Airships. Some people like em, some don't

I've never heard anyone give an even half decent scifi explanation either, what DOES lift them up?

go away.

...

...

...

Play NT OST:
youtube.com/watch?v=408tWOubRDM

Looking at these pics...
>I will never live in airship world...

I'm not interested in your Dieselpunk. I'll post Edgy skyships in every single one of these threads until the setting gets the respect it deserves.

Love 'em...

man, those are my least favorite kind too...

But, hey in the name of tolerance. Welcome aboard skyfriend.

Thanks. To each his own.

...

>I've never heard anyone give an even half decent scifi explanation either, what DOES lift them up?

Your choices are basically
1: Unobtainium
2: Magic
3: I don't give a shit, armoured zeppelins are the coolest!

They're all valid.

...

...

...

...

Airships are entirely possible, just not on Earth.

ooooh science! pls educate me.

...

...

...

In order for an airship to actually float it has to weigh less than the area that would normally be taken up by atmospheric gas. Since on Earth we breath oxygen and nitrogen we're shit out of luck for trying to make a ship that doesn't either have a ton of gasses that we DON'T breath, or has to make a ton of weight compromises in order to float.

If we were to live on a planet with an atmosphere that was composed of gasses that were heavier than the air we breath, we could make vessels that float just because they're filled with the stuff we need to live.

On Mars the atmosphere is way too thin for us to make a vessel that was light enough to float just on air alone and not kill us from a lack of pressure.

HOWEVER, on Venus there's a point in its atmosphere that the pressure level is just right for us to live, and since it's made up roughly 90% carbon dioxide, we can get a vessel floating on Venus just because it has air in it.

Now, since breathable air alone is a lifting gas on Venus that makes helium or hydrogen into SUPER lifting gasses. As in, you can lift a fucking Soyuz rocket with just a few hydrogen balloons kind of lifting power.

You can build anything you want on Venus and it'll probably float. The only downside is that you need the outer hull to be acid resistant, but really that's not that big of a deal, we've got a laundry list of cheap acid resistant materials.

Good to know!

I guess you could use some sort of scifi lift-machine as an explanation as well.

Hey, that project got paused/cancelled by Lockmart, but it's nearly finished in the UK now.

I don't have pics on me, but I have some from the last airship thread
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/47528700/#47536701

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

It's literally the fucking same thing in every setting with airships: "magic unobtainium powered engines" or alternatively "organs taken from flying whales" which is actually the same except the engine is unobtainium itself.

Magical floating rocks or crystals are also used sometimes.

Last Exile had a pretty cool soft scifi idea

lastexile.wikia.com/wiki/Claudia

OP here, do you guys want me to keep going? I don't feel like much of tg has a boner for this like I do...

Personally, if I was in a game with them, I think it should be defined.

Fictional Lighter-than-Helium Gas? Ok, but we have to make sure there are no leaks. Also, is the gas lethal to humans?

Special metal that has massive lift/anti-grav when electrified? Ok, key is keeping the electric generators going, if they fail the ship falls out of the sky. Diesel-electric engines spewing smoke! Need the diesel to keep running too.

These aspects would also have an impact on ship design and battle tactics as well.

Maybe the electrified anti-grav metal can only reach a ceiling of 5,000 feet from sea level, so big mountains are still impassable, etc.

It doesn't need to be real or physics heavy, but to me it's part of the world as much as the cool art. It's all fuel to send the imagination racing!

...

...

...

And now I have a bunch of smaller planes, all done by the same artist.

...

...

...

Reasonable enough. The types I've personally used have both been based heavily on enchantments. In the 1st case a large amount of runic stuff complete with large amounts of redundant magic circles. Certain portions of the critical hit table were re-fluffed to represent these circles being broken, though any boarding party could also do so deliberately.

The main limit of these ships is that they needed living mages on the ship to control it. Once enchanted it would just maintain current position near indefinitely (though weather could eventually destroy those circles), but mages were required to move it. Players encountered a floating wreck at one point and had intensely dangerous investigations.

The second type was powered by the good old magic crystal variety and latent local magic streams. Environmental magic was a huge part of that world as were spirits, and there were some simple rules for how much was around, and how quickly it ran out. So flying ships were basically really mana intensive spells. The crystals (condensed souls, but hey how bout you stop asking questions about that) were reserve power, capable of fueling a ship for X amount of hours in drained or null magic zones.

Both have been water ships, but in the sky, big and lumbering and using naval combat rules instead of dog fighting ones.

Again that's just unobtainium.

youtube.com/watch?v=v3rhQc666Sg

Best airship comin' through, out of the way peasants

...

...

>The crystals (condensed souls, but hey how bout you stop asking questions about that)
tell me about the crystals

...

...

That's pretty good

oh, you kill something over the seedling of a certain flower, sentient blood is more potent of course, until it germinates, and then it will grow into a blood flower, which while cared for normally with water and fertilizer is a bit finicky and hard to cultivate. Grow one to fruiting though, and you get little crystals which contain absurd amount of magical power.

Crushing a crystal would release the magic into the environment, or through a little ritual you could absorb it, which took some time, but was still way quicker than natural absorption.

What you're talking about is basically a Submarine, but in super dense gas instead of liquid.

...

anyone knows some airship centric system or something?
something to pull of some skies of arcadia shit, but dieselpunk

>inb4 gurps

The fact that this artist has different "nations" with different styles of aircraft gives me the impression that they're an awful lot of world building going on in that person's head. Would be a shame if that only existed in the form of artwork, but it's good artwork none the less.

Artist is awesome. Apparently he's had a few people proposition him to make games from the world he built, but it always falls apart. A shame too, this style could make some seriously good vidya content, but AAA studios are too busy wanking to FPS and cult favorites.

aoiwaffle0608.deviantart.com/?rnrd=179653

I've done it with Savage Worlds, but I can't say if it's any better or worse than GURPS. You're probably looking for a system dedicated to the topic, not fitting it into a generic system.

There really isn't much of a difference between a submarine and a rigid airship when the outside air isn't breathable.

Just started checking his DA out, definitely impressed.

OP here, the reason I'm posting all this art is because I have a very rough system in dev atm. Ship combat rules getting out of hand though, tracking 3d movements with a sheet of paper is... not easy or fun.

>basically a Submarine
Please don't say this, as a former submariner the differences trigger me

The Few is my goto for airborn/spacefighters/etc. games. Its set up for ww2 dogfighting, but that's pretty much what everyone pretends the other stuff is like too.

If you want to get more tactical, larger scale warships floating around blowing the crap out of each other, you can try and find a rules set for Leviathans. No longer supported but I hear good things about the rules set.

...

i think i can understand the whole altitude think

since its airship to airship intead of somethingK to the ground, why not use 100m highter than enemy/initial altitude, for example? wouldnt it be easier?

just thowing ideas here

Attack Vector Tactical does hard 3d space combat for actual if you want to look at a rules set for inspiration.

But if you get too realistic/3d with airships as presented, mostly like ww1-2 battleships firing broadsides, it stops making much sense fast.

>tracking 3d movements with a sheet of paper is... not easy or fun

I imagine. I'm thinking about it as a normal flat grid like any other map you'd use for minis in an RPG, but where each ship has an "altitude" coordinate in addition to its position on the game board. the board wouldn't represent it visually, but you could have two ships occupying the same space but at different altitudes.

Of course, moving a humanoid figure on a grid wouldn't accurately portray how a massive warship handles. They wouldn't exactly be able to change direction on a dime.

seems more like a spaceship to me

Assuming everything is within the lower layers of the atmosphere you really only need vague altitude bands.

Yeah, i've thought of going pure simulation, and also of far abstractism. Neither works well, now to just find the perfect balance of realism and rules-light. Add in that fighters will be skirmishing meanwhile and plenty of boarding action (my setting will be boarding heavy because FUCK YES ziplines down to enemy airship, cutter tool to punch through carapace, running around breaching doors, fucking shit up, kidnap captain.) And things get really confusing. Honestly, focusing on the world rules as a whole, will probably do combat last, as the setting is being built to be just as accommodating for a mercantile (weight to cost ratios of goods, tax areas, trade routes and jet stream) or political (trying to have a rich history for each nation in the world, as well as a mysterious precursor civilization that left ruins) campaign, as it is for combat.

>accommodating for a mercantile (weight to cost ratios of goods, tax areas, trade routes and jet stream) or political (trying to have a rich history for each nation in the world

I've always wanted to do airships with economics, good luck to you.

if you are going everthing happens in the skies, try to go with altitude relative to enemy/object/giant evil mosquito or what you have

it will keep it managable i think

Thanks! I've been working on it slowly, maybe have beta rules down soon for the world, probably sans combat like I said. Totally classless as an RPG characterwise, with a dots system similar to whitewolf, though maybe that comparison is a bad idea since dicepools work differently.

The MAJOR feature I'm working on, is completely random charts for EVERYTHING, so as a DM, you can run a game without having a story in mind, or overlay the story over the actions of the world. Random charts for daily weather, global politics, tax changes, port fees, pirates!, military patrols, stowaways, getting your cargo hold robbed while drinking in a port town, disease, local megafauna (giant fucking avians), lost technology hunts, and more!

Plus, I want to make sure theres an extensive system for tile by tile building of your airship. Purposefully reinforce certain parts of the ship to make breaching more difficult, all the while remembering weight restrictions....

Lots of work to be done.

It's probably an old trope, but having the first 'airship' be the spaceship the humans arrived in is great. Everything else is an inferior copy by people that don't really understand the technology but can figure out a few pieces of it.

Last exile is the only place that did that afaik, but its a GREAT trope if it is one. Honestly, the only real airship trope that's played out, is the association between airships and steampunk. I don't even mind steampunk its just... been tainted for me.

"Well, we don't know what they were using to power their anti-gravity drive back then and there's definitely none left, but we've been doing okay with whale oil and coal so far."

if you ever got it together, do post it here

That's just because steampunk routinely degenerates into a mess of meaningless gears, brass and tophats without consideration for actual age of steam technology.

Actual victorian era warships are fucking great, they have hugely varied designs, they're got guns all over them, have sexy curves, belch clouds of black smoke and most of them had fucking rams.

But instead of building their airships on that, most shitty steampunk settings just dangle a boat from a balloon.

toot toot motherfucker it's 1887 and I have 27 guns and six torpedo tubes

Last Exile certainly comes to mind, in a way.

...

...

Man this thread is good, recently got a wwl-ll kick and was thinking about making a setting. Perhaps somthing along the lines of valkeria chronicles meets skies of arcadia.

tell me anons, would it be a better idea for the stereotypical 'sky islands' or should the airships simply be a part of a larger entity?
Kinda like the idea of a party getting and repairing a early wwll kind of tank like pic related.

my idea, large continent size islants floating low, over a cloud sea, and many small island/ archipellagos on mid/high alts, that way you get all

plus a journey into the abyssal surface that is ground level is more likely
but thats just me

The tank idea is cool. If they've got a big enough ship they can load it on there.

that could work, perhaps have the 'cloud sea' be some kind of toxic no go zone.

Better question then. What should the surface be like?

>tell me anons, would it be a better idea for the stereotypical 'sky islands' or should the airships simply be a part of a larger entity?
Personally, I'm not actually all that fond of sky islands, so I'd recommend having a normal landmass, and airships being only part of a larger army. If you want, you can have some natural or artificial flying islands above the normal landmass: kinda Miyazaki's Laputa or Howl style.

skis of arcadia?

IF its toxic, old not-quite rotten skyscrappers and buldings, wrecks of battles both of before and after humans got to the skies, big ol' beasts, all kinds of very advaced tech?

its an abyss, you can fill it with whatever you want

im on the old humanity ruins side