Air Ship Fighters ?

[puddingwrestler]

A book you might want to look up is 'the wooden spaceships' by Bod Shaw. It's the sequel to 'The ragged astronauts' (which I have not read, I picked this one up from the opshop). IN the book, Shaw imagines two worlds which orbit each other and are linked by a common atmosphere (sort of dumbell shaped if you catch my drift). In the first book, a plague forces a migration from Land (planet A) to Overland (planet B). Since there is an atmosphere linking them, this can be done by AIRSHIP! The book is Science Fantasy - a lot of scientificaly plausible stuff, but fantastical semi-magic things are required to get it to work with the primitive tech base of the people in the book.

In 'The Wooden Spaceships', the inhabitants of Land have developed an imunity to the plague and are trying to invade Overland. Overland uses airships to deploy aerial fortresses in the zero-gravity zone between the two planets from which they launch fighters. The fighters are basically just jet engines with some control surfaces since they are designed to operate in zero gravity, but inside an atmosphere.

A rather entertaining idea eh?

I'm about 2/3 finished in the book so if anyone has read it DON'T GO POSTING SPOILERS!

[NARSES2]

I now have vissions of an "Age of Sail" type battle fleet, with Ships of the Line, Frigates, Cutters etc.

A kind of 1920's Trafalgar. You could probably adapt some wargames rules for the Trafalgar period to suit, updated with WWI weapons stats ?

Don't forget to add in the third dimension, altitude.

Airship to airship combat would most closely resemble combat between submerged submarines, but with
the advantage of being able to see your opponent.

Also remember folks, sails don't work for propulsion on balloons and airships.
You can't sail an airship like you sail a boat. 

Jon

I can see the resemblence to sub to sub combat, but I can see parallels to "combat in the age of sail" - you would for instance have to take the wind into account and probably differeing barometric pressures. I'm definately going to try and build a couple of examples - small scale with bits from some Skytrex WWI ships etc

[Jschmus]

There's a little about airships in S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers.  In that scenario, North America is struck by a comet during the Victoria Era, and the British Empire only survives by relocating the government and the bulk of the populace to the Indian Raj.  The novel picks up the story of an Army officer in the region of Pakistan in the early 21st C.  Airships are the main form of long-distance transport.  Machine guns are a recent innovation.  You get to see a heavier-than-air aircraft in the story, but they are a very late invention, and regarded as barbaric.  "Civilized" people travel in a stately fashion by airship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peshawar_Lancers

[cthulhu77]

Intriguing, to say the least.  This is going to dovetail well with the RASS Dagon I am building.

[Mossie]

Also remember folks, sails don't work for propulsion on balloons and airships.
You can't sail an airship like you sail a boat. 

Jon

But you can use oars!  Some of the earliest airships used oars for propulsion or maneuvering.  While propellers were a much better bet they might suit steam punk style sci-fi or classical era airships.  Greek or Roman airships, lifted by hydrogen discovered by accident during an alchemy experiment, rowed through the air by teams of slaves!

You could use sail type surfaces for maneuvering & braking.  Deploy 'sails' on either side to cause drag to give an airship a much quicker rate of turn.  Hybrid designs could help give more modern designs extra lift.

Rather than as with fighter aeroplanes, I can see small airships being used to attack much larger airships in a simillar way to torpedo boats with some kind of heavy weapon.  Large guns or cannon, maybe ballista?

[puddingwrestler]

If you go over to the conceptships blog right now, you will find some nifty aero frigates. If you leave it a while, well, they'll be somewhere further down the page I guess.

[jcf]

Some Verne-sian airships and other machines:
http://www.freewebs.com/steamnoir/aircraft.htm


Oh yeah, he uses cardboard. 

Jon

[NARSES2]

But you can use oars!  Some of the earliest airships used oars for propulsion or maneuvering.  While propellers were a much better bet they might suit steam punk style sci-fi or classical era airships.  Greek or Roman airships, lifted by hydrogen discovered by accident during an alchemy experiment, rowed through the air by teams of slaves!

Rather than as with fighter aeroplanes, I can see small airships being used to attack much larger airships in a simillar way to torpedo boats with some kind of heavy weapon.  Large guns or cannon, maybe ballista?

Oh bugger Simon I'm now thinking of Trimerene airships. I saw a demo game at a show recently which was using Fantasy sailing ships and galleys armed with laser canon 

Now you can get resin/white metal galleys in small scale, so fit a gas-bag and you are away.

As for small airships with large guns, that's what I was thinking. A single 6" or 8" weapon

[Weaver]

I think airships would always lack the manoueverability to work like fighter planes, especially the fixed gun single seat type. More likely to evolve into something like a wet navy ship with a multi-person crew and trainable weapons mountings. There are a lot of pics of how people expcted them to evolve during the later part of the 19th century in SciFi art, some very elegant, and some looking like nothing but flying submarines! Michale Moorcock wrote an excellent alternate history in which your scenario came to pass, full of swashbuckling airshipmen, russian revolutionaries and massive aerial naval engagements (Russian revolution never happened until the 70s, and the British empire still covered most of the world as I recall). I think it's called the 'Sky Lords' trilogy or some such, but I appear to have leant my copy to my brother and thus am unablke to check the title.
His airships where made from light weight plastics allowing considerably greater size, super structure and weapons fits.

The Moorcock books were The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar, collectively known as the Oswald Bastable Trilogy after their chief protagonist. Only the first one features airships heavily, since they take place in three close, but different, parrallel universes. The point of the books is to take someone from the heyday of the British Empire (Bastable) and confront him with his confident (and reasonable for 1880) dreams and expectations for it coming unstuck in different ways.

The airships in the first book have carbon fibre structures and fight with recoilless cannon and machine-guns. Technical details are IIRC, pretty thin. The "revolutionary" (in every sense) development which defeats them is heavier-than-air fighters, of course, their fall being symbolic of the fall of the Empire which, like them, has gone on past it's time....

Good books, easily and cheaply picked up second-hand, and well worth a read for anyone on here.

Oh, and in the unlikely event that they were ever filmed, the opening theme music should be the London Symphony Orchestra's "classical" version of Paul McCartney's Jet, from the album Rock Classics. The incidental and closing music should be Layla from the same album. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlord_of_the_Air

[GTX]

My take on an airship fighter:

The hero of the Battle of Britain - the Boulton Paul Defiant Corvette class airship.  Operating as part of His Majesty's Royal Air Fleet (RAF), these were instrumental in defending Britain from Hitler's/Goering's Luftwaffe Zeppelin attacks of 1940:



Regards,

Greg

[PR19_Kit]

Greg,

AWESOME idea! 

Now how big would that be in 1/72? Would I have to build a new garage to display it?

[GTX]

Greg,

AWESOME idea! 

Now how big would that be in 1/72? Would I have to build a new garage to display it?

That really depends upon your garage!  It wouldn't be that big - use the real world Defiant as a reference for scale.

BTW, in case it wasn't already obvious, the side engines are on small 360° rotatable pylons for better agility/directional control.  I still figure the main armament would be turret mounted though.  Perhaps some sort of aerial equivalent to the torpedo (yes, I know - a missile!) would be carried though.

Regards,

Greg

[PR19_Kit]

That really depends upon your garage!  It wouldn't be that big - use the real world Defiant as a reference for scale.

BTW, in case it wasn't already obvious, the side engines are on small 360° rotatable pylons for better agility/directional control.  I still figure the main armament would be turret mounted though.  Perhaps some sort of aerial equivalent to the torpedo (yes, I know - a missile!) would be carried though.

Greg,

Still bigger than my car I think! 

So that's three Merlins to shove it along, and a bit of wing lift from the pylon mounted side engines, hmmmmmmm. How about some underside defence with a ventral turret as well? Of course only Australians or New Zealanders need apply for the gunners job! 

[philp]

Looks almost 1/144th scale as drawn, 9.5 inches, quick conversion 19" in 1/72nd and about 5" arcross at the widest. 
Yeh, that is doable.  Course, you got to hack up 3-4 Defiants but if you are using the Airfix kit...

[GTX]

That really depends upon your garage!  It wouldn't be that big - use the real world Defiant as a reference for scale.

BTW, in case it wasn't already obvious, the side engines are on small 360° rotatable pylons for better agility/directional control.  I still figure the main armament would be turret mounted though.  Perhaps some sort of aerial equivalent to the torpedo (yes, I know - a missile!) would be carried though.

Greg,

Still bigger than my car I think! 

So that's three Merlins to shove it along, and a bit of wing lift from the pylon mounted side engines, hmmmmmmm. How about some underside defence with a ventral turret as well? Of course only Australians or New Zealanders need apply for the gunners job! 

I did n't think there were that many of these (see below), around:



Video here.

Regards,

Greg