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Space suits in a 16th century style medium fantasy setting

the atom

the atom

Anarcho-Kemalist Thought Leader
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I'm working on a new renaissance-era style fantasy setting with a friend, and a limited aspect of this setting is space travel.

Basically, there's a certain type of mineral when, refined, floats above the ground, and can be used to move spacecraft interplanetary distances. This mineral is found only in a single specific, extremely inaccessible region, so it's very, very expensive and very hard to acquire, which means that only a very small number of kingdoms ever acquire some.

Now, because the technology of the setting is 16th century European at the very best, these ships are basically just sealed galleons in space, which means that actual ship to ship cannon duels in space are a no go because a single cannon ball can decompress a whole ship, which means that whenever it's been attempted both sides die almost immediately.

So when battles in space do actually happen, the idea is that they would revolve around boarding combat instead.

My question is, how might one construct a space suit using a 16th century tech base (ideally, with as little magic involved as possible)?
 
The skinny: You can't (not without magic).

The long: You're stuck with leather for making the suit; Rubber wouldn't be known of to the Old World, much less the vulcanizing process. You'll pretty much need perfect sealing and a fixed oxygen supply, something that you CAN'T do without extensive use of magic to refine the fitting and manufacturing. I wouldn't trust contemporary metal working for manufacturing durable, reliable oxygen tanks, much less making a helmet with clear vision.

With magic, you pretty much get to handwave these problems: Anything from metallurgy to sealants can be massively improved beyond 16th century standards.
 
Tiny_Dic said:
The long: You're stuck with leather for making the suit; Rubber wouldn't be known of to the Old World
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This isn't our world specifically, just one that sort of resembles ours, so they definite;y know about rubber. How much use they could make with it....I'm unsure.
 
the atom said:
This isn't our world specifically, just one that sort of resembles ours, so they definite;y know about rubber. How much use they could make with it....I'm unsure.
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Vulcanization at its simplest is heating and rolling/kneading rubber with sulfur. Magic can easily take care of the first two preconditions. If they have the knowledge, then I don't see why they can't use magic to make vulcanized rubber. You'll need it for the suit's joints (elbow, knees, waist, hips, hip-thigh section, and the helmet-suit sealing ring. This grants the astronaut - or whatever you want to call it - full range of motion without tearing the leather.

Honestly, magic is practically authourial fiat; You can use it do things that wouldn't be possible in a 16th century setting otherwise.
 
The 16th century is a pretty tough period. John Lethbridge was coming up with diving solutions in the early 18th, but they were barrels with sleeves. There were also apparently leather diving suits at the time that used tubes to get air down to a classical style diving helmet, but I don't know much about them.

Siebe's diving suits are from the 1830s, but I think they might be a good model aesthetically. Rather than a traditional pressurised space suit, you might be better of imagining a full body canvas or leather suit that works something like a mechanical counterpressure suit, which NASA has experimented with. This would be combined with a positive pressure helmet connected by a tube or tubes to an air pump. Obviously an umbilical cable like this would make boarding difficult depending on the distance from which you launch your assault, but I guess you'd be close enough. An idea I had is that spacesuit assault teams might have a portable 'landing boat' which carries enough air for a team along with a number of air pumps. So you'd have this box floating through space dangling tentacles that have redcoats on the end of them.

The really difficult thing would be cooling them, but perhaps that can add to the danger.
 
Its an interesting Idea, hut as the above members suggested the technology just wasn't feasible at the time period you are looking at.

Perhaps you can change the setting to be placed in a world with 16th-century aesthetic rather than placed in the 16th century. So like if leonardo da vinci inventions actually worked in practicality rather then just theories.

In Warhammer and 40k humans do this a lot.

Also if you're going to have interstellar ship combat, there would also be ramming tactics. those tactics were huge before we started to uses artillery more effectively.

Hope to hear more about your setting :)
 
Holland said:
Perhaps you can change the setting to be placed in a world with 16th-century aesthetic rather than placed in the 16th century
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As I've mentioned it's not set in the actual 16th century earth, it's just the technology base they're working with. Magic is around but I wanted to see what I could get away with with as few macguffins as possible.
 
And I didn't say it was the earth, merely saying "our" 16th-century technology, ie earth technological level then was not able to do what you want it to do. unless, of course, you favor heavily on magic.

Again all the places and people and the looks and feels of everything ie the aesthetics can look like they were straight out of Leonardo da Vinci pictures, but don't need to be at that level.

As I said, both Warhammer properties do this. The Empire of the Old World has a distinct 30-year war vibe, but then they had tanks and rockets and other crazy contraptions (and that's before talking about the dwarf manOwars and Zepllins :p). the 40k imperium of man has become a meme of Crusader knights "IN SPACE!!!" with the most of the lower level minions looking like the peasants from Monty Pythons Search for the Grail.

Don't feel like you have to constrain yourself too much.

If you want a Copper Rocket Zepplin, you go for that. You want your protagonist to wear pantaloons and a big flappy hat with a feather in it, it's all good. Not everything needs to line up specifically, there is no graph saying you can't have this without that. you just need to have a believable brigde between the to, and thats all up to you :)
 
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I don't know that it's very useful to say that it can't be done. We all know that space travel isn't possible in the 16th century. Saying that doesn't really answer the question.

Rather than say 'you can't' or 'just use magic' instead try to think about what could be done, and whether that might look like something that would work. All stories having some fudging in the margins.
 
The Atomic Rocket page on spacesuits might be helpful. Then again, it might not; it assumes space age technology.

Maybe a skintight suit would work better than a conventional space suit for something like this? That way you only need to worry about maintaining an air-tight seal in the helmet. I don't know what material they'd use for the skintight suit though.

One possibility that occurs to me... In the Murasaki series, the alien Chujoans have "clothing" that is actually a symbiotic living organism. Maybe instead of a conventional space suit, you could use something like this?

Alternately, maybe instead of space suits, these people use boarding torpedoes? Or they ram their enemies like ancient triremes, with the ram doubling as a boarding tube?

Or maybe the setting can be a bit "schizo-tech," with bits of more advanced technology unevenly distributed? "Sixteenth century social conditions with some unevenly distributed nineteenth and early twentieth century technology" is something you might get on a world with no fossil fuels.
 
Ford Prefect said:
The really difficult thing would be cooling them, but perhaps that can add to the danger.
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I was thinking on this and maybe they could either use some sort of exposable copper/iron radiators when things are getting hot under the collar? Or maybe when working outside the hull they'd keep some sort of shade between them and the sun and just focus on pumping hot air into the suit.
 
the atom said:
I was thinking on this and maybe they could either use some sort of exposable copper/iron radiators when things are getting hot under the collar? Or maybe when working outside the hull they'd keep some sort of shade between them and the sun and just focus on pumping hot air into the suit.
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I don't think it's an insurmountable issue, particularly if they have some kind of umbilical back to the ship or what have you. But heat management is a pretty important part of spacewalks, as I understand them.
 
From @the atom's description, it sounds like these suits might only need to keep the person alive in space for a few minutes (just long enough to jump to the enemy ship, make a way in, and seal the breach behind you), which might be helpful with the heat issue.

The big issue I see with that approach is pre-breathing. Modern soft shell and skintight suits use low-pressure high-oxygen gas mixes, which means the process of using the suit involves prolonged pre-breathing and you can't just casually take your helmet on and off or you'll get the bends. With a hard shell suit it's easier to use normal air in your suit, so you could casually take the helmet on and off, but hard shell suits are more cumbersome. I'm getting this from the Atomic Rockets space suits page.

I think this might be a lot easier with boarding torpedoes instead of space suits.
 
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Memphet'ran said:
From @the atom's description, it sounds like these suits might only need to keep the person alive in space for a few minutes (just long enough to jump to the enemy ship, make a way in, and seal the breach behind you), which might be helpful with the heat issue.

The big issue I see with that approach is pre-breathing. Modern soft shell and skintight suits use low-pressure high-oxygen gas mixes, which means the process of using the suit involves prolonged pre-breathing and you can't just casually take your helmet on and off or you'll get the bends. With a hard shell suit it's easier to use normal air in your suit, so you could casually take the helmet on and off, but hard shell suits are more cumbersome. I'm getting this from the Atomic Rockets space suits page.

I think this might be a lot easier with boarding torpedoes instead of space suits.
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Boarding torpedoes would work, but they kinda run into the whole storage space issue.

The total number of spaceships in this setting is less than two dozen (minus the fleet of the celestial empire, which has has two dozen by itself), with the greatest trading power having only five to its name. Now they're pretty big, but they're in absurdly high demand between terrestrial and extra terrestrial duties, which means that economization of storage space is a huge issue, so it'd be pretty hard to justify taking up a chunk of the hold with a big barrel thing that you're probably never going to use.

An idea I just had is maybe some sort of chemical solution? Like maybe boarding crews could ingest some kind of narcotic that does things to the blood chemistry that inhibits the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream.
 
I honestly don't see how you could make this work. Even if you somehow do manage to deal with all the air pressure issues, you setting is quickly going to run into heat problems.

Humans just can't survive in space for extended periods of time without having active climate control and I severely doubt people in the 16th century would be capable of that.

Honestly, I'd recommend you to just go full AU and have Aether be a real thing that's essentially an inert gas at 20-30% normal atmospheric pressure. This would solve the heating problem, make navigation without computers (or even knowledge of Newtonian physics) actually feasible and even make your air pressure problem a bit less of an issue.
 
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So this is unrelated to combat, but I was wondering about the possibility of transporting livestock over long distances in micro-gravity.

The travel time between the 'main' world (Tuguria) and the colonial frontier of Tartarus is about 8-10 months. There's no artificial gravity, but ships have an internally vertical layout that allows crews to take advantage of the (very low) acceleration, roughly comparable to the effect of walking around on Pluto.

My question is, would livestock such as cows or horses be capable of surviving such a trip?
 
as an aside how does the mineral work? is it constantly trying to fly up, or can it's buoyancy be regulated? For 16th century space suits maybe go a little biopunk and have space whales whose harvested remains can be used as insulation, life support or whatever. Could even have a neutral whaling faction that supplies everyone's leather
 
primus said:
as an aside how does the mineral work? is it constantly trying to fly up, or can it's buoyancy be regulated?
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It's a powdery substance that's refined into an alloy, which is what actually floats off the ground.

It's less a matter of buoyancy than propulsion. When one end is subjected to a certain amount of heat, the mass will accelerate in the opposite direction.
 
the atom said:
It's a powdery substance that's refined into an alloy, which is what actually floats off the ground.

It's less a matter of buoyancy than propulsion. When one end is subjected to a certain amount of heat, the mass will accelerate in the opposite direction.
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would it be better to have multiple smaller "thrusters" or like a central engine? by central engine I mean something like a sphere surrounded in contact heaters
 
primus said:
would it be better to have multiple smaller "thrusters" or like a central engine? by central engine I mean something like a sphere surrounded in contact heaters
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Some ships use that approach for sure. The Celestial Empire in particular uses crossbars with heating apparatuses on each end.

Most however use the cheaper, riskier approach: balloons. They use a single, fixed alloy mass at the top of the ship that's surrounded by a bunch of unrefined powdered byproduct. When they heat the bottom of the mass to accelerate, the powder becomes suspended in the balloon. The crew steers by pulling the balloon in a certain direction, which draws the mass towards wherever most of the powder is.
 
I think the book is Cosmonaut's Keep, or a sequel, a human stone age tribe makes leather mechanical counterpressure suits and ceramic helmets. Each suit has to be completely bespoke for each person, and needs to be sewn onto them. To remove the suit it has to be cut away or the seams carefully removed. I cannot remember what they did for air, but simply covering the entire head in a large enough airtight helmet would extend vacuum survivability from 15 seconds to something greater. They might have used large leather bags of uncompressed air for a couple minutes of survival in vacuum.

Frankly it would be far more practical if all combat takes place on land, and for space walks to be extremely rare, dangerous gambles against worse fates. Realistically though any hull damage should be something repairable from inside the hull.

In Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken, it turns out most civilizations across the universe stumble into a faster than light capable form of anti gravity in their stone age. Humans are unique for never finding it until another civilization, with flintlocks as their high technology, invade Los Angeles. I think they store fresh air in unpressurized barrels, but for the most part the ship's air is just what's trapped inside before they leave a world, and it lasts as long as it lasts. It's pretty bad because their only source of light is by fire. All their fighting occurs on planets, with the ships as nothing more than means for point to point travel, not combat. They wouldn't have the sophistication to make an air tight turret, let alone an air tight fixed gun.

When I read it I assumed the ship was wood, but later I read something that the author's intent was for the ship to be bronze. I think would could work, especially if the timber is vacuum treated first, then heavily tarred from the inside when assembled. I frankly think making a vacuum safe vessel as if it were a giant barrel would be more practical than casting one like a giant bronze bell with a sealed bottom. Not that I really know either way.
 
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Bronze may be better for getting rid of unwanted heat - can be polished to a shine so is reflective enough not to soak up too much heat when in direct sunlight.
 
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