphers are fleeing abroad less they fall into the hands of the Austrian Inquisitors.

But pride goeth before a fall, and forces are marshalling to oppose the Habsburgs. Secret emissaries, travelling by phlogiston-powered submersible to avoid discovery by Habsburg ships of the sea or skies, now work to bind together an alliance to reverse the Habsburg conquests. In Poland, King Jan's Golem Corps, a gift from the Kabbalist philosophers he protects, are more than a match for any clockworks: in the Ottoman capital, the Sultan has natural philosophers of his own, and it is rumored that they have created a mechanical brain able to predict the outcome of battles: and in the British republic, Isaac Newton and the National Institute of the Sciences have developed alchemical weapons such as nothing the world has seen before, including the process by which the Great Ditch was created, seperating the rump of the independent Netherlands from the conquered continent, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. France, too, is defeated but hardly pacified...

Nobody really thinks of backward Muscovy, and its seizure of Livonia is generally attributed to the fact that Sweden was busy getting whomped on by the Austrians at the time. But its rather large Czar is a man of ambition, and he has not only been building a modern army, for he pays well for foreign talent, especially of skilled material philosophers, alechemists and otherwise...

Bruce

[1] Well, Gulliver's Travels and the flying island of Laputa are clockpunk-era...

I have not thought of a story for this map, I only wanted to have some form of rivalry between clockwork and steam-powered airship designs. And that's what this is - the Italian states are developing clockwork devices, drawing from the works of Leonardo da Vinci (who was apprenticed to a Swiss watchmaker in this timeline), while the Ottomans are harnessing the power of steam after discovering some ancient Greek texts relating to that.

Psh, enough focusing on Steampunk Europe, lets take a look at what other parts of the world are doing!

General Note:

A steampunk setting would vastly increase the demand for metal and rubber products, whilst the new technology of aerial vehicles and submarines would allow easy evasion of the authorities if you can hide in a rugged mountainious archipelgo. The perfect recipe for piracy in South East Asia! In this land of a thousand treasures and hiding places vast fortunes can be made at gunpoint.

The greater power available to adventures and fortune seeking europeans with their new technology has lead many to carve out small fiefdoms in the more remote areas, the most successful being the notorious Baron Vega and the Brookes of Sarawak.

Technological notes:

Cloudships are obviously airships, generally used for passengers and time sensitive freight as shipping it by sea is vastly cheaper (if much slower), note no radio and high fuel requirements (unlike the petrol engines of your standard airship wanks) means generally sticking close to land where possible. Expensive long range Cloudships make the Manila-Guam-Hawai'i-San Francisco run.
Nautiloids are submarines, named after the first successful underwater ship; Fulton's Nautilus. Rather than using expensive and hard to replace torpedos, most pirate Nautiliods surface and engage with cannons, or utilise hydrolic tenticles of claws from underwater to disable their prey.
Jets are essentially heavy Gliders launched by Steam catapults and compressed Steam boost stages, and equipped with Hydrogen Peroxide rockets for weaponry and afterburners. Formidable weapons indeed, they rip Cloudships to shreds but their limited flight time and extensive launch infrastructure severely limits their range, and Cloud Pirates have a merry old time outside their range.
Skyrails are self/gravity powered cable cars that whizz between pylons hundreds of metres high and leagues apart. Because they're cool.

Baron Vega's technology is based on the extremely high pressure steam (and sometimes direct manipulation of magnetic lava) available from geothermal sources. A dangerious madman who managed to beat back a 5 nation intervention in 1842 by spraying molten iron dozens of miles from the dreaded Vega cannon. However when it became apparent that the technology couldn't be utilised away from its volcano power sources and the Baron thus could not expand beyond his jungles the great powers decided to ignore/buy copper from him.

map in next post.

Not entirely sure if this qualifies as clockpunk but here's my submission. It's a bit cramped in some places but I wanted to get all that info in.

Without a civil war to impede the March of Progress the Unionarchy (Union + Hierarchy; having become the most common nickname for the United States of America) has shown such rapid signs of infrastructural build-up in it's newly acquired territories that the British Empire (under the Tory-Labour coalition for "Industry and Empire") has put massive military, technological, and human resources into it's North American holdings in order to carve out a piece of the West for itself; causing war with the US.

Steampunk Australia in the year 1900 with a POD in 1840. This is a map of referendum results for each colony concerning Australian federation. The map is overlain on an image of the Puffing Billy, a steam train which opened in OTL 1900. More than just a novelty ITTL, steam trains like this are commonplace in Steampunk Australia, particularly across Fumoterra (latin for 'steam land').

Map coming in 5 minutes or so...

wilcoxchar said:

Not entirely sure if this qualifies as clockpunk but here's my submission. It's a bit cramped in some places but I wanted to get all that info in.

Click to expand...

the Germiyans? you got my vote. (don't think anyone's ever let them survive - in map or timeline)

great work.

And without further ado, the Steampunk Australia map:

CSA balkanization

No new maps yet? Also bump.

I am working on one... It is large, however, and rather time consuming.

Here is my entry, one of the continents from the world my novel is set in.



Despite it's relatively recent printing, a slightly deranged mail clerk shoved this proof into his pocket soon after it left the drying rack, he has been let loose to the constabulary and a replacement is en route.

-Memo to Editor of the Gears of Tellus.


--Edit: This pic doesn't seem to be the right size, rather a smaller version than on my computer, so if a larger is desired/needed, I can provide one.

Steampunk Europe:

Because of its paucity of liquid fossil fuels, the German Federation made heavy investmetns in steam power in the early industrial era. Steam was found to be a very powerful tool, though limited for long-distance travel due to the large amount of fuel stock needed to keep boilers running. This led to a frission of government structures in Europe, with few, large, steam-powered and centralized states holding sway over central and eastern europe, that used railways and a highly mechanized, land-based military to hold sway. The more diverse, inter-continental empires on the Atlantic Coast relied on wind and eventually oil power to provide the transport that connected their global possessions.

The French Empire was slow to realize the magnitude of change that steam power would provide to military arms, and were utterly devastated in the First and Second Franco-German Wars, eventually being reduced to a rump state allied to Great Britain, with a monarchy-in-exile on the island of Reunion. Along with its European territories came African possessions for the emerging German super-state.

The development of solar-heated steam boilers was perfectly situated for the blistering environement of North Africa.The combination of cheap, powerful solar-steam engineering allowed for massive reimagining of the landscape - a large amount of the Niger's flow was redirected northward, through a subterreanean tunnel through the atlas foothills, and eventually into the Bay of Tuniz on the Mediterranean. The Ubangi river was also redirected to flow north into Lake Tchad, which swelled to an immense size before flowing northwards, also to the Med. These two new 'Nile's transformed the ecology of the Sahara, creating an immense fertile belt that was used primarily for sugarcane, providing a release from the monopolies of Great Britain and the United Kingdom in the New World.

Imperia Rusa, not to be outdone in prestige projects and also denied free-access to the Med, created the Don-Volga Canal, creating a direct link between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. This had the side effect of flooding the Caspian, raising its sea-level to that of the world's oceans (+90 feet). Empress Katerina declared that the Rus now 'had their own Mediterranean, a vastly superior to the original'. Unfortunately without the same intense sun as the African projects, manual labour was needed instead of steam-powered mechanicals. Many tens of thousands died for the Tsarina's project.

Here's my take