Yes, but much is contained in those two words, from Space:1889’s “luminiferous aether” and liftwood, the marvelous Martian tree with antigravitic properties… all the way up to the real-world “Project Orion,” where a battleship-sized spacecraft is lofted into orbit and propelled thereafter with a succession of kiloton-yield atomic bombs!
The basic assumption of steampunk is steam, that is, 19th-century technology being otherwise unchanged. No lasers, no HAL 9000 computers. (And no radio. Space:1889 posits a solar heliograph in Earth orbit winking Morse code to Mars.) Ditto no radar. But wet- and dry-plate photography were well established and would work fine in free-fall, that is looking down from space.
Re: Is everything known
Yes, but much is contained in those two words, from Space:1889’s “luminiferous aether” and liftwood, the marvelous Martian tree with antigravitic properties… all the way up to the real-world “Project Orion,” where a battleship-sized spacecraft is lofted into orbit and propelled thereafter with a succession of kiloton-yield atomic bombs!
The basic assumption of steampunk is steam, that is, 19th-century technology being otherwise unchanged. No lasers, no HAL 9000 computers. (And no radio. Space:1889 posits a solar heliograph in Earth orbit winking Morse code to Mars.) Ditto no radar. But wet- and dry-plate photography were well established and would work fine in free-fall, that is looking down from space.