How could non-mechanically powered airships actually be navigable?

I think op doesn't want propellers/gas or steam powered shit

Sounds boring.

I like this idea.

1) wing warping by wires.
2) center of gravity weight shifting
3) drag induced yaw and pitch
4) semi flexible fuselage just in front of the empennage

They run on air rails.

One way might be to look at the environment making such a thing possible, rather than the ship itself.

Just adjust the sails. Have a rudder. Assuming you can get them in the air and flying in the first place, and we all know that will just be hand waved as magic.

Most of you idiots don't seem to understand the OP.

The way a sailing ship moves is by using the force of the wind to move the ship against the drag of the sea. This allows the ship to divert and navigate in directions other than the vectors of the wind or the waves.

If an airship has no means of alternate propulsion (ie mechanical, like a propeller or some jet) then the ship will basically just move in the direction of airflow because there is no drag to adjust the course. It will only move in the vector of the wind and gravity.

you'd have to have some sort of system to increase air friction on the sides selectively, like extra deployable sails, maybe?

Magic leafblowers

They would still catch the air of the current the ship was in. OP mentions dynamic soaring, where you just switch current but that's in unique geographic areas.I guess the same would be true for things like thermals and shit.

Just have a wizard casting Gust of Wind into the sail in the direction you want to go I guess.

Maybe the people in the setting never figured it out either, and cities are more like to crop up and be prosperous on air current lines, rather like how cities would often spring up along rail lines and stops

Air balloons navigate by either going up or down and catching wind currents in different parts of the atmosphere ya foo.

The sails could be shaped so as to cause more friction in one direction than the other, or to say more clearly was unbalance aerodynamic. For instance if you had a rigid framed "scoop" shaped sail, the curved end towards the wind would provide less pushing force than the scooped end did do the incoming air.

I'm not an engineer though, so I may be wrong about that since it's based off of "intuitive" reasoning.

Zeppelin like ship pulled by griffons

It works for boats and migratory birds

How about a vehicle lifted with superconducting electromagnets?

Relevant: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14044/can-superconducting-magnets-fly-or-repel-the-earths-core

or Air Elementals.

What's wrong with spring- or manually-driven propellers? Like with old river barges that had their waterwheels operated by oxen.

I mean, if you're not doing balloon airships, then magic's the only way, and if you're using magic to keep the craft aloft why not use it to drive the damn thing, too?

Speaking of superconductors, they made metallic hydrogen in a lab a bit ago, and it's theorized once they take the pressure off it might stay that way and be superconducting at "room temperatures".

Pretty nifty ey?

The same way sailing boats travel: by tacking into the wind and following trade winds (jet stream?).

Same way balloons navigate. Change altitude: different altitude - different wind direction.

Yay! One other person knows what tacking is!

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)

The problem is, though, and I think this is what the OP is referring to, is that airships *can't tack*.

Tacking requires you to have a keel in the water as well; it works by playing the hydrodynamics of the keel against the aerodynamics of a sail. If your whole ship is immersed in the same medium, you can't get thrust against the current. Solar sails can't tack either, for the same reason - if you want to go inwards, or decelerate as you move outwards, you can't do anything but wait for feeble solar gravity to pull you back in.

At the risk of a thread hijack, does anyone have more pics of non-mechanically powered airships?

Then do it the way hot air balloons do-using altitude control, get into a current going the right direction.
This is what a piloting check would be ingame-you're trying to find the current going the way you want to go without burning too much fuel-or if it's a dirigible, navigating to your destination fast enough before you run out of lifting gas.

Stupid question: wouldn't it be better for airships to have a bullet or seed shaped hull with sails distributed evenly above and below the ship rather than just have a "water hull" ship with a few extra sails slapped onto the sides and bottom?

"water hull" allows you to land it on water, even if some of the side sails need to be retracted first, and emergency land on solid ground. Having sails on the bottom would fuck that up.

> Trained rocs pull them through the skies.
> Castings of Control Weather create thermals
> Air elementals bound to sails for steerage and propulsion

Yeah, this is the fundamental issue that I've always had with boat-style airships. Generally, I've taken to the use of aether in all its pseudo-scientific glory. Essentially, it's a magically-active, light-than-air medium, heavily influenced by Le Sage's theory of gravitational aether.

Airships are capable of tacking because their hulls are crafted around an enchanted frame which is capable of interacting with gravitational aether, essentially giving you another form of hydrodynamics. Yay for theoretical fluid mediums that don't actually exist, amirite?

How would you access the lower sails? And as stated, it's necessary to keep the bottom uncluttered for landings.

Well, depending on the setting, you might not ever land your airships. I think a fairly recurrent part of JRPG airships is actual dedicated towers and such structure that act as fantasy airports, basically like a dock that's entirely suspended in the air.

As far as access, incredibly risky rigging, I would assume.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Phlogiston

>Airship has 5 or so "drives"
>A Drive being a magic device, be it an enchanted rod or mystic engine, the how isn't important at this stage, which has a single very powerful enchant- "levitate in x direction", where x is up at a standard orientation
>At the center of the ship is a "neutral drive" that needs no power source, and as such is by far the most expensive part of any ship, which has enough power to keep the ship neutrally buoyant when empty or at a light load, so if all the engines fail or run out of juice the ship can stay aloft or at least gently land
>The Neutral Drive is mounted in a gyroscopic mount so as the ship orients itself the drive is always pointing up
>Around the edge of the ship is 4 "flight drives", which require external power to function. While it varies from ship to ship, the two main kinds are "fixed drive" and "rotating drive" ships.
Fixed Drive ships are generally cheaper and more durable simply because they have less moving parts, some only having a single neutral drive and two or three main drives, however are considerably slower and flipping upside down will result in a destroyed ship without very careful intervention by the captain. Fixed Drive ships fly by increasing the power to edge drives to lean the entire ship, meaning turning to the left or right tilts the entire ship a considerable amount unless outfitted with special rotational drives or other means. Fixed Drive ships can be thought to fly similar to a standard helicopter.

Rotating Drive ships, as their name implies, are piloted by turning the individual drives so they get forward thrust from the drives pushing in the direction they're oriented. This means that rotational drive ships are much more expensive, needing advanced machining to construct the drive housings and control system leading to the pilot's seat. R-drive ships vary from cargo ships to military juggernauts to speedy scout ships and as such there is no general description, however the ability to turn the drives 360° (and even turning them to face outwards on some ships) means they completely outclass fixed drive ships when it comes to maneuverability- at a cost, as the rotating drives are much harder to armor and the ship can be crippled by a well placed enemy attack or from careless flying knocking a drive loose. The ability to fly the ship at any orientation including upside down, (though the crew might not enjoy it), fly at significantly higher speeds, and the ability to turn on a dime is considered by most to be more than enough to make up for any weakness of the design though.

Rotating Drive ships vary in design enough that they can't be considered to all fly like any singular vehicle, but you could think of them as being akin to a helicopter which could also rotate in any direction without flying into the ground and exploding. (Or an ESF if you ever played Planetside 2)

I even made an exceptionally shitty doodle in case my description is shit.

If the "neutral drive" is so expensive, why bother with it? Just split up the power generation to provide redundancy. If you have three generators you can lose one and limp home, and even with one left you could still crash softly.

Whille small fdrive ships might fly by leaning the whole ship over, on anything decently sized it would make more sense to simply have drives pointing out in several directions. break the drives up into groups and by varying the power you'll have full roll, pitch, yaw, lift and trust control. Also, while rdrives would definitely make a large ship more comfortable, they sound a lot heavier and more complex than fdrives. I'd be surprised if a warship flying rdrives could really outmanoeuvre a similar tonnage fdrive ship, and it has far more moving parts to break.

That was me- yeah, it went down under the weight of the three different canonical eras.

The solar sails from Treasure Planet always piqued my interest.

The entire movie flies in the face of conventional science, but that's half the fun.

Because the neutral drive essentially means you only need enough thrust to move the ship itself instead of the huge amount of energy to both lift the entire ship and move it in a given direction (without flipping it), since the neutral drive doesn't need any external power to operate it means that the onboard power system for the main drives doesn't need to be a fuckhuge magic equivalent to a nuclear reactor needing an entire section dedicated just to fuel and can instead be the equivalent to a simple coal furnace.
Granted those are just general guidelines, I'm sure there'd be hybrid fixed/rotation drive ships and ships without a neutral drive at all.

>Because the neutral drive essentially means you only need enough thrust to move the ship itself instead of the huge amount of energy to both lift the entire ship and move it in a given direction (without flipping it), since the neutral drive doesn't need any external power to operate it means that the onboard power system for the main drives doesn't need to be a fuckhuge magic equivalent to a nuclear reactor
That makes sense. I was wondering how much power drives needed.

>Granted those are just general guidelines, I'm sure there'd be hybrid fixed/rotation drive ships and ships without a neutral drive at all.
What's stopping people from putting two neutral drives on a ship, and rolling them towards / away from each other to adjust the net thrust? With a bit of clever engineering, rotating the drives independently should provide full control without any power at all. Or do neutral drives only provide vertical lift?

Anyway, that's a pretty damn cool concept.

And yeah, once you get to giant warships (Of which there's only like 3 in the setting since the nation which uses airships is more like an alliance of city states, so they lack a unified military) all work pretty much as you described it, though slightly more primitive as in setting massive airships are still a very new invention and as such don't have a lot of dedicated research or tech made for them yet.

For a sense of scale, the largest airships yet built are similar to the medium ships in Last Exile (And are considered 40k fuckhuge by the citizens)

Well Eberron has airships, and although they focus on it less under-water/earth ships too.
They use the concept of bound elementals which makes about as much sense as any other fantasy explanation. A "pilot" is required to command the elementals and there's a risk of them breaking free and fucking shit up if the pilot is incompetent or the ship suffers damage.

Personally, I like how they use the different elementals. Like airships often have fire and air elementals for movement and underwater ships have water elementals, but for underwater you also need an air elemental for oxygen and assumedly atmosphere in general if you want to bring in realism.

What about "kites"? Weighted or buoyed sails on ropes that could be raised or lowered into regions of air with different wind strengths or directions.

In theory nothing, except that you could build two airships instead, and that usually neutral drives are designed on a per-ship basis to match the weight of the ship since only small changes to it's power output can be made so they're much harder to regulate for actual flight purposes.

it'd be a cool project for a wizard researcher though

So if a ship crashes and the neutral drive breaks free, what happens to it? Does it just shoot off over the horizon?

>In theory nothing, except that you could build two airships instead,
The two ships would each be ~60% of the mass. Unless you're building a rocket, you shouldn't need much more than your own weight in thrust, so the "spoiling angle" can be very small.

>only small changes to it's power output can be made so they're much harder to regulate for actual flight purposes.
That's the trick - you don't need to control the amount of thrust each ndrive makes, you just need to be able to steer them.
The price you pay is that the machinery needed to control it becomes insane - the entire system is highly unstable, so you need some kind of ridiculous analog computer to provide the feedback needed to stay in place.

So yeah, it's pretty impractical unless you REALLY need something massive to stay airborne for years.

>it'd be a cool project for a wizard researcher though
The idea of a wizard coming up with control systems engineering is hilarious.

It would fly off into the horizon (Or whichever direction it's facing when breaking free like a GMod prop with rocket engines on it), eventually smash into something and rupture, and result in a big kaboom or a mediocre Ppthththththhhhhhhhhh of magic leakage depending on how bad the crash was. Or just explode/leak out inside the ship without breaking free. Either way it'd be a very expensive piece/thousands of tiny pieces of scrap afterwords.

To prevent wacky PCs from accidentally building magic Sputnik the neutral Drive would freeze up if it went flying high enough into the stratosphere due to a wreck, and come crashing down after a while.

>To prevent wacky PCs from accidentally building magic Sputnik the neutral Drive would freeze up if it went flying high enough into the stratosphere due to a wreck, and come crashing down after a while.
Dammit.

So, aside from drives what kind of technology do they have? What do this ships use for weapons?

The basic weapon and equivalent to a browning .50 is a sponson mounted rotary Firebolt cannon, which you can even occasionally find on simple merchant ships, made of a bunch of Firebolt rods set in a rotary turret. It's extremely deadly against human-size targets and decent against wooden structures and airships but lacks any real "oomph" for penetrating armored crafts or buildings, as the bolts don't have any kinetic force and are too inaccurate at long ranges to concentrate on one spot to melt it, (though it can melt through most metals like butter at point blank). It's also useless against Demons and other fire-immune enemies, and needing at least 12 rods to get a decent rate of fire without burning out the rods, are making the magitech guilds look into Eldritch Blast rods instead, since raw force is useful against just about anything and an upgraded Eldritch Blast rod can fire at a considerably faster rate while remaining accurate out to longer ranges, though upgrading said rods is a bit expensive.

Weapons are something I've yet to do a lot of work on, but for the most part you can assume that the weapons would be akin to souped-up Rods, Staves, and other magic gear since they need no cargo space for ammo in addition to traditional weapons like bombs, with the small weapons being Cantrip-level spells set up en masse to allow rapid firing without overheating, and larger weapons like Fireball cannons or Magic Missile swarms which can only be used a limited amount of times daily without burning them out.

*As of now a Firebolt Rotary would deal 6d10 damage per attack- at point blank. At longer ranges (on foot) the rotary would be akin to a "save or take half damage" spell in a radius as the gunner fired a suppression volley at the PCs (or their enemies) on the ground- at 500 feet for example it would be something along the lines of

"Firebolt Volley- The Airship fires a volley of Firebolts from it's rotary cannon, saturating an area.

Each creature in a 15-foot-radius sphere centered on that point must make a Dexterity saving throw. A target takes 3d10 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. A creature in partial cover gets a +3 to the save and a creature in full cover gets a +5 to the save if the cover is fireproof.

It ignites flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."

which would change depending on how close or far the ship is, being a larger but easier to dodge and less damaging radius further away and a smaller but more damaging one up close.

As of now I'd be ad-libbing the thing since I don't think I'd be able to make balanced airship combat (and ship-to-ground combat for that matter) rules, so things like range wouldn't have a hard limit and I'd adjust it depending on terrain and weather conditions.

>souped-up Rods, Staves, and other magic gear since they need no cargo space for ammo in addition to traditional weapons like bombs, with the small weapons being Cantrip-level spells set up en masse to allow rapid firing without overheating, and larger weapons like Fireball cannons or Magic Missile swarms which can only be used a limited amount of times daily without burning them out.
Ah, okay. So the technology is basically wizard engineering. That's pretty cool.
What about other magic, besides propulsion and weapons? Communications and scouting is obvious, but is (as a particularly crazy example) teleporting a ship possible?

Also, Is there anyone crazy enough to try and weaponise drives? Because if you had shitloads of resources, a magical drive missile would be fucking terrifying,

How about 'monkey gods did it?'

Crazy shit like teleporting a ship is like the dual nDrive ship- theoretically possible, but it'd be stupidly expensive to manufacture. The most you'd likely see would be a ship that happens to have an incredibly powerful wizard on it who can cast the spell himself.

I'm going off the 5e DMG for magic items, with the assumption that while Cantrip level spells are relatively easy and cheap to scribe into items, something like a magic device able to do something like teleport an entire ship would probably be a Legendary item- which RAW takes 500,000 gp and about 54 fucking years.

>Crazy shit like teleporting a ship is like the dual nDrive ship- theoretically possible, but it'd be stupidly expensive to manufacture. The most you'd likely see would be a ship that happens to have an incredibly powerful wizard on it who can cast the spell himself.
Fair enough.

>54 fucking years.
Oh. So how expensive are the drives then? Are there ships carrying cattle and grain?
Also, how would the feedback and control on one of these ships work - Is there some way to magically sense acceleration? Or is there going to need to be a bunch of mechanical parts to govern the drives?

Unfortunately, I don't actually know much about DnD magic. Still, the idea of wizard engineers with flying ships is amazing.

You could make parts of the ship interact with another medium without that medium needing to be water. For a sci-fi setting, maybe the hull is treated in such a way that it interacts with the luminiferous aether -- in a fantasy, the Astral plane. With the sails still on in contact with mundane wind, that would let you tack.

Couldn't you tack against whatever bullshit magical force is holding you up?

To be honest I havent actually worked out things like exactly how expensive a drive would be or how long they'd take to manufacture, as of now I'm leaning to taking a few months from raw material to usable, with a team building each one (assembly lines don't exist yet, each one is made by a bunch of artisans in a very exclusive guild which fiercely defends their monopoly. in theory the entire process could be made much cheaper and faster with modern industrial standards, but the nation is akin to old italian city-states and is pre-industrial revolution.), most of the cost is in raw materials themselves rather than any super-advanced tech requirements.

Airships have become the main means of transport in the nation due to necessity- the city-states are built right on the sides of impassable mountains, and over the years due to "plot" and natural weather eroding roads faster than it was practical to fix them up, the ground paths were largely abandoned in favor of flying ships. As such this loose confederacy of cities is able to be safe from their much larger neighbors simply because they live in a region where normal armies can't even move while they control a monopoly on the only effective transportation in the region. (This is also why these rival cities put aside differences to make a unified army, much larger traditional fantasy nations would love to get their hands on the ore-rich mountains and magitech research they have).

TLDR: yes there's ships with grain and cattle, as there's no farmland for them to make their own and it's all imported. The nations biggest weakness is a lack of sustainable agriculture, as such they need to trade for it in exchange for ore.

Ships are still somewhat primitive when it comes to navigation, with basic cargo ships being entirely based on eyesight and some even having individual drives controlled by crew members via the captain yelling orders, with hi-tech ships having a single pilot with joystick and pedal control.

I should probably be asleep, but Im pretty sure manually controlling each drive would be insanely difficult. These ships have no inherent stability, so they wont just fly like an aircraft would. Any long distance flights would need stabilisation.

There's already some kind of magic making it levitate, why not another to grant favorable winds?

You could fluff it as a kind of folk magic. Experienced old airmen paint the correct runes on the sails (different sails for different purposes), make the right prayers, and prepare offerings to please the local wind spirits (which might be pleasant and accomodating in one area, but irrational and wicked in another place--perhaps the spirits of a certain valley only serve a ship whose hull is painted in blood!)

You need experienced sailors because it's a net karma kind of thing. A wizard could cast a control weather spell or gust of wind to get you out of a jam, but the wind spirits don't like being pushed around. If you get on their bad side, they might slow you down, steer you into a storm, or when especially angered, just knock your ship to the ground with a downdraft.

I should also be asleep, but I'm writing out half my current settings backstory for a single user in a Veeky Forums thread instead.

That goes back to the difference between fixed and rotation drives- a fixed drive can have a simple enough system of "more juice=more lift", and as such on a ship with the absolute minimum of tech used only for the transport of basic goods the captain could just yell "Port Stern Drive to half power!" Or some other sky sailor jargon and have the crewman/crewmen depending on ship size adjust the input, while a rotational ship without a super-advanced system that lets a single pilot control the ship would need a fully trained crew working to keep the individual drives facing in the correct orientation the captain orders- be it via good old muscle or manipulating their own areas machinery.

And as for long distance flights, as I mentioned the nation itself is rather small, being restricted to the mountains themselves the other nations cant or dont want to bother trying to tame and as such an airship could cross the entire nation in only a few days time while staying away from the various dangerous air currents and nasty mountain critters that can fly. I'm purposefully keeping the nation itself small so all but the previously mentioned military juggernauts and specialized merchant ships for trading outside their borders lack anything but rudimentary stabilization, with most ships relying on shrewd captains keeping them from dangerous airflow that would knock them into the mountains; after all, these ships are neutrally buoyant and as such can end up getting fucked by harsh mountain weather unless specially outfitted for it, (ie- Immovable Rod Anchor or even just mundane ropes mooring them in place until weather subsides)

I guess and orc or dwarf ship would just have a giant propeller shaft running down the middle and a bunch of rowers on each side.

You could even make the Red Orktober by casting heat metal on a pipe section and funneling enough air and pressure into it to turn it into a jet engine. Heat metal and permanency have so much potential for machines, it's beyond belief why it's not used more often.