Airships and their weapons.

This thread was originally for a personal writing project but has grown a little bit beyond that. Feel free to discuss fictional Airships in general.

Given both the open nature of the thread and the site feel free to use the examples here for your use.

edited 25th Mar '15 6:54:38 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Light cannon, in a 20-30mm range, same as the stuff mounted on planes. They inflict a good amount of damage and a hole not easily fixed. Use incendiary rounds for twice the fun.

Also, the same flack that one is likely to find on the ground should probably be adapted onto ships as well.

edited 31st Jul '10 8:52:11 PM by Morgulion

They're also mounted to the side, like ships of old.

Also, have some sort of weapon - grapeshot? - that targets enemy airship's propellers at either side.

They don't use propellers but the grape shot fired at non-enclosed gun mounts or for use against ground targets would be good.

The ships use a engine that effectively pushes or pulls against the earths center of gravity using a an Applied Phlebotinum Alloy. The incendiary rounds would be good because they still have to use generators powered by flammable materials and the engines themselves are prone to overheating if they are damaged or have too much power applied to them. Plus Ammo Stores.

Only first generation of the airships will fire their weapons from the sides until Science Marches On far enough for them to figure out how to make a simple turret for the airships frame and then later a ball turret.

The ships that will have turrets will have "Decks" that are sitting on top of or just below a tubular structure that contains the crew quarters and the guts of the ship. There will be decks that stick out the sides a bit for weapon emplacements and other items.

The Flack rounds could be an interesting thing to add. But as they advance their science their ships will field heavier armor. But it could be useful on lighter ship types and "Air Planes"

edited 8th Mar '13 4:21:11 PM by TuefelHundenIV

You could always design a rail system so heavier weapons won't throw the ships around with their recoil; that way, artillery=style guns could be mounted on ships.

Also, see the Raufoss AP round. You could use that on a larger scale.

edited 31st Jul '10 9:06:09 PM by Morgulion

There's recoil-less rifle rounds in howitzer size. Such as 105mm. I seem to recall an armored vehicle that carried six of these on one turret.

Holy crap i forgot about that round. Nasty little bugger.

Pom Pom Gun

Ha found one that is in the right era. 37mm machine gun.

And im a dork. Der the other wiki has tons of stuff. But any other ideas would be helpful.

Don't be afraid of using tech that is not in use until early in the next war. or unusual weapons that were not widely used. Gas shells will be used late in the war and ship mounted breech loading mortars.

You could always make an AP Bofors style cannon. I think they come in three size currently, 40, 57 and 76 mm.

Another option is to make nimble airships that would fly at high altitudes and drop bombs on their less agile counterparts.

I had thought about that. Basically Air planes, they would also carry rockets or a single large caliber gun.

The Airships have no balloons or propellers and guns will be mounted in your standard turrets and later in ball type turrets.

Tuefuel, could you go into some more detail about how, exactly, these things fly? I mean, going by the idea of an Applied Phlebotinum scheme like you described earlier, why bother with an "airship" at all, when you could just go with something along the lines of a floating castle or flying saucer craft with that sort of anti-gravity technology? I'm just saying, as much as I like Zeppelins from Another World, it kind of feels like you are forcing the technology in your 'verse if they have anti-gravity tech.

Back to the original topic, maybe you could do something along the lines of a Death Ray? I mean, since you already have anti-gravity systems in place, might as well take the weapons a bit further into the future technology levels as well.

edited 31st Jul '10 10:57:44 PM by Bioelectricclam

Yeah, I'm a little confused. At first I thought you were talking about the real world definition of an airship. Now I'm not completely clear on what we're talking about.

I know what he's talking about. Basically, it's an airship, but with a different engine.

Perhaps the very late ones could use an early kind of guided missile (either wire guided or radio guided)?

Also, some kind of discus blade-shot, hook-attached chains, or some other kind of ammunition that can shear canvas well.

Yeah, most of the things we suggested are only good against the hull/deck as the envelope's properties make them ineffective (most missiles' warheads only detonate on hard contact, etc).

Where's that image you linked that had all the airships in it?

^You talking about Castle Wulfenbach?

No Tuefel linked an image over in the aircraft thread in YF that had a bunch.

Id Have to dig around for that image.

Basically the tech uses a mineral that needs to be refined and then made into alloy. The alloy is then shaped in a specific manner to produce the pushing or pulling effect. The power of the affect depends on electrical current passing through the Alloy and its overall shape. The alloy is limited by heat constraints kind of like a resistor in modern circuitry are which limits how much current and what alloys can be used in making the engines.

If it gets to hot the alloy melts and causes a catastrophic engine failure with the alloy portion of the engine becoming deformed and possibly pulling itself apart as the shape changes.

The alloy does not negate the physical mass of the object or its air resistance. Each air ship will have main Neutral buoyancy engine which makes the ship pretty much just sit there and it is then pushed around by the other engines. The cost of this though is that the engines need to be constantly powered by the ships generators. This means the ships need to stop at various fuel stops to stock up their fuel bunkers and take on other supplies.

They won't be anywhere quite as large as Water Born naval vessel as the lighter the ships are overall the easier it is to get them airborne.

Depending on the alloy used for the neutral engine there is a engine weight to max lift weight ratio. I am still working the kinks out of that idea. Ie One pound round engine of Iron Alloy can make 100lbs of weight neutral.

If you go over the neutral weight threshold the ship will start to "sink".

Generators weight, fuel consumption, and overall output will also be limiting factors.

If you have a engine that is heavy and inefficient it will limit how high and how far it is safe to fly the airship. The Cheap lower quality engines will be used for things more along the lines of mail craft and light cargo couriers.

The larger engines and generators will be more expensive both monetarily and resource wise.

There will still be wet naval ships just that their military role will not be as potent as it was in our own history.

They will have more or less the same range as a wet navy ship would but can over land. Mountains will become valuable as fuel and supply depots and sites for defenses.

A flying fortress of any appreciable mass would be difficult and disturbingly expensive to build, float, and keep its fuel bunkers topped off. The airships will be able to land at ground side "ports" so they can shut off their engines and conserve fuel for loading and unloading.

But something like a tethered defense platform with a single weapon or weapon cluster that could be floated whenever the enemy has been spotted in the area.

I will try to dig up that pic I posted in the aircraft thread.

Edit Add

The more efficient and smaller engines will be painfully expensive to the point where only a government can afford them.

Air Ship Fleet Pic

edited 5th Aug '10 5:21:24 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Incendiaries still an option? Fighting a fire on a ship is an issue, even when surrounded by lots of water - smoke obscured vision, has nasty effects on the crew and if it's near anythign that in Transportation Hazard Class 1 (ESPECIALLY 1.1 Mass-Detonating), can really mess up someone's day. Probably just a subset of ammunition you would feed 20mm's, Bofors 40mm's and whatever other weapons of the period you pick. Why settle for punching grapefruit-sized holes in things, when those holes can be on fire, too?

EDIT: And airships won't even be able to shove a pump into the ocean for a ready supply of fire-fighting water, either...

Not to mention, they work well for setting fires on targets on the ground, like fuel dumps.

edited 5th Aug '10 6:22:36 PM by pvtnum11

Actually, for flames, I'd suggest a version of something like this:

A MLRS with incendiary ammo. Even a one-time volley would probably be enough to turn an airship to scrap.

Minus the treads , of course, but the principle is the same. Cannons are also a viable option, as suggested one post above.

edited 5th Aug '10 6:34:04 PM by Morgulion

Incendiaries are indeed the bane of the ships. the API rounds will be the rounds that land the final blow on most ships. But I am working on an idea that will make them less likely to just punch a hole straight through the hole and set something like a internal ammo store or a fuel bunker or engines on fire.

The counter measure will need more research as to what will work.

One thing that comes to mind is something similar to those thermo-baric shoulder fired rockets that they use to take out buildings. Their fuse is set to go through the building, then go off. Just stuff it full of willy pete and you're good to go.

Delayed fuses were common enough I could use them.

There will be rockets they will effectively fill the role of torpedos. An advanced torpedo engine using an alloy engine. Both weapon types will have advantages and disadvantages.

There will be wire guided projectiles as well.

edited 5th Aug '10 8:09:52 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Something you might run into is the fact that they will be seen from afar, long before actual weapons range - unless you simply up the weapons range of course. More son if the spotter is another airship, already elevated high above the ground. Also, I can imagine that since they'll be visible from far off, concealed triple-A sites on the ground will be a big problem, if they were built without the other side knowing about it. Really big gun, rockets, missiles, whatever does the job. To counter that, there's two options - move fast enough to avoid accurate hits, armor the ship well enough so you don't care if they hit, or stay high enough up that rounds will have lost much of their velocity and be rendered inaccurate, or simply out of range, but its only a matter of time before weapons and ammunition are developed that shoot at higher velocities so as to reach the ships.

Water-borne ships have those tall masts in order to see as much as they can before stuff disappears beyond the horizon, and are usually brimming with range-finders, powerful optics for the watch-standers and observation platforms. With an airship, that's as easy as going up in elevation a hundred feet or so. A benefit of being an airship, is that wave action affecting the ship is a thing of the past, so they should make very stable gun platforms, unless gun recoil is powerful enough to induce rolling motion to the ship itself when they're fired - for that reason, the most powerful guns might be placed as close to the center of mass as possible, maybe, that or special gun mounts to dampen recoil, recoiless weapons, or just firing smaller shells at lower velocities.

Naturally, I would imagine that the construction portion of such a ship would be tightly controlled, to reduce the chances that the enemy figures out new construction techniques, where the armor belts are, and where the delicate stuff is stored inside the hull. (and that's why we have national security, dang it- oh sorry, wrong thread)