How would history have changed if we discovered radioactivity and studied it in depth at the beginning of the industrial revolution rather than 100 years later like we did in real life?
Could steam engines powered by nuclear reactors become common within a few decades? What kind of effect would it have on the course of history?
A few friends and I have been discussing the idea of something like that for use in a campaign possibly.
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World War One would have left most of France uninhabitable by man, along with parts of Britain and Germany.
Its discovery and subsequent unraveling was only possible because of the decades of development that went into the equipment used to measure it in the first place. You'd need to have a lot of things progress more quickly at the very beginning of the industrial revolution.
Exploiting nuclear power isn't just tossing radioactive rocks into a furnace instead of coal. The scientific framework needed to understand radioactivity and the technological foundation necessary to build and run enough reactors to develop practices sound enough to allow for commercial exploitation wasn't there, and would not have sprung up overnight like a Civ tech you just bought from Ghandi.
Is there any sort of development that could suddenly give someone a few steps forward into the studies far earlier than we did in this world?
>Exploiting nuclear power isn't just tossing radioactive rocks into a furnace instead of coal
Well yeah, but at least the base concept of it is simple enough, controlled reaction things that get hot, and using that heat to make water hot so you can spin a steam turbine. In the beginning it probably wouldn't have been the safest industry.
Mostly trying to come up with some sort of way to justify a technologically advanced alternate history that could start out with a somewhat Steampunk feel throughout the Victoria era, towards the turn of the century start becoming more of a Dieselpunk setting and slowly advance into a more and more sci-fi setting as we approach modern times.
Just trying to think of a way that could be more based in reality than just a handwave of "we have this different tech than we did in real life because reasons" and without just putting the setting on an alternate world, I want it to be Earth.
The framework to discover radioactivity didn't exist at the time, and discovering radioactivity by no means allows you to convert it into power.
If you're wanting a steampunk campaign, just use phlebotium.
The trouble is that using radioactive material is a fundamental shift in how you harness energy. Burning coal instead of wood isn't too complicated... At least, not compared to using super heavy death rocks that cancer and death by proximity.
Also, remember that technological develop isn't just about information--economics are important too. No one is going to develop a steam engine when it's absurdly cheap to use manpower. Prototype steam engines existed for centuries before practical ones were used but they only caught on after there was a financial benefit for the people employing them.
How about having everyone run out of coal? The industrial revolution happened, lots of scientific progress, and then for whatever reason it is discovered that the coal supply is much smaller than previously expected? Or harvesting it has become much more expensive for whatever reason? Having some reason to restrict access would spur people to look for alternatives.
And maybe speed things up with an unhappy accident? For whatever reason a scientist got a bunch of radioactive material together and it started giving off heat; he clearly was dying and conducted some experiments while warning people off and raving about the great potential
Not much beyond ; Without the knowledge of how to build a proper containment unit or measure radioactivity, all you can hope for is dirty bombs.
Lol wtf kind of thread is this?
>can muh steampunk use nuclear stuff?
The answer is technically, yes, if you can produce fission or fusion reactions then you could use them to heat water for your steam engine.
The issue is, to use nuclear reactions, you need a solid understanding of electromagnetism, at which point why use steam? Its dangerous, it cant be stored, and its inefficient. Just use an electromagnetic motor
Using nuclear reactions to power a steam engine is a bit like building a machinegun to kill an ant. Sure its possible but youre wasting a lot of power
>I can't read: the post
Stay in school, kid.
You will need to start developing your setting far before the first industrial revolution hits, then, because
>the base concept of it is simple enough
is a point born of ignorance, much like how neckbeerds here think they would be able to build steam engines and radar if somehow transplanted into medieval Europe. Knowing the grossly simplified explanation of a process and understanding the process itself, let alone having all he prerequisites necessary to realize it, are things world apart. In order to make use of nuclear power you need materials that don't exist yet, you need solutions to architectural problems that don't exist yet, and you need fairly ripe computers. NEED. In order to exploit nuclear power in mid-XIX century you need to transplant most of mid-XX century technology there as well, which requires you to somehow transplant all the problems these technologies were developed to solve, at which point your setting is either 1950. with top hats and blimps or something that diverged from the way our history went centuries earlier, with all the ramifications of that.
>Using nuclear reactions to power a steam engine is a bit like building a machinegun to kill an ant. Sure its possible but youre wasting a lot of power
You... uh... do know that all nuclear-powered things in current use are steam-powered, right?
A nuclear reactor is just a different kind of boiler, everything from the primary coolant loop back is exactly the same for an oil-fired plant and a nuclear-fired plant.
How far back would a divergence have to have been for nuclear powered steam engines to be viable by the 1800s?
And I've been planning to keep the Victorian stuff limited to the Victorian age, at the turn of the century things get more advanced, less blimps and zeppelins and more full on air battleships like Last Exile, and landships on the ground because I like those, so by the time the 1950s rolls around we'd be more 1950s but it's like a sci-fi novel from the time.
Even the end of the 1800s would be less fully steampunk and more closer to having technology like the Nautilus from 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. Iron, steel and military design becoming preferable over the brass leather and wood of the past.
Just have the Roman empire fracture in it's glory days. All these little Roman factions are all trying to get the upper hand, they start the Industrial Revolution during "our Early Morning period", until eventually nuclear power is invented during "our Industrial Revolution".
>since there's no big roman empire anymore, it cannot fall anymore - so roman culture remains alive - or at least, for as long as it mutates in something new, like west-roman culture, north-roman culture, east-roman culture, south-roman culture, etc.
Yea but just to convert the heat energy into electrical energy, not to actually use the steam power to run a steam boat or something
You convert the heat energy to electrical energy via a steam turbine spinning a generator, but that's only if your end product is going to be electricity.
Nuclear warships use *exactly* the same geared steam turbines as their oil-fired processors, because steam->rotation is more efficient than steam->rotation->electricity->rotation.
The only way we have to generate electricity from nuclear substances *without* a steam turbine somewhere in the loop is radio-thermal isotope generators, which produce *minute* amounts of power using thermocouples.
If you want more than a trickle of power to run your space probe, you're going to have to treat the nuclear reactor as an exotic boiler for an otherwise-conventional steam plant.
First you need to find a reason why anyone would bother with nuclear power when wood and coal are widely available, then you need to explain how infrastructure for exploitation of nuclear power could be built in a society that didn't go through the massive industrial expansion piggybacking on the first industrial revolution's hunger for coal and steel.
The best I can be bothered to come up with right now is delaying the Black Death for a few centuries so the Eastern Roman Empire under Constantine can retake Europe and grow big and strong. Then the plague hits, but is mostly foiled by medicine, leaving the markets alive but with a shortage of labor. Que the Byzantine FIR. Then have another epidemic, brought on by the booming urban populations and maritime trade, but this time the disease hits in earnest. Now you can have the Empire's inheritor states take over a lot of industrial infrastructure, but all the easily mined fuel is gone and the way is open for alternative sources of energy. You will still need computers to control reactors - nothing else can react fast enough - but the rest takes far less bullshitting.
I was trying to think of the nuclear steam engines being a lot more powerful and easier to use than what they could get from a traditional engine, so we could have nuclear trains that can carry heavier loads, nuclear engines in our ships that don't need to re-coaling ports, they can simply go on their nuclear fuel, and eventually able to make airships and the like powered from this principle too.
The nuclear was less for the sake of nuclear power being a thing and more a justification for having these advancements in technology such as widespread use of zeppelins and armored war trains and landships and such.
That can partially be solved by someone discovering modern processes for mass producing helium and steel. 'Landships and such' won't be plausible on any tech level, so either cut them, or just stop caring and use plotanuim to power everything. Go read up on Victorian quack science for inspiration.
Nuclear engines aren't more powerful than conventional engines, because the actual *engine* part is the same, only the boiler's changed.
Nukes give you massively more endurance at the expense of less overall power per ton. (You need bigger turbines that require more frequent maintenance with nuclear boilers compared to conventional boilers.)
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> 'Landships and such' won't be plausible on any tech level
Well, plausible and practical are two different matters entirely.
They're certainly plausible depending on how big you wanted to go.
There are also things such as Bagger 293.
Forgot my picture
That article is a bit outdated today.
The A1B on the ford, produces more power than a similarly footprinted conventional system. The A1B is smaller, weighs less, uses substantially less parts while outputting 3x more power than the nimitz's A4W reactor.
What would Europe end up being like after something like that?
Would we end up with the same ideas of Germany, France, England, Italy etc?
German Unification is one of the things I really like in history for some autistic reason I can't really explain.
I was imagining the increased technological strength of the great powers due to the more advanced tech would lead to more conflict over Africa in the colonial eras due to each nation having more force to throw around.
If America was able to take advantage of these advancements they could probably be a lot more Imperialistic, stomp Mexico in the 1840s and leave them a bit more fucked up than usual, and if the British Empire had more resources tied up in a hotter fight over Africa they might be more likely to let border disputes with America go more in favor of the US, and heightened conflict between the British Empire and France might provoke the Quebecois and other French Canadians.
So you think just more modern metalworking processes and such would lead to more advancements in that area being made possible?
I was under the assumption that nuclear engines would have been preferable and made more fanciful invention possible on a large scale.
"Because reasons" is starting to seem like an easier explanation to use for these advances.
Honestly the steampunk aspect isn't the biggest draw, I prefer the Dieselpunk era that would be from the turn of the century to the 1950s, the Steampunk Victorian age is just a fun touch.
>So you think just more modern metalworking processes and such would lead to more advancements in that area being made possible?
>I was under the assumption that nuclear engines would have been preferable and made more fanciful invention possible on a large scale.
Nuclear engines are really only good for naval propulsion when you care about range more than power-to-weight, and can afford the immense weight of all the heavy radiation shielding you'd need.
Just having internal-combustion engines advance faster then they did in reality would be enough. Look at the airships and landships used in the first world war. The Mark V managed to change the course of history with a crappy 150 horsepower engine that needed constant babysitting.
Imagine you have more reliable mid-century diesels available. The landship fleet (while not being *much* larger than the early tanks we saw during the Great War) would have a lot more tactical mobility. You could even start to use the armor tactics the British Army was developing towards the end of the war.
Big armored siege tanks would smash though the trenchlines with a squad or two embarked on each. The infantry would then dismount and hold the breach open long enough for faster cruiser tanks (which lacked the armor to endure a frontal assault on a fortified trench) to zip past the trenches and raise havoc in the enemy rear (perhaps even bringing their own dismounts.)
If you want to keep things realistic, you'll probably have to scale down the size of things a bit. Have your landships be roughly the size of a WWI tank, with a crew of maybe twenty instead of hundreds.
If you wanted airships, just look at the *actual* airships of the period. Zeppelins were notoriously hard to shoot down, they could tank thousands of rounds of incendiary bullets and still make it home alive.
Hydrogen, after all, doesn't burn. Hydrogen *and oxygen in the proper ratio* burn, and a bullet-sized hole in a non-pressurized gas bag will take hours to let in enough air for fire to be a hazard. (You need a 2:1 ratio of Hydrogen to Oxygen for combustion, and air's only 20~ percent oxygen. You wouldn't start worrying about flame until your gasbags were 5 parts air to every 2 parts hydrogen, and I'd be worried about loosing lift before that happened.)
You also might want to look into hybrid airships. Essentially, instead of leaving the envelope as a cigar shape, you build a giant lifting body and fill it with lifting gas. It's an awful lot easier to handle than a conventional airship, and you get a lot more payload mass per cubic meter. It's also one of the very few times the square-cube law works in your favor.
Was there much advancement in steam engine technology that a few decade headstart would have made a huge difference in performance like how our internal combustion engines compare to early ones or is steam more straightforward with less room for improvement?
Seems like most impressive steam stuff came from the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was a primitive steam powered motorcycle by the 1860s though, first real traction engines were popular by the 1880s, and American engineers made pic related around 1910, which is powered by a steam boiler inside it.
Tech being 50-75 years ahead of our time could mean America having tanks by the Mexican-American war, or by the Civil War at least.
I could see the tanks being scoffed at by the Europeans, being expensive, hard to produce and slow, much like the idea was originally, then as WWI breaks out they realize how practical that actually would be to have and start getting into tank development more, so it's not just America with tanks.
I just want to imagine some way we could have a world with America invading Mexico using tanks and zeppelins to Manifest Destiny their ass. But World War 1 is too influential and hardcore to prevent some form of it from happening. Though it might be a lot closer to what Battlefield 1 shows than it was in real life.
This.
Also atomic bombs are a step in the process.
If you want nuclear power in 1860, how has the world changed by having nukes in 1850?
Whatever explanation you use is going to need a lot of handwavium.
Maybe aliens crashed and left a highly advanced self replicating nuclear power plant.
Well, I mean, there are examples. Archimedes seemed to have been developing calculus about 2000 years before it actually became known about, but his notes were written over with religious texts, and weren't rediscovered until modern day.
> some lab geared for energy research creates a working model
> people copy the working model without understanding it why it works.
You don't need to understand to use it. It can be "magic"
>people later find out everyone who works with it dies horrible
>it's still used cause it's so powerfull by the military while the public scorns it as witchcraft
Been moving away from the nuclear power option now that I've thought about it.
Landships would only be plausible in a setting where aircraft didn't take off and render non-carrier megavehicles unviable like they did in the 40s. Prior to field experiences which showed multi-turreted tanks like the T-35 and T-100 were inefficient followed by sinking of the Bismark and Yamato proving that massive big guns vessels didn't cut it on land or sea, there were serious considerations for landships for military use in practically every military that cared to use tanks in a serious matter.
In other words, any setting where battleships are viable in is one that landships are a theoretically possible (if not terribly practical) in.
Nuclear power could be developed by some fringe state. There are some countries out there that are very coal-poor, but uranium rich. Some dictator somewhere pours money into finding some way to turn that into fuel for whatever crackpot plan he has, and manages the most dangerous ship in the world, both to opponents and the crew.