Could a solar punk setting work?

Already did one. Not sharing it on Veeky Forums tho since I noticed alot of writers/companies outright stealing ideas from here back when we did good shit.

If you do even a tiny bit of research into what needs oil and what needs coal to function as a thing then you'll come to the conclusion is the best way to explain the setting but the small communities thing isn't 'solarpunk' at all.

I have a preference for distopian x-punk settings to ones that take a utopian bent.

At their best 'punk' stories are about disruptive technologies and how humanity deals with a new world that was created faster then people could learn to deal with it.

*punk scenarios are distopian by definition, but they're also the opposite of postapoc. They usually depict a society at the peak of its technological and cultural development, but with extremely low standards of living and complete lack of justice.

>I noticed alot of writers/companies outright stealing ideas from here back when we did good shit.
Or maybe your ideas are nowhere as unique as you think they are and people come up with something similar separately.

Or maybe you need to learn that since people realised that Veeky Forums wasn't just a bastion of shitposters and some of the boards were actually creative and anonymity resulted in easily steal-able ideas that it became common to do so.

Such as Kingdom Death being an idea on Veeky Forums years before the actual kickstarter began.

Not OP, but Tank Girl managed to create fucking water punk. Solar punk doesn't sound that far-fetched.

>the ultra rich oligarchs in their cities deep underground force the wage slaves to toil under the oppressive heat of the sun so their undercities can have electricity
>pale skinned oligarchs stand in stark contrast to bronze skinned wage slaves who work the surface
>laborers crowd into claustrophobic warrens at night to eat and rest until the sun rises again
>up in geostationary orbit are the richest oligarchs and their security watch stations, ready to LOIC any dissident union or slave rebellion

>laborers can't run away very far because the ozone layer has eroded to look like Swiss cheese
>if they enter an unprotected zone the excessive UV radiation will cancerify them over the course of a few hours

>solar
>punk

The city is literally shrouded in PVs. It's a felony to walk on top of a building's roof unauthorized. 90% of the electricity being generated goes to fancy boondoggles owned by 10% of the population. Every character talks about the first time they "stole" a glimpse of natural light.

>Kingdom Death being an idea on Veeky Forums years before the actual kickstarter began
That's a whole new level of delusion

2004 I was working on a scifi setting where one faction has been living in isolation for generations, which has made their immune system not very adapt to the outside world. The few of them that do go out do so in protective gear and rebreathers. They're mostly seen as vermin by the others people.

In 2007 we get Mass Effect where the Quarians are a race of people who've lived in isolation for generations, which has made their immune system not very adapt to the outside world. The few of them that do go out do so in protective gear and rebreathers. They're mostly seen as vermin by the others people.

Help, Bioware has hacked into my brain!

When I read the phrase "solarpunk," my mind immediately went to a setting that is either heavy into environmentalism or would seem like it to someone from our world. Now, humor me here, but it reminds me of Pokemon.

The only time industrialization comes up in Pokemon is when it's plot-important. The only two times I can remember an electricity power plant coming up, they were used as literal dungeons; and one of them led to a legendary! I only remember seeing one singular mine, and the only references we have to any kind of pollution are certain poison-type Pokemon like Muk.

On the other hand, towns are small and healthy, while cities don't feel too choked-up by pollution at all. While, yes, this is a game and those aren't direct translations to towns or cities, everything in Pokemon feels bright and healthy and the amount of countryside between each settlement is expansive and well-maintained; this is the same for the games and the show. Paved roads only really exist in the cities, and a lot of these settlements seem to be connected by simple well-worn cleared dirt paths. There are hardly any cars, and the main methods of travel include walking, biking, swimming, boating, or using your Pokemon either as a ferry or to fly somewhere.

The entire setting seems very environmentally aware (something to expect, given the Japanese and their love of the Green Aesop), and the Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald versions even featured environmental terrorists who either wanted to go full Waterworld or make the oceans effectively disappear, depending on which game you played.

That level of environmentally-friendly setting strikes me as a natural pair to go with everyone reliant on solar power; it's one of the brighter options where the transition has already happened and life goes on as normal. "Solarpunk," sounds comfy, and it doesn't get more comfy than the Pokemon world.

Someone built a ceiling over most of the earth to capture most of the sunlight. It's abundant energy, but most people now live in dark grimy cities that lack vegetation and might as well be underground for how little natural light gets through. Having a "naturally" lit home, much less living on the "surface" above the light-collectors, is extreme opulence.

People aren't allowed to travel above the solar panels because that would interfere with light collection and cost the corps and government valuable light-money. Most folks have never seen the sun, or else would have to either go out in a boat to see it from the areas that haven't been covered by solar panels yet, or illegally breach the surface.

Tank girl works for that because it's post-apoc and hydraulic empires are a historiography cliche about the early bronze age.

Basically, imagine a /pol/ fever dream about a totalitarian green distopia. Crazy environmentalists have taken over (thanks to a weaponized green biotechnology gimmick?). The nuclear powerplants have been shut down and little to no coal is being mined any more. Only solar panels remain. There is a lot of them around, but you can't make more because use of petrochemicals is restricted. Oh, and you can't own a solar panel. Every panel more powerful than that for your mobile phone is automatically state property and is required to supply power to the mains. As a result of all this, power is strictly rationed. A private home only gets mains electricity for a 5-8 hours a day. Everybody gets the same mains power quota. You can't buy more even when you can afford it since that would be inequality. "Grounders", groups of three to nine men, women and nonbinaries, are sent by the green dictatorship on missions to find illegal overuse, sale or production of power or the solar panels themselves.

Oh, and there is no cheap petrochemical soap any more. so everybody who isn't rich or very patient stinks.

The aesthetic would be shit.

Perfect.

>so everybody who isn't rich or very patient stinks.
It's really easy to make soap without petrochemicals

>Muk
>tfw the Sun and Moon Pokedex entry mentions that because of declining pollution, Muk are going extinct

What about windpunk?

That setting would blow.

Pianopunk

Every machine has a user interface consisting of piano keys.

It would also suck.

I didn't read that wall of text, but how about something like green party/peace core types now regulate environmental protection on a oppressive scale, and all the links are young wanna be industrialists who just want to use the Earth's resources to get rich and climb out of the socio economic hell they're in. Also, no farming, only mass gathering plantations

Before you look like an idiot, friendo, maybe you should read the wall of text.

You're suggesting a dystopian idea when the entire point of the post you're responding to was "when you say solarpunk, my mind jumps to comfy settings; the Pokemon World is one of those settings and here's why."

Highlander 2

Punk settings should by definitely not be comfy unless the revolution is won.

Before we get too mired in "what *punk means," I'll specify that I jumped to the conclusion of "punk has moved on from the 'all stories include punks of that society,' meaning to the 'all stories include either an aesthetic or tone implied or directly stated through the societal aspect being noted,' meaning, and is therefore effectively a tag to indicate aesthetics and tone."

With that in mind, yes, a punk setting can be comfy. I'm assuming you're going with the "all stories include punks of that society," angle in which case whatever bro, have fun with making solar panels evil. Makes it feel like you just want to lash out at something for its own sake.

Why shouldn't there be a comfy steam punk?

>I want to be able to pretend lord Milton Milton, 3rd baron Milton, gentleman adventurer is the people's hero

Megacorps build massive underground mega cities and use the majority of the surface for high tech solar arrays and powerstations.

People are forced off the land and undeground below where they are controlled via access to energy and essential vitamins in the absense of sunlight.

reddit.com/r/SolarPunk

Yes.

By buying the Sun, and adding a tax to the people that use it.

>b-but no one can buy the Sun!

Although quaint, the spirit of punk lies in there.

Don't be fucking ridiculous.
Bioware just tapped to alternative timeline where you wrote up and published stuff based on your ideas and stole them form there.

>Explaining the joke

Running it would be a breeze though.

imzy.com/solarpunk

Doesn't everything in Five Star Stories run with solar power?

Yep
>Clean. Very clean. Austistically clean on the surface. Don't want to risk dirt build up on your panels, everything is sterile and life is only permitted in designated areas
>Light based weaponry. Laser guns. Shiny reflective armor.
>The rich live in hovering habitats for maximum solar energy with genetically engineered plants for aesthetics.
>The poor live underneath in the darkness of a blanket of eternal smog, working factories to produce goodies and habitats for the wealthy. Natural light is a privilege, not a right.
>Light based computers as opposed to electrical ones, bright holograms everywhere.
>A dyson sphere is under construction. Despite all that energy, it's almost solely for the benefit of the wealth. The sun itself is in danger of being covered up.

Wait, didn't we have that one setting where the sun broke into pieces that fell to the world, and humanity became nomads who fight each other over the fragments?

That sort of fits.

Desert planet.

Everything is covered in solar panels. Everything. Solar is the only available energy source, and future-tech is an energy hog. So you have soldiers in power-armor (the plates are solar panels, too much damage and you run out of power) Crazy half-naked barbarian raiders (with implanted solar panel tattoos to power their cybernetics) and wandering techno-druids who herd genetically-manipulated plant/animal hybrids with electric plugs that the druids 'nurse' their tech on.

Alternatively, dark world.

Rare are the breaks in the cloud layer that lets light shine through, nomads follow the instructions of the forecasters to find those rare rays of light, unpack the panels, and absorb as much power as they can before the clouds close again. And without power, the machines they need to survive won't run.

jesus christ, look at that retarded bullshit. if something was ever manufactured by a bunch of far-brained imbeciles to look 'cool' this is it

I came here to post something like this. Look at Mirror's Edge for both asthetic and government inspiration, and maybe Signapore.

>find those rare rays of light,
Make those scoring hot, so that you couldn't simply remove the cloud layer even if had the power to do it because it would fuck the climate and fry everyone. However, it also means you can get a lot of mileage from the few rays that get through.

Reminder to build enormous orbital elevators for electricity

>Everybody gets the same mains power quota.
Hardly Punk if the rich aren't cheating the system somehow, user.

What is Nausicaa

I wrote a short story in college about a race of mole people who would sail out of their underground caves on solar fishing boats to catch rays of the sun in nets. Sunlight would only fall from the sky after a storm broke the thick cloud cover, and the vast majority of the "caught" light went to illuminate the homes of the wealthy or grow crops.. of course in this sunlight was an actual substantive material you could catch in a net and haul around in barrels.

...

That's the exact opposite of solar punk.

>The Man opressing masses with the use of Sun
>Opposite of solar punk
I'm not sure you understand the concept of punk genre aside le ebin mohawks/cogfop

>What is pears soap

Because that already is most of steampunk?

Be creative. You have the revolutions of 1848, The Communist Manfiesto, the Anarchists in Russia, the African, Asian, Arab, Indian, and Latin peoples fighting off the Europeans and literal corporations, you have the Paris Commune, Anarchists shooting presidents, the gilded age, the rise of unions and the trust busting and Theodore Fucking Roosevelt.

Then how exactly is the evil cooperation benefiting from solar power without the sun?
Poking holes into the shield?

The epa?

>The only guys around with access to Sun
>hurr how do you profit
Are you insane or just baiting?

>Soap requires petrochemicals
It's literally fat mixed with sodium hydroxide. How fucking stupid one must be to not know that?

Also
>Green utopia
>No nuclear power
Let me guess - Greenpeace told you that?

And if you want to go really green, you build wind turbines, since they require 1/10 of the tech and are much cheaper, not to mention not toxic in production and without need for strip-mining of rare materials.

Yes, because soap totally isn't made out of lard, vegetable oil or just any fucking fat you can get.

Pic related

That's not a solar punk setting if you can just substitue solar energy with any other source of energy and it has the same aestetics.
>the city only depends on solar power
>the city only depends on nuclear power
>the city only depends on wind power
Where is the optical difference if the the power source is outside the city but everything looks the same?

>It doesn't count!
>Because I say so

Keep trying. Also, if you seriously think that Sun only provides energy for solar panels, you are some sort of special kind of idiot.

I mean - do you even heat?!

So catastrophe with better understanding of tech

Mirai Shōnen Konan. Miyasaki's underrated tv series.

It's about solar power ultimately, and the world setting it's really ad hoc.

Ghiblidrones are cancer.

Every single thing by that hack is overrated in the extreme.

Ahh a healthy reminder that Veeky Forums no longer posesses taste

Different user, but he's right. Out of entire stable of Ghibli, only maybe Mononoke Hime is worth watching at all. Everything else is pure, unfiltered shit, which also happens to be cringy as fuck in the same time.

>heh I only liek good animes such as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle
>the rest is garbage for children
Never mind that all of Miyazaki's productions are exactly the fucking same, that they're all for children, and that they're all uncreative anti-culture.

But sure, you keep praising this zipperhead minstrel dancing in whiteface for the Western mainstream.

Or just slap solar panels on top of the shield, so they're the only one able to harvest sun's power

10/10, solid bait

The trouble with solar punk as a concept is that most punks are based on some thing involving a scarce and controllable substance, the sun is neither baring unnatural circumstances

>tfw you were a child when these hit your tv
God I'm old

Limited photovoltaic efficiency and available surface area, or a fantastical unusual climate, might still make it fit.

A different sort of interesting thematic fit might be combining solar energy and water filtering to set up nuclear fusion. Make the futuretech really power hungry.

Yeah Steampunk is 99.999% actually just "Steamfop".

Upper class arseholes most bothered by their appearance and having tales to regale their high society chums with.

The rich aren't doing it on a massive scale (but they try, hence the "need" for Grounders). The people at the top of the dictatorship, though - why, they have as much energy available as they want. They can use it however they want, as long as it's for the good of the environment and the nation.

Because of the power rationing this corner of the world is a pretty dark place at night, but the halls of the countless Big Government ministries are as bright as day. Some wanderers even use them as a beacon for navigation. The public servants employed there are awful workaholics, you see. The worst thing is, unlike the far more bearable cynical corporate bosses and mafiosos of cyberpunk, most of them are true believers. (Former Grounders stand out as an exception, but they're rare. Grounder is typically a dangerous dead end job that you can be drafted for if there isn't enough volunteers.) They actually think their grand projects are for the greater good and totally worth it. Just ask one of older ones about The Moon Heat Beam.

>Let me guess - Greenpeace told you that?
Oh yes it did. That's the whole point. You seem to have missed the "/pol/ fever dream" angle.

Please stop spreading lies about old regime soap. We all know perfectly well that making it was an oppressive and environmentally harmful enterprise that depended on nonrenewable resources. Worse yet, the product itself was toxic and probably the second most common cause of autism in babies after vaccination. Our soap substitutes are better for you in every way.

Future boy conan, it's an extraordinary show, story it's solid, and it wraps up perfectly.

If you can stomach 70's anime aesthetics it's great, one of the best even.

>It's totally solarpunk, despite we never ever see any solar technology, because I say so.
Are you just pretending to be retarded just to start a fight?
There is no point in any form of punk if the form of technology is completely isolated and you only get told second hand that said technology exists.

This is so much like my Horus heresy/40k setting its unreal.

Gist is basically:
>Planet at L1 in binary star system.
>Always daylight
>Planet is covered in solar panels extending from the equator outwards. ttheyre suspended in the sky on massive pillars/towers, blotting out almost all sunlight.
>Two major forges at each pole sucking up the energy, one traitor one loyalist.

How I;d alter it for this setting is:
>Make power some kind of currency/drug analogue, where everyone needs it to survive because idk theyve implants/suits that need it. Black market trade of battery packs or something
>gaps and channels in tthe solar panels leave corridors tthatt allow solar powered vehicles to travel and as trade route between the two polar cities.
>Solar towers along the trade routes are well defended and you cant steal energy
>make expeditions into the darker areas to leech energy and chrge batteries
>Government controls flow of power, in the cities youre rationed out via outlet sockets you plug into, outside cities nomadic towns move around leeching enrgy from towers to charge huge batteries to last the trip.

I even have ideas for tthe foot soldiers of tthe BBG, who go out into 'The Dark' to hunt down the power thieves. Pic related.

Just like steampunk.

>big translucent domes that people live in
>lots of trees and greenery
>new age positivity, cooperativeness and tranquility is the norm to the point where it's oppressive, although the vast majority of people do not believe they are oppressed because they feel good
>L"G" technohippie society on steroids, anyone who goes against it is cast out for being a "toxic person" rather than for breaking any discrete laws, the aim of punishment isn't to reform, pass judgment, get revenge or condemn but instead to detoxify the social ecosystem. So basically once you're out no one gives a fuck about you because you're not even human, you're a bundle of "bad vibes"
>there's a soma equivalent that is not illegal or in short supply
>people who were cast out of the solar societies live in isolated areas, especially those where there is no sunlight (caves, underground, lower levels of rain forests) or it's overcast
>the solar people lead methodical extermination raids on the outcasts to cleanse the planet of what they see as violating tranquility, while the outcasts fight mostly by planting operatives in the dome-cities who wage psychological warfare and try to get people to break out of their willfully blind mentality
>lots of biological technology and things where you can't tell if it's a plant or a machine or both, de-emphasizes cyborgs and metal machinery, and when there is metal machinery it's white and ipod-like
>scientists are working on developing a giant plant overmind that will neurologically connect all people like some kind of hippie anti-zerg, that's another thing that the outcasts have to prevent from happening because once it does there's no chance of breaking anyone free
>people are genetically enhanced to be photosynthetic, this encourages people to stay in sunlit areas and not rebel against the system because those who do need a food source

The underlying theme would be something like how excessive positivity to the point of being phobic of negativity can be evil.

>Steampunk has cogfop
>Le funneh maymay 1880s faux-British gentleman with le top hat with le cogs on top of it that serve no purpose
>It's full of Americans who try and fail to sound upper class British

>Solarpunk has panelfop
>Le funneh maymay 1990's faux-Bronx gangster with le backwards cap with le solar panels on top o fit that serve no purpose
>It's full of white people who try and fail to sound black

To be honest, I'd say it's an improvement.

Combine it with Steampunk. Keep the aesthetics and steam power of Steampunk, but use Solar power for most of the energy production. Solar Power already has uses for boiling water, and producing steam pressure. The real world applications of combining steam technology and solar power technology is stupidly easy enough as it is. So just layer Solar punk (and to a lesser extent wind power) on top of Steampunk. Hell you could even make it more silvery and aluminum/steel based, too. If you really wanted it to be "but different".

>windpunk
Yes. We had that

It could work. Less steam punk, more cyberpunk.

Just cyberpunk with Google, Facebook, Apple and internet companies as the megacorps, instead of Sony, Semp Toshiba and other electronics companies. Executives wearing jeans and sneakers instead of suits, PC/SJW culture inforced on everybody, with all positions filled by quota except for the very high ups, like CEOs.
An extra heap of 1984 Big Brother for every MegaCorp. Less cameras everywhere but every iPhone is spying on you at all time, and the obligatory Google Glass filming all you do. Everything you do must be logged in the companies own social network.

The working class are still fucked, disillusioned overworked and told it's all for their own good. The executives are way more open about being degenerates, since being a pedo or furry is just another gender. Middle management is even more bloated than normal cyberpunk, but with less bureaucracy and more identity politics.

The corps have another new weapon to use against dissent, the social mob, that can attack deckers in cyberspace or cause riots in the real world.

On the good side, less polution and more clean energy.

I don't only like Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. I also like such films as Akira, Grave of the Fireflies, Paprika and a few others. the rest is garbage for children.

As somebody who has never played mirror's edge, mirror's edge seems to be similar to this concept. Nice bright, white, sanitised world, where you play an underground courier on the run from Da Man.

Watch the Norwegian movie "The Bothersome Man". It's exactly what you described.

If Baksinsky art inspired post apocalyptica earth in 2.224.000 ad. where only sentient androids reside worshipping bloated red SUN as a god who gives the spark of life (energy) to them and they fight tyrannical rouge split personality AI overlord counts as SOLARpunk then maybe... maybe.

rate if want
but no bully pls

I'm a little late here, but here's the (You)s you so desperately craved.