Eric's thread got me thinking about the worldbuilt aspects of the Middle Earth I'm writing into my fantasy cosmology. It's a place that takes a backseat to Left Earth, which is a more traditional medieval world, but that's one of those Attention-Span Black Holes that I'm far more likely to end up writing a bunch of short stories about rather than just get around to writing a storygame about, and you guys sure as hell don't want to hear me prattle on about short stories in the WW, right?
Point is, Middle Earth is a Napoleon-Punk fantasy. Which, like Eric's story, is a lot like steampunk, except it tries to stay pre-industrial. Industry is mostly people-powered, uniforms are fancy and frilly, and electricity is generated sparingly by big windmills and big water wheels that don't have any more immediate tasks, usually for the purpose of electrifying the water around fortified islands, shoving live tesla coils down hills at attacking formations, telegraphs, and cooling/heating public buildings. Some more alchemy-minded fellows use this mysterious "Electricity" to draw out Aluminum, the rarest and most valuable metal of them all.
However, New Earth is very young, (Still has dragons and dinosaurs, Psuedo-England actually has polar bears and ferns all over the broader plains) and doesn't really have any fossil fuels. Whale oil is used a bit, but since whales are now magical, if not also prehistoric behemoths, actually killing a whale and taking its oil is a downright Herculean feat of foolhardiness and expensiveness. Whaling is a thing that happens by accident for the survival of the crew when an old and/or weakened whale breaks off from their herd to hunt whatever moving thing they thing they can keep up with. (Which often results in "Maneaters", which are generally avoided until they starve, or hunted down by fleets if they get too close to the coast.) In other words, all the whale oil they get is either an accident or harvested from some poor whaley bastard that washed up on the beach.
Therefore, they've had enough time to invent "Steampunk" technology, but their methods of industry, society, and warfare remain firmly rooted in the 1700s, because modern power sources either don't exist, or they take their sweet time generating enough power to get a city-wide grid working. Anyway, that's how I'm writing off the fact that this place presumably has been in that weird technological renaissance for thousands of years without jumping off into an industrial revolution. Still don't know how I'm going to explain the lack of innovation in guns, but I'm sure you guys can help me with that.
Anyway, the thing I've come here to ask you guys about is airships!
Yup, they're not just the old exploration devices your Uncle Verne used to ramble about. Part of the reason I chose this period is because the concepts and designs people came up with before we started making combustion engines were pretty fucking metal. Da Vinci's tank was pretty badass before Assassin's creed ruined it. And hell, look at this fucking thing:
And hell, even if it meant all of Europe would eventually be France, it'd still be badass to have the English Channel be fought over like this:
Anyway, back to airships. This is how I'm thinking they'll work, feel free to jump in at any point and offer corrections or criticisms. Sometimes I make holes in my logic that befuckle the story, and I aspire to have a Stryker-like understanding of the technogeekology in my story!
1. Airships can only really move with the wind, since they don't have engines or propellers to propel themselves. With wings and sails, they can fly with or against the wind, and turn using their momentum, but flying across wind, or moving in slow winds, can become tricky business and leave them stuck, sort of like water ships, but arguably floatier and more dangerous.
2. Because they create a helluva lot less drag in the air, broadsides are avoided, because it can send them "sliding" into other ships in their formation and knocking them off course. Usually cannons are fired just a few at a time, or formations break up and fly into the enemy, so they can fire cannons on both sides simultaneously and not push themselves around by accident.
3. They're big and slow, have a lot of hull space, and don't really fight each other all that well without leaving themselves open to massive damage, so from a tactical application standpoint they're used mainly to bomb fortifications, bring paratroopers behind enemy lines or on enemy flanks, and otherwise just rain shit on people from above.
4. There are very few ways to fight off this air force without betting on the notion that your crew will blow the other guys up before they blow up you. (Unless you're the Psuedo-Russia of Middle Earth. The Tsardom has goddamn dragons.) One common strategy between ships is to try and fly above the enemy and drop paratroopers down on top of their ship, so they can take the ship in close combat possibly by surprise. The big problem with this is that balloons are round, and it's hard to keep your hot air balloon hot at higher-than-average altitudes.
5. Another balloon combat strategy is to attach big fuckin' blades to the belly of your ship and then ram into the other guy's balloon. This can result in a hilarious bout of slow and meticulous manuevering as one crew desperately tries to get higher than the other before ramming.
6. Balloons are made of pretty durable material, and usually damage from a volley of rifles and/or field cannons will result in the ship's slow, usually harmless descent back to earth if it gets severe enough. Therefore, cannon crews and gunmen are encouraged to keep their sights on grounded targets, since by the time they're in range of most ammunition, the most they can do is put a de-facto fort full of angry marines and sky-sailors on the ground directly in front of them. (Or worse, behind them!) so attacks against airships need to be more or less immediately demoralizing and destructive. Therefore, large anti-air mortars that cause dangerously big holes in balloons and ships, cannons and mortars with explosive rounds, or, in the case of Psuedo-China, boulder catapults and fucking Lord-of-the-Rings triple ballistas, are kept on towers, walls, and hilltops as a countermeasure against airships.
7. They have sort of steel skis around the bottom to absorb harsher-than-average landings and stay upright. Like Helicopters, but big and pretty long. However, since steel is very heavy, the more "safety" you want to have in that regard, the slower your ship will go and the lower your max altitude will be. So big ships, like sky-traders and troop transports, will have big skis, but fighters and bombers will be smaller and have little skis. Tourist and pleasure ships will be small and have large skis, which will allow middling speed and altitude but lots of safety, which is what Tourists usually pay for anyway.
Does this sound practical, from a fantasy warfare standpoint? Does any of this not make sense? (And by that, I mean in-world-sense, not "Sent, you're a stream-of-consciousness fucktard and I can't be arsed to pay attention to anything you're saying" sense.)
