This is a dieselpunk thread. Post your dieselpunk

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What exactly is dieselpunk? What era is it meant to reflect? What are its main components?

It's a loose term to be sure. WW1 through the end of WW2 is the general time frame. You get a general idea of the look from the pictures posted. As for the main components, i'm going to borrow an user's description from an art deco thread, which is not the same but kinda touches on the themes

>Art deco is about hope and this grand, shining future. It's the reason for all those sun beams and thunderbolt design. You run mutants and masterminds in the 1920s where the great war has just ended and prohibition begun. Plenty of badass veterans and grizzled gangsters. Corruption in the streets and the courthouse you cant just punch away, as well as the earliest fbu. While pulp heroes are away on mars andbfar flung jungles, you're in the city as the earliest super heroes. You might fight crazy monsters on occasion, but your biggest issues is making things good for people on the street. You're exotic, stange and powerful, yet still humble and human. Think of the Rocketeer, a man with a jet pack yet able to affect great change. Superman of this kind of period was just an amazingly strong man who could lify cars and was immune to bullets. He fought wife beaters and evil cops. Help the little man to a brighter future. Deliver hope.

Sky Captain and the World of tomorrow is a good example of a dieselpunk movie.

>Not naming that picture "Imperial Fortress World"

Wierd War 2 is so sadly under utilized.

Adding diesel powered mechs and a few armored zepplins to this scene would do it. I'm running out of dieselpunk pictures so I'll be reaching from now on

God that movie is awful, but holy shit do I love the design aesthetics

>You will never pilot a submersible plane

The 1920+ is an excellent example of the genre. Guy really knows how to do slavic dieselpunk

It was the first movie shot fully in CGI. And it showed. Oh god, it showed. Angelina Joli with an eyepatch was genius though

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They totally nailed my gruff, yet flirty commander fetish, while also realizing my love for nose-art and eyepatches. Shame about the plot and how everything looked

This. This picture right here. It encompasses everything I love about the genre. Roaring 20's Great Gatsby opulence and gritty diesel powered mad science

What about the towering, sharp-edged, brightly-lit metroplexes like and ?

Femme Fatales are important for any game run in this setting

Like I said in it's certainly a loose term, and can encompasses a lot of themes from the interwar period. The metropolis style city is definitely a hallmark of the setting, especially when it incorporates mad science

What's this? A Dieselpunk thread with no Mutant Chronicles? We must rectify this.

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Because fuck you, this absolutely counts.

So how dieselpunk is art deco?

I have not heard of this game, I'll have to do some investigating

yes

Well played user

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Japanese mad scientist don't get enough love in this setting

Mutant Chronicles is an interesting case. Instead of taking place in an alternate reality where technology progressed along post WWII lines, it takes place in a future where more advanced technology had to be hastily retro-fitted with dieselpunk tech.

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I won't lie, I'm totally playing a character who I modelled after Don Karnage.
I'm trying to finagle my way into an Iron Vulture substitute.

Does brutalist architecture count, or is it too far removed (timeline wise it is ~1950 to ~1970)?

Agreed, waiting for reboot

It's not hard to play Don Karnage. Just be THE MOST FRENCH sky pirate ever.

Nah, that's a little removed. Art deco is a bit more "graceful" than that.

That's a good question. That's soviet bloc style buildings right? Might be more atom/ray/retro rocket style than anything

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Brutalist buildings are about blunt force and ruggedness. Lots of government and college buildings adopted it in the '50s or '60s.

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I uh. Did not mean to post that picture. Wrong skeleton picture

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Anons? Quick, hopefully inoffensive query: if Steampunk's "magical" counterpart is Gaslamp Fantasy (see: Girl Genius, Deadlands, Castle Falkenstein, Masque of the Red Death), then what is the "magical" counterpart to Dieselpunk?

I mean, it's got to exist - Dishonored is a pretty good Veeky Forums example of it, what with clockwork automatons and disintegrator gates fuelled by oil from mutant squid-whales coexisting alongside demons and magical talismans - but what would you actually call it?

>what is the "magical" counterpart to Dieselpunk?
Cthulhu mythos.

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>Steampunk's "magical" counterpart is [called] Gaslamp Fantasy
News to me.

tru

Not everything needs to be eldritch, user. Yes, a lot of the stories took place in the era, but it's not the only thing that should be there.

Is there another magical element to the dieselpunk genre besides nazi occultism and pulp cults?

Dieselpunk has the rise of superscience and mad science, so it's got that going for it. Any sorts of magic will probably be a spinoff from that.

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I thought he was supposed to be Spanish?

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how is that even supposed to fucking work

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Nevermind that cosmic horror works just as well - if not better in actual scifi. Also, plenty of Lovecraft's stories take place in older eras, like medieval times, antiquity etc.

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Depends on if you want to do "Alternate Earth" setting with it or more a fantasy world with dieselpunk-grade technology.

For example, the obvious example of the former is something like Weird Wars 2, where Nazis are conducting blood magic rituals powered by the death camps and the Allies unknowingly have mages fighting on their side and the Japanese have recruited onis as elite super-soldiers.

For the latter, though, look at Dishonored, like I said. The technology is clearly Diselpunky, with whale oil-burning generators that power disintegration fields and clockwork robots and the like, but there's also a powerful spirit-creature called the Outsider making demonic pacts, and runic talismans that grant magical powers. Heck, the PCs of both games are essentially warlocks doing the assassin gig.

It's funny that Eldrich means "related to elves" when elves are now considered the least exotic thing imaginable.

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Asian dieselpunk would be interesting. Crowded cities like singapore and chinese gangsters like the ax gang from kung fu hustle

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nothing better than pulp

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Legend of Korra was oddly dieselpunk

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The tech fits, but it's not very 'punk'. Too wacky and idealistic.

Also, I don't care what you think, we're still living partly in a dieselpunk era.
We still use trains from the 1980s in britain. The same fucking HSTs they introduced originally, just repainted from BR livery and 'refurbished' so they don't murder your hearing when they move off.
We still have great big rumbly diesel engines with whacking great turbos.
There's still grime and soot everywhere.
Hell, they recently cleaned off the original roof of Paddington station, with the reasoning that letting sunlight in would save money on lighting and the space would improve ventilation.
And they're busily digging and lining a big tunnel to run trains through.

Weird picture, but it gives a nice feel of the more glamorous side of the genre

To my mind, though, dieselpunk carried through right up to the early 90s, before all the green politics took hold.

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And while we're using jet engines on aircraft, they still make a shitton of noise and have whacking great big fans in front.
Modern airliner turbofans get something like 80% of their thrust from the bypass fan in front. Most of the engine is just burning fuel to keep that turning.

Diesels for efficiency, turbines for raw power.