Lord Pendragon
First Post
Triggered Elemental summons could help. Air elementals would be great aerial defenders and water elementals make fine firefighters.
That's also a sweet idea, particular the water elemental firefighters!
Triggered Elemental summons could help. Air elementals would be great aerial defenders and water elementals make fine firefighters.
Protecting an airship is tricky. At first you should define what is the biggest threat you want to defend against as not every strategy defends against every enemy.
Against boarders and smaller flying monsters a closed airship instead of one with an open deck would fare well. Just don't forget several hatches to get people out when needed and observation cupolas both on the top and bottom of the ship. The downside of such a setup is that it will limit your weapon arcs extremely.
This is a good point, I'll have to start looking into how we can protect them.The propellers are an obvious weak spot and sadly you can't put much armor on them. Increase their hardness through magic as good as you can.
Running away (or ramming) also does not seem to be an option as bound elementals are likely much faster than your propeller design,
Misdirection is probably the best solution with invisibility and fog spells.
Hrm. Considering that we have two maxed out engineers, I wonder if it'd be possible to rebuild the propellers so that they can be folded in against the hull during combat. That could make them easier to protect...
Get some way to quickly cross the distance to the enemy ship - far faster than flying there. Your best defense against enemy airships is to send PCs onto their decks. Perhaps develop a method of quickly freeing the enemy ship's bound elemental. Then you can both knock them out of the sky and further your ethos of freeing the elemental slaves.
But will also make you a sitting duck. Without speed and maneuverability you already lost the combat as ship to ship engagements are always about better positioning.
Unless you find a good way to retain speed and maneuverability without the propellers a monitor design, a big, long range weapon on a turret might be preferable to the normal short range weapons or airships.
At high levels you can use Wall of Force to block attacks.
Indeed. We also have both a monk and magus in the party, so by mid levels we should be able to Dimension Door to an enemy ship through Walls of Force to wreak havoc. Then again, they could very well have similar individuals. Of course, it just wouldn't be fun if nobody was mixing it up in hand-to-hand.Problem is, so can the enemy, making a monitor design rather useless at range (except for very big guns) when the WoF is anchored to the ship (Skull&Shackles apparently has rules for that). Ballista Bolts of Disintegration seems like a good investment for offense.
Even as a monitor, you still need some close range weapons. Defense against enemies above you it a problem as most mundane weapons of non modern technology level do not have enough force behind them to travel very far upwards, while bombs fall down rather easily.
Btw, about what size of a ship are we talking?
Oh yeah, and Spell Immunity to Disintegrate. Otherwise your ship will have big holes in it in short order.