Here's something silly - I've seen conspiracy theorists sling the term "Socialist Vampire" around as an insult frequently enough (saying socialists are secretly vampires, sometimes literally, basically a continuation of the usual rightwing blood libel bullshit).

This musician appears to have worked backwards and asked what if there were actual vampires and those vampires were genuine socialists and it's pretty funny.

It's a three part series of short songs. They're on other sites too but the tiktok version seems to have the best video (which kinda makes it) and lyrics onscreen.

Vampire Conspiracy: https://www.tiktok.com/@olifro.st/video/7427845222706548001

Vampire Conspiracy II: https://www.tiktok.com/@olifro.st/video/7336959535183121696

Vampire Conspiracy III - Mesmerize: https://www.tiktok.com/@olifro.st/video/7407128924838235424

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

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/17046426

I've talked about this campaign a bit in the monthly check-in posts so I thought I'd include this update here! 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/>>

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/>>

We recently switched to using a Linux Mint laptop with an adblocker for our streaming (while also cancelling a bunch of services). A friend at the recycling center set it aside for me - the screen was irreparably smashed but it was otherwise quite a nice little laptop. Replacement screens were too expensive so I carefully removed the broken one entirely so it'd default to the HDMI port and then set it up as a quick media center (we watch a lot of YouTube and the ads were driving me crazy, I might switch to a more purpose-built OS eventually). The TV is one I pulled from an ewaste bin to replace my previous ewaste TV after it finally gave up. It has a thin line through one edge of the screen occasionally but is otherwise fine. I also recently found a perfectly good wireless trackball mouse and a Bluetooth keyboard in the same bin where I got the TV (came with that other mouse). The bin even supplied HDMI cables. The whole thing is perched on a particle board TV stand I found like a decade ago when the college kids move out.

I stumbled on this brief article while looking through this solarpunk blog. On the farm I worked at growing up, all but one of our greenhouses were plastic stretched over a metal frame. We replaced the plastic fairly often (I'm not sure how often - I know I helped do it more than once, but probably not for the same greenhouse) due to sun and wind damage. The old plastic was pretty useless at that point unless you needed a dropcloth with some cracks in it, so it usually went in the dumpster and then to our local landfill.

It sounds like these folks soaked some sort of fabric in beeswax, and I'm curious how well that holds up. Certainly it'll need replacing at some point, but so did the plastic, and at least the textile and wax can be composted eventually. Does anyone have any experience with this?

I’ve been wanting to do more scenes of solarpunk ships. Shipping underpins a huge amount of our society and I think building a more solarpunk world will mean changing it in some really interesting ways.

Last time I did a ship in a storm, but I wanted to do something a little more bright and happy this time around. A month or so ago I was talking with a sailor on the solarpunk subreddit and I asked if there was anything they’d like to see in nautical solarpunk art. I was kind of looking for design ideas but what they gave me was better –an excellent list of experiences and details which stood out from their voyages, one of which was the way whales come right up to sail ships because they’re so quiet and the whales are curious. So I started looking for art of ships and whales to reference, and (of course) almost exclusively found of paintings of whalers killing and carving up whales (which put a kind of tragic tinge on that wholesome description of their curiosity). So I figured that was my next subject – I wanted to do a scene with a similar composition to those paintings, but with the ship very clearly hauling cargo, and the two subjects just sort of harmlessly crossing paths.

The trouble is that with a lot of ships (especially sailing ships), it can be hard for most of us to tell its purpose from a distance. Container ships are kind of the exception, so I started looking for the rare combination of sail ships that can haul containers, and sort of went down a rabbit hole as I learned more both about our current shipping and proposed designs. I ended up collecting so much information in the course of that reading that I’ve actually put together a second post just with information for solarpunk writers and artists who want resources for nautical solarpunk](https://slrpnk.net/post/14284744). I’m very much not an expert but I hope it hits the level of detail most folks need to get started and that it consolidates it nicely in one place.

By far the best luck I had with all that was in reaching out to the Naval Architecture subreddit, where I found a handful of folks with the patience of saints willing to answer my questions, provide all sorts of resources I’d missed, and who walked me through drafting this junk-rigged-cargo-ship-with-offset-masts design. I can’t thank Open_Ad1920and the others enough for all their help!

I’d started out unsure of whether I wanted to do a more traditional ship design to better match the old whaling scenes I was riffing on, or to lean in on some of the more modern concept art I’d found to better contrast it. I ended up taking the proposed windcoop container ship and changing it to follow recommendations from Open_Ad1920. They had a lot of interesting design ideas for a sail-based modern container ship and I basically decided I wanted to go all in on their dream design and see what it looked like, rather than copy a company’s concept art. I’m glad I went with a more modern design now, because I was able to make it look less sleek and more like a modern working vessel (with a paint scheme copied from some real life container ships). I think that reflects some of my goals in the postcard series of showing the less-pretty, industrial kind of spaces that underpin even a solarpunk society that tries to co-exist with nature.

Speaking of which, one of their recommendations was modifications to the hull of the ship to make it safer for whales. Whales are sometimes hit by ships (they sleep just below the surface and don’t know where human shipping lanes are). Some hulls are more dangerous to them than others. Ships with steep, sharp prows and bulbous bows are apparently especially dangerous for whales. If you search for ship hulls and whale safety, you’ll find an unfortunate number of photographs of a dead whale draped over one of those bulbs.

One of their suggestions was to change the prow of the ship so it was angled forward, with no bulb below the surface, and a much more rounded/blunt bowstem. This design will likely lose some performance benefits while underway but if it hits a whale I guess it’s more likely to sort of dunk them rather than to slam into them like an axe.

The notes post and this conversation go much deeper into some of the design choices, but there’s a few other interesting aspects to call out here:

As they explained it, cargo cranes aren’t as inconvenienced by masts as you might expect, but bridges built after the age of tall ships block a lot of important ports, so folding masts are necessary just to reach the dock. Junk rigs like the ones in the scene are apparently well-suited to folding and offer decent performance.

They also recommended placing the masts on the ship offset from the centerline, in a sort of zigzag pattern, two on each side. As they explained it, this gets more masts on the ship, without going extra tall or messing up each others’ lift over drag ratio. I’ve poked around and found a few examples of offset masts (on flat bottomed boats, proas, or catamarans) but not much like this.

Most of their other suggestions for reducing draft and maintaining control underwater are hidden by the ocean. To paraphrase their suggestions, "the vessel has either a lifting keel or daggerboards. It also has at least two rudders, if not more, to get sufficient area. The rudders might end up as transom-hung folding types to reduce draft and maintain good performance under sail. A long, thin rudder works best. Racing monohulls of all sizes have been built this way and they work well while avoiding rudder damage from impacts."

The whales in the foreground are blue whales,just sort of swimming alongside.

Nautical Solarpunk:

I've been reading up on modern sail ships and asking questions while working on some solarpunk sailing artwork. At this point, I think I have gathered enough information that it might be useful to someone else.

So if you want to include ships in your solarpunk story (even just mentioned in the background) or you’re looking for references for some artwork, take a look. I’m very much not an expert, but I’ve been pestering some of them, and collecting examples from the internet and doing my best to organize it. Hopefully this by-laymen-for-laymen approach will help make it accessible without leading you astray.

One thing to note up front: there’s a ton of variety here. Historical nautical terminology is remarkably chaotic – probably because most of it predates manufacturing practices that involved standardization. Highlights include the fact that ships can be classified based on size, sail plan, rigging, hull type, how they’re used, some combination thereof, or whether they have a figurehead or not. Modern sail-based freight shipping is still very new and I get the impression that the industry as a whole is sort of picking up old ideas and new ones and trying them in different combinations to see what fits. There are very few finished examples underway out in the world and I’m not sure we’ll know what designs are the absolute best for which use cases until a lot more ships have been launched and put to work.

That said, I think we’re definitely going to see a resurgence of sail and it seems like there’s a decent amount of interest and enthusiasm in the industry, even if many are understandably nervous about making huge changes when those changes involve incredibly expensive ships.

Why sail?

It’s the original zero-carbon (-ish, they deforested huge amounts of land and destroyed entire habitats to build ships back when) shipping and transportation system. We had the technology to move cargo and passengers using the wind to directly do most of the work, and we have the technology (metal hulls, automated rigging, satellite navigation systems, radio, etc) to do it much more safely than our ancestors could. Even if a shipping company isn’t motivated by regulations or pure environmental reasons, oil will get more expensive eventually and that will cut into the profitability of giant motor vessels.

How shipping might change:

Modern day shipping is extremely cheap but only when you limit the metrics you track to money. When you account for the pollution, the waste, it gets a lot harder to justify. A huge part of keeping modern day cargo shipping cheap is using the absolute worst fuel (bunker fuel, tar-like stuff left over after distilling and cracking petroleum, which is contaminated with everything the fuel they were actually making couldn’t include), as soon as they hit international waters.

I think a solarpunk society is one that cares about externalities.

I genuinely like the optimization and logistical advantage of using standardized, stackable shipping containers which fit on ships, trucks, and trains without the need to load and unload the cargoes by hand at each transition in their journey. That’s great stuff, no complaints.

What I wonder about is if the cost efficiency brought by combining containerization with ever-more-massive, bunker-fuel-burning ships has caused other problems. We ship cargo all over the world but much of the time, we do it because it’s so cheap to do so. Many of those containers are full of cheap tat that ends up in landfills after one use or no use at all. We ship raw material from one continent to process it on another, we ship that material to another so it can be shaped into parts, which are shipped away for partial assembly on another continent, and then again for final assembly. Is that efficient? It’s cost efficient. But we burn terrible amounts of fuel each time we do it, and we do it for so many things.

When you read through the handful of real sail ships operating today, a theme becomes somewhat clear – these early (for profit) ones at least are primarily transporting the same high-value or location-specific cargoes sail ships were carrying a hundred years or more ago. Wines, champagnes, and other liquors, raw coffee, raw cocoa, luxury goods like that. This is partly because they need to justify the up-front cost of standing up a whole new kind of shipping, because they’re often slower, and because there are already crew shortages even before getting into the specialized skillsets related to sailing by wind. So they’re currently prioritizing the kind of specialty products (that only grow in certain climates or need special skills or reputation to produce) that exist in one place with markets in others, where they can markup for greener shipping. As they expand, the range of products will no doubt expand as well - cargo ships used to carry all kinds of stuff. But even with massive fleets (to make up for the fact that it’ll be hard to make single ships as big as we have now for reasons I’ll get to) we probably won’t see shipping done as cheap as it is today. Generally I think this lines up well with solarpunk principles like building to your local environment using local materials, manufacturing things locally, and building them to last and to be repairable. Shipping would fit the things that have to come from somewhere else.

The motor to wind spectrum:

I think it’s safe to say that almost any ship is going to be some kind of hybrid between motor vessel and sailing vessel. What ratio of wind to other energy (electricity, biodesiel, hydrogen, bunker fuel) is up to you. I will say there’s potential for a timeline here, starting with the majority being modern-day cargo ships with sails bolted on saving around 20% of their fuel, and transitioning towards more numerous, smaller ships using more and more wind, until the bulk of the fleet is primarily-sail ships with auxiliary motors or engines for maneuvering in port and dealing with emergencies. And chances are good that ships from all over that spectrum will be sailing at the same time.

So what does modern-day shipping look like?

We should cover the current landscape a little so you know what the new stuff is competing with or building on.

Most of the sites I’ve read break cargo ships into a few big categories:

Container ships:

These are apparently the most common and probably for good reason. The convenience and efficiency of shipping containers allows for some real benefits. Cargo can be packed into a 20′, 40′ and 45′ long container, transported by truck or train to a port, loaded onto a ship, transported to another continent, lifted onto trains and trucks and not actually unpacked until it reaches its destination. When the alternative is people physically carrying stuff onto the ship and packing it into the hold, and carrying it out and packing it into a truck, you can see where there’d be some advantages. (Palatalized cargo is a sort of great middle ground that allows for better weight distribution in the hold (you want the heaviest stuff near the bottom so the ship is stable) and can be loaded very similarly to how containers are (you move the entire pallet, so it doesn’t get unpacked until it reaches its destination) but that’s not super relevant at the moment.)

The big modern container ships can transport 85 TEUs (twenty equivalent units) to 15,000+ depending on their size. So far the biggest primarily-sail design I can find can haul 100 TEU containers.

Putting sails on these is kind of difficult because they use the deck for cargo space and will have cranes loading and unloading containers whenever they’re in port. Apparently this isn’t as big an issue as I expected, but it’s still something to keep in mind, especially if there’s tons of rigging involved in the design of the sails.

There’s a ton of designs out there for adding big easy-to-use sails and kites to existing container ships in order to boost their efficiency and cut fuel use somewhat. They’re in use now and have some good info if you’re looking for hard numbers. I haven't really covered them in these notes much.

I find container sailships to be the most interesting (something about the mix of old and new, and the fact that containers make the ship's purpose visually clear) so I’ve got a bunch of examples of them below.

Roll-on roll-off ships:

These ships are used to transport wheeled cargo, things like private cars, industrial vehicles, buses, trucks, construction equipment, excavators, etc. They usually have a huge door in the side or stern and the vehicles can directly roll on and off the vessel. They seem to be a popular choice for full-sail cargo ships because they don’t need to worry as much about keeping the decks clear for loading and unloading. How well they’ll fit in a solarpunk world is up to you – some vehicles and wheeled equipment will undoubtedly have to be transported overseas but whether there’ll be enough to justify this class of ship is up to you. Neoline is a good primarily-sail example of this type, Norsepower is a more traditional primarily-fuel version.

Dry Bulk Carriers:

These transport solid non-packaged loose dry cargo in bulk quantities. Think wheat/grain, chemicals for fertilizer, cement, wheat, sugar, coal, iron ore etc. Some of the last sail vessels in operation were bulk carriers, like the Flying P-Liners, some of which were still transporting nitrates in the 1950s. Most of the modern sailships listed below seem to do at least some of this.

Tankers:

These ships transport large amount of liquid cargoes like petroleum products (oil, gas), chemicals, wine, juice, etc. in bulk. They are probably a good fit for a wider range of sail types since they don’t need to worry as much about keeping the decks clear for loading and unloading.

Reefer ships:

(Short for refrigerator) they’re designed to transport frozen/temperature-controlled cargoes, mainly in refrigerated containers. Food and perishable goods (fruits, vegetables, meat, fish…). I don’t have much info on these (except that I think a lot of the container examples should apply). I do suspect these would be one of the most challenging as they’ll need a lot of power onboard.

Considerations for sailing cargo vessels:

This info is mostly pulled from some excellent comments provided by the folks on the Naval Architecture subreddit, especially Open_Ad1920.

This is a simplified summary, there are definitely details I left out that you can find over there.

What kind of sails do you need?

The most obvious (to most of us) difference between motor vessels and sail vessels is the huge masts and sails on top. For cargo vessels, they seem like they should pose huge issues for cranes in the ports (in the case of containerized shipping) but apparently this isn’t as much of an issue with larger and more modern crane designs as I would have expected. The modern cranes lift their booms to allow tall structures past, then lower them to the working position. Apparently they already work right up alongside tall structures on modern cargo ships so masts should be similar.

Where masts pose a problem is with going under bridges. Bridges often block ports and rivers where sail ships would like to enter. Most all of our modern bridge and port infrastructure was built in the days after tall ships had been replaced by steam and motor vessels, but that means there are trillions of dollars worth of port infrastructure that would be blocked to anything with a mast.

This has been a major motivator for folding mast designs. Some sails are better suited to folding masts than others, so consider the routes and ports your ship would likely see, and whether it would need to get past bridges. Consider bridge height, the height of the mast normally associated with your ship height, and whether the mast needs to fold. If it does, consider which sails are well-suited to doing so.

• Several modern/proposed designs like the Windcoop or Neoliner use rigid sails on masts that can apparently fold down.
• Of the more traditional designs, junk rigs / Chinese lug sails / fully battened lug sails seem to be the best candidate for a folding mast and are apparently pretty easy to use. Hasler & McLeod for more info. They may use curved battens that flip to orient the curve towards the tack in order to make close-hauled upwind performance comparable to that of a bermuda rig. If you need to understand those terms in order to write your story at the correct level of detail, you probably either know them already or are about to dive in to the world of nautical terminology, in which case best of luck! Lots more info here.
• Lateen or “crab claw” varieties fold fine. Unfortunately they're not very efficient upwind.
• I’m told a bermuda main sail with in-boom furling is also conceivably compatible with a folding mast but that hasn’t been done yet.

Water draft/how deep is the ship below the waterline?

Water draft is another major consideration for port entry. Ports and rivers are shallower than the open ocean and sailing vessels with reasonably good performance will have a deeper draft than an equivalent motor vessel. This is for two reasons that I think basically sum up to ‘preventing the sails from tipping the ship over’ and ‘preventing the wind from pushing the ship sideways’:

• Ballast weight – the lower they can hang the ballast, the lower the vessel’s center of gravity. This makes it more stable against the tendency of the sails to pull it over onto its side.
• The protruding part under the hull acts as a wing in the water, producing horizontal lift. This counteracts the sideways component of the forces generated by the sails when traveling upwind, or even perpendicular to the wind. Having this makes the ship safer by helping prevent it from getting pushed onto shores, rocks, and reefs by unfavorable winds. This extra lateral area is going to stick out way under the hull for hydrodynamic reasons.

To allow them to enter these ports, modern sail ships might use lifting keels or have a flatter bottom, no keel fin, with daggerboards to provide that control while being able to lift up and cross into shallower water.

How tippy is it?

Motor vessels can make do with a higher center of gravity and much lower angle of vanishing stability (AVS). This is the point at which the vessel will capsize and stay inverted, thus sinking it. That’s because they don’t have sails making it easy for the wind to tip them. Sailing ships tend to lean more while underway, so they can’t pile containers as high.

Containers also don’t allow for the cargo to be packed quite as densely, or apportioned particularly well within the vessel from heavy to light as you go upwards compared to other systems. You just get what you get. Heavier containers can be placed lower, but the overall packaging density is less so the center of gravity still ends up higher than with more piecemeal loading methods. Palletization is a good compromise that can still load a sizable vessel in acceptable time. So while there’s a bunch of interesting container sailboat designs, I think we probably won’t see something equivalent to the absolutely massive cargo ships transporting thousands of containers.

However, this is another place where folding masts can help – being able reef the sails and tip them down during bad weather provides additional stability/safety so the ship can be loaded to a higher center of gravity.

Examples:

This is a list of new, operating, and proposed sailship designs. I’m going to sort them from less-traditional to more-traditional as determined by me (a person who learned most of this terminology a week ago). There are a lot of traditional sailboat designs seeing a resurgence, with various modernizations ranging from basic stuff like metal hulls, on-board motors, and modern navigation and communication equipment, to fancier stuff like automated sails on rotating masts.

The Windcoop container ship - this one has heavily-automated sails with very little rigging, making it easier to load and unload cargo. It can haul 100 TEUs which is the highest number I’ve found so far. It appears to have been designed by the same folks who drew up this one https://www.dykstra-na.nl/designs/wasp-ecoliner/ which would have used dynarig sails. At time of writing, neither has been revealed or launched.

Neoliner - cosmetically similar to Windcoop (I think, anyways), this is a roll-on roll-off cargo ship with heavily automated sails which can fold down to go under bridges. This has also not launched yet.

The Anemos, an 81-meter ‘Phoenix’ class ship (I can’t find an equivalent historical type) with a thousand-ton capacity and some automation on the sails. It’s currently transporting cognac, champagne, coffee, and other high-value cargoes.

The SV Juren AE a 48-meter cargo vessel with an Indosail-Sailing Rig and a 300-ton capacity. It looks much more like modern ships to me, and has an interesting frame rig on the structure near the stern covered in solar panels. A few other ships have used the Indosail rig, including one of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior Ships (I think the one the french didn’t blow up?).

The Harryproa (and any other cargo proa designs). These use hull designs borrowed from the outrigger sailing canoes of the Pacific Islands. Made from fiberglass using simple, modular molds, they’re intended to be easy to build and repair. One hull is intended to transport up to 10 tonnes of cargo in modular containers, while the other holds the crew quarters and ferry seating space for 25 passengers. It has a built-in tender (small boat) for reaching areas the main ship can’t, and for powering the main ship when it needs it. This may also be a good candidate for the river boat section below. https://www.harryproa.com/

The Iliens, a sail catamaran with a 68-passenger capacity traveling along the coast between Quiberon and Belle-Île in France. 
https://en.rochefortenterre-tourisme.bzh/offers/iliens-la-navette-qui-met-les-voiles-quiberon-en-4652240/

Grain de Sail II, a 24-meter, metal-hulled clipper ship with a 350 ton capacity, transporting wines, raw coffee and cocao following the trade winds. It looks somewhat more traditional in the rigging to me. https://graindesail-overseas.com/grain-de-sail-ii

https://gosailcargo.com/ships.html A list of designs for somewhat traditional (I think) sailboats designed to transport shipping containers, starting with a clipper and working down to small boats. I really appreciate the diagrams they provide with each ship description and feature list. I don’t think any of these have been built yet but they’re based on historical designs. I didn't notice any mention of being able to lower the masts, but some other tall ships, like the USCG training vessel Eagle (a three-masted barque), have upper mast sections that can be lowered to squeeze under modern bridges so that might be an option.

The SV Kwai for an example of a motor vessel retrofitted with fairly traditional sails. This allowed it to visit ports that weren’t considered profitable for motor vessels. A reuse-focused solarpunk society might make a lot of similar retrofits.

Sailcargo – a company operating a small fleet of wood-hulled schooners. They have a fair number of photos to use as references, including some clever solar panel placement.

Tres Hombres - about as traditional-looking as it gets – an engineless, wood-hulled brigantine made in the 1940s transporting rum, cocoa, coffee and olive oil.

Vega - (a looks like either a galleass or a cutter?) built in 1892 and formerly used to transport limestone, bricks, pig iron and cement, it is still in use today, transporting free school and health supplies to remote islands in eastern Indonesia and to East Timor. More info here: https://www.hrmm.org/history-blog/sail-freighter-friday-galleass-vega-1892-present

This is far from an exhaustive list, if you know of a cool ship or design I should include by all means let me know and I’ll add it!

River Sailboats – here’s a few examples (real or proposed) which would operate on large rivers like the Hudson, hauling cargoes or passengers. (Here’s a neat worldbuilding idea I found in the IWSA Small Windships Publication – the term ‘Sail Freight’ is apparently more common in the US while Sail Cargo is more common in Europe – both terms seem to have gained popularity independently, but in the US it was mostly in the context of rivers and coasts while in Europe it seems to be more about ocean cargo. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for sail freight to come to mean transporting cargo on rivers (competing with trucks and trains) while sail cargo ends up referring to the ocean.)

Schooner:

https://www.scenichudson.org/viewfinder/carbon-neutral-shipping-on-the-hudson/

Sloop:

https://www.clearwater.org/the-sloop/history-and-specifications/

Gaff yawl:

https://gosailcargo.com/secret-40.html – hauling a single shipping container or a modular ‘bus’ passenger compartment.

For recreation, these could be cool to include: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moth_(dinghy

The Eriemax canal barge https://www.shipshares.com/Eriemax%20Final%20Report.pdf

Known for its somewhat chaotic looking collection of sails, the junk-rigged schooner Summer Wind does tours of Baltimore harbour

Like the ships, these smaller watercraft will likely need some kind of motor for tight maneuvering, emergencies, lack of wind, and to work as their primary power in some canals (similar to the old sail-driven canal barges (sailboats intended to lift dagger boards and drop masts when they get to the canal but able to operate as sailboats outside it). Perhaps these could even operate as trolly boats using overhead wires for power when they get to the canal so they wouldn’t require dense onboard energy storage.

Other Solarpunk Ship Stuff:

Other types of vessel

This post is mostly about cargo but there’s a ton of sail-based passenger stuff out there. I’ve gathered a few examples and will add more as I find new ones:

A company called Star Clipper is operating three tall ship cruise ships, Star Flyer, Star Clipper, and Royal Clipper. These look like older style clipper ships to me so they might actually be using mostly wind. They seem to be very much operating in the cruise ship format, probably with some associated issues, but they demonstrate that passenger liners could still be viable (and can be quite comfortable) if a change in pace of life or available resources reduces the number of airplanes for that kind of travel.

Seacloud, another sail-based cruise ship

A company called WindStar Cruises also operates a series of cruise-ship-sized ‘motor sailing yachts.’ These have sails but I don’t think these actually rely much on wind, at best I suspect they’re closer to the cargo ships with rotary sails bolted on to save some fuel. One of the naval architects on reddit seemed to confirm this.

There are also smaller crafts such as the 38-meter Schooner Mary Day which can carry 28 passengers. This may be duplicate with the schooner example from the Hudson above, but it still represents the potential for sail-based water buses on both rivers and coasts.

River and harbour cleanup boats like Mr. Trash Wheel (even if you hope a more solarpunk society would have less plastic trash, storms and floods can wash all kinds of non-trash stuff into the rivers).

There’s also the scaled-up version of those (though stopping plastic in the rivers appear to still be the critical part)

Magazines and publications with lots of good info:

The IWSA Small Windships Publication has tons of info on the sub-500GT range of smaller vessels including more info on most of the ships from the examples section (so it would have been really convenient if that was the first thing I found!). You can get a downloadable version here. Developments of Note lists a bunch of goo ships starting on page 10 and Sources for Vessel Plans on page 71 are especially useful but it’s all cool stuff.

Journal of Merchant Ship Wind Energy – another industry magazine with all kinds of information you might need.

Wind Propulsion for Ships of the American Merchant Marine (an older resource I haven’t read yet but am including for completeness).

Cool sails!:

https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/the-design-of-soft-wing-sails-for-cruising.49425/

Dynarig sails if you want ultra-modern sailboats and ships (the entire mast rotates)

All the info you could want on the Indosail Rig

https://www.junkrigassociation.org/photo_gallery

Whale Safety

Whales are sometimes hit by ships (they sleep just below the surface and don’t know where human shipping lanes are). Some hulls are more dangerous to them than others. Ships with steep, sharp prows and bulbous bows are especially dangerous for whales. If you search for ship hulls and whale safety, you’ll find an unfortunate number of photographs of dead whales draped over those bulbs.

One suggestion is to follow some cargo ferry designs and design the prow of the ship so it’s more traditional, angled forward so the deck is further forward than where the hull meets the waterline, with no bulb below the surface, and a much more rounded/blunt bowstem. This design will likely lose some performance benefits while underway but if it hits a whale I guess it’s more likely to sort of dunk them rather than to slam into them like an axe.

There are also ongoing attempts to map our whale activity and to ensure that human crews are both aware of their presence and actually making efforts to avoid them, but if you’re looking for visuals this might be worth considering.

Lists of current projects:

This event has a decent list of current modern sail ships, from basically-modern-cargo-ships-with-sails-bolted-on to completely modernized 90-100% wind driven ships, to largely historical designs still in use.

https://www.wind-ship.org/archived-site/membership/ This organization lists its members, many of whom are related in some way to modern sailing vessels. Lots of good examples.

As I said up front, I'm not an expert. If you notice any errors, omissions, or just have a cool link to add, by all means let me know!

Jars are used to contain tons of different things, and require different form factors to do so. That said, I have a hard time seeing any benefit to the incredible range of dimensions on the types of lids products currently use (often different than each other only by millimeters). Standardization could improve reuse tremendously.

So my proposal is this:

• Establish around five diameters for jar openings that best fit the many use cases.
• Standardize the threads.
• Jars can be whatever shape, height, width you want but their openings must conform to those standards.
• Ideally these standard sizes will include the existing canning jar dimensions.

Then, with the production of home canning rims and lids that fit those dimensions, all jars used in commercial products can be canning jars.

I'm not proposing this IRL because I know it would require a lot of changes in industry and assembly lines and I'm not sure how that would balance against the benefits of standardization. But the current system seems unnecessarily wasteful, even if glass is easier to recycle than many materials.

This is a little different from my other photobashes in that this one can’t really pass as a postcard. I ended up having so many things to include in the topic of flood-compatible cities that the only way to fit them all was to keep expanding the canvas. I think I have enough for a second picture (and possibly a third), but we’ll get to what’s missing in a moment.

So awhile back, I stumbled on to this discussion on reddit about what solarpunk might look like in a wetland area (and what it'd mean for cities built in wetlands). I very much believe that solarpunk will look radically different based on location, with infrastructure, routines, fashion, etc, being carefully tailored to fit climate, local weather, and the available materials, so this really caught my attention.

That discussion lead to this one, and this one, then this one as well as this conversation back over there plus several good chats on the Fully Automated and Solarpunk Hub discords.

I received a ton of awesome input which I genuinely couldn’t have made this without. Thank you! Most of the ideas here came from those talks. Even when people disagreed with each others’ suggestions, I tried to include them in the scene if I could make them fit.

The basic idea is for this to be a city that expects to be flooded regularly. One where, if the water rises a few feet seasonally, everything stays basically the same, and if a huge storm rolls in and swamps the whole area, people grumble about it, but can mostly still go about their day (using things like elevated walkways). The lower portions of buildings are used for third place activities that can be packed up and removed when forecasts predict bad weather (like marketplaces) or which use sturdy, permanent structures which can be hosed clean later.

There’s an argument to be made that the best answer to building cities in swamps is the simplest: don’t do it. And if you’ve failed that step, then you shouldn’t rebuild when whatever you build inevitably gets flooded.

I think there’s a lot of reasons to push back on that. Most major cities are already built on waterways or on the coasts due to the value of those locations for shipping and industry. Some are already below seal level, others are likely to be in the future as climate change worsens. These places house millions of people, they represent home, historical legacies, and preserving them helps preserve the cultures and communities of the people who live there. Lots of cities are looking for answers to rising water, and I’d love to see what solarpunk versions look like.

Sponge city tactics came up a lot in our discussions but we struggled to find ones that fit for a city (like New Orleans) which are at least partially located below sea level. If I expand the image to the left, I think I can definitely include a few, but generally, the water needs somewhere to go.

That said, I think this scene fits a tight shot of a much larger take on sponge city tactics of slowing water and absorbing it where possible.

Our current society has spent a lot of resources on straightening rivers for shipping and building dams and levees to shunt extra water downstream, to make it the next town’s problem, rather than suffer floods themselves. Farmers don’t want their fields washed out or polluted with debris so they build more levees and so on and so forth.

I think a solarpunk civilization might accept on some level that rivers are going to meander, they’re going to rise seasonally, and they’re going to flood the flood plains they’ve always washed over, and it might build with those expectations in mind. A solarpunk setting might adjust itself to coexist with the weather and floods rather than use huge infrastructure projects to try to keep them away.

The admittedly thin backstory I’ve got in mind is that this was a city which frequently flooded, and where some of its lowest areas (possibly mostly abandoned already due to uninsured damages and unlivable conditions near the collapse) were ceded to the water but not surrendered altogether. People built some structures higher than the water is likely to reach, and everywhere else, they float on it in boats, float houses, or even large rafts which contain small neighborhoods. They farm locally using floating gardens, hydroponics, Chinampas, and more. This isn’t a pristine wetland that’s been colonized, but a flooded neighborhood which has been partially rewilded.

I pulled in a few different living-with-water concepts in for this one:

• The lifted buildings are an upscaled version of the lifted houses you can find all along the US Gulf Coast, intended to survive storm surges and floods during hurricanes.
• I based the covered upper walkway on the iron lace balconies found on some buildings in the New Orleans French Quarter. It’s not quite the ‘correct’ use of the design, since they don’t traditionally span from building to building, but I thought it’d be a nice reference. The goal here is that if the area really floods, and the ground level is unsafe to traverse, people still have a way to get around. For safety purposes, I figure each building needs a ladder on each road to access the upper level in an emergency. For accessibility, I included frequent, standardized elevators and 15 degree ramps.
• I used this amphibious bus design because it looked more municipal than the DUKW style duckboats many cities have for recreational purposes. Credit to Cromlyngames for suggesting this idea (and then making this 3d model about it). I suspect the amphibious design would be harder to maintain than a normal bus because of the sealed hull, but perhaps some of the efficiencies and practice that come with a larger, standardized fleet would help.
• Dutch-style floating houses (these exist all over the world but I referenced dutch ones while making this scene). These are just meant to be towed into place and parked. Unlike the houseboats which are more boat than house and can travel as they want.
• A Bangkok-style water bus – the idea is that the flooded zone is likely somewhat shallow, with deeper waterways intended for transit between neighborhoods of floating houses, large rafts supporting small neighborhoods, and through rivers and canals in the dryer parts of the city. If I do another scene, I’ll try to include a transfer station where passengers can switch between boat and an elevated train.
• Waterways with restored eelgrass for manatees. I wanted to show some of the work that’s been done restoring rivers in the US south.
• Chinampa agricultural system (farming on artificial islands) this is a pretty ancient farming practice from Mexico and Central America, which is still in use in some areas, and I’m still learning about it. I’ve done my best to get the scale and composition of the design correct. Some of the trees might be a bit overlarge, but they wouldn’t be planted very densely.

Other notes/elements included:

• There’s a Savonius wind turbine attached to one of the dolphins (poles) for the dock. I imagine this probably isn’t supposed to be there, since it could get in the way during a high flood, but perhaps there’s not much enforcement or its the subject of a disagreement.
• Awnings and porches to shade windows and balconies and buildings. The simple solutions work.
• The hospital in the background would need to be able to operate during a flood, and to have water access (possibly via canals) so that people with only boats can access it quickly, in addition to road access.
• The climbing wall probably isn’t ideal, as you’d want open spaces between the pillars if the flood will have a current. This was kind of an art decision - I needed a type of tall, narrow third place to include that would demonstrate its use even with the bus in the way and that seemed like the best option I could think of. Climbing walls are often made with wood frames and plywood – this one would have to be able to survive submersion, so perhaps it’s made from thick sections of recycled plastic or something similar. My other plan was just some trees, to show that it was a park, but that wasn’t as clear.

Speaking of third places, here’s some other ideas we had for third places you could have under these buildings. Presented in no particular order:

• Tide pools and natural landscape features
• Parks
• Dog Parks
• Meeting rooms
• Lecture spots (could double as a bring-your-own-movie movie theater)
• Squash courts
• Playground (depending on the design)
• Planetarium?
• Speaker’s corners
• Booths for food trucks or downstairs seating for a lifted cafeteria
• Parkour course
• Roller rink
• Laser tag/paintball arena
• Fresh water reserve tanks (firefighting, heat sinks, municipal cleaning as well as last reserve drinking water post major floods
• Possibly storage for flood-tolerant stuff like scaffolding

Things I’d like to include next time:

• Floating neighborhoods in the style of the floating islands of the Uros on Lake Titicaca (this would take a fair bit of space and a lot more reading)
• A transfer station where passengers can switch between boat and an elevated train
• Amphibious emergency vehicles

This image, like all the Postcards from a Solarpunk Future, is CC-BY, use it how you like.