Tech levels and other random stuff

A reminder that Roselight is sorta steampunk inspired! Probably set a little later as far as the genre goes, tech-wise probably more into the early 1900s – 40s is probably the latest any influences go.

In particular the Titanic (1912-1912) stands out as a good example of the sorta domestic-environment tech I want to have. Electric lighting and other basic features are definitely included, but most people won’t interact with much digital stuff at all.

Rosa’s frequent magnetic storms make the use of any electrical equipment difficult. Any long cables need to be shielded, adding additional cost to long-distance power and communications wires. Even still, they’re subject to outages or continuous interference, so quality is going to suck – transmission rates are probably slow like morse to combat noise (averaging out the small fluctuations over a longer tone?) and overall volume is low. Good excuse to have telegraph-like comms.

Radio transmissions can be used but are also susceptible to noise during storms. These are reserved primarily for high-priority applications – most individual ships, aircraft, and all spacecraft will have them, as they are used by traffic controllers. Major government/corporation/headquarters buildings use them, but not your everyday average citizens. They will generally have a single telecommunications line into their residence, or even just a single line shared by multiple residences (common in lower-income housing like Noira’s old tenement – the entire building had one line!).

Advanced microelectronics are also right out on account of radiation damage, especially in space. Flight computers are more akin to Apollo than this laptop, though we do retain lessons learned from thousands of years ago so we can probably make them more efficient even if the tech is forced to suck a bit. Spacecraft will each have their own simple flight computers that can do limited orbital mechanics – probably like patched conics, with hand-based tools used to calculate for other perturbations, like radiation pressure and n-body effects – much like the little hand-calculators used by pilots to account for crosswind and stuff. Aircraft might not have these systems at all, relying only on analogue sensors and readouts to give flight engineers info about the status of their aircraft. And individual consumers – sheesh. “Consumer electronics” is hardly even a thing, relegated to simple appliances – there are no “personal devices,” not a screen in sight, just people living in the moment.

Actually, that’s a good point; live image transmission is almost fully out of the question for now, although facsimile (wait THAT’s what fax means????) is a very real and prevalent technology. Can be used in news media to transmit images of important things (like exposé images, or faces of fugitive company employees), which could be printed on paper…

….Stone paper, probably, since regular paper is NOT in abundant supply. I’m sure there are forests and trees that can be used for wood products in Roselight, primarily in construction, but paper is probably not something that can be afforded when stone is RIGHT THERE. Indeed, most textiles come from a variety of different geologic sources – we’ve heard of petra already, one of the most common. pr’Sefone is a source of some plant-based fibers, similar to flax.