Big Steam

[Pyrate Jim]

The torque that thing must have.
ELLENROAD STEAM MUSEUM - FIRST 2025 STEAMING OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST SURVIVING MILL ENGINE

[DocsMachine]

The torque that thing must have.

-All of it. That monster has all the torque. When it's running, there is no torque left anywhere else, and the earth itself slows down slightly.

What's even more amazing is when you remember that they built that behemoth with paper and pencil, and a slide rule.

Doc.

[Pyrate Jim]

As I understand it, a nuclear sub runs by heating water to steam and running it through a turbine to generate electric power.
Using basically the same platform as the steam engine.
Of course, upgraded with a constant heat source (being nuclear rather than wood or coal) and using a turbine rather than pistons, it's still the same thing.

[DocsMachine]

Virtually every thermal power plant works that way. Nuclear power plants, coal, natural gas... Something produces heat, the heat boils the water, the steam drives a turbine, the turbine spins a generator.

If you really want to boil your noodle, look up the engines on the Titanic. It used two four-cylinder triple-expansion reciprocating engines, meaning that the steam came in, pushed one piston down, the "exhaust" from that cylinder moved to a second piston and pushed IT down, then moved to a third cylinder and pushed that one down. (Actually two low-pressure pistons.)

And the exhaust from that, after producing 15,000 HP, was fed to the center turbine engine, where the residual exhaust from the two reciprocating engines, combined to generate another sixteen thousand horsepower.

That turbine extracted so much energy out of that residual steam, that the exhaust came out cold and below atmospheric pressure.

... And a bunch of glorified blacksmiths and tin-workers did all that more than a century ago, without the benefit of so much as a pocket freakin' calculator.

Doc.