Jet powered paddle steamer

[JayBee]

O.K. not a WhIf but just as weird.
The PS Lucy Ashton was a Clyde built paddle Steamer that ended up being jet powered.
I only found out about her two days ago when visiting the the Scottish Maritime Museum at Irvine with my Australian brother in law, he is a mad keen sailor.
Ex Royal Australian Army sailing team and has done the Sidney-Hobart five times now.

But back to this strange ship.

http://www.aqpl43.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/lucyasht/lucyasht.htm

Jim

[PR19_Kit]

Hehehe, a cracking idea! 

I like the bit about '.....as reverse thrust hadn't been invented there was no way to go backwards...........' 

[Rheged]

That is a wonderful discovery!   It's amazing what jets have been mounted on/in. Not just aircraft but ships and even trains.....LNER experimented in 1947 with a jet engine mounted on a wagon to clear the line but found it also blew the ballast away breaking windows in signal boxes and railway huts as well as destroying fences.

http://www.lner.info/forums/download/file.php?id=907&sid=a85e26fc187382e44ca2a250ff5c1292

[Weaver]

Heh - since there are no water propellors in Kerbal Space Program, all boats have to be jet-propelled like that. I just posted it to Twitter to see what the Kerbal crowd have to say....

[Steel Penguin]

well its an idea, and the reasoning behind it, is spotless,  so    from me.
though the caustic soda powered steam engines on one of the other  pages are an idea that's frankly terrifying     

[ericr]

it makes me think of the 40s german Tornado boat (Ju52 floats with a V1 jet engine)

[zenrat]

well its an idea, and the reasoning behind it, is spotless,  so    from me.
though the caustic soda powered steam engines on one of the other  pages are an idea that's frankly terrifying     

Personally i'd be more scared of travelling with a Boiling Petrol engine.   

[kerick]

The jet engine ex paddle wheeler has steam punk written all over it!
Who in their right mind thought boiling gasoline/petrol/naptha was a good idea! And I don't mean just the inventor.

[jcf]

Nothing steampunk about an old hulk pushed along by 1950's aircraft turbines, a steampunk 'jet' powered vessel would use a
gas turbine to turn the paddles. It would be an extraordinarily inefficient, wasteful and pointless way to use a gas turbine, but no
doubt it would be wonderful to the steampunk types who seem to think that Victorian and Edwardian machines were some sort of
semi-mystical primitive technology made of brass rather than the highly developed machines made of iron and steel that they
actually were, well that and believing Tesla was some sort of God. 

Read one Steampunk novel, threw it across the room when the authour had a brass-framed machine 'throwing sparks off the glazed tiles lining
the Underground Tube' in an 1870s setting. Brass aint' gonna throw sparks under any circumstances and certainly not off of smooth glazed tiles,
and in that period the nascent London Underground was referred to as a subway, the colloquiailism of 'the Underground' and 'the Tube' came
much later. Check out period issues of The Engineer if you don't believe me.

The truth is that the naptha engines had a lower rate of incidents/accidents/explosions than the typical steam launch of the period.
The main reason they were attractive to the average owner is that they didn't have the licensing requirement$ of a $team
powered vessel, licensing requiremenst that came about because of numerous gruesome events. Like their steam and electric
powered contemporaries they were put to pasture by the more effcient internal combustion engine.
Speedboat by D.W. Fostle, Mystic Seaport Museum Store 1988, has an excellent chapter on naptha launches.

[Weaver]

But brass is prettier.... 

Actually you beat me to it Jon: dieselpunk at a push. Maybe.

How much slack you can cut steampunk depends on the sub-genre as far as I'm concerned. If it's proffered as a scientific extrapolation of Victorian technology, then by all means subject it to the same level of scrutiny and criticism as The Martian. On the other hand, if (as some 'steampunk' does) it also features magic, dragons, ray guns and glamorous Martian princesses then you're essentially dealing with fantasy-in-brass-goggles and applying rigorous scientific critique to it is pointless.

[NARSES2]

Fascinating find and some of the other linked stuff is just 

As for Steampunk ? I can admire and enjoy the illustrations and have some of the Osprey wargaming books but that's about as far as it goes. Mind you I've always liked my Sc Fi on the simple side. I can re-read E.E. Doc Smiths Skylark and Lensman series again and again

[Gondor]

Fascinating find and some of the other linked stuff is just 

As for Steampunk ? I can admire and enjoy the illustrations and have some of the Osprey wargaming books but that's about as far as it goes. Mind you I've always liked my Sc Fi on the simple side. I can re-read E.E. Doc Smiths Skylark and Lensman series again and again

Oh I agree about the E.E. Smith books. A good old fashioned tail from when life and fiction were far simpler. Definitely never mind the details, just enjoy the adventure.

Gondor

[JayBee]

One of the various links that I found had an eye-witness acount from a lady who remembers the PS Lucy Ashton "roaring up and down the Gare Loch".
For those who do not know, the Gare Loch is where Faslane is, and it is not that huge a piece of water.
So I rather expect that our jet powered ship would have been realy, REALY, noisy.

[loupgarou]

well its an idea, and the reasoning behind it, is spotless,  so    from me.
though the caustic soda powered steam engines on one of the other  pages are an idea that's frankly terrifying     

Personally i'd be more scared of travelling with a Boiling Petrol engine.   

I'd be more in favour of the Carbon Disulphide or Ether & Chloroform Engines:
" Diethyl ether oxidises and polymerises in the presence of air, creating the interesting compound diethyl ether peroxide (-CH(CH3)OO-)n. This is a colorless oily liquid that is an extremely brisant (fast-exploding) and friction-sensitive explosive; less than 5 milligrams can damage chemical apparatus." 

[Captain Canada]

Never heard of that jet powered boat, but that is pretty wild !