I'd say it depends on the subgenre of steampunk you are in. Some of it is so closely modelled on nineteenth-century reality that anything not foreground is simply as it existed. If it hadn't been written in the 1870s, "Around the World in 80 Days" could be a steampunk novel, and it only uses known equipment. For most workaday application, the normal suffices, actually. Even a dashing half-vampire secret agent to Timelord Disraeli (brrh!) doesn't need anything other than a regular train to get from London to Liverpool. If there is any difference, it is in small details, things like integrated thermantidotes, automatic doors, compartment gaslights or similar minor touches.
In other cases, scale and ambition make the difference. A steampunk world would see the most ambitious projects of the Victorian era realised. The Great Eastern does not remain one-of-a-kind, but spawns a class of 1860s ocean liners. New Tower Bridge is replicated hundreds of times on rivers throughout the Empire. Underground trains whizz through capital cities throughout Europe. Every dinky county seat has a pneumatic tube mail system, steam gurney station and telegraph network. This is, of course, impossible, but it is impossible in the small details, not the big scheme of things, and it stays reasonably true to the GURPS tenet of TL X+n . Finally, you have the world where sufficiently advanced steam tech is indistinguishable from magic. Here, vehicles of all kinds don't have a style, they consist of style only. In such a world, there are no quotidian vehicles because, why would there be? After all, you can have steam-powered horses, ornithopter wingpacks, transatlantic airships, ether rockets and nautilus submarines. Economics and physics are no constraints. Even in the background, you have airship liners filling the sky and steel elephants traipsing the fields of the NWFP. ________________________________ Von: Onno Meyer <[email protected]> An: [email protected] Gesendet: 15:34 Samstag, 26.Januar 2013 Betreff: [gurps] Instant Punk, just add Steam What makes the difference between age of steam vehicles and steampunk vehicles? I'm thinking of 'background' vehicles, not the one-of-a-kind vehicles by inventor protagonists or antagonists. Cutting corners for profit? Check. Rigid class differences in accommodations? Check. Exploding steam engines? Check. Insufficient lifeboats? Check. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
