I think we're all forgetting to address a very, very important question here:
Will there be
tanks!? Sure, every steampunk series worth its salt will either have some sort of complicated flying machine or airship of some sort, but the steam-powered land combat vehicle remains woefully unrepresented beyond a few broad allusions in most series! (100% truth, I totally researched that, yo). I want to have
land monitors, which double as mobile bases, that you can drive across the map, into other bases, which you can then use your land monitor to
explode, or even better, you can be a land pirate, and broadside trains, or even duel
other land monitors, and board them while fighting with sabres and cutlass(es)! Then again, you wouldn't have to actually add guns to them at any point in time, and could use a "mobile base" to offer humanitarian aid to all those impoverished settlements on the frontier.
If you're into that sort of thing.Alternatively, if not tanks (
even little wagon-sized ones), then mobile rooms mounted on train tracks! Or just trains! Trains which can be weaponized as anti-invasion force-fields! Or not, but you see where I'm going with this.
Basically, what I'm getting here is that once the infrastructure is built up, semi-customizable mobile entities (or,
SCMEs), whether they be ships, or tanks could be buildable in a way similar to a house is generated, and while you'd likely need an actual settlement to be able to support them (vehicles need fuel, after all) they could be used for more mundane things things such as mobile stock-piles, weaponized by both the defense and offensive, or used as part of a mechanism for some intricate logic gate if you're creative enough.
This is all of course merely wishful thinking, and I'm sure that the crew is having enough trouble as is to get all the base details down before they try to tackle intricacies like that.
Oh, and babies are typically too fatty to get a good meat return from em'. You're better off using them for candle production, if anything.