Sounds like a great location! I’m in a very different climate zone so most of my advice would have been around keeping the temperature warm enough through winter, while it sounds like you won’t have to deal with a lot of that.

I’ve seen some cool designs that made glass houses out of secondhand windows or slider doors - if that appeals I can share some links but it’s a certain kind of look, and Povoq’s suggestion of clear corrugated sheets is probably easier and more uniform. Rain collection from the house roof and greenhouse roof would be very useful.

I’ll see if I have any good links for you

Very cool project! I have a couple questions:

Do you get snow in your area? If it sheds from the house roof that could be an issue.

What is the siding on the house? Greenhouses can get pretty humid/damp so you’ll probably want to ensure it doesn’t/can’t rot the house. It can still be done but it’s good to plan for. If your house is concrete that would be much less of an issue.

Also what’s the directional orientation of the 12x24’ space? You’ll probably want to optimize your layout for sun exposure, so it’ll help to know what parts will be shaded when (such as by the garage) and where the sunlight will track.

Thanks! I hope running the game sessions will provide some good perspective and things I missed. I’m told the only thing you can count on as a GM is for your players to surprise you.

Solar sails are a cool idea - I think the feasibility would mostly depend on the fabric. How sturdy it is, whether it can stand up to the strain of pulling the ship along in a full wind, how well it handles being rolled up and unrolled again and again.

It was a pretty busy month! I did the research into solarpunk shipping that I talked about last time - I gathered up everything I could find on modern cargo shipping done primarily using sails, along with some of the alternative systems they bolt onto modern day freighters to save some fuel, and wrote it up here:

https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/10/15/nautical-solarpunk-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/

I aimed for a very broad introduction to sailing, how it’s done now, the new designs and technologies either already in use or still on the drawing board, viable old sail tech, and hopefully everything else you need to get started, no matter what kind of solarpunk sailing you’re hoping to depict. For depth, it’s full of links to more technical resources. Personally I find that the stuff intended for the public like press releases is too light on details for writers, and the industry resources are too focused and siloed to get a good intro to the whole picture, so I sort of aimed for in between. There’s also a bunch of stuff that’s hard to find (or know to look for) unless you read industry magazines. I hope it’s helpful.

I then finished up a photobash of a cargo ship at sea. This is my second one but it’s much brighter and happier than my previous cargo ship scene. It’s very much the brainchild of someone from the Naval Architecture subreddit, who was tremendously helpful in explaining design considerations. Their design is an oddball, with four folding, junk-rigged masts, all offset from the centerline in a zigzag pattern. They made some really convincing arguments and it was genuinely too weird not to make.

After that I got back to work on the campaign I’ve been writing for Fully Automated! I’ve been making character art for all the NPCs, filling in and editing sections of the document that just had notes before, and adding concepts I’ve learned about since I took a break, like rocket mass heaters, masonry heaters, and savonious wind turbines to the scene details here and there. I’m working on getting descriptions/backstories for more NPCs written, and stats assigned for everyone.

It’s looking like we’ll try a playthrough starting this Thursday! It’ll be my first time GMing anything, let alone a campaign I wrote. Though I’ve played a few TTRPGs and watched a lot of games so hopefully I’ve picked up some good habits. We’ll see soon enough!

Thanks for all your work keeping this place going!

I’ve watched this specific one! The rifftrax actually made for a pretty great time - from what I remember the movie had some cool ideas (and the jokes kind of filled in for the rest).

I mean, you can’t have everything

GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I’d suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you’re comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.

For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn’t find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.

Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it’d probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don’t think any feel reliable enough to me yet.

That’s a good idea! I do that with peanut butter at a fancy grocery store - I wonder if there’s one around that does juice

I hadn’t realized how lucky we were - we have one of those crunchy refill stores in town, where you can bring your own containers and buy various powders and liquids (primarily cleaning supplies though they do some seasonings as well. I wish I could buy orange juice that way (I basically gave up on drinking it because I didn’t need any more plastic bottles). We switched to various dilutions of castile soap for most things, and a generic dishwasher powder for our little countertop rig.

I figured it was in response to people using the ships as a gotcha. Pointing out that solar panels are manufactured using power that, itself, isn’t green yet, and are shipped using non-green methods. If done in good faith, I’d suspect the were unfamiliar with using one existing process to bootstrap a new one, but it’s usually just another way of saying we should maintain the status quo (however bad) until its replacement is absolutely perfect.

There are some interesting projects turning them into pedestrian bridges and roofs for bike racks.

I don’t know how well remembered this is but big media execs latched on to the aesthetic of cyberpunk in the 90s and overused it so clumsily they killed the entire genre for over a decade. They stripped any punk message and turned it into another extreeeeem joke of the era.

Solarpunk needs more time to find it’s feet and build a body of work that embodies it’s values. So I’d much rather the big companies piss off for now rather than successfully define what it’s about for mass audiences.

Seconding this - if I ever move back home I’ll be looking for some kind of little electric kei truck for hauling trash and supplies. Most of my driving when I lived there was under 50mph and over fairly short distances.

A few folks I know switched smoothly from “climate change is fake” to “maybe it’s real but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Might as well live it up.” Basically anything to avoid change at any level.

I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here, not people pointing out the issues.

Good points! I suspect the ‘even thickness’ thing came from broken up concrete pads/sidewalks/patios, where the result would be irregulary shaped on X and Y but somewhat consistent for Z depending on how well they prepped the site for the slab. In that case it might end up pretty similar to landscaping rock. In some of the photos you can see they have a much flatter top and much more irregular edges and undersides.

100% agreed on demolition practices. There’s a lot of potential in deconstruction for reclaiming building materials rather than consigning them to the waste stream. The tradeoff is in time, person hours (my grandfather once claimed a truckload of bricks from a demolished mill to build the family fireplace - my mother and her siblings weren’t allowed to come inside that summer unless they chipped cement off some bricks and brought them with them). And in materials/energy - blades for a concrete saw and power to run it, perhaps. I’m sure there are other ways to get more-or-less regular building blocks but they’ll have some cost to balance against the good of saving the materials and reducing the need for new manufacturing. Either way, there’s some cool potential. Treating rubble or urbanite like quarried stone I think fits the solarpunk ethos.

Thank you for the details on bonding concrete! I’ve used cement to patch some holes in custom-shaped, 45° concrete blocks I made once (didn’t shake all the air pockets out of the first couple) so I knew you couldn’t just stick concrete to concrete, but not how to actually go about it when you had to. I’ll refer back here if I need to fix it someday, or if it comes up in any of my stories.

Thanks!

Thanks! I’m very much not nautical so take this with a grain of sea salt. I think yeah, able to travel faster and use weaker winds, plus perhaps better handling in whatever conditions the hull was designed for. The person I was talking with mentioned that the original hull from the windcoop looked like ones meant for the north Atlantic where it’d be dealing with short choppy waves. Presumably this one would heave up over them a bit more than the original, so it’d be a less-smooth ride. That might mean more wear and tear? That’d be a trade off they’d have to assess.

I think generally I very much want to depict a slower society, one that’s actually willing to take an efficiency hit if it means protecting animals, or habitats around it. That sort of consideration is sort of unthinkable in our current world, but yeah, I think it’d be worth it. Hopefully looking out for whales is a small piece, indicative of a much larger cultural theme.

Similariy, I hope that this society is configured differently enough, paced slowly enough, that it can tolerate some unreliability without issue. I imagine they have some high-priority, guaranteed-fast shipping for important stuff like aid, medicine, food, but that the rest of their shipping might show up late or early depending on the favorability of the weather, and that people expect that. I think that might be a general theme in a lot of areas of life - they’ve looked at the tradeoffs and decided that the convenience isn’t worth the cost in externalities. Sort of heresy to a modern American (or so it feels in some of my IRL conversations) but plenty of societies, including our own, got by that way.

I dunno, I could kinda see it - they don’t understand a ton of their own tech, and have folded religious belief into even basic maintenance routines until they can’t tell whether lighting incense or chanting as they work changes the outcome. I don’t know about the admech, but the imperial guard types seem to believe every device from a heavy bolter to an ancient and venerable space marine tank are all equally likely to have machine spirits animating them - presumably they got that thinking from their tech experts. There’s also the sort of outlined belief that tech is sort of… naturally occurring? and that it’s heretical to invent new stuff when the correct process is to discover it somewhere.

Add to that the fact that the quality of their tech has declined pretty drastically from their past (aren’t most STCs, which they basically worship as the best of their modern tech, like the crude, sturdy equipment you’d give a colony that was just starting out?) and the fact that some of it is sometimes possessed by literal daemons or other ancient abominations… it sort of seems like they’re in over their heads compared to the others.

It’s a cool idea but I think sailors would really hate it. Loose containers floating like manmade icebergs seem to be a sort of universal fear among sailors if the articles and forum posts I’ve found are anything to go off of:

I stumbled onto this one awhile back while reading about sailing container ships and read it because it was interesting:

https://www.yachtingworld.com/news/could-a-floating-shipping-container-sink-your-yacht-is-the-danger-to-sailors-real-or-imagined-107508

I found this one while looking for the first one: https://www.yachtingmonthly.com/sailing-skills/how-big-a-risk-are-shipping-containers-32722

And this one was kinda interesting too: https://oceannavigator.com/a-legendary-offshore-danger/

There’s lots more, seems like every sailing publication has run at least one article on this subject (and apparently there’s lots of sailing publications!).

And that danger (real or imagined) is with only a few thousand containers going in the drink per year (less than 1% of the total currently traversing the oceans). Deliberately moving more of the fleet that way would be a big increase.

Those fears/articles are proof they can float already, though that’s usually because of the packaging (styrofoam packaging wrapped in watertight plastic etc). But what stood out to me (I think in the second article) was how flimsy, cheap, and poorly maintained the current fleet of containers is. And it makes sense, they get used constantly and banged around as they’re lifted, stacked, stored, moved. But that damage comes while also doing fairly light work compared to what you’re thinking of - they just sit stacked up, they don’t have to traverse oceans on their own or drive or anything. To do that they’d have to be much stronger, (they’re not currently reinforced except at the ends which is why they can’t be buried to build survival bunkers), most aren’t very watertight, and they’re simple, without the mechanisms for sailing or driving. And even still they’re failing their jobs for lack of maintenance.

I think it could actually be a really interesting concept for a fiction setting - the hazards posed by rogue, damaged, leaking containers could be a good plot hook, the potential for high tech piracy, hacking to redirect them or just stealing them out of the ocean, could feature in all kinds of plots. It might be a little more cyberpunk but I’m a huge fan of that genre too and write in it occasionally so I think there’s a lot of potential there.

I think a couple big cargo ships, including Norsepower, are using them. Apparently they provide some provable savings in fuel consumption, even with the energy consumed to spin the rotors to get the sail effect. It sounds like the main advantages over sail is in integrating very conveniently with modern motor vessels (easy to use/control by changing spin speed, the slender shape leaves it out of the way of the cargo hatches/holds).

I think they fit the “basically a normal cargo ship with some begrudging compromises for fuel efficiency” school of green ship design. I think the progress they represent is really important and the amount of fuel saved even by partial measures is incredible (thousands of tons per trip in one case). It wasn’t what I was looking to make art of when I began reading so I’ll admit I went kinda light on them in the post.