Ways to make an airship fly?

[VoidAdept]

I'm thinking of adding airships to my campaign world. It got me thinking... what are some ways to make an airship actually fly? So far I've managed to come up with:

- Propellers/rotors
- Hot air or lighter-than-air gas
- Neutral-buoyancy or lighter-than-air materials (wood, metal, etc.)
- Magical treatment of mundane materials (I think the Princess Ark had a dragon's essense or hide bonded to it, IIRC)
- A magical item, possibly built into the hull
- Bound air elementals/djinni (doesn't Eberron use this?)

Any others?

I'm just concerned about getting the ship off the ground. Steering it's a completely different matter.

 

[Meloncov]

I'm thinking of adding airships to my campaign world. It got me thinking... what are some ways to make an airship actually fly? So far I've managed to come up with:

- Propellers/rotors
- Hot air or lighter-than-air gas
- Neutral-buoyancy or lighter-than-air materials (wood, metal, etc.)
- Magical treatment of mundane materials (I think the Princess Ark had a dragon's essense or hide bonded to it, IIRC)
- A magical item, possibly built into the hull
- Bound air elementals/djinni (doesn't Eberron use this?)

Eberron uses a combination of these. Airships are made of an only slightly heavier than air wood, but are also dependent on magical treatments of other materials and a bound elemental (not necessarily air; fire and lightning elementals are used as well.O

 

[Imperialus]

In a now defunct campaign I used the idea of a special type of metal that when heated became much lighter than air. Relatively small amounts of it could be interconnected throught the structure of the object you wanted to fly and then heated making the whole thing lighter than air. This allowed for anything from a flying dinghy with a little campfire in the middle to a huge citadel ripped from the earth and powered by a huge furnace heating the metal throughout the structure.

 

[AuraSeer]

Mechanical wings
Animated object wings
Tethered flying creatures (twenty eyeless beholders strapped to the deck)
Rocket effects, like gust of wind

If you have a very loose definition of "flying," give the ship enormous grasshopper legs and a set of parasails. It leaps hundreds of feet into the air, glides on air currents until it touches down, then leaps again.

 

[jdrakeh]

Snipping an idea from Tenkuu no Escaflowne, sky galleons could have hulls crafted of a rare stone that is highly magnetized, causing it (and any vessel that it is attached to) to float above the world's surface. This also means that there are "treacherous skies" littered with "ore fields" of the stone in question -- such fields can obviously cause great damage to sky galleons, as individual stone shards would be attracted to the ships' hulls, likely being propelled toward them at high speeds, effectively functioning as natural cannon shot.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

HG Wells had a character who created an alloy called Cavorite. It created an anti-gravity field, and the A-G field's strength depended upon the angle of the alloy relative to the force of gravity.

Space 1889 used something like that for human airships and a natural substance called Liftwood to do the same for Martian ones.

Terry Brooks used magical crystals that were charged by solar energy in his later Shanarra books to provide lift for his flying ships.

And of course, the bound spirits/elementals thing is pretty popular, as is pure magic.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The idea of a rock that is lighter than air is pretty popular and has a lot of mythohistory in it. It also allows you to have flying islands and the like -- islands rich in this lighter-than-air rock.

In Final Fantasy 12, for instance, Airships run on this lighter-than-air magic rock, called "skystone." Only, the magic powering it can't work in certain areas, called "Jagd." Because airships are fairly ubiquitous and a great way to keep law in a rich empire, jagd become lawless lands where no authority is enforced and monsters run unchecked.

 

[Arkhandus]

Eberron uses bound Air Elementals to make ships float in the air, IIRC, and bound Fire Elementals for actual propulsion.

In my Aurelia homebrew D&D setting, the Aeragi race (a custom race of mine) use secretive means to produce, find, or refine a crystal called Levantine, which levitates when heated above normal temperatures (probably anything above 100 degrees Fahrenheit). It's an unusually resilient crystal made in the Elemental Plane of Air, used mainly in fist-sized and skull-sized chunks in various parts of a skyship, providing lift to each section of the ship when heated with ordinary or magical flames. Aeragi use simple propellor systems for horizontal propulsion and maneuvering, along with sails and the occasional application of wind magic (Control Wind for instance) or a summoned/called Air Elemental (rarely is it bound though, as it is generally a short term pact or indentured servitude to an Aeragi of some high standing in the Elemental Plane of Air).

A quality Levantine crystal the size of a man's fist will typically support a few thousand pounds, when heated as much as possible with medieval/early-Renaissance technology or sorta-high-level sources of magical flame. An average flame will instead lift a few hundred pounds, and a weak flame will lift only a few dozen pounds at best. Lower-quality Levantine crystals tend to be about half or three-quarters as powerful. Larger crystals are more potent, but no more than twice as effective at best, and are difficult to find (or produce, or refine, whichever the case may be). Only very wealthy individuals or groups can afford quality Levantine, strong and well-made furnaces for heating the many crystals on a skyship, a good propellor system, and sometimes an experienced mage to apply wind magic or summoned elementals for extra speed. Somewhat-less-wealthy folk may be able to afford a small skyship with a handful of low-grade, fist-sized Levantine crystals, some small furnaces no better than a village blacksmith's, and simple, labor-intensive, man-powered propellor units.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

In my homebrew I have airships that look like actual ships, but with 4 sets of sails in a top/bottom/left/right configurration. The wood is from a nearby parellel dimension which is almost entirely ocean and in which the level of the ocean is a couple of miles up in the home dimension. The wood exists partially on the home and partially on the alternate dimension - the buoyancy forces from the ocean world make the ships want to maintain an altitude of a few miles up with regard to the home dimension. This has some implication for play. Disabled ships tend to rise to a certain height rather than fall. There is a definite ceiling for altitude. Wind and current on the alternate world can affect your heading. Weather or monsters on the alternate world occaisionally have an effect of play. It's a little disconcerting to see your ship grow a hole for no apparent reason then start to sink.

I played with the idea of having the ships only work at the height of the ocean on the alternate world, which would mean all skyports would be on mountains at a particular height, but in the end opted for a helm that would allow mages to affect the strength of the connection to the alternate world and hence altitude.

 

[amethal]

Bastion Press's Airships uses magic engines.

These can be powered by a variety of mundane and not so mundane methods. Cheapest is a wood burning engine, but for those who like to live dangerously you can have a volatile oil burning engine.

Those with loose morals can power it from dead bodies, or the life force of living creatures.