Notable Military Airships


Juggernaut III: The world's most recently built flagship, the Juggernaut is also the most modern. It so drained the resources of the Seeker Empire that it is said that an entire additional fleet could have been built in its place. Nearly two thousand slaves were worked to death during its construction, thousands more maimed, and two hundred slain when Asmodean had his new ship baptized in blood.

The sequel to the Juggernaut II, the Seeker's first airship, the newest Juggernaut is a product of radical design, and bares not even a passing resemblance to any traditional airships. From below, it looks like a gigantic, eight-pointed star. The center of this star is the 'ship' itself, which looks more like an orb, lined with dozens of war spikes. Well over two hundred feet wide and nearly as tall, this central structure is extremely well armored and can hold upwards of 800 men in a garrison to fire through the crenellated hulls. It is also in this central structure that the crystal engine is found. It houses only one humongous engine, a crystal of well over fifteen square feet, powered constantly by some of Asmodean's most cruelly punished prisoners of war, elven and wingly magi whose energies were now harnessed to destroy their own people. At least twenty prisoners are hooked onto the crystal engine at a time, though there is room for at least sixty.

The eight points of the star are the eight magical cannons. Situated slightly below the central structure, each of these is a long, thin pyramid of runed metal, ten feet wide at the base and fifty feet long. Within these armored shells lie the thin rods of crystal that are the magical cannons, and the gear system (designed, ironically, by goblins) that allows each of the magical cannons of the Juggernaut their independent rotation. The cannons have enough movement so that four of them could conceivably target one target at once or eight different targets at a time. Since each of the magical cannons is an independent structure, they could be destroyed without harming the central structure at all.

It is hard to name a weakness for the Juggernaut III, but it does have one major blind spot. If one was to stand directly beneath the central structure, the only armaments that could fire at you would be the magical cannons, which would have a hard time rotating fast enough to fire at an airship of great speed. It is conceivable to have a smaller airship fly directly beneath the central structure and, in the few moments before the magical cannons targeted it, unleash everything it had on the underbelly of the Juggernaut. However, it is at this point where the armor is thickest, and a maneuver such as that would be suicidal to say the least.

Thorne: The second-strongest vessel in the Red Armada, the Thorne is the flagship of the Violet Knight Templar, Deloss. It is shaped like a round-bottomed conventional ship, and is configured not to carry troops, but support airships in its holding bays, allowing any strike force containing the Thorne to outlast any other fleet in the sky. Deloss is nothing if not a technophile, so all the latest and greatest of the Weapon Project's innovations can be found aboard, from the spike cannon off the prow of the vessel to the Aerial Weapon Bays on either side of the bridge to the auxiliary ramming engines aft.

It is powered by three sorcerous engines and contains sufficient gas chambers to, in case of emergency, let the ship crash-land with a minimum of damage should the engines and their backups be destroyed.

Its armament is cutting-edge and extensive, from the Molten Cannon turrets mounted fore and aft to pierce hulls and detonate gas chambers to the small chambers at the bottom of the ship filled with Rotmist gas bombs, perfectly positioned to be rained on cities and armies below.

The Thorne suffers from two major flaws. Without support from other airships, its lack of troops and crenellation result in difficulty repelling boarding parties, and the experimental nature of many of the weapons aboard can result in catastrophic explosions in whatever weapon Deloss was seeking to terrify with.

Draco: Flagship of the Red Faction, and transport of the Voice of Rein, the Draco has come a long way since its humble beginnings as the airship of the twin generals of the Dilosian Army.

The Rebellion was cutting-edge airship technology two hundred and fifty years ago; Goblin technicians had just discovered the way to armor lift bags without sacrificing the ability to remain aloft, and were experimenting with different arrangements for maximum defensibility and lift capacity.

It was pure chance that the ship assigned to Rein and Nol took the shape of an enormous wing, but time and countless renovations have elaborated on whatever long-dead goblin first conceived an airship specifically made to drop cargo to the earth below.

Draco is a masterwork to behold, as the ship's primary duty has never been combat. Its task is to transport and impress, and both tasks it performs admirably. Engineers have added an additional cargo compartment beneath the great wing, and a purely ornamental observation window atop it. Artisans have carved the face of a dragon, with the observation window set as its eyes, into the prow of the vessel. Ornamental claws surmount the landing struts, and lines protruding from the swept V of the wing have turned a crude mockery of a creature of the air into a vessel that looks as though it was born, not made to fly.

Ornamentation, however, is not the only purpose of the sleek lines that cover the Draco. Though some are picked out in silver, and others in gold, most are of melted and reforged elemental crystal.
A skeleton of emerald lines the cargo hold and transport chambers, sorcerously rendering them stronger than ten times the weight in armor that an airship can safely carry.
A thin sheet of ruby lies just below the surface, and just above the lift bags, guarding them from any weapons designed to ignite the volatile gas within.
Lines of topaz form the leading edges of the great wing, increasing the great vessel's speed beyond that expected of a ship of anywhere near the same size.
And practically a tenth of the airship's hull is amethyst, to render the minds of those within utterly unreadable by those who aim using the mind, not mere sight.

The weaponry of the Draco follows the precedent set by its armor: hellishly expensive and hellishly powerful. The amethysts studding the ship's hull are used for basic defense, but its defining weapons are only two; the Scourge and the Dragonsbreath Cannon.

The Scourge is the name Weapon Project scientists gave to the chains that can be fired from multiple apertures lining the ship designed for the sole purpose of being electrocuted as soon as they make contact with a nearby vessel... or boarder. Over half the ship's carrying capacity is devoted to this weapon's ammunition, which doubles as armor in case of emergency.

The Dragonsbreath was the crowning glory of the Weapon Project's first ten years under Rythe. Since the War of the Apocalypse, magic cannon had been standard issue on Armada airships, but logistical problems prevented them from increasing in firepower past a certain point, at which point they tended to explode violently.

Then an unremembered Ercian magician came up with the idea of creating a chamber designed solely to amplify a spell already cast, not to aid a mage in casting a spell that would normally be beyond him.

The Dragonsbreath chamber is a room made almost entirely of elemental rubies, with diamonds located at four of the nexi of the pentahedronal shape the crystals form.

At the fifth, the chamber opens to the sky.

The first testing of the Dragonsbreath Cannon burned a crater five hundred feet deep and sixty feet wide into an island off the coast of Ercus.

Monetary reasons have stopped the spread of the Dragonsbreath technology more effectively than Rythe's injunction of total secrecy regarding its construction; it is too expensive to research and develop to be worth the time and effort. With the resources required to build the Dragonsbreath, a ship can be outfitted with twenty Magic Cannon to far more total devastating effect.

The Draco was designed with its cardinal weakness in mind; its reliance on magic for superiority can be countered by a sufficiently powerful antimagic.

The solution of Rythe and Kalethus Rendich was simple: make sure no antimagic powerful enough to defeat it exists.

Deploying the Draco is prohibitively expensive in terms of magepower, the chief reason it is usually only used for transport purposes... but every year, there is a great competition held among the Crimson Knights to find the greatest mage of Ercus loyal to Rein. And his duty is to man the Dragonsbreath Cannon.

To destroy the Draco would be to deal the Dragon Empire a crushing blow.

But to destroy the Draco would be to face the greatest might, physical and mental, the Empire has to offer.

And the fool who would make that decision has not yet been found.