Functioning Steampunk

The G+ +steampunk_tendencies group is mostly pictures of attractive women in a bodice, a top hat with goggles and gears glued on.


They are often wrapped in buckles and frequently holding some kind of oversized plastic gun with a brass/bronze paintjob. Many of the guns are made out of nerf guns for that classic multibarrel effect. The girls are often wearing skirts too short, so they'e showing a lot of leg.

When the railroad was finished the West rapidly shifted from ragged survivalists to newly arrived Victorians who quickly forced the Eastern standards of dress, buildings, and manners on those who'd actually been here for a while and built the houses and railroad. As you'd expect, the Victorians went over like a lead brick. However, frequent fires and required towns to be rebuilt every few years until they ended up with stone to stop them spreading, and many of the frontier towns were stone walls shared with the place next door so you got rows of shops down the main street as you see in Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Truckee. Sacramento also ended up this way, though it flooded every spring until they filled in the street to cover the first floor and everybody shifted their business to the second. This happened in Oakland too, for the same reason. If Venice had been more sensible and less prosaic they'd have done the same, filling in the canals and raising the streets. New Orleans ought to do this if they want to stay occupied, but its a lazy city, constantly drunk, so that's probably too much like work.

Marlin 1895 Guide Gun Lever Action 45-70 rifle

The upside to all this is there's still lots of Victorian era buildings around in the West, and life is easier. You don't have to pretend with your Victorian stuff. If you want a functioning Victorian era firearm, you can have one with modern materials and actually use it at a gun range. The Winchester 1864 Lever Action Rifle was designed by John Browning (I think) and you can buy one in .357 Magnum, to take advantage of the caliber properly with the barrel longer than any pistol and still be acceptable recoil for some skinny model with a top hat. Or you can do better with a Browning Lever Action in 7mm08, a fixed 4x scope painted in bronze finish. The pinion gear when you work the action is a thing of beauty. It would be ruined by a single piece of large sand, but its truly beautiful. And the rifle is very pointable and will kill deer and elk out to 300 yards.

There's also the falling block Ruger Number One model rifle, in a caliber like .270 Winchester or possibly something lighter like .243 Winchester. In stainless steel with light colored wood stock and silver finished scope its a ladies' weapon if ever one could be.

Ruger No. 1, Falling Block Single Shot Rifles

Another tool of that era was the bicycle. I'm sure you can't ride a bicycle in skirts, but women were trying to get out of the kitchen, to get the vote and have more choices in life. Yes, the first thing they used the vote for was to ban alcohol and create the mafia, so that utterly failed, but they had strong feelings about hooch. They should have thought things through. One of the great charms of bicycles is you can make them look all sorts of ways, though Penny Farthings were a great way to get badly injured and the modern bicycle was originally called a Safety Bicycle because they didn't face-plant very easily.

It was bicyclists that organized and passed laws to pave the streets so they could actually ride at any speed. Cars took advantage of their work, not the other way around. By the post-war period after WW2, leftover parts from the aircraft industry and collected from the invasion, literally a million cushman scooters air dropped for the GIs to advance across Italy left behind, powered the invention of the Vespa Scooter. With modern carbon fiber painted to look like OD green, brass, and bronze could give a proper Victorian lady her ride. Some attempts are being made with this by motorcycle designers, working from existing designs or new ones to try and capture the young woman's market. I wish them luck.

Smartphones are too useful to discard, but they can accept sleeves to dress them up, and software can be tweaked to adjust the colors and looks. These things are possible.

Boating can be made very steampunk, particularly if you stick to oars or small sailboats. Dingy sailing are the boats under about 16 feet long, big enough to carry two people on a date but small enough to fit on a light trailer for a trip to the lake. Perhaps skirts are not the best idea in a boat likely to tip over, but they're less work than rowing, though also less certain. A sailboat can be dressed up from the typical plastic when painted to look like plank strips, or it can be made from plywood and stained, then sealed with epoxy and fiberglass for full strength. A modern thin plywood boat can be built lighter than a modern plastic fiberglass and foam boat, and you can use the mast rig from a different boat if you build it right. Or build your own mast of wood if you want to.

Unfortunately I haven't had much luck finding any books on the MATH of sailboats to be able to design one that doesn't wallow or flip over. Most of the designers don't like people to know their tricks. The Peterson Project Weekender is an interesting little boat, built without a keel or ballast, yet able to carry two in its cabin and still fit on a trailer under 500 pounds. It takes advantage of curved plywood for its strength and still looks antique. Put some brass lamps with LEDs on the outside and paint the interior with cream and browns and give it some magenta or olive cushions, it would be great on the Great Lakes or sailing up the Columbia River.

As for homes, at the time of Victoria we were building these ornate, tall, wooden townhouses mocking castles but all too flammable and difficult to clean. By 1900, we were already shifting to Craftsman design, which was lighter, smaller, and used some new non-victorian materials like stained glass and glass brick. A craftsman house was meant to be built by a young single man with a day job, in his evenings and weekends, during the course of a single summer, with hand tools, by himself. When the house was done, he could get married. A nice idea and it worked at the time. Now we have too much complexity and expertise and need official county inspectors because of lawsuits over building standards getting responsibility shoved onto the county so they have a vested interest that no hovels are built or sold.

Naturally, the transition from steampunk into art deco is rough. Steampunk wasn't aware of streamlining yet, and when that was discovered as the race to develop metal flying aircraft from wood and fabric designs, discarding the airship (blimps and zepplins are popular in steampunk) for the more flash Gordon design that grew into the 1930's Art Deco movement. Eventually WW2 minimalism spelled the end of Baroque style and began simple utilitarianism which continues today. Rejection of utilitarianism and shapeless grunge style returned under the name Steampunk. 

Obviously, we like the aesthetic of craftsmanship rather than the utility of mass produced identity suppressing sameness of modern civilization, which has managed to make the population resent all its advantages and simultaneously disemploying them so they can't afford them in the first place. Ornate and baroque craftsmanship, clothes that fit, tools with art rather than merely utility. These are things people want today. Girl Genius has done a great job providing more views of the ideal, the post-waif woman who is allowed to own a gun to defend herself from ruffians, beasts, and finds machinery and fine china to be necessities of progress. Communism has failed. Post-communist neo-Victorianism has more of a future, even if the commies suffer conniption fits when considering Victoria and Rand.