Morven nerds about her nerdy interests

Morven

because I want a place to post about the random stuff that fascinates me without feeling like I'm pushing other peoples' stuff aside for things that probably bore everyone.

E.g. my trains obsession.  Like this delightful creature.  Southern Utah Railroad's #100, build 1916, the largest and most powerful McKeen Car ever built.  These were the ancestors of today's self-propelled trains, and were powered by a big 300hp straight-6 gasoline engine which was a rigid part of the power truck up front.  A whole 8500 cubic inches of engine, or 140 liters!  Wasn't all that successful, though; they were a bit underpowered and finicky.  Three gear speeds, but no reverse; instead, there was an alternate camshaft which allowed the engine to be stopped, the cams switched over, and the engine run backwards!

It kinda survives.  In that the body, split into two pieces, is being used as a pair of sheds.

Previous Calica

you hotlinked something I can't see.  rehost on imgur, please?

Princess Alice

ohhh that was supposed to be an image

now the post makes more sense

i wish firefox would have some indication of a broken image besides just displaying the alt text in plain text style

Morven

Huh weird, it shows for me.  Bah.  Putting it somewhere else.

Morven

There we go.  Amazon S3 cause I work there.

Previous Calica

Morven said:

Huh weird, it shows for me.  Bah.  Putting it somewhere else.

You already had it cached from elsewhere, probably.

That's really common with people who upload danbooru images.

Morven

Probably.  

Imipolex G

that is a cool train

Miss Miko Mayonegg

It looks nostalgic. :)

Morven

And yet, at the time, can you imagine how futuristic this looked?

Even more so, in fact, the earlier McKeen cars, which were shaped like boats, with sharp prows and rounded sterns.  Think of how Jules Verne something like this must have seemed, in 1910?  

Previous Calica

It still seems pretty Jules Verne, really; it's just that "Jules Verne" means something different now, since reality's caught up in certain aspects.

Morven

And fashions have changed.

I'm still surprised I haven't seen anything like this in steampunk.  It's not steam, but conceptually it still belongs to that pre-World War I "steampunk" aesthetic, I think.

Imipolex G

zeerust

Previous Calica

I think "dieselpunk" is also a thing.

Morven

Definitely.

It's also noticeable how ideas of streamlining changed over the years.  Both in terms of the science & engineering, and in terms of the popular notion of what looked streamlined and fast.

This one's from the period where the inspiration was ship hulls, because really ship hulls had been the only place where any degree of serious analysis had taken place, even if it was mostly trial and error.  Serious fluid dynamics is one of those hard problems that requires heavy computing power, after all.

Thus the pointed "wind-splitter" prow and the rounded stern seen here.

Aviation changed things.  Then, the streamlined shape became that of the aircraft wing -- in other words, it reversed.  Now, the rounded end was the front, the pointed end the back -- the "teardrop" shape.

And then in the 1930s aerodynamicist Kamm discovered that you didn't need to continue the teardrop shape all the way to the point in the back; you just had to start the taper a little bit then cut it off, and the air would follow that flow even though there was no real pointed tail there.

At some point I'd really like to write a history of the aesthetic idea of streamlining and how it was influenced by the science/engineering understanding of it.

Morven

-calica: It is, but dieselpunk as an artistic/stylistic thing tends to follow the styles of a later era.  Sort of a 1930s through 1940s style.

There's some crossover, but I'd say the era of steampunk's inspiration starts to die in 1914 and is dead before 1930.  Once you start having fascists, it's not really steampunk anymore.

Morven

And here's a ship.  An unusual ship.

This is the HMS Agincourt, which the British siezed from the Turks in 1914 on the outbreak of the First World War.  It is still the only battleship ever to have had seven turrets of main armament.

Its appointments were considered positively luxurious compared to the rather Spartan amenities on a Royal Navy-designed ship, and it was considered an easy posting; the ship was nicknamed the Gin Palace by sailors.

Its seizing, and that of another Turkish vessel also under construction in England, was what definitively pushed the Turks into declaring war on the side of the Central Powers against the Allies.  Smooth move, Churchill.

Previous Calica

I was about to ask about Churchill because I associated him with WWII but then remembered that he probably had some other militarily-important position then.

Morven

First Lord of the Admiralty, from 1911 to 1915.  His record in WWI was not quite that of his later one, to put it mildly.  Turkey proved his undoing, because it was his Gallipoli Campaign's disastrous failure that got him kicked out of office.

If his career had never recovered, his name would probably be cursed now, especially in Australia and New Zealand, who both lost a lot of men in that campaign.

Sredni Vashtar

Project Habakkuk!

Seriously, that plan is my favourite war trivia thing ever.

Morven

Sawdust iceberg aircraft carriers!  What could go wrong?

MadisonKirkman

I am the adminestrator of the McKeen Car website, www.McKeenCar.com and the presedent of the Cuyamaca McKeen Motor Car Resotation.  I would like to share a few photos of these McKeen cars.  One of these cars still exists, and is in operating condition.  This car is the Virginia & Truckee #22 Motor Car.

I have a bunch of information on my website, and even old articles if would like to know the reason for the drop-center door, the round windows and even the pointed nose, and rounded end.  

I am doing all of this because I would like to restore the Cuyamaca Motor Car, which is the best surviving McKeen Car, and I got interested in it because the car ran in my county, and if there had not been the "Hatfield Flood" of 1916, the car probably would have run to my town.  Here are 2 pictures of the car I would like to restore, one of it in about 1910, and one take last year.   

If you have any questions about these motor cars, I would probably be the best person to ask.

M.K.

Imipolex G

nifty

Morven

Neat stuff!  Thanks for those pictures; I love the porthole glass and the colors ...

MadisonKirkman

Morven, If you like those colors, then these will really stand out to you, click here.

Morven

I've started a new Tumblr at http://railblue.tumblr.com/ to cover the rail blue era of British Rail, aka about 1970 through 1990.  What I grew up with.

Obā-san

im rather sad that i didnt get to grow up with trains

i was obsessed with them as a child, but there were none anywhere near me, i just had books

Morven

I was always fascinated but from when I was about 9 to 13 or so we lived really close to the East Coast Main Line in Durham, and my brothers and I spent all our free time being mad trainspotters.  We'd get the cheap kids' all-summer regional ticket in the summers and go up to Newcastle and stand on the platforms and watch everything, or my dad would take us up to this wasteland area above the Gateshead depot and we'd watch for hours.  Or we'd spend time down at Durham station when we didn't have time for a trip.  Lots of freezing hours but then the joy of these great living beasts, as locomotives always seemed to me.  Each type with its own character, its own cries and calls.  Feeling the wash of warmth over us from the great radiators, feeling the throb of the engines' beat through our bodies as they sat waiting, and then the thunder as they departed.  It's a complete sensory experience and I really cannot do it justice.

Of course, to the non-sperglord, the above probably makes no sense at all.

lee4hmz

Very few of the houses I've lived at here in Virginia have been near train track, but my grandparents' house on my father's side was right next to the C&O main line to Huntington, and my granny on my mom's side lived in several houses in Kentucky that were near the N&W line along the Big Sandy. Especially at the first house, when there was a train coming through, you'd know it.

Corvina

Ooh, trains. I wish we had more of those up here in the northwest

Corvina

I've been on an Amtrak to Portland, a train from Nice to Milan, from Milan to Zurich, and several trains in India.

(The latter are an interesting experience, especially seeing the difference between class of ticket)

Miss Miko Mayonegg

I completely understand the autistic fondness for trains. I might have liked trains a lot if I were around them more but instead I obsessed over robotics and then dinosaurs and then space and then video games and fiction.

Corvina

Trains are amazing. When I was younger, I really wanted to build giant model trains but never ended up doing so.

lee4hmz

Since long-distance passenger trains were considered awfully passe in the early 1980s, I didn't really get to geek out over them much (even though I did get to ride Amtrak to the aforementioned grandparents' houses a couple of times). When I was little, the passenger system I thought was really cool was Metrorail. The huge stations, the the weird little gates you had to go through, farecards, it was a geeky kid's dream come true.

Of course, since I was still in school, I had no reason to ride it regularly, so I only ever did so a few times before adulthood.

Obā-san

oh man that's so cool!

Corvina

Of course, my childhood dream was (and still is) to ride on the Christie-era Orient Express.

Calica

Morven said:

I've started a new Tumblr at http://railblue.tumblr.com/ to cover the rail blue era of British Rail, aka about 1970 through 1990.  What I grew up with.

those are some pretty trains