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Airships: Part Two - Military Airships

The airborne carriers were always a wonderful concept to my mind, and they aquitted themselves well in Fleet Problems, but the devil is that they had massive sustainment issues both short and long term; the former in that aviation fuel was a very limited store, and later that a flying airship carrier with four planes cost about as much as a twelve pack of Catalinas and a seaplane tender. That said, if one had liberty to mount weapons as they saw fit, I'd happily engage a Spitfire nose to nose- by the time his 20mm cannons come about, my Bofors or possibly a 3"/50 will have made a mincemeat of him. The structural budget can be there, if an engineer was willing to accept certain limitations on the gun armament.

That all said though C3ISTAR just sounds like goobdlygook. C3 was perfectly fine, and this newfangled ISTAR sounds like someone in a radio Hut trying to buy a new transceiver set or somesuch.
 
I know airships value as persistent surveillance platforms-but have to admit I want to see an absurdist dogfight between airships.

There'd be Top Gun-style fast music as these two lummoxes fly around very slowly.
 
I've been thinking - it may be a bit too technical, but to aid authors using airships, maybe I should do an article with a (very) brief overview (almost a bluffers guide) to air navigation, air meteorology, and stuff like how to identify the inversion layer (and the difference above an below it), what thermic air is like to fly through, and the like?

Obviously the next article is civilian airships, but the nav/mat/feel of the air thing could be useful?
 
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...
 
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...

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.
 
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.
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.

A few thoughts.
...
Usually, if one side has a weapon system and platform, the other side will quickly develop a counter to it.
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.
 
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.

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.
 
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.
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.

Airship fights tend to be a lot of fireworks with nothing to show for it and then everything is on fire when a magazine gets hit/a rocket with hooks on the tailstick gets stuck in a gasbag/a wyvern rips open the envelope and starts spraying burning venom everywhere.
 
I've long thought that the ASW role of Airships has been criminally underutilised in OTL and in AH writing.

That's more because ASW is boring. You're sitting there on convoy duty, just banging away on your sonar set or dropping the occasional sonobuoy to make sure everything still works. Putting it in a K-blimp with a MAD doesn't really make it better.
 
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