Airships

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A magical element is my go to option if not using lighter than air gasses.

I can't remember the name of it but I use the element alan moore used in league of extraordinary gentlemen, basically a very unstable substance that has to controlled precisely in order for the airship to fly and there has to be a hole in the middle where the element spews out energy to keep the airship aloft.

I use this rather than "lol" magic because: A, magic is a boring explanation and B an airship with a fault is easier to dramatize and weave into the plot.

Ebberron did this right. Bound elementals.
Air or Fire for airships, air or water for sailing or submersibles and Earth for anything land based.
>pic related

Loved that book series as a kid, though I stopped after that floating city flew off into the sky and the MC flew off into the unknown and disappeared from the plot. Did anything interesting happen after that?

fuck, hivemind.

With the elemental system like , the captain basically has to maintain control over the elemental using will checks if i remember correctly. If you fail too many in a row, the fucker can break free and attack your ship as it is falling through the air.

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Angry orks who've been convinced they're tied to the ceiling of a room but is really tied to the keel of the ship.

Actually yeah, society flipped upside down after that so it kept the setting fresh. If I could travel time and recommend it to kid you, then I would say keep reading the three books that come afterward.

But that would just mean that my pc's would make nigh uncontrollable cruise missile airships!

Come to think of it, that sounds more fun. I'm using this idea next time I DM

Damn, guess like I missed out. Are the remaining books any good or is it a case of "if you are above X age don't even bother."?

And does Twig ever come back? I so wanted to see if he ever found his father, and if he got with the Trog(is that the right name?) engineer. I must admit, the first one was my first 'waifu', got crushed hard when she hit puberty and became a turbo SJW

A mixture of different technologies such as lighter than air ballons and propellers. The main source of energy is a super battery made of a alloy of certain magic metals called Adamant Stacks. Resources such as oil and gas is used to charge Adamant Stacks which are used in many vehicles as well power armor.

They are good, I wouldn't say that they strictly have an age limit.

Twig comes back, but I don't want to spoil it.

Bump for intrest

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Good night

Extremely low density rocks. Think "those pumice stones that float on water," but sci-fi.

Anyone here read the 'Ketty Jay' series?

That shit was awesome.

Well, what if there's giant birds that allows humans to ride them on howdahs in exchange for food and housing. These giant birds are sentient and only a few people are born being able to communicate with them. They only lay eggs every 100 years and over time, nations have evolved ritualized aerial warfare to fight over the eggs.

Also wood with the density of air.

Bind an air or fire elemental to the ship to power its flight.

>How do you justify airships that don't use lighter than air gases in your setting, assuming they exist in the first place?

The same way I justify not!Power armour, not!Hover tanks, not!Jet packs and not!Laser weapons in my setting; implementing sorcerous phenomena in mechanics via manatech.

Airships in my setting are used to refer to balloons/zeppelins filled with lighter-than-air gases, like those harvested from the airbladders of Cloud Mantas.

Actual skyships use manapowered skystones to set them afloat and levitate them in the air as well as to give them lift, while manapowered engines provide the propulsion through arcane anti-gravitic repulsion.

In the context of manatech ''mana'' simply means magic that CAN be detected, measured, manipulated and harnessed by layman through technology, as opposed to the wider definition of magic which surpasses definitions and any relevancy to non-magicians.

The weakness of manatech is that the same counter-measures used against magic and sorcery also apply to it. Void gems that absorb mana into themselves can shutdown a skyship completely, bringing it crashing down, analoguous how an EMP blast would fuck up an aircraftcarrier. This also explains why it is not possible to fly over with skyships over certain regions of the earth and sea, and why manatech can't be used at all in certain environments due to the concentration of void gem-like elements in the soil or seafloor.

>"those pumice stones that float on water,"

the what?

This idea is better than elemental because players won't get sidetracked with the boring topic of slavery of sentient beings to power their ship.

Pumice is a kind of very porous volcanic stone. This gives it an overall very low density, allowing it to float.

youtu.be/TT-LH9KImLU?t=59s

Isn't there like gel that's super light / as light as air?

Aerogels. Google it.

Super light, yes. Lighter than air, no.

Anyway, magitech. 8th ray, liftwood, etc., etc.

The world is a hollow sphere filled with a breathable atmosphere. Gravity is negligible compared to wind, and hadly cells. Airships float by default.

Turn up the steampunk if the manmade 'sun' at the center of the planet is archaeotech, or not, and it might be emitting a powerful electromagnetic field to disrupt electronics.

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i have some. it will float on water....for a while. It absorbs the water slowly, and will eventually sink over the course of a few hours (I think; maybe longer).

in muh homebrew, there are crystals from meteors (aetherium) which float and have an aura of float around them, so like a necklace can let a person fly, a fist-sized stone can fly an airship, a head sized stone can fly a castle, and a body sized one can fly an island. They are very rare, and exponentially so when it comes to size; airship ones are like minor artifacts, castle ones are like major artifacts, and for island ones there are like 2-3.

There is also elemental binding and a few other rarer magics that can work, but I do like the balloons, so I say that these other things aid the balloons in keeping the ships afloat; if you destroy the balloons, the ships will float down to teh ground/water, likewise if you cancel the magic used for aid. Aetherium does not require a balloon, however, and allows for faster flight, wind manipulation, etc. Basically magic air crystals.

Bound elemental that can fly, soarwood, low gravity (setting wide), low gravity (gravity magic), wind, boilers and props, repulsive materials like th LoEG example above, an of course: huge undead flying whales surrounded by inch thick adimantium plate.

>What do they use for lift and propulsion?
upside down juice, what else?

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>How do you justify airships that don't use lighter than air gases in your setting
75% of known airships do use lighter-than-air gasses, so HA! the other 25% use Cavorite, don't know what that is? go read more H.G. Wells!

>assuming they exist in the first place? What do they use for lift and propulsion?
Either large bags of hygrogen or helium, or cavorite plates to keep aloft, (a rare few use aerodynamics and are, in, fact airplanes) and are propelled either by alchemical engines powering large fans, or batteries of gunpowder-based rockets to achieve forward propulsion.

there are a few Elvin civilizations that use giant greyhound bus-size crystals enchanted out-the-wazoo with various levitation and movement spells as both a means of lift and propulsion and the vessel itself usually hangs underneath it via a network of ropes and nets.

Some alchemists have proposed using magnetism to keep airships aloft but no working examples exist as of yet.

I'm going to do an asspull here. In the setting's planet. There is a type of material called revmag which acts as the knd of opposite of magnetic materials.

Revmag comes into two varieties : alpha and beta. Alpha and beta revmag repel each other. Revmag of the same type has no special interaction besides that of regular matter.

Now, in the planet's crust, there are very large deposits of revmag alpha. Sometimes, due to volcanic activity, revmag beta is created from revmag alpha and is expelled from the crust. These revmag beta chunks start floating up, repelled by the revmag alpha underneath until the are far enough to stop going up. Thus we have chunks f revmag beta "floating" on a sea of revmag alpha.

Now revmag alpha deposits are not uniform in the crust. Some regions do not have revmag alpha. So they act like "islands" in the revmag alpha "sea" where revmag beta can fall down like floatsam in a water sea on beaches. Except that it would be the wing pushing the revmag beta. Also there would be revmag beta clouds floating around.

Thus revmag beta can be collected from those "islands", transported back to the revmag alpha sea and used as anti gravity units.

A civilization developping on this world would learn to use revmag beta early in history as a transport support, to lighten carrying loads but maybe not as vehicles initially. Just like boats and sails, technological developpement would be required before being able to use revmag beta for skyships.

Now for the seas of revmag alpha (and islands of no revmag alpha) would act like land and sea for conventional ships. Revmag alpha canals would be defended/taxed in order to profit from the skyshippng coming through.