Comic Report #107 - The Magic of Engineering (Patreon)

Hello!  This week I managed to get the next page penciled up sooner than later so hopefully it won't take me too long to get it finished.  This one's a fun one, since it follows up on a detail from page 506, which was posted-- almost ten years ago?  No!!      Well, anyways, today we get to experience Peak Lou as he explains what keeps the lights on in Tombstone.  

For a little while the comic has sort of downplayed the fact that it's a zombie story, so just as a heads-up, this page very much confronts the fact that Tombstone is set amidst a tide of undead, so you're ready for the meat of what's going on on this page.

So as mentioned above, the story of how Tombstone keeps its lights on stretches back to page 506, where Deputy Mayor Maria is surveying the work site.  I know there are a few engineers who follow my work who popped up when the previous page went up, so hopefully I got all the details right on how this contraption works.  If you're an engineer yourself, please chime in and let me know.

This was my first drawing of the handmade steam-electric generator Tombstone uses to generate power.  As Lou explains in panel 3 of the new page, it's essentially a large water boiler that pipes steam upwards and into that big metal cylinder.  Inside there is a set of turbines on an axle; the pressure of the hot steam rotates the turbines and causes the axle to spin, and when the hot steam cools down it drops down and out a bottom pipe below the cylinder to be collected and reused.  On the intake and in an exhaust position there are pressure release valves as a safety measure for controlling the steam pressure inside the turbine housing. This is how the steam part of the steam-electric generator works.

In the panels before this Lou explains that water is collected from upstream to keep the boiler topped up.  In a real boiler you'll want to have hot water join the hot water reserve since pouring cold water into a hot metal tank could cause damage to the metal housing.  With Tombstone built next to a river that is one natural resource they have an abundance of, so they can keep the power on in perpetuity.  

So moving on, the steam pipes up from the boiler and blasts through the turbines, causing the propeller blades to turn the axle.  That axle continues on into the next cylinder, which Maria's head kinda blocked in my first drawing so I got to make up a bit more for this scene.  Now what's going on in here is you have a series of copper coils set around the axle- you can imagine this is why there are no power lines or phone poles besides the ones strung up by the townsfolk.  These copper coils are housed around a big plate with a set of magnets on it.  The principle here is a magnetic field in motion produces electricity, so you have this magnet plate with positive on one side and negative on the other and you spin it around real fast, and the electricity it produces is collected by the conductivity of the copper coils surrounding it.  I'd thought about this part a lot and I don't think there's a reliable way to get one big magnet to stick in there, so the makeshift aesthetic of Tombstone dictates that they collected as many medium-sized industrial magnets as they could and fitted them onto the big plate.  It won't produce as much electricity as if the whole thing was magnetized but this is also the reason why only select buildings have power to them, and that power mostly only goes to lights and the occasional freezer.  The last part of the panel three diagram is the cables leading from the copper coils out to Battery Land, where the energy produced by the turbines is stored.

That is the magic of steam-electric power generation!  Now, seeing as this is Dead Winter and it's a hodgepodge jury-rigged little community there's another element to the Tombstone power puzzle: how do you keep the water boiling to produce the steam to turn the turbines to spin the magnets and generate the power?  Well.

This is the dirty little secret of Tombstone and part of the reason why Lou said he's not supposed to let townies into the hardhat zone.  The way they keep the boiler hot is by utilizing the other abundant natural resource surrounding Tombstone, the undead, and boy howdy did someone leave a big stack of them outside Tombstone the night before.  I won't go into the goopy details of how it works but it involves something called "the wick effect" and the fact that the undead are probably somewhat dried out and come ensconced in fabric, Tombstone found a way to turn them from a threat at their gates into a way to keep their lights on and their food preserved.  It was either that or start pulling houses apart for wood, because being stuck in a city meant the land is all paved over and there's only a few bare trees lining the river.  I tried to reference at least two of the undead in that panel from specific undead who featured in the fight scene with the Hornets outside Tombstone the night before, tying it to Lizzie and Alice's own actions.

Panel five captures the contrasting reactions to this revelation between Lizzie and Alice.  Liz had struggled with the inherent humanity of the undead in the early parts of the comic and that hasn't fully left her, she's somewhat aghast at people with histories and stories of their own being recycled into a public utility.  Alice, being a seasoned nurse, is a bit more desensitized to the narrative history of our walking meat suits, so she's more intrigued by how them wicking like candles actually works, implying that one of her two doctor teammates had brought up that trivia fact at some point in the past.  

Lou seems almost apologetic at this reaction in the next panel, mentioning how there ain't really nowhere to bury people in the middle of a paved-over city.  They send the ashes downstream to let them return to nature and give a sense of closure to the departed, but he points out that this is a big reason townies aren't allowed back here. It's somewhat of an ugly secret and it's the main thing the Gravekeepers go outside the town gates to do.  Incidentally, this is also a big reason why the team was excited to hear about Lou's waterwheel idea on page 598, so they don't have to rely on their steam generator forever.

The very last panel ties this scene back into the main story arc, with Lou implying that since there's nowhere to bury anyone that ol' Sheriff Tanner might be looking down on them from above.  Since he's involved in a somewhat secretive aspect of Tombstone's infrastructure he might know or have heard something no one else is privy to, so that's a thread the girls can tug in the next page.  

Anyways, that's it for today.  It's a little bit of electrical engineering and a little bit of medical science but it's overall a look at why Tombstone has lights.  Thanks as always for your kind patience and support for this comic.  I've got some gamedev news to share after this so stick around for that.  Until next time, have a nice weekend!