Hi, it's been awhile since I photobashed art for the solarpunk postcard series (I've been busy on a couple other, larger-scope solarpunk projects I hope to share soon) but I have some time while we work through final edits and I wanted to get back into it.

I've done a couple other nautical solarpunk pictures but they were both about modernized tall ships on the open ocean and I wanted to do one focused on the kind of activity you might see in a harbor, big river, or along a coastline.

The biggest/closest vessel here is an electric cargo barge originally from the Netherlands. These close-to-the-shore cargo vessels are a good fit for electrification as they run shorter distances and can swap their shipping-container-sized batteries whenever they transfer cargo using the same cranes. This article goes into more detail though it's a little out of date as much of what it describes is now happening IRL.

The house shifting barge was lifted from a photograph of a real project carried out by a company in Vancouver, Canada though this appears to be common on coastlines. I'm a huge believer in salvage and reuse and have featured deconstruction in a previous postcard, but I haven't showcased the work of picking up and moving entire houses yet. House shifting is also done overland, using large flatbed trucks, but the width of the roadways imposes more limitations on how big a piece of a building you can move so some additional disassembly and reassembly may be required. I think a solarpunk society would strive to limit outright demolition to very specific circumstances where the structure and materials are truly unrecoverable, and to relocate buildings wherever possible so this kind of move might be a common sight.

I replaced the original lead tugboat with an electric one.

Closer to the opposite shore on the left, we have a cargo sailboat, or more officially, a steel-hulled, container-capable gaff ketch. I don't know how practical it is but I really liked this design as soon as I saw it - the mixture of a fairly traditional design with capacity for a modern shipping container (or 1 TEU sized 'bus' module to serve as a passenger ferry) just calls to me because I like a good anacronism. One of the big advantages of ships and containers is scale but single containers will still have to be moved from whatever big port they're unloaded at to their final destination, so I suppose this would be similar to a riverborn 18-wheeler truck. It's primarily wind driven but also has some configuration of electric motors. If these are viable we might see a good many of them in the bays, coasts, and big rivers of a solarpunk society, if only because they can reduce externalities like pollution or unnecessary draw on the grid.

In the middle there's a docked sailboat. Not much to say about that.

And on the right is a river cleanup craft. Hopefully a solarpunk society will produce far less trash overall, especially far less disposable plastic waste, and would recycle or dispose of it better. But there's always something that gets away and water has a way of catching anything blown around by the wind. Waterborne trash might also include debris swept downstream in previous floods.

It's more effective to catch this waste while it's concentrated in waterways near human settlements than it is to try to find and collect it on the open ocean, so I wanted to show one of these boats at work. There are many designs, but I picked Mr Trash Wheel from Baltimore, MD because the design is whimsical and probably easiest to recognize.

As for the shoreline, I was inspired by a photograph of Troy, New York, where a neighborhood of brick buildings look out at the Hudson river over a set of parking lots. I wanted to do a quick background with a dense community with a lot of four to five story brick buildings (as they're pretty sustainable/practical long term) with hints of forested streets and a big park/riparian forest buffer along the waterfront.

I've done one postcard about flood compatible cities and generally favor sponge city designs where applicable, but I'm not sure what the best answer is for old downtowns built right up against rivers, with reinforced shorelines already in place. Replacing waterfront parking lots with parks full of swales and other flood mitigation designs is probably a good start and those changes could also improve water quality in the river by trapping waste and filtering surface runoff, especially if any fertilizer/compost use is carefully minimized or eliminated. Perhaps the community has also bought up waterfront land nearby, removed levees and restored flood planes to give the river room to spread and slow. Levee removal can both mitigate flooding and restore important wetland habitats.

The amphitheatre-shaped recess in the embankment is intended to provide safe public access to the river. This is also kind of aspirational for me - canals, harbors, and rivers IRL often catch drainage from city streets contaminated with animal waste and vehicle fluids, overflows from sewers, outflows (legal or illegal) from various manufacturers and industry and even just fertilizers and pesticides from lawns. I've seen people swimming in all sorts of waterways I'd personally stay out of IRL, but I'd love to live in a society which was so conciencious about its impacts that the water downstream even from major cities remained safe and clean.

Spilled! is a cute little game in which you clean up waters and their surroundings with your little boat. I find it very relaxing and I hope you do, too! :)

It's available on Steam, iOS and Android.

I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to my full ideas with each concepts !
This one i'll try and gouache it when coming back from my vacations !

Source (warning, reddit) with comments from the creator of how they made and dyed it.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37159586

Hey everyone ! as some of you may know, i'm currently making some concept arts of a solarpunk city for an animation project, and there is one thing that i find particularly complicated, it's the urban design and street design ! It's one big puzzle and the things i find on the internet are not quite what i want and i might miss some keywords. (also a LOT of AI images so it doesn't help)
Does anyone have good resources on urban design planning, like cadastral maps in sustainable city studies ? I know there is a lot of take on that from wonderful artists, but I'm searching for a more "technical" point of view.
I've also heard that redesigning urban spaces is an effective way to help ensure women's safety. If anyone knows of maps designs made on the subject It would be greatly appreciated, I found serveral interesting articles on the subject but it is often staying kind of general in terms of solutions.
Cheers everyone !

I'm working on a personnal project called "Octa Solis" (just little stories taking place in a solarpunk city)! It turned out pretty good i think but in my next concepts i'd like them to be a lot more solarpunk in the designs
Ultimately I'll try and animate it! 😁

This is a critique of how Outsiders approach portraying Appalachia, however, it is also a valid look at how Outsiders look at and think of Appalachia as a whole. I had to move from a home I loved living in because the air polution from a Danish mining operation made it impossible for me to breathe. However, I do not think of that place as a place ruined, I think of it as a place whose story needs told. There are still people there demanding they be treated fair, and who envision for the great great grand children they'll never meet a river they can fish in.

(sorry i couldn't find a better place to post this to, thrs seemed the most appropriate)

OK a few things: firstly, is this where users submit their own artwork? I searched, and it looks like it -- but I am unsure. Pardon me if I posted in the wrong place. Plz redirect me as practical.

Secondly, I have been working on a new style. Specifically, I am painting on my own drawings with watercolors. My next step is to make my own watercolor inks. I have been watching hella youtubes on how. I had no idea it was so accessible. I'm hoping a similar process makes paint.

I had a thirdly, too, but it escapes me now. I blame this tiny keyboard.

"In a world where remnants of the past remind us of the mistakes of the 21st century, the memory of ancient animals fades. Our best engineers have combined documentation from history with technological innovation to offer you the chance to immerse yourself in a reimagined era, where the hopes of the 23rd century are reflected in every movement of our creatures!"
I've wanted to finish this since forever but oh well.. one day !

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33792914

The other Fully Automated devs are working on a new set of chase mechanics. We've been jokingly calling the create-an-obstacle-behind-yourself move "Summon Fruit Stand" and every time we say it I picture a walking robot fruit stand plodding slowly into the way, blocking the route. I don't need much excuse to make solarpunk art so I photobashed this scene.

Most of my solarpunk photobashes are researched in advance, this one was kinda off-the-cuff. I knew if I included a background I wanted a narrow side street climbing a hill, and was able to find that. I added some water permeable street surfaces and shutters for passive temperature regulation in buildings while I was cladding it with textures.

The robot design is inherently silly so I tried not to overthink things this time.

Speaking of the robot - I wanted something that said "my cabbages!" but couldn't quite justify giving it a thatched roof so we get a questionably-better tiled roof robot instead.

I wanted its human companions to look like they were guiding it to a new location, aimed for a kinda casual, happy posture, like they have no idea they're in the way.

saw this out working out

This is another bit of art from an ongoing solarpunk fiction project: a flying crane cargo airship docked at a mooring mast made from a recycled wind turbine tower.

I was looking for a modernized mooring mast design for a sort of prefab kit that might be used by frontier communities and one of the FullyAutomated devs suggested these reused segments because the turbines already get replaced regularly, and the structures meet many of the same goals with sideload and weather and even support elevators.

Realistically a lot of locations might use platforms on the ground which rotate so the airship can land and still weathervane in the wind instead of mooring masts. I've seen these called Boyant Aircraft Rotating Terminals or Depots. But some communities may not want to clear that much space, or might be supported by airships that don't land. Others may use mooring masts as a place for an airship to temporarily wait for access to a facility.

I've posted about airships a few times before. I think they have some good potential for certain kinds of cargo and especially for locations which are hard to reach overland, though I think that description might fit more locations if the solarpunk future deprioritizes cars and roads, and especially if a period of societal crumbles leaves behind extensive infrastructure debt.

Extrapolating modern designs with all the accompanying safety improvements is kinda hard when all you've got to start with is some lattice towers from the 1920s.

I'm not any kind of engineer, so it's mostly guesswork on my part. I wish the airship industry had had more time to iterate on this stuff. I know the designs and materials and control mechanisms of the airships have improved massively in the last century, but I'm not sure how the masts, especially simple, seldom-used ones like this might be redesigned. (With big airports I picture something like the Skylon Tower or Space Needle which rotate with the airship in the wind.)

If you're an engineer with the right skillset I'd love to hear your thoughts!

It's been awhile since I shared a Postcard from a Solarpunk Future. I've been working on a fiction project which kind of got away from me in scope and scale - you can read a bit more about it here if you're interested. That said, it's nearly complete so I thought I'd share a mostly-standalone photobash from the interior art.

This one is from the beginning of the story, it shows an electric railbus traveling along an old rail causeway in a rural area. It's modeled on an Ecuadorian autoferro and it has a pantograph it's not currently using - I'll get to why in a bit.

The area I grew up in is crisscrossed with inactive train lines. These former short lines transported passengers and cargo and interlinked small, dense towns and villages for almost a hundred years.

The tracks, bridges, causeways, crossings, and right-of-ways are mostly intact but none of them have seen use since around 1970. Many are being converted to bike paths, though the local railcar clubs are keeping some of the tracks intact.

Getting into solarpunk has revived some of my childhood fascination with trains, and I routinely imagine a world where my hometowns' short lines are back in service and I can ride trains all the way from the major city where I live to the small towns where I grew up.

For now I accept that it's unrealistic, not for just logistical reasons but cultural ones. The car is so entrenched that most people in the region genuinely can't live without it. Their homes (most built since the 1940s) are spread out in a way that public transportation can't reasonably serve, and located at least a half hour's drive from most of the things they need. And too many people up there seem to believe that all public services (except repaving the roads almost annually) must somehow turn a profit. Abutters to the tracks would squack about noise and the whole thing would spend decades hung up in planning board meetings.

But in this fictional setting car infrastructure already collapsed decades ago, when war and societal crumbles broke the long, fragile supply chains that produced fuel, new vehicles, and replacement parts. Rural exurbs (bedroom communities where people live but don't work) are really only practical when perched at the very end of long, quick, plentiful supply chains. They're a modern invention. Historically, people here lived in a very different layout - the towns and villages were much denser, the land in between was clearcut for farming or left as wild habitat (though there was a lot less of this than I would have liked). People lived near their work.

I think that's both a more practical arrangement and a likely way things would reshape once the supply chains start to break down. I've written about this elsewhere a few times.

The important thing is that they're at a point where it makes sense to return these old tracks to service. As for what they'd use, I'd planned on a self-propelled railcar, but after talking to railfans on reddit.com/r/trains and lemmy.ml/c/trains I decided on a railbus. Specifically, an old electric bus converted to rail service.

Historically self-propelled railcars and railbuses were the last gasp of struggling railroads in low-traffic areas. They cost less to operate because they were smaller than a full locomotive, and were often easier to maintain. Because traffic was low they were still able to meet demand, and many railroads eked out decades running these machines on some lines.

I figure that the same features that make them appealing in those circumstances probably work in reverse. A collection of denser, rebuilding towns looking at a crumbling road network and the comparatively cheap cost of fixing the train tracks enough for light service might decide to start small, using a common old vehicle they could more easily salvage replacement parts for.

As for the pantograph rig, since this is a pretty ad-hoc rebuilding effort, I imagine overhead wires are another thing that are still in-progress, and each town or village has set up overhead cantenaries extending out as far as they can manage. In the long spans in between, the bus uses its batteries, and likely still has to stop and recharge at the end of its route. litchralee@sh.itjust.works was a huge help in figuring out if this could work and under what circumstances.

As with most of the postcards, I really like to focus on these in-progress glimpses of a recovering future. Looking for better, rather than perfect. This image, like all the postcards, is CC-BY, use it how you like.