JacobCoffinWrites

Hi, I hope this post/question is okay - I'm doing some art that includes various radio antennas and I'd really like to run them past someone who knows more than I do to make sure they look okay.

I'm working on location art for a solarpunk TTRPG campaign and am doing a scene for a somewhat old fashioned (in this setting), heavily automated farm. The guy who lives here does a lot of the work maintaining a meshnet in the mostly-abandoned town where the campaign takes place. I figure he's also sort of generally a tinkerer and has probably amassed a decent assortment of old tech.

The last time I was working on a scene with antennas I asked the folks over on r/hamradio for advice and they were super helpful so I reused a lot of the antennas from before, and tried to scale them to match that scene and to photographs I've seen, but I'm definitely not knowledgeable on this stuff and am happy to make changes to get it right.

As before, I really just want to make sure it doesn't look offensively dumb to folks in the ham radio scene, and if you have any recommendations for antennas you'd like to see or that would say something interesting, I'd be happy to include them. Thanks for any advice you feel like giving!

I realized while setting up my campaign for the second playthrough that I never actually wrote a intro for the Reclaimers, though I gave one during the first session. I think they're a fun organization so I thought I'd share it here too:

The Reclaimers are an international community of volunteer builders mostly known these days for using the lessons of the GCW wartime slums and the American Realignment to turn parking garages, strip malls, parking lots, and other remnants of the interstate age into vibrant communities. Their members include builders, electricians, plumbers, roofers, masons, architects, engineers, inspectors, farmers, community planners, mechanics, and anyone else who wants to contribute to their projects. If Habitat for Humanity was a full-out lifestyle and organized into chapters that double as extended family groups, it’d be a pretty close fit.

They arose during the Global Climate War as a mutual aid network helping provide shelter to people using whatever was available to them, making ruins and abandoned structures habitable, often repurposing them in creative ways. They entrenched themselves in many areas through their contributions to the postwar cleanup, and were very active in protests leading to the American Realignment, even helping build fortifications where necessary.

The Reclaimers have an old policy dating back to the crumbles that goes ‘there's always room for one more and we’d be lousy builders if there wasn't.’ They won't turn anyone away unless they’re a threat to their other residents.

In my campaign they've turned an abandoned wealth enclave – a development of McMansions around a golf course – into a planned, self-sustaining agricultural community (which has then become a salvage boom town during the region's rewilding).

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

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.

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.