What are some good vehicles that can be used in a steam-punk setting set mostly in a city?

Here's some real world steam powered vehicles to get you started.
youtube.com/watch?v=GL2GzD4m_oY

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youtube.com/watch?v=fR8BbShEX2s

youtube.com/watch?v=iIACtwYil7M

youtube.com/watch?v=ws-Kp2aLcEc

youtube.com/watch?v=ACO-HXvrRz8

Pic related
douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/fictional/fictional.htm

Or maybe blimps and articulated bridges, going from wagon to wagon in a city made of paralell trains in eternal movement around the globe, one of many, like in Night Land time before the Last Redoubt.

Dinotopia had some pretty cool steampunk vehicles.

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The Wheel is the best.

Carriage drawn by mechanical horses

An actual thing by the way

(your call on if it's Steam or Dieselpunk, there's a fair bit of overlap, especially seeing as the latter has a fair bit of late-end steam in it)

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I'm a firm believer that steam punk doesn't have to be just steam

Electric cars existed before gas cars and until the model T, were far more popular in urban environments. They could only go about 20mph and had limited range, but for cities this was fine, and their ease of operation made them popular with women

They called them hummingbirds. Unlike gas cars they produced little noise, no pollution, and didn't neat gear replacements. Unlike steam cars they didn't need a long boil up phase to run.

Yeah, I'd agree with that - a lot of early electric shit fits with the aesthetic and the ideas, just like a lot of later steam stuff (turbine-powered warships and giant ocean liners, streamlined trains) feels much more dieselpunk than steampunk

Steam punk isn't really an aesthetic, cogfop is, and the conflation of the two is why tg hates steampunk

That and the suffix -punk which admittedly does not fit the genre well

Scientific Pulp Adventure is more accurate, though -punk elements can be present depending on the story.

To answer ops actual question, carriages were still incredibly common, horsedrawn or otherwise.

Steampunk, as a genre, has a lot of problems - it's kind of this big frankenstien thing that came about in bits - as a term, it exists because a bunch of authors made similar novels and wanted a word to group them, and cyberpunk was popular at the time, and then you get it coming in with people being more interested in pulp stories as well, and then it got a stamp of legitimacy by the big names of cyberpunk giving it a shot, etc. - it's much less coherent and based in any cultural mood than cyberpunk, that's for sure.

Which is why, I think, most people prefer to look at it as an aesthetic instead (plus, it really is loads easier, hence """cogfop""" stuff).
You can also see why a lot of people will avoid the name like the plague... which ironically leads back to the problem the term steampunk exists to get around.

Though I would also say that early electricity stuff also fits in with the grittier, punkier side, as well as the "woo, SCIENCE!" side - look at Edison's shady shit

God that movie was awful. Beautiful, but completely stupid and boring. Such a waste of a good opportunity. In the end, it seems like Karel Zeman and Hayao Miyazaky were ultimately the only two people who can do Verne's aesthetic right in a movie.

Steampunk is actually NOTHING but an aesthetic flavor of the sci-fi or fantasy genre. It has been coined retroactively and as most similar labels, it's purely heuristic and orientational: there is no actual precise definition for the flavor, and the word "punk" within the name has no actual meaning, it's merely a product of appearing after the popularity of cyberpunk and adopting similar style of nomenclature. The "steam" aspect also does not need to be taken literary: the idea is to emulate the aesthetics of the "steam era" (that is second half of 19th century) rather than implying that everything HAS to be ran on steam, or that other types of power can't be featured.

The roots of steampunk lies in Verne and a couple of like-minded authors in the 19th century. Verne himself never really considered himself anything akin to sci-fi: his work was motivated by actually encyclopedic drive: he wanted to create a literature collection of didactic books encapsulating all currently available engineering knowledge in an accessible fashion - if it wasn't for the pressure of his publisher, he would never bother with the fantastic or adventure elements at all.

The main reason why Steampunk is hated around here is because A) people are stupid and think the best way to define themselves is through what the hate, B) most people STILL don't understand how genre and subgenre labels work, and C) Steampunk library is still actually very small and lacks high-impact and influential works that could convince people that the subgenre has merit: Steampunk lacks it's own Blade Runner or Neuromancer. Which is also because it's an aesthetic movement, and as such offers less relevant social commentary.

What about combining the cart and blimp?
Blimps built into trains on tracks too fantastically tall to support a normal train.

I read that fucking book +100 times as a kid, and I don't remember anything about robot trilobites deathmatches.
What the actual fuck.
Are there sequels?
It was the greatest shit ever.

I find your ideas about Jules Verne's authorship entirely unlikely.
Before he was ever published, he was writing tragedies, poems and theater, that weren't technical or encyclopedic at all, and he said himself that he was a big fan, and heavily influenced by Victor Hugo.

Initially I thought it sounded kinda dumb, but it could be kind of cool as a sort of variation on cable cars or a really light elevated railway that needs minimal support structures, and can get away with being spindly as fuck.

Still a bit dumb though

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Mechanical steed, yes!

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Reversed engineered Martian tech?

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Haha, that was the only thing I remembered about Dinotopia besides the giant waterfall city.

Have some early roller skates.

Yup, there are sequels. Remember how the narrator in the first book builds a submarine to explore the world beneath the island? One of the following books details what's down there, and I'm pretty sure that's where the crazy machine-arthropods come from.

I think this version is more fitting for your average steampunk fan.

there are currently 4 books. :D

How fantastical is the steampunk?
An interesting fantasy series (at least to me) was the Edge Chronicles. Within it they had airships which used a special type of rock that naturally levitated (I do not believe they ever explained why), thus you do not necessarily need to use steam. Simply use an aesthetic derived from the Victorian Age.

To me, the Industrial Revolution marked a time of innovation and manufacturing. So whatever phlebotinum or unobtanium you have in this setting, you can develop technology that utilizes such materials.

The Edge Chronicles was cool, though I wouldn't in any way consider them steampunk.
How fantastical depends on the person - some people love having airships, steam trains and wizards, some really don't, but there's nothing hard and fast about it

They look pretty cool

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bump

Funicular railways, public lifts and other things like that are quite cool.

And of course there's lots of early aviation, usually being tried by a frenchman (balloons were used as early as the french revolutionary wars, even before Napoleon was in charge)

>posting the sub-microscopic version
I challenge you to a duel!

I agree it's pretty dumb honestly but I think it's the kind of dumb that fits with the sort of vague silly anachronistic futurism that is steampunk.

I don't expect anyone else to agree, but I like to include Frankstein itself in steampunk. A bit because it is 19th century science fiction, a lot because I use the setting of scarred ressurected soldiers with mechanical grafts opressing workers in name of an analogic computer whose gears are measured in kilometers. All inside factories built like panopticons.

Do these things actually work? is there a downside to them?

They work. They are hard to steer, incredibly uncomfortable, and cannot deal with wet terrain.

But they're fun.

>But they're fun.
You've tried one?

Much like Verne, I wouldn't call the original steampunk, because it was a sci-fi thing at the time, but the concepts, and shit inspired by them now, very much so - have you read Mortal Engines, with its resurrected soldiers?

A panopticon, while a very cool design, is pretty poor for a factory, but you can certainly up the sense of security and paranoia - IRL a few early factories had to be built like fortresses, some even having gun ports - luddite riots and industrial espionage were real issues, especially during the great change of the industrial revolution

>You've tried one?

Redneck second cousins built one a few years back. It's a riot, but it's really uncomfortable. No suspension at all, and you can't see straight ahead. You need good thick-soled boots too.

Compared to their twin-engine lawnmower (2 V6, one to drive the wheels, the other to drive the four sets of blades), it wasn't that fun to drive.

That sounds pretty hilarious (though I bet you could work on the comfort if you concentrated on the seats) - giving it a quick google, they seem surprisingly easy to build, in theory

youtu.be/MD9v9v7Dbqk
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>V6 to drive four sets of blades
These sound like the right sort of madmen for all sorts of mechanical shenanigans

Maybe. You'd need some sort of actively gyroscoped seats though. There shock absorption capacity of a motorcycle isn't present here. It's bouncy as fuck, and you feel every bounce in your spine.

The second cousins also built a side-rack haybale picker by (essentially) bolting a tractor onto the side of a cargo truck. It works, but it's dangerous as hell.

The lawnmower will mow perfectly evenly at 80km/hr, but at that speed, the blades are rotating so fast that the bearings smoke.

Cable cars traversing the city above from the police-controlled concrete towers.

Spindly steampowered creations that trawl the sewers, removing and grinding the creatures endemic down there.
Segmented and cylindrical, with a radial arrangement of legs for extra purchase.

Cars that run on tightly coiled mainsprings made of some super-material. The cars are rewound from a network of mechanical power with outlets through the city. Analogous to electrical outlets but instead transferring mechanical force.

I'm thinking you'd raise and perhaps offset the seat a bit, maybe introduce some linkages where you could fit some damping - just stuff to get it off the frame really, because obviously that's going to vibrate like a motherfucker.

Not quite sure what you mean by side-rack picker, but after googling haybale pickers, I think I get the idea

Did anyone else read the Honourable Guild of Specialist series: Operation Red Jericho, Operation Typhoon Shore and Operation Storm City?

They were cool, very pulp - later than steampunk really, but they had verne-esque shit like pic related - really nice art and drawings of shit, but I can't find any of it at a decent size

Basically the only bit I've been able to find where the text is legible - from Storm City I think.

Decent pulp YA stuff

Wouldn't the blimp be perpetually in the smoke from the train?

Depends which one's doing the pulling really (though it really should be the train, which begs the question why it's towing a blimp, but I digress)

Also how long the connecting cable is

I have brought shame on myself and my people and can only hope my death will in some small way attone for my sins

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Bump

>Steampunk is actually NOTHING but an aesthetic flavor of the sci-fi or fantasy genre. It has been coined retroactively and as most similar labels, it's purely heuristic and orientational: there is no actual precise definition for the flavor, and the word "punk" within the name has no actual meaning, it's merely a product of appearing after the popularity of cyberpunk and adopting similar style of nomenclature. The "steam" aspect also does not need to be taken literary: the idea is to emulate the aesthetics of the "steam era" (that is second half of 19th century) rather than implying that everything HAS to be ran on steam, or that other types of power can't be featured.

Not sure. I think the "counter-historical" element of the early industrialized age has some meaning, if you can call it that.

I mean, it's not really like cyberpunk expressing pretty spot on fears about society, but let's take even Blades in the Dark. As as a setting it features:

a) an almost total ecological fuckup
b) which is also a spiritual fuckup
c) society is ruled by a very small elite of rich as fuck families
d) the rest is a sea of poors (without the slightest hint of a real social security) with a small smearing of relatively educated people with an unceratin future
e) even art itself seems to be pretty much fucked up, decadent and soulles; science goes on but doesn't really save the day

I dunno about you, but to me that speaks of our times more than Harper inteded to, probably.

with this

Satomobiles.

No wait, that's dieselpunk.

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That's one of the first sci-fi books, isn't it?

Something like the "steam man of the prairies" - not quite sure if that inspired, or was inspired by that walking carriage dude