Dieselpunk Airship Propulsion systems

Hey Veeky Forums. I've been bouncing around ideas for a WW1 themed Dieselpunk campaign, and I am struck by a dilemma of aesthetics. What do you fine folks imagine to be the most appealing method of propulsion for them? Just massive arrays of propellers whose efficacy is justified by some strange flub of the universe, or some sort of weird thematically styled scifi tech? Is the thematic aesthetic worth sacrificing for some semblance of sense?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft
youtube.com/watch?v=_eDlstjujKg
mikedoscher.deviantart.com/gallery/46610677/Spacecraft-of-the-First-World-War
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokosuka_MXY7_Ohka
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Also, dieselpunk pics.

...

...

There was an episode of mythbusters where they were testing "anti-gravity" devices and one was a triangle shaped thing that was found to push air through it when a current was run.

I don't remember what the process was called but I imagine massive egine arrays that look like jet turbines that open up as more current is given so imagine a massive airship with several of these with massive currents jumping around them as they lift the machine into the air.

...

That's a fuckin rad one, actually. I was also considering going for sort of a pulpy eldritch horror thing in the background. I really like the idea of including some sort of Lovecraftian rituals powering the engines of dreadnoughts and making them fly, but I feel like that might be getting too close to 40k's warp drives without some major tweaking
.

...

...

The airships in my setting went through a neat evolution. Thanks to schizo tech, this world has no fixed wing flight but does have nuclear reactors, including surprisingly compact thorium fueled ones.

If you take one of these thorium reactors and use the heat it throws off to heat up air, you can get the air hot enough to use it as lift gas instead of helium or hydrogen.

The first generation of designs used water to cool the reactor and also functioned as a steam engine, spinning turbines to turn propellers.

The second generation used fans powered by the steam engine to pump air in through pipes and past the reactor, air cooling the reactor and massively cutting down on how much water you had to carry. However, sucking air in, compressing it, heating it up, and expelling it out the back actually produces thrust; someone noticed this, and designed a radical new engine based entirely around this.

Nuclear jet engine.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft

Needs more propellers

...

I think you have a good idea there man, THe warp is on the outside of the ships in 40k, You're using the wiggly-woogly-spooky-scary as a fuel/power source. Different ideas. It also gives us an interesting senario: If you strike a foe's Dreadnoght in the Core, you could cause a Critical failure in the warding systems, tearing open a momentary door for the fuel source to rage into reality, Replacing A human foe with an utterly unknowable one.

Here, From my megar stores.

...

Just say this is achieved by a special sort of metal (read: Cthulhu metal) that has properties that allows it to amplify energy conducted through it, but if the power isn't regulated (i.e proper warding through geometric shapes and containment units) it can cause dangerous phenomenon such as partially opening gateways into alternate dimensions.

Alternative, there is the scene from FF12 where the Shiva was destroyed when they hooked up the Dusk Shared to her engines

In general, FF12 has the best airships
youtube.com/watch?v=_eDlstjujKg

...

Diesel obviously.

...

I'd guess something like a propfan (pic related), but I guess they aren't really dieselpunk. They're faster than propeller engines but more fuel efficient than tubofans, with the only really downside being noise.

Plus they look exotic because they've never really been adopted in the real world (yet).

Here, OP.
mikedoscher.deviantart.com/gallery/46610677/Spacecraft-of-the-First-World-War

This guy's got a buttload of designs based on a speculative aftermath to War of the Worlds.

...

...

...

Alphashade...

I remember that. went on a indefinite rest.

Nothing user, absolutely nothing.

And they are never going to be adopted - they are not only horribly loud but they also generate tremendous vibrations and air turbulences for no benefits over the average turbofan.

Go for the classics: cavorite and lotta propellers.

You anons made me think of how mi-go had wings which fly through the ether of space.

Humanity may identify the exotic element which gives the wings this property, and discover it is one of the things mined by them in our planet.

Then they create a mechanical equivalent based on propellers which interact not with air, but the ether itself, which is an intangible and invisible property of vacuums.

Ether engines are hollow spheres where a vacuum is disturbed by a contraption which mixes propellers and gyroscopes. Windowless too, because watching its function does strange things to one's mind.

Ether syndrome is becoming a problem on crews, sailors insisting on machines moving in ways that they aren't designed to, warped trajectories and paranoia about the unwholesome body language of some crewmembers.

It's believed that a mass episode of ether syndrome resulted in the destruction of the HMS Wellington, designed to breach the calculated limits of terrestrial atmosphere.

>A large exposed area makes airships susceptible to gusts and difficult to takeoff, land, or moor in windy conditions. Propelling airships with cyclorotors could enable flight in more severe atmospheric conditions by compensating for gusts with rapid thrust vectoring. Following this idea, the US Navy seriously considered fitting of 6 primitive Kirsten-Boeing cyclorotors to the USS Shenandoah airship. Unfortunately, the Shenandoah crashed while transiting a squall line on 3 September 1925 before any possible installation and testing.[21] No large scale tests have been attempted since, but a 20m cyclorotor airship demonstrate improved performance over a traditional airship configuration in a test by Nozaki et al.[22]

The advantage is now your airships can look like old-fashioned steamboats with the huge paddle-wheels in the back.

>>>Scott Westerfeld Leviathan series

MY Nigga. Loved those books. totally making a cult of druids who build shit like this for warfare.

I always liked mixing in some magitech for that kinda thing. Anti-gravity field generators and magical power sources that, of course, give off a lot of smoke and are oily as fuck.

That setting was cool as fuck, if only the book didn't focus on two shit kids. Fucking YA lit

Im a sucker for YA lit, but the setting was what really drew me in personally to. Everything about it made me want to use it in a game. the clankers to the dawinists. Shit was awesome. Old school steam and oil mech walkers vs bio engineered monsters for war. shit basically sets itself up for some awesome campaigns.

Apparently he published an art book as well detailing how all the creatures and machines worked in his books. Time to drop some money.

...

...

Damn, that sound sweet

Like real world. Helium (or hydrogen if you feel splodey) for lift, a diesel-electric array of fans for propulsion.

Oh shit, yeah that looks pretty nice

How does that thing fly?

It's a jet, look at the bottom near the front

It's also a Keith Thompson drawing, and he goes for looks over practicality every time

It (well the plane it's based off of) was never meant to fly very far anyway. Towards the end of WWII the Japanese built jet propelled flying bombs that would by piloted into enemy targets.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokosuka_MXY7_Ohka .48139759's pic is a fictional Nuclear version.

I've always wondered how they were supposed to fire their cannons without flipping over, but then again, I'm probably being too much of a sperg

I made a couple for my friend who wanted to do the same thing. She liked the campaign, but had trouble explaining how they were propelled or stayed afloat. We just chalked it up to space magic and enjoyed the game.

This the main vessel and fighter used by the "evil" empire known as "the Contingency". With the system keeping the airship in the air being under the hull, the strategy that the Contingency used was to have squadrons of fighters underneath while the larger guns on deck would handle anything above or level with it

The Contingency's main enemy was a large conglomerate of minority groups known simply as "the Rebellion".

My friend had the group operate inbetween the two major factions. Mercenaries really.

The world had a large creature known as "the Strom". They saw using electro-magnetic pulses in their prey. Ships with all their electronics tended to draw schools of them - which we refereed to as a "Cataclysm of Strom": like a murder of crows.

The rebels were airborn more without cities to properly defend them, so their adaptations against the Strom are better. This included faster fighters

Nah, it's an honest concern. Actual navies today need to account for that... otherwise even a modern destroyer would just roll over like a happy dog

So basically this?

Ionocraft. They have less thrust per watt than a gnat's fart, though.

>F4F Wildcat
>"10,000 horsepower"

If you're not even going to fucking try why bother making up numbers at all

Protip: the space below the waterline on a ship usually holds the most important shit, even if it's not in the water

>not a single gun that could fire down
Is it supposed to hover just above the ground?

>3-plane flights
>not doing 4-plane flights
[ANGER]

It's perfectly valid, just not ideal.

What's wrong with that - that looks like a jet, and sure, you don't measure jets in HP, but it's only 3 or 4 times or so what a late war fighter would put out with a piston engine

Maybe, but you'll have to tell what's this first.

If you guys like his books artwork, chekc out the rest of Keith Thompson's stuff, its pretty well drawn and has a lot of very depthy lore, even to his freelance illustrations.

Also his drawings of the Central Powers Walkers are top tier.

>looks like a jet
it's literally an F4F with no prop, m8

If you were to make an interior cross-section of these crafts, what would those turret-spaces look like? It looks like any ammunition storage would be cramped Soviet-Tank style, due to the flattened hull.

For the matter, how are those smokestacks powering the turbines?

forgot pic

lighter than air metal combined with balloons

>but it's only 3 or 4 times or so what a late war fighter would put out with a piston engine

Dude.

The F6F Hellcat had a 2,000 horsepower engine. The Wildcat had a 1,000 horsepower engine. It's literally an order of magnitude out of whack. A plane that size, with that much power in its powerplant would be an uncontrollable rocket. It just doesn't work. It's fucking retarded. May as well put an infinity sign there.

>no benefits over the average turbofan
Except fuel savings.

Whether or not they get adopted in future depends on whether turbofan and turboprop efficiency improves (which it has been)

>Ionocraft. They have less thrust per watt than a gnat's fart, though.
That's the kind of physics that doth easily get tweaked for settings purposes.

Maan there's a lot of crazy looking stuff that is surprisingly real.

Yeah, he's a good artist, even if a fair bit of his stuff is pure "looks cool" over any RL physics (artillery on very thin legs comes to mind)

"Who will against these monsters protect us?"

"War is the solution 1914"

>Churchill
Was there a different Churchill in WW1 or is that just a silly image

Same Churchill - IRL he was a prominent politician before and during the First World War as well - he put his support behind the development of the tank and was the First Lord of the Admiralty for a while, but he also was the brains behind Gallipoli, which got him fired

It seems strange to mark the British beast by his name in WW1 though, given that he wasn't the PM back then

As First Lord of the Admiralty, he was probably the one who decided to keep the ship the British had been building for the Ottomans, which was one of the major grievances.
Besides, the /readers/ know who Churchill is, but probably couldn't name who the WWI PM was if their life depended on it.

Eh, you can see he's doing an attack on Turkish Gallipoli in this timeline too, but as says it's mostly for the readers (Asquith and Lloyd-George, but I looked that up - I thought it was Balfour)

If you look at other pictures of that airship, it appears to have some kind of internal combustion engines turning propellers.

You can see the propellers on the back, even here.

It has basically the same airframe design as the Wildcat, but note that there is no visible propeller. Presumably it has some kind of ducted fan/turbine engine rather than a WWII style piston engine.

It doesn't have a propeller though. it presumably uses a ducted fan or EHD system, which may produce less thrust for a given power, in exchange for avoiding the issues that occur when propeller tips go supersonic. So it would give speeds better than a propeller, but would be less efficient in terms of thrust-to-power ratio.

I imagine rocketry, particularly the kind that fires after being dropped, would be popular for this reason on airships, as well as smaller caliber weaponry that won't knock the whole thing about. Also simple bombs wouldn't be too much of an issue.

Mixing unknowable magic and science is definitely my favorite way to go. Strange, pulsing engines whose "mechanics" are more like clerics, constantly praying in strange tongues lest the fuel leak into reality...

Plus, there's something so perfect about the inherently desperate nature of the aesthetic

If it's lovecraftian, you can just stick aethric propellers or giant flapping wings on the thing, it's what byakee and mi-go fly through space with.

Shit man, that's neat as hell