Fully Automated RPG

The Kingdom of The Asrai grew out of Ann Arbor's legislative theater program. In legislative theater, a short play about a particular issue or set of issues that ends in a crisis is performed. The audience is then invited to help solve the issue by taking the place of one of the characters on stage. Audience interventions are followed by a brainstorm and discussion of policies or laws that could help solve some of the problems that came up in the performance, or that could help bring about some of the solutions “spect-actors” (the engaged audience) had offered during the performance. The program was a success, but many spect-actors were dissatisfied with the small scale and inconsistent implementation, desiring an in-depth simulation that functioned as a crowdsourcing platform and testing ground for social innovations. After computer simulations failed to reliably produce useable data, a group of members decided that a live-action roleplay scenario inspired by model UN and the Robin Sage exercises would be more suitable for testing and developing people's ability to effectively collaborate. To add a fantastical, game-like element to the scenario, it was decided that the "collaboratory" would be situated in an underwater city, with an elaborate fantasy worldbuild accompanying it. People would be able to utilize special skidoo technology developed by Square Deal to pilot underwater bio-drones as if they were their own bodies, creating a community of part-time volunteers who would reside in the underwater community for a few weeks in a slice-of-life roleplay that was studied for civic insights. Soon, however, people enjoyed the program so much that they started spending most of their time in the lake, with many even modifying their real bodies to live underwater. This effectively turned the project into its own community, as well as one of the first "fae folk" communities.

Originally pitched for the Great Lakes Avengers campaign, can be modified to take place anywhere with a sufficiently large body of water.

One of our GMs is looking for additional players! I thought I'd repost their LFG from a discord we're both in:

Looking for one or two people to join a brand new solar punk SF game using the free ruleset Fully Automated! 7:30 PM EST Tuesdays on Discord

Fully Automated! is a new solar punk TTRPG undergoing testing. Join on the ground floor of a brand new play test campaign as we explore Michigan and the Great Lakes region. Explore the depths of deserted Detroit, fight off Quebecois pirates, and negotiate between synthetic humans and bird-adapted survivalists!

If interested, you can find them on the Fully Automated discord: https://discord.gg/2FtTfGGDJr

Text pulled from my blog post here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/buried-treasure/

The blog’s been quiet for a few weeks while I’ve been working on another project, so I thought I’d go ahead and write about that a little.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m also a dev for the Solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated!, but I don’t think I’ve said so here. It’s an open-source, free (libre and gratis) project intended to be something like a solarpunk scifi version of Dungeons and Dragons (in that it has a robust ruleset and lore you can use or discard as you like while writing your own campaign). I joined like a year ago because I was looking for somewhere to talk solarpunk worldbuilding, and was drawn in by their lore and the sheer ambitious scope of their setting.

I think my understanding of solarpunk and my dreams for the future improved significantly just reading through their guide on how their world works. I think it’s by far the easiest-to-understand depiction of the end-state goal of various leftist systems, probably because it’s designed specifically to help players and GMs actually occupy this eutopian future in-game. It’s hard enough to imagine a better world, let alone to play a character who lives in it. They do a good job of depicting what a day-in-the-life would actually entail, in simple language, and it’s appealing.

When I spotted some gaps in the lore they were happy to take on my suggestions, and I contributed more and more until eventually they asked me to formally join the team.

The other devs have a wonderful knack for taking any idea I have about how something could work and dialing it up to 11. My solarpunk and cyberpunk fiction tend to be near-future things, the solarpunk in particular being much more postapoclyptic than utopian. The FA! team is ambitious and sees a much grander end state much further out than I normally focus on. If I tend to write the journey, I think they’re writing the destination.

I helped them get the rulebook ready for release, then helped review the premade campaigns they’d written. I think that was when I started thinking about making a campaign of my own.

I wanted to do something set in my neck of the woods, to explore how small, rural, ‘bedroom communities’ like the ones I grew up in would change in a world where endless growth and a total reliance on cars were no longer the societal default. The existing lore and premade campaigns are very LA-centric, so I moved my campaign to the east coast and got about as rural as you can while still having some human presence. In contrast to some of Fully Automated’s setting details, the region generally aims for a lower-tech, slightly more grounded vibe.

The end result is a sort of riff on treasure hunting adventures where the players need to journey off the edge of the map, searching dense forests and lost ruins for clues. But the forests and ruins are in a mostly-abandoned region of rural New Hampshire which is being rewilded, and the treasure is tons of industrial waste illegally dumped there sixty years ago during the setting’s WWIII (and which is now useful in the production of geopolymers). It’s got some heavy environmental themes around conservation of wild land and watersheds. As the players search for the pollution they begin to unearth other forgotten details of the region’s wartime history and draw the attention of someone who would rather they left the past alone.

I had two big goals for this campaign – the first was to explore various ways rural solarpunk could look, including questions of what makes for a genuinely sustainable community, the sort of tradeoffs and sacrifices a degrowth-based rural community may need to accept, and how towns and industries look when they accept that they live in a world without limitless resources. It examines various lifestyles and technologies that make sense in that context, local infrastructure, and even the kinds of people the region might attract. It pulls a lot from what historically worked in the region long before cars reshaped it.

In many ways, it represents a sort of amalgamation of all my rural solarpunk projects so far. If you like my postcard series, then playing this campaign should be the closest thing to stepping into those scenes and visiting the people they depict.

The second goal was to get an admittedly narrow glimpse into the Thousand-Year Cleanup – the nigh-endless work of a world where many people have made cleaning up our society’s mess their life’s purpose. The hidden pollution the players and their allies are working to find represents a common wrong from our time, and from the last hundred years of industrial production. Every time a corporation or business owner takes a shortcut that leads to disaster, or deliberately dumps poison into the land and water to save a few bucks, it represents their entitled expectation that the world around them, their human community, and all the other species impacted, will subsidize their cost savings with their health and lives.

Long term, I’m hoping to make The Thousand-Year Cleanup a collection of adventure modules (with the first being this adventure, Buried Treasure). This would be similar to Fully Automated’s previous premade campaign: Regulation, which included four playable modules. It probably won’t have a throughline plot, just a set of adventures themed around various aspects of cleaning up the world our society left to them. From buried industrial waste to massive swaths of plastic in the ocean, to endless heaps of clothes discarded in the desert, I think there’s tons of potential for campaigns based in some way around cleaning up our waste and making it useful. The scope is a little overwhelming but there’s a powerful optimism in depicting a world that’s making real progress on these disasters through the collective efforts of regular people.

I think it’s safe to say that this 160+ page campaign guide is my biggest Solarpunk project to date – it’s actually shaping up to be my longest finished work of fiction in general. I’ve tried to write several novels in the last decade or so, but usually get bogged down in logistical snares in the setting and plot. Writing for a tabletop campaign (and one I might not even be running) has been oddly freeing. I can’t know what the players or GM will do, so I present options, people and places and events which will be triggered by circumstances in their playthrough, but I’ve been careful not to set a specific set of rails for them to follow. In some ways, this plotless format has been much easier for me than writing a single story. And I’ve been able to include far more world building than any one group of players can possibly see!

Fully Automated’s dev team has a sort of template for organizing the notes/prepwork for running a tabletop campaign – it seems to be inspired a bit by the way scientific papers are laid out in sections, and while I don’t have much experience with GMing, I found it very intuitive. (Though I made some adjustments to organize mine around in-world locations rather than a timeline as Buried Treasure is a bit more open than the introductory ones they’d previously published.)

When I was writing the campaign, I’ll admit I sort of saw actually running it as the playtesting cost I had to pay to get the thing published. I had no idea how much fun I’d have actually sitting down with a group and trying it out. My players are great and I was shocked at how entertaining it was to watch them explore my world and interact with my characters, not to mention the satisfaction of watching them piece together the mystery!

At time of writing we’ve just finished up session 8 and I think the players are approaching the endgame and generally seem to be having a lot of fun. They’ve even talked about doing a second session per week which is asking a lot of six adults with day jobs and projects of their own. They have been excellent at unraveling the mysteries and at interpreting the clues they’ve found – they’ve surprised me a few times now by figuring things out quicker than I’d expected or with fewer clues than I’d prepared. I’m also very pleased with the ways they’ve leveraged community and preemptively diffused potential conflicts – they’ve not just avoided some potential fights but amassed a small army of allies who are helping them solve this mystery. That, to me, is a very solarpunk way to play this solarpunk campaign, and it feels very natural in a reasonable-people-acting-reasonably sort of way in the moment.

We’re looking at getting another group going with a different GM to better test my guide to running this campaign, and the lead dev is looking at finding an artist to do a pulp-style cover for it which is just really cool!

If all goes well we’ll publish the cleaned up version libre and gratis through the game’s various channels. But if you want to try it out sooner than that, we’ve currently got multiple groups testing it out on the game’s discord! And if you want more info or to download resources without an account, you can find Fully Automated over here: http://fullyautomatedrpg.com/>>

I recorded this a few months ago!

I'm disappointed that I seem to have spoken too fast, but otherwise I'm excited by the direction of the conversation!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/16264721

I'm looking for a GM and players for a post-capitalist scifi adventure game.

The game setting and system are from an indie RPG called Fully Automated! (We have a community: c/fullyautomatedrpg )

I'm one of the developers, looking for a GM and possibly players on behalf of some other players who don't have quite enough people to start a new group.

The Game

The game takes place 100 years into our post-capitalist future. It's cyberpunky in style, but with an optimistic, earthy flavor. It uses a custom 2d10 system, but it's very flexible and modable if you prefer something else. The GM is welcome to use the rules as described in the manual (which are very straightforward) or just graft the campaign onto their preferred system.

We're currently playtesting a new campaign and we've got a few too many players for one play group. The extra players asked if I could look for a GM and a few more players to make a second group. I'm actually a player in the first test group, and we're 5 weeks into what is really a helluva campaign. It's a lot of fun and very well written. I expect it to be about 10 sessions, but don't really know.

The Campaign

The campaign is called "The 1000 Year Cleanup". The players are sent to the backwoods of New Hampshire by a supply chain specialist who thinks that they've found indications of a long-buried toxic waste dumping site. Salvaged records suggest that a local landowner helped a chemical corporation illegally dump tons of toxic slag during the later years of the Global Climate War. Sixty years later, the slag is now sought after by a company that recycles toxic waste into useful, non-toxic industrial products. But the whole area is in in the process of being rewilded. Deconstruction crews are dismantling what's left of some largely abandoned ghost towns. If the players don't find the waste, soon there'll be no one left to ask and no roads by which to remove it, and the toxins will simply leach into the surrounding hills in slow silence for centuries to come.

(There's also a little twist! I don't want to reveal it to anyone who might want to play, but if you're interested in running the game (or just curious), message me and I'll clue you in.)

In terms of play, it's a bit like an extended Star Trek away mission if it took place amidst a big ecological restoration project. It's a very cool vibe that most players will find surprisingly easy to get into. Let me know if you'd like to play!

During a gameplay session last week my character left a message on the Wood Wide Web for some local wildfolk. I was just improvising in the game, but I love the concept and I think it'd be nice to develop the concept a bit and share to make it easier to use in games.

The concept of the Wood Wide Web is currently understood strictly as a mycorrhizal network for coordinating interactions between fungal communities and plants across forests, but within the game I'd like to establish that these existing networks are used as a backbone for sending messages across forests by humans.

I don't want to go too deep, but what should the player experience of using this be like?

In my head, I'm imagining this as an organic version of a wireless ad-hoc mesh network. One project in particular, diaster.radio, is designed to set up a system for Twitter-like microblogging that is geotagged across a decentralized mesh of nodes. I think this is a good framework. Users access the Wood-Web by plugging a small electronic spike into the dirt, and it lets them browse recent posts like you do on Mastodon, but perhaps with low character limits and no multimedia. Does that sound good? What do folks think of this interface?

Also, I'd like a basic overview of how it works. It doesn't need to be highly technical. But just as one might try to hack a network and we all understand what a WiFi router is, I'd like for there to be a basic understanding of how this is managed. I'm thinking that it's primarily based on the naturally occurring mycorrhizal networks, but with a series of low-power router nodes that allow humans to interface with it.

What do folks think? As a player, if you went into a forest and plugged in to this, what would you expect to see? How fast and far do you think messages should go? What kind of maintenance would you imagine sysadmins needing to perform? Thanks!

I think this is a glimpse of both our present and near future. Companies failing without an end-of-life plan, and hackers swooping in. It's fascinating. I wonder what it might tell us about more extreme examples, like major power and fuel infrastructure.

These aren't the kind of election results that lead in the news, but Alaskan natives recognizing the importance of a rule that obstructs the two major parties from gatekeeping voters abilities to express choices that don't align with party line issues is exactly the kind of change in politics that might save us.

A few of us just started a new campaign! We might have room for one or two more people if anyone has been looking for an opportunity to join in a game of Fully Automated!

I'm not the GM, fyi, so participating is contingent on the preferences of our GM. But I'm excited to finally be trying this game as a player!

I volunteered to present a talk on Robot Operating System (ROS) to the Open Automation Club. Details can be found here: https://www.autobio.blog/robot-operating-system-with-andy-gross/

If you want to join, this is the link (although I added the word "POTATO" to prevent bots from doing anything weird. Remove the word POTATO to access the meeting).

https://us06web.zoomPOTATO.us/j/85686205319?pwd=QUuCxqbbfYb3xhjf8X3Nqrn9VGVxHy.1

There was a post on Reddit that praised the ubiquitous "Dear Alice" commercial, and inevitably a comment criticizing praise for a commercial. This led to me to wonder more about who it was that made this famous solarpunk advertisement. The answer is an animation studio called The Line. I went looking at some of their other work, and came across this interesting demo short for what appears to be a proof of concept or pilot for a solarpunky animated monster hunting series.

I don't love the heavy use of guns. But setting that aside, I think the art is interesting. I'm fascinated to see what people are doing with the artistic and conceptual toolset solarpunk offers, and I think this is a use case that I wouldn't mind seeing more of.

Unfortunately, this demo is as far as the project went. But I'm happy to see that the folks at The Line appear to have some broader interest in solarpunk, and I hope they keep putting it into practice in unique ways.

Full disclosure: I'm the one in the interview. But still, I think this was a great episode! I really appreciated the questions Ariel asked and where the conversation went. There's so much I wish we could've covered, but considering the limitations of time, I have no regrets.

Share thoughts. I think there are other podcasts that would be a good fit to discuss this game. If so, though I'd encourage other devs of the game to consider going on. I think the diversity of perspectives would be cool to hear.

I had this idea for an adventure. I wanted to post it here so I don't forget it, and also to share it in case anyone else wants to use parts of this.

~

Players investigate a fatal industrial accident in a mining project by a fault line management agency. They discover that the deceased had uncovered a conspiracy: the agency has been slowly infiltrated at multiple levels by members of the suicide cult NostroCramo. This group believes that the world is a simulation, and seeks to crash the simulation to liberate themselves and anyone else who is trapped in it, and they've become convinced that triggering a massive earthquake will do it.

To do so, they've infiltrated the Seismic Management Division of the Pacifican Department of Geology, which is responsible for conducting deep subterranean operations to execute small controlled releases of energy along fault lines. Their plan has been to use the agency's resources to do the exact opposite purpose: instead of modeling out the safest way to release energy, they've been setting up an energy release meant to trigger the biggest possible release along the entire San Andreas fault line ever: the first magnitude 10+ quake.

The players have to investigate the death, discover that the accident was really a murder, uncover the conspiracy, then make their way through mine shafts to disable the charges. They must work their way all the way to the location of the largest charge in a bunker sitting 7 km down within the earth's crust. They can initially be trying to move undetected to avoid motivating the cultists to trigger the charges early, and then later be racing them down to the last and deepest one.

(I'm calling it "Rock-a-bye Baby" for now, although I'm pretty sure I can do better than that. Feel free to suggest cooler names.)

I created a brief introductory video explaining the premise of the game, another describing the premade characters, and four actual play videos to show folks what the game looks like in practice!

I've uploaded these to YouTube and of course PeerTube as well!

https://video.everythingbagel.me/c/fully_automated/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@FullyAutomatedRPG-nz1wh

I don't plan on making any more content at the moment, but I'm glad to have a few videos that I think might help people who want to know more get a clearer picture on what this is. And if we happen to make more video content in the future, we now have somewhere to put it!

RPGGeek.com is a website for rating and discussing role playing games. We now have a product listing there. If anyone is registered to the site, consider going on and leaving a rating or review!

Parable of the Sower is such a good book.

First, it's interesting that it starts right about now. The book starts in mid-2024, and even mentions that its an election year. That was a fascinating experience to read a scifi book in the moment in time in which it is set. It still feels like it takes place about 20 years in the future. It was written 31 years ago, so politically things have seemed to move as many steps forward as backward. It seems like a lot of things have not gotten better and worse than when Butler wrote it, so in some sense I feel like I'm looking at it as a near future in the same way as when it was written a generation ago. I guess I'm glad things didn't go as badly as in the story, but it's rough that the looming threat from 30 years ago feels the same distance away now as then.

Second, it's painful to read. Although the events described in the book haven't happened in the book's setting -- California -- the social collapse and migrations described have happened in Honduras, Gaza, Yemen, and certainly others I'm not aware of. It was really hard to read that and know that it was already real somewhere.

Third, as a solarpunk novel -- and really as general fiction -- it feels like it should be part of a high school curriculum. It's really well written and an engrossing read. Since publishing Fully Automated, I often relate solarpunk stories to that game. What might I have added to the game if I'd read this before? How well does it naturally fit? One thing that struck me is that her emerging in-world faith -- Earthseed -- reminds me quite a bit of elements of Seekerism, a new faith tradition in Fully Automated. I wish I'd known and included direct references to Earthseed, but it's nice when the game has alignment with great works that I wasn't directly familiar with.

Has anyone else read this? What do you folks think?

I finally got around to making a playlist of the music used to score the starter campaign, Fully Automated: Regulation!

I think it's a collection of real bangers. I hope that for people who haven't played these stories, this might give an enticing taste of what to expect. And for people who might've played, perhaps it takes you back to some memorable moments.

Demonstration of Power

• The stakeout: “This DJ” by Warren G
• Fight scene!: “Dare to be Stupid”, covered by The Cybertronic Spree
• Roll credits: “Fine”, by Lemon Demon

Psychonautica

• Opening Sparing match: “Champion” by Buju Banton
• Entering neurospace: “Just dropped in” by Kenny Roger
• The mindscape: “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C.” by André 3000
• Dance battle: “Do the Damn Thing” by Rupee
• The Bathhouse: “Ants to You, Gods to Who?” by André 3000
• Android assault: “Robot Rock” by Daft Punk
• Synthesizing the cure: “The Oligo Separation Verse” and “Analytical Gangster” by True Speak
• Roll credits: “Pony” by Deluxe

Piece of Mind

• Surf Intro: “Cecilia Ann” by The Pixies
• Fighting back: “Headshot” by she
• Starting the investigation: “No Time for Dreaming” by Charles Bradley & Menahan Street Band
• Sneaking around: “The Sensual Woman” by The Herbaliser
• Piecing things together: “Cause for Alarm” by The Heavy
• Research montage, pt.1: “Metrocenter 84” by Sunset Neon.
• Research montage, pt.2: “You Rock Me” by she
• Making a plan: “Drag and Drop” by the Soul Motivator
• Showtime: “Swing Break” by the McMash Clan, feat. Kate Mullins
• Showdown: “Mastermind” by Deltron 3030 and Dan the Automater
• Showdown, cont’d: “Don’t Get In My Way” by Zach Hemsey
• Roll credits: “UNLVD” by Socalled

Olives Fair in Love and War

• Vampire fight: “Dark Entities” cover by Daniel Guerra Caballero
• Roll credits: “Birdhouse in your Soul” by They Might Be Giants

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13032570

One of my ongoing goals is to emphasize reuse in solarpunk media – both through my own projects and whenever I get the chance while helping others through suggestions or editing.

There’s a wealth of stuff all around us which could be repurposed in creative ways, and solarpunk art and fiction has a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that ingenuity and thrift.

A lot of that stuff is in cars. So here’s some notes I’ve pulled together from various online discussions and from many people’s recommendations in solarpunk spaces. It’s not exhaustive, its probably not all good advice, but it should be good enough for a writer to casually drop into a description of a room or workshop, or for an artist to include in the background of a scene. Something that shows that this isn’t a scratch-built future, that they’re repurposing existing stuff wherever they can.

Think of all the weird ways postapoclyptic movies dress the sets with misused items from the present – here’s a somewhat practical guide to solarpunk set dressing with the guts of cars:

The big stuff:

• Depending on the vehicle, its frame (if it has one), axles, and wheels can be used to make a trailer, cart, or similar. (I’ve definitely seen trailers that were just the back half of a pickup truck with a tongue and hitch welded on.) Bonus: the bearings in car wheels tend to be better than those used in regular trailers.
• The transmission from a vehicle could be rigged up to a wind/water mill to adjust rotational velocity of a sawmill or other industrial application. Some power tools, like lathes, use vehicle transmissions: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/truck-transmission-for-lathe.240574/
• Steel leaf springs can be removed from their bundles (they’re long, flat pieces of steel stacked and bound together with strips of steel) and are favorites of blacksmiths for making swords and knives because of the type of steel used.
• Earthships can be made with stacked tires packed with rammed earth: https://earthship.com/systems/garbage-management/

The Electronics:

• Alternators can be used to generate a wide range of amperage and voltage, suitable for different needs, including (in a few specific cases) welding: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/diy-low-cost-generator-from-vehicle-alternator-alternating-generator.1843/
  • The terminology here is a little confusing – early cars had DC generators (sometimes called dynamos), then they switched to AC alternators. But modern ’emergency generators’ still use alternators hooked up to an engine. So if you’re looking for something to convert motion to electricity, perhaps to attach to a water wheel, a vehicle alternator (and some belts to adjust the speeds) could do the job.
  • Some caveats: suitable vehicle generators and motors will likely work better, and to get an alternator to work you may need to either include a power source of 12v to excite the alternator, or to to replace certain internals to include permanent magnets. You'll need to mess with the gear/pulley ratio to get the right (high) speed too.
• The electronics in most cars are usually all designed to run off 12 volts, which can be very convenient for a household with solar panels depending on their setup. If a household has a low-voltage DC battery bank (some do, some don’t) then dropping the battery voltage a few times to power car parts comes with a smaller efficiency loss.
• These 12 volt electronics include things like the cab lights, headlights, radio/entertainment system, backup/surround cameras (perhaps for a security system?), all of which could be placed in a home on a circuit providing the same power they’d get in a car.
• LED headlights make for decent grow lights. Different models hit different parts of the spectrum, but generally they’re sturdy, run cool, and don’t take much power. They might not be as fine-tuned for plants as a dedicated product but they’re common and probably not being used for much in a solarpunk society.
  • Alternative use: outdoor lights, indoor spotlights, light on a wagon, rickshaw etc.
• A car air conditioner could cool some small storage room decently. With big living rooms, it would have difficulty https://permies.com/t/177638/Convert-car-air-conditioner-home
• Cars have lots of small electric motors with various advantages and disadvantages: you can pull motors from the blower, power windows, and windshield wiper motors have a fair bit of torque and can be decent actuators for some projects (I’ve seen them included in robotics projects).
  • The blower and motor could be used for ventilation elsewhere.
• Starter motors are tricky – they’re designed to provide a lot of sudden torque to briefly turn the engine, and not to run for a long time. So they don’t fit a lot of our usual use-cases for electric motors. I’ve seen forum posts that describe using them for hoists (like to lift heavy things) but that’s about it so far.
• There’s plenty of wiring in a car which can all be reused as long as the gauge is correct for the new use.
• Automotive Relays are used to enable a low amperage circuit to switch a higher amperage circuit on or off, making the control systems safer. One example given was switching on heaters in a thermal storage water tank. There’s a fair number of forum threads where people link arduinos to automotive relays to control things the arduino couldn’t handle on its own.
• Car batteries have long seen alternative uses – they might be the one car part used most outside of cars. As vehicles go hybrid and electric, their bigger, more powerful batteries become more common. Even when they weaken overtime, the lower power density doesn’t matter much for fixed installations where weight isn’t a factor, so old electric car batteries show up in homes and local grid storage systems: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/11/old-ev-batteries-solar-power-grid-backup-b2u/

Moving fluids:

• Various pumps and tubing can be used for moving fluids (though the original purpose/contents will restrict what you can use them for).
• The tubing, tanks, pumps, and other parts used for windshield washer fluid are probably the safest car-fluid-handling components to reuse for non-car things (with a lot of rinsing and cleaning): https://www.mountainbuzz.com/threads/reusing-wiper-fluid-jugs-for-drinking-water.97053/
  • Possible uses could include aquariums and hydroponic setups (This may stand out to fish keepers though, who are very cautious around how they handle the water for their aquatic friends and who would be leery of traces of methyl alcohol wiper fluid contaminating it. https://www.nano-reef.com/forums/topic/376583-windshield-wiper-water-pump-as-ato-pump/)
• Car radiators work well for heat exchange, their intended purpose whether they’re in a car or not. This can be part of systems for heating or cooling.
• Copper brake line can also be used in heat exchanges.
• Fuel and brake lines should definitely not be used for things like potable water. But you wouldn’t be using potable water for heat exchange anyways, so contamination from the radiators, tubing, or brake line won’t make much difference there.

Odds and Ends:

• Inside the rubber squeegee part of windshield wipers is a long thin strip of good quality spring steel. Lockpicking folks like it for making tools.
• Catalytic converters might be useful for other kinds of filtering? Maybe not in wood stoves though: https://permies.com/t/96864/Misusing-car-parts-cleaner-cooking
• Certain vehicle exhaust parts can be used to make rocket stoves: https://permies.com/t/15611/Auto-exhaust-muffler-pipe-parts
  • https://permies.com/t/129517/Homemade-Wood-Stove-Propane-Tank

Cosmetic stuff:

• Seats: couches, chairs, porch swing, etc, fabric, foam stuffing for stuffed animals.
• Windows are tricky because the shapes are weird, which can make framing them difficult, but they could be set into clay or concrete or similar building materials.
• Hoods, roofs, and body panels offer some large sheets of metal which could be used for sheds.

Last but not least, there’s always conversion to run on woodgas (something I’ve depicted in a photobash) for some limited uses, or conversion to electric. And if all else fails, you can always melt them down for your society’s steel manufacturing needs – electric arc furnace smelters running off a green grid, recycling, are about as close to zero emission steel as you’re likely to get, and the metal is already refined so I think you could get pretty tight control over the quality on the output.

But I hope you’ll consider some of the above possibilities too. The parts are out there, we might as well use them.

Thanks for reading! Like I said, this is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you know of something I’ve missed, or see something I got wrong, I’m happy to edit it!

Also available here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/using-every-part-of-the-car-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12735795

Hi! I'm hoping to hear people's thoughts on what my city, New Orleans, would look like in a perfect solarpunk world.

Most solarpunk art (which I love to see!) Seems to be praire/plains or forest inspired, and definitely one of the issues we have that I want to avoid is people bring environmental and ecological policies and thoughts from those two biomes to other ones (because they're seen as kind of default).

So, New Orleans! Lots of interesting challenges to address, including:

-tornados (so we need safe rooms and to withstand them

-hurricanes (there's probably no way to withstand these, instead maybe something that's kind of designed to be refixed once a year, since that's what happens anyways)

-flooding, both hurricane-associated and flash-flooding throughout the year (definitely no basements, honestly maybe no first or second floors either).

-extreme heat (feels-like gets to 120F/50C at least a couple days a year)

-extreme cold (not nearly as bad as the heat, but can be brutal enough that they turn schools into extra shelter for our unhoused for about a week each year)

-end of the river (we're at the end of the Mississippi, so we're definitely more silt than soil)

-swamp (New Orleans is sinking, our ground isn't particularly stable)

-agriculture (I'm really not sure farming is a great idea. It's hard to find local crops that grow in the wetlands--even lists of indigenous foodways focus more on upstate, where traditional planting would work. Can we farm in the wetlands without turning it into a farm?)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12656646

Created by /u/joan_de_art on Reddit.

I just wanted to share that I recorded an upcoming episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast!

I recorded it last Thursday, so I'm guessing it'll probably come out in September. I hope it went well. I'm a little concerned I was overcaffinated and also got too excited and might sound like it. But hopefully that won't be too much of a problem.

I'm very excited to hear it. The conversation felt very lively, and I'm eager to see what comes of it.

If anyone knows of other opportunities to talk on streams or podcasts, let us know! You can offer to go on yourself or refer another person. Cheers!

Earlier today, I saw this thread on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@jannik@norden.social/112965146817661555

In it, the poster wondered what solarpunk cars would look like, and speculated that we already agree that they'd be lightweight small cars with electric drive. I wrote up a few posts in response, and gathered up some reference images, and I think they might be useful for folks looking to add detail to streets in Fully Automated.

I'd argue that in a solarpunk world, most personal travel should be feasible with public transit in one form or another, and with bikes or other similar pedal/electric contraptions filling much of the last-mile needs. And FA! offers a wide range of vehicles from ropeways and airbus to trains and streetcars and ferries that fill those various public transit niches. Likewise, most cargo should be being moved by train, airship, or ocean vessel.

But that still leaves a lot of gaps: last mile transit, especially for heavy cargo, and personal conveyance for people with disabilities and other needs spring to mind. FA! has some wild/exciting stuff like personal rotorcoptors and gliders here, but what would some of the more mundane vehicles look like?

I think with most transportation handled by public transit, car-ready streets are likely going to be de-prioritized, if only as a matter of cost/resource allotment. I picture a lot of them shrunk down to make room for parks, gardens, and sponge-city permeable surfaces and basins, leaving something wider than a bike path, but narrower than our current default.

I think we'd see road networks used mostly to reach local destinations, and public transit hubs, and that the vehicles on those roads would generally travel much slower, and could be held to much lower safety standards than modern cars.

In real life there are a dizying array of contraptions people come up with in alternative vehicle competitions - hybrid electric, solar, and pedal-powered machines sort of partway between a bike and a car. If the roads are no longer the sole domain of cars and high speed limits, and bikes weren't restricted to narrow bike lanes and paths, I could see people building all sorts of things to suit their needs for local transportation and cargo capacity.

Ideally they'd be open source, DIY things which reuse as many existing parts and materials as possible. I've gathered up a few of my favorite examples here:

The vhelio modular electric/pedal hybrid vehicle looks pretty crude, but it offers a crazy variety of configurations, I could see some descendant of it, a bit more developed, being common on streets.

Here's another take on the design:

Electric rikshaws are a practical city vehicle, small but with large carrying capacity:

I'm not even sure how much taxonomic difference there really is between them and ebike tricycles:

I think the four-wheeled, cargo-hauling, recumbant velov armidillo bicycle cart is especially cool.

We might even see mini-car-like things like the UD MUUV Velocar:

I think the closest fit to modern day vehicles would actually be trucks (albeit often smaller and more utilitarian than many of the giant pickup trucks we have now). But for moving heavy items for the last few miles trucks are a good form factor.

I photobashed some art of one using a streetcar pantograph rig, set up to haul heavy stuff for a library of things:

Full post here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/01/16/library-economy-heavy-items-delivery-collections/

As for what they would look like - if we didn't need every vehicle to be able to fly down freeways and survive 180-mile-per-hour crashes, they could be much simpler than what we have now. Something along the lines of electric kei trucks, small cabs, large beds, not intended to double as a mini van or daily driver. This article had a kind of cool example: https://slrpnk.net/post/11465754

Another potential truck answer is Woodgas conversions of old Internal Combustion Engine trucks. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-vehicles-firewood-in-the-fuel-tank/

I think these make sense for rural areas, for specific tasks, by farmers, forest managers, and others whose work takes them impractically far from public transit. Woodgas conversions emphasize reuse of existing machinery instead of new manufacturing. It doesn’t require high-tech electronics like electric vehicles.

These are less practical for the kind of quick trip to the store or daily commute which has shaped our current society. A woodgas vehicle takes awhile to start up, and because the fire needs to burn down, doesn’t make much sense for short trips. They might be used for hauling produce to town, supplies out to forest management camps, research sites, and other remote locations. And perhaps for road trips by campers and other people who might borrow one for awhile. I could also see hobbyists having a lot of fun with them.

The wood could be sustainably sourced, using scraps from sawmills, harvested invasive trees, brush, and even dedicated coppiced plantations of especially fast-growing trees like paulownia elongata. though its important to note that while this can be done well, the last time these vehicles were used in massive numbers (during WWII) they led to deforestation. They make sense in small doses, and with some careful management of their inputs.

One last bit of art - I featured a bunch of big woodgas trucks, smaller electric kei trucks, electric rickshaws, cargo bikes, and a modernized chinese wheelbarrow in this scene of McMansions being deconstructed and the materials salvaged in this photobash:

Full text here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/05/02/deconstruction-crew-disassembling-abandoned-mcmansions-so-the-material-can-be-reused/

edit to add this goofball bicycle-powered car-sized cargo contraption:

https://www.icebike.org/biggest-cargo-bike/

A gentleperson in the Discord opined that the world guide lacks definition in its addressing of all the major catastrophes. Specifically, they pointed out that these catastrophes are pivotal, culture-defining events. How we navigate them informs so much of the present. That means that it underserves the game world if they're hand-waved away.

This document is an opportunity to elaborate on how various problems were addressed and what marks they've left on society. Feel free to add your own ideas freely! We can edit for clarity later.

This is from the solarpunk images collection of pickledtezcat. It was shared with me by @JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net . Here's the description of this piece:

A bit of Afrofuturism with this one. One of the scenarios I'd like to include in my pen and paper RPG project.

I just discovered this artist, but I'm immediately going to reach out and see if they'd like to collaborate on anything RPG related. This is great.

This is from the Utopic Cities collection by artist aerroscape: https://www.deviantart.com/aerroscape/gallery/91089978/utopistic-cities.

It was shared with me by @JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net . I really love all these. Here is the artist description of this piece:

a back & front cover art commission for Lino Zeddies, an activist for a better world and author from Berlin. In his book UTOPIA 2048 he creates a what-if scenario, where you wake up in the year 2048, realizing how favourably the world has developped after major changes in the financial system have been made. His book is now available in many online stores printed and as e-book.

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this is a photo manipulation to about 30%. Sources: altered, licensed and open source web photos, own photographs and google earth images

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feel free to share this artwork! you may use the artwork non-commercially, according to the creative commons license (CC BY-NC-SE 4.0)