Discuss the latest article by @AndyC here
Trying to keep things "balanced" so that I can have my Congreve-rocket-spewing air battleships without them just murdering everything on the ground when not opposed by enemy airships, or being so fragile that they're useless, has been one of the bigger pains in the neck with Broken Lance's wordbuilding. Almost enough to make me want to ditch the things in the rewrite, but they're so damn cool...
17th century barrel bombs(alongside fletchettes) are pretty much their main anti-surface weapon. Rockets and swivel guns are their main air-to-air weapon.They're launching Congreves; with a weapon that terrible they're already balanced. A barrel bomb with a retarding fin would get you more bang for your buck, and odds are would be more accurate too.
That was the conclusion (with the addendum that airships don't actually use hydrogen-it's a fictional magical compound) I eventually came to after much overthinking things. They're also horribly expensive and vulnerable to bad weather, so no-one wants to risk their small airship fleets when they don't have to.A few thoughts.
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Usually, if one side has a weapon system and platform, the other side will quickly develop a counter to it.
17th century barrel bombs(alongside fletchettes) are pretty much their main anti-surface weapon. Rockets and swivel guns are their main air-to-air weapon.
The swivels are mostly for shooting wyverns, war-dragons and miscellaneous flying critters, basically acting as point defence loaded with grapeshot. The rockets tend to be fired en-masse, and a variety of gimmick rockets are floating around. Airships haven't been around that long in the setting, so everyone is still throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.By the point in time you'd actually be in a position to hit something with a low their weight cannon, my honest thought would be to just launch grapnels and board. You can't throw enough chain from the average falconet swivel gun to really garuntee traumatic framing damage, and I'm reasonably certain unless you hit a structural member you wouldn't set off a Congreve with a good head of steam on it. Those things had rather robust fuses, and I know that much better and more sensitive fuses had trouble detonating on doped fabric IRL. Your best bet may very well be a mortar bomb, but then there's the finicky issue of launching one. Considering the lengths the Royal Navy ships went to with using them on bombard ships, they'd make a good general purpose weapon with the caveat you need a good fuse cutter.
I've long thought that the ASW role of Airships has been criminally underutilised in OTL and in AH writing.