I’m having trouble with the scale - could you do a scaffold with two ladders and some planks, maybe across a corner?

This is awesome news! Thanks for letting me know! I’ve been waiting to see these sails get real world use

This is an awesome outlook, thank you for all your work on this design!

There are some interesting oven designs that use rooftop solar collectors (mirrored troughs with a tube of transfer fluid running through them) connected to normal-ish form factors ovens downstairs. It’s basically the same setup for solar steam generators (if you run a business that uses a lot of steam). The only problem is it’s a direct use of the heat without much storage (from what I remember) so you can’t really start baking before sunup.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/23/aggressive-tiger-mosquitoes-are-spreading-through-europe-how-can-we-protect-ourselves

There are also some cool designs for direct solar that point a reflector dish into a hole in a wall (the inside of the hole is the inside of an oven in the kitchen). Tamara solar kitchen has one but there are lots of similar versions.

This sounds really cool! I like that this and NomadNet seem to bundle hosting in with browsing/viewing. It feels like lowering the barrier for entry on self hosting nicely.

Looking over my bookshelves and trying to remember what I’ve read so this’ll be kinda eclectic.

Harry Harrison’s the Jupiter Plague probably hits some of what you’re looking for. It’s not my favorite of everything he wrote, but he wrote so much that that’d be a pretty stiff competition anyway.

There’s a book called Space Doctor which I obviously bought for the title (by Lee Correy). It’s about setting up the first medical center in space, on a new orbital construction platform, and all the challenges they run into with zero gravity trauma surgery, contamination, radiation, vacuum injury, etc. The high frontier medicine and logistical stuff was very interesting, probably because the author was a medical doctor. Unfortunately that stuff shares the book with a love story which is bad even for older scifi (I was gonna say 60s scifi but it turns out it was published in the 80s).

Actually it looks like that’s all I’ve got. I’ll edit if I find any others!

Have you looked at Reticulum at all? I know it’s not a drop-in replacement but it can also do messaging over LoRa and it sounds like it’s a bit more resilient than Meshtastic’s flood protocol. Also more complicated though.

I’m only just getting into this stuff, so I’m basically wondering how they compare for someone with more experience using LoRa devices. Does it seem workable?

I’ve read the least about Meshcore so far - it looked like a corporate alternative to Meshtastic but I might not have given it enough consideration.

That makes sense, similar use case and a more active community - I’ll see what I can find

This is an awesome explanation and I think it feels like a good way forward! I’ll read up on bus power draw to make sure but I think we’re approaching reasonable - especially if the towns are already setting up battery banks to manage their own power demand.

Thank you again for all your help, I really appreciate it.

Does the math change at all if they’re only trying to power a single electric bus converted to rail use? I’d planned on some kind of single vehicle, but I’m not sure what factors lead to such a significant draw.

Thanks!

This is really good to know and quite disappointing. I try to keep things grounded and at least close to reality but had no idea of the limitations here. I’ll have to think on this and I might come back with questions if that’s okay.

I suspect the utopian emphasis on green power, hydro, solar, and wind, will further weaken this possibility? I haven’t thought much about what the grid looks like around these fringe communities (further out where the story takes place it’s basically gone and homesteads and villages have to be self sufficient) but these folks could be tied to the grid or striving for self suffiency but that would probably make it even harder to provide this kind of power reliably, even if someone was making tons of the necessary hardware because a train boom is happening.

That is interesting! If it’s alright with you I’m going to save this for future worldbuilding.

This is really good information, thank you for explaining where the complexity really starts! I especially appreciate the heirachy of practicality. This is exactly what I was asking. So far it seems like there is a much wider range of options than I expected so I’ll think on what best fits the setting.

Thanks again!

I’ll take a look at those! I was imagining overhead wires but perhaps only in/near towns as resources are constrained (with the self propelled railcar using batteries when disconnected) but they’re building towards a full line eventually. Not sure how realistic that is

Are you thinking battery, third rail, or cantenary? The latter two are much more infrastructure heavy so you might not see them at the outer edges of a network.

I was picturing a kind of jury-rigged ‘both’ where each town or village has set up cantenaries extending our as far as they can manage, and it uses its batteries between villages. I imagine it’d stop for a moment and raise or lower the pantographs, sort of similar to the silver line in Boston. I don’t know if that’s realistic but it felt like splitting the difference in an interesting way.

Okay, that makes more sense, thanks

If they’re not generating enough to backfeed even at peak, and they can detect when the power cuts off and deactivate until it comes back, is there an actual safety/legal issue?

The poor C-suite at that utility company already needs to find ever-increasing profits on a basically stable business model and now consumers can just precipitate electricity out thin air? That’s moving things in the wrong direction! Thank goodness they basically own our local government and shareholder value can be maintained.

There are some interesting proposals for electric ships using containerized batteries which can be loaded/unloaded with the same cranes they use for shipping containers and charged in port. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/24/beyond-the-harbor-electrifying-short-sea-routes-and-hybridizing-blue-water-shipping/

It may not be suitable for transoceanic trips but a lot of shipping follows the coasts or even travels by river where this may be more practical.

The lack of official touchscreens/GPS/center console media etc seems like a good step - at the very least, unnecessary antennas and microphones should be easier to spot/replace with an old MP3 player with one annoying song.