Skyships

[Celtic_Minstrel]

I am sure I asumed somewhere that fire/air/wind magic is pretty common. Just look at your current army and count how much units with magic fire damage are there. Levitation should be more rare.

Fire magic is almost completely restricted to the human mage line (the seemingly rare Troll Shaman is the sole exception). The only other humans with magic are the dark adepts with their ice magic, shadow magic, etc. Saurians also have ice magic. Arcane is more common, with both elves and merfolk having arcane mages. Dwarves have rune magic, but it seems fairly rare. Orcs have curses, but again, that's not common. And that's more or less all the magic. (I might've missed one or two.) In your army, sure, there might be a fair few mages (especially if you have humans or elves), but your army does not represent the norm for the Wesnoth setting. I think a typical commoner would have no access to magic.

The traditional ship design for skyship is a fail save feature in case the levitation is off. Good for crash landings and such. There is no reason for ship like design what so ever. You could animate a giant carpet if you wish.

Uhh, I don't see how a ship design is any better than whatever other shape you might choose. If that ship falls out of the sky into the ocean, it's probably going to crack open and sink.

Blimps will ease the requirements for levitation a bit. Wind in your favor is mandatory, if you want to get somewhere with a baloon. Please keep in mind how big the blimp would have to be in real physics. Everything else would be magic.

Well yes, the blimp would have to be three or four times larger than the ship's hull.

Since there are only a handfull of skyships around, the design will be asumed to be somehow conservative. But their is allways room for innovators.

I'm... not really sure what you mean here. If there are skyships I'd say there's probably a fair few of them. Once someone makes one, they'll try to make more.

Lets asume you have 4 crystals to fly. You need 3 for controled landing, 2 for an emergency dive with damaged ship, one for a controlled crash with total damage to the ship, but surviveable.

I'm not quite sure why you've chosen these numbers, but whatever.

If you come with a blimp and somebody runs it through you might be toast.

Not entirely true, a smart blimp design would actually be divided into many compartments, so that if one compartment is punctured, the rest still hold air, enough to at least drift down instead of falling. (And puncturing it in the first place wouldn't be easy — a blimp would need to be made from fairly thick, tough material in order to hold against the internal air pressure.)

Anyway, it's not that I particularly dislike the design, just asking why other possible designs seem to have been dismissed.

[Wussel]

I think there was a big text at the beginning about steampunk airships with zeppelin design. If you read, you might find out. About blimps in real live. They are not 3 times the payload in length. They are at least 5 times as long as the payload. (Please do some research and look at pictures of things which fly in the real world.)

That does not sound like a huge difference. Unfortunatlly the real world has 3 dimenison. So 3x3x3 is 27 while 5x5x5 is 125. So your fantsy steampunk blimp would only carry about 20% of the weight in the real world. How will you lift the remaining 80%?

There was the question about 4 crystals. I suppose it can be more for bigger ships and less for smaller. However why do they built modern fun drones the way they do? You may research that as well.

You may have steampunk wesnoth and draw all the art you like for it. For me a fantasy skyship and a steampunk airship is a different thing.

[White_Drag0n]

Just throwing my 5¢ - I think you don't need to follow the real world scale in 1:1. If human's head can take 1/3rd of their heigh, a zeppelin can be a little shorter than usual.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

I think there was a big text at the beginning about steampunk airships with zeppelin design. If you read, you might find out. About blimps in real live. They are not 3 times the payload in length. They are at least 5 times as long as the payload. (Please do some research and look at pictures of things which fly in the real world.)

That "three or four" was not supposed to be hard, rigorous numbers, but rather a vague guesstimate. From what you say here, it sounds like it was a reasonable one. I'm sure the situation is also more complicated than what you describe here. For example, the choice of helium vs hydrogen as a lifting gas (obviously the latter is quite dangerous in real life, but you could imagine some fantastical way around that)... or some fantastical gas that's even lighter than hydrogen, like the hydrium gas from Kenneth Oppel's Airborn series. Or the choice of material for the actual blimp (and how much it ends up contributing to the total weight).

[tr0ll]

Considering that the world of Wesnoth (not WoW(TM) lol) contains flying drakes and gryphons and dragons, air density could be higher or gravity lower. Therefore, the physics constants constraining airships might be more lenient.
Or nasty sea orcs might have captured flying creatures such as sylphs or giant bats for use in lifting large platforms/ships. Voila, crystals not needed!

[Celtic_Minstrel]

Given that we know Wesnoth has fire elementals, and mudcrawlers could be seen as an earth elemental, it seems reasonable to suppose that there also exist air elementals.

[tr0ll]

Doh! of course

[Tad_Carlucci]

I don't know about you, but there is NO WAY I'm getting in an airship which uses an Air Elemental. They are simply too capricious. Who know when one will decide it's had enough and fly off, sending you crashing to the ground. Call me old-fashioned, and I know they're much slower and don't perform well in weather, but I won't get on a ship which doesn't use Crystals.

[ForestDragon]

I don't know about you, but there is NO WAY I'm getting in an airship which uses an Air Elemental. They are simply too capricious. Who know when one will decide it's had enough and fly off, sending you crashing to the ground. Call me old-fashioned, and I know they're much slower and don't perform well in weather, but I won't get on a ship which doesn't use Crystals.

hmmm... how about this: use MOST of the crystals to keep the ship afloat, and the air elementals mostly for acceleration

[Tad_Carlucci]

Yea, great. Well I suppose that finding oneself stuck motionless a few kilometers up in the air, drifting this way and that as the wind blows, is better than crashing to your death. Maybe someone will notice you drifting by and throw a rope. But it seems to me a choice between sudden death from a 'near ground incident' or a long, drawn-out death from thirst and starvation. Not much of a choice, if you ask me.

[tr0ll]

ah but you are not an orc

[Eagle_11]

Pah, peasants. who needs skyships when youve got teleportation and town portals.

[Wussel]

I would asume, humans have maybe 2 or 3 skyships for the king and the mage counsil. Elves might have a small flottila maybe 4 to 6 skyships.

Of course there can be lots of crazy and unsave inventions by crazy inventors. Personally I like the idea of stuffing enslaved air elementals in far to small bags.

I still demand windmagic to be used as means of propulsion. Otherwise you could not stand on an open deck in mid air. And you could not stear at all.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

I find that a bizarre theory, personally. I'm sure it could be justified by lore, of course, but I think that, if a civilization can make airships, they're probably going to want to make lots of them and use them for trade and transport. I'd expect the majority of airships to be owned by merchants (or pirates!).

Why wouldn't you be able to steer without wind magic? If I understand correctly, there's usually air movement at higher altitudes, so you'd never be short of wind. There may be a little trouble in putting that wind to good use, admittedly (I can't think of anything that doesn't involve sails). It is possible to sail against the wind though, by following a zigzag path sort of perpendicular to its motion (the technical term is "tacking" as I recall).

Not that there's anything wrong with using wind magic to steer; it's be more convenient if you can just tell the wind to blow in whatever direction you wish to sail.

[tr0ll]

Tacking requires something to slide a keel against, which you dont have equivalent in open air unless you use long lassos and mountaintops or something.
Normal economics says skyships and people who can bind them might not be very common.