Sounds like a great location! I’m in a very different climate zone so most of my advice would have been around keeping the temperature warm enough through winter, while it sounds like you won’t have to deal with a lot of that.

I’ve seen some cool designs that made glass houses out of secondhand windows or slider doors - if that appeals I can share some links but it’s a certain kind of look, and Povoq’s suggestion of clear corrugated sheets is probably easier and more uniform. Rain collection from the house roof and greenhouse roof would be very useful.

I’ll see if I have any good links for you

Very cool project! I have a couple questions:

Do you get snow in your area? If it sheds from the house roof that could be an issue.

What is the siding on the house? Greenhouses can get pretty humid/damp so you’ll probably want to ensure it doesn’t/can’t rot the house. It can still be done but it’s good to plan for. If your house is concrete that would be much less of an issue.

Also what’s the directional orientation of the 12x24’ space? You’ll probably want to optimize your layout for sun exposure, so it’ll help to know what parts will be shaded when (such as by the garage) and where the sunlight will track.

I’ve watched this specific one! The rifftrax actually made for a pretty great time - from what I remember the movie had some cool ideas (and the jokes kind of filled in for the rest).

I mean, you can’t have everything

GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I’d suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you’re comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.

For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn’t find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.

Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it’d probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don’t think any feel reliable enough to me yet.

That’s a good idea! I do that with peanut butter at a fancy grocery store - I wonder if there’s one around that does juice

I hadn’t realized how lucky we were - we have one of those crunchy refill stores in town, where you can bring your own containers and buy various powders and liquids (primarily cleaning supplies though they do some seasonings as well. I wish I could buy orange juice that way (I basically gave up on drinking it because I didn’t need any more plastic bottles). We switched to various dilutions of castile soap for most things, and a generic dishwasher powder for our little countertop rig.

I figured it was in response to people using the ships as a gotcha. Pointing out that solar panels are manufactured using power that, itself, isn’t green yet, and are shipped using non-green methods. If done in good faith, I’d suspect the were unfamiliar with using one existing process to bootstrap a new one, but it’s usually just another way of saying we should maintain the status quo (however bad) until its replacement is absolutely perfect.

A few folks I know switched smoothly from “climate change is fake” to “maybe it’s real but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Might as well live it up.” Basically anything to avoid change at any level.

I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here, not people pointing out the issues.

Good points! I suspect the ‘even thickness’ thing came from broken up concrete pads/sidewalks/patios, where the result would be irregulary shaped on X and Y but somewhat consistent for Z depending on how well they prepped the site for the slab. In that case it might end up pretty similar to landscaping rock. In some of the photos you can see they have a much flatter top and much more irregular edges and undersides.

100% agreed on demolition practices. There’s a lot of potential in deconstruction for reclaiming building materials rather than consigning them to the waste stream. The tradeoff is in time, person hours (my grandfather once claimed a truckload of bricks from a demolished mill to build the family fireplace - my mother and her siblings weren’t allowed to come inside that summer unless they chipped cement off some bricks and brought them with them). And in materials/energy - blades for a concrete saw and power to run it, perhaps. I’m sure there are other ways to get more-or-less regular building blocks but they’ll have some cost to balance against the good of saving the materials and reducing the need for new manufacturing. Either way, there’s some cool potential. Treating rubble or urbanite like quarried stone I think fits the solarpunk ethos.

Thank you for the details on bonding concrete! I’ve used cement to patch some holes in custom-shaped, 45° concrete blocks I made once (didn’t shake all the air pockets out of the first couple) so I knew you couldn’t just stick concrete to concrete, but not how to actually go about it when you had to. I’ll refer back here if I need to fix it someday, or if it comes up in any of my stories.

Thanks!

I dunno, I could kinda see it - they don’t understand a ton of their own tech, and have folded religious belief into even basic maintenance routines until they can’t tell whether lighting incense or chanting as they work changes the outcome. I don’t know about the admech, but the imperial guard types seem to believe every device from a heavy bolter to an ancient and venerable space marine tank are all equally likely to have machine spirits animating them - presumably they got that thinking from their tech experts. There’s also the sort of outlined belief that tech is sort of… naturally occurring? and that it’s heretical to invent new stuff when the correct process is to discover it somewhere.

Add to that the fact that the quality of their tech has declined pretty drastically from their past (aren’t most STCs, which they basically worship as the best of their modern tech, like the crude, sturdy equipment you’d give a colony that was just starting out?) and the fact that some of it is sometimes possessed by literal daemons or other ancient abominations… it sort of seems like they’re in over their heads compared to the others.

Electric Arc Furnaces are probably our best bet for that - they’re an established, proven technology and can be swapped over to a green power source without any other changes (assuming the society has the energy capacity). I think I remember reading that a factory somewhere in Europe had already done that but a quick search has failed me.

Thanks!

I do have thoughts on that! This might be a little jumbled as it’s mostly off the cuff, but I think how much a society can be run only on renewable materials will depend on how much they’re willing to change their whole default framework, and what they’re prepared to give up in the short and long term to do it. Degrowth and library economy concepts would certainly apply. (I really like library economy stuff because I really like reuse).

I think there’s an abundance of resources, from existing usable items to raw materials which have already been extracted already accessable to us out in the world.

Right now there’s this default pipeline from extracted raw material to new (ideally fragile/flimsy/disposable) products to landfill. A library economy on steroids might include both tons of long-term reuse of whatever’s already been made, but also recycling of available materials that have already been extracted. There’ll always have to be new manufacture but ideally it’d be much reduced and anything made new would be designed to last and to be fixable. But that takes a ton of commitment on a societal level to using less and to sorting and distributing everything that already exists. It means mining junkyards and landfills for already-extracted raw materials and generally changing how we do things.

When it comes to energy, I think there’s a sort of hurdle we have to get over - first we need to get most of our energy to renewable, then we can optimize for long term repairability. There’s a lot of interesting recycling processes ramping up for solar panels, and as I understand it, there are less-efficient designs that are more fixable. So for the short term, I suspect whatever designs get the job done we use, and after that, we can start adjusting for long term.

My art tends to be of a society that’s as obsessed with reuse and externalities as ours is with money. They’re a society of scavengers and fixers and makers. That handwaved cultural change is sort of what I’ve chosen for my spec fix suspension of disbelief. Most of the tech I include already exists, but examining what a society that makes all its decisions around reducing harm would do with them is what I really enjoy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6j8jMn2Kcgs

They’ve been doing a bunch of cool solarpunk art for a bit, and they’ve started releasing it CC-BY (I think) including on wikimedia commons, which is great because otherwise the solarpunk category over there was mostly a bunch of AI art and proposed flags. (I’d added some of my photobashes so it wasn’t just AI representing the genre, but I’m very glad to have them contributing art with a lot of intent behind it.) I think a lot of the planning for their scenes comes from the solarpunk prompts podcast these days.

I really enjoy reading about the investigations that follow any big crypto heist, where they track the stolen money through various exchanges etc. The Swindled podcast just did one about a pretty poor attempt to launder crypto (see Razzlekhan) and Darknet diaries did one on the much more competent (suspected North Korean) heist of eth from Axie Infinity and their various laundering efforts including through Tornado cash. It’s surprisingly transparent in a lot of ways. It seems like stealing the money is often the comparatively easy part, and getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder.

There’s conversion to EV, conversion to run on woodgas or possibly conversion to an alcohol engine - I think it depends on what’s readily available locally in parts and energy sources. If you have a sawmill or work construction or deconstruction and can be burning wood scraps for fuel that already exist, gasification might make sense. If you live in a place with lots of sugarcane or another source of alcohol, that might work. Ideally your energy source is a waste product of something that’s already there, and your use doesn’t incentivize more deforestation etc (that’s the hard part).

I also started a list of car parts that can be used/repurposed for other tasks, mostly based on stuff I’d seen on permaculture and tool forums: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/using-every-part-of-the-car-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/ it’s intended more for writers/artists, but some of the links might be interesting.

Just to add, the way I pictured this working was to set up a basic smithee, probably a three sided shed so I’d have a dark place to work (helps to gauge the temp of the metal by color). I’d get some of those gas welder’s goggles with the flip up flip down lens (or use my electronic welder’s hood) so I could safely look at the work in the firepot (solarpot?) then take it inside to quickly work on it. I’d stow the forge inside the smithee (or in an attached lean-to) when not using it. One feature that might be good would be a way to cover the lens and unclip it from the forge so it can be stored in a box or wrapped up, to reduce the risks of it starting a fire.

Sure! Generally they’re just an old coffee can with a thick layer of plaster of Paris and sand or firebox cement on the inside. They cement in some torch parts so they can attach a can from a burnzomatic torch and blow fire into the small, contained space from the side while having a hole on the front (usually with some loose firebrick for a door) to insert the work.

https://makezine.com/article/workshop/making-your-own-tin-can-forge/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xv9nnEhgfuY

I don’t know that the design itself is actually applicable here, just that they’re a good demonstration that even with a small forge, you can do some pretty cool blacksmithing.

In practice I think a solar forge would have to be open from the top, and couldn’t really benefit from the tight space confining the heat, so it’d probably be closer to using a portable ferrier’s anvil like you might see reenactors use at the fair, or something like this:

Though it’d look more like that artist’s smelting rig with the big lens and all.

Thanks! I’m really excited to see what you come up with

This is great!