Stormonu
NeoGrognard
Scotty/La Forge/Trip Tucker III/Han would be good models for abilities - faster repair, defensive or offensive boosts ("moar power to shields!"). A lot of tropes this come from has the one-shot modification; some "I'm not sure it'll work or blow us up" super power-up (read: spell) gimmick. Think cloaking device (invisibility), Yamato gun (disintegration), Hyperjump (Teleport) and the like. Hell, a sailing ship that can use a modified animate dead to create drones that act as crewmembers, gun crew or boarding marines sounds like a cool ability I'd consider for an Artificer.@Stormonu One thing you touched on is really making me think about the general topic and my aeronaut artificer subclass.
The current build gets basically a magitech speederbike (Star Wars), and can customize it a bit, and can upgrade it at later levels. But, focusing on that makes it hard to put things in that are focused on the artficer themselves.
One idea I had was that you could detach the main gun and use it as a personal power rifle.
What other stuff should the “airship artificer” be able to do? Repair airships faster, give ship systems a boost or THP, cast “self” spells on the ship, like absorb elements?
I feel like I’m just plain overlooking obvious stuff. Perhaps I need to refamiliarise myself with the wotc Star Wars games and how they handled outlaw tech/engineer characters, and think about how to simplify and make it more fantasy.
I'm not too hot on the idea of a detachable gun (can't think of a vehicle off the top of my head that does it, primarily), but it would work on things like transformable mecha (thinking like the VF-1 Valkyrie from Robotech), battlesuits or possibly a "back-up weapon". Toting around a vehicle's main weapon, to me, is on the order of giving out a Buster Sword (or portable Ballista...) to someone in D&D. I think it should be an option/power/slot, but not necessarily an automatic ability.
I think a personal conveyance is a great ability that fits right along the steel defender and battle turret. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on it - treat it like the Paladin's mount for the most part so that the class can still operate in those places where a mount/vehicle wouldn't be prudent. Don't forget that a personal conveyance could be quite small - like a Segway, unicycle, Tenser's Floating Disc (the 4E version), iron man's battlesuit (even it's just the hand repulsors or a rocket pack like mandolarian or rocketeer) and the like.
On Intelligence, KITT was pretty freakin' intelligent, no reason not to allow the vehicle sidekick to not have access to it, even if an average/high intelligence costs a perk/slot. That could bring it up to a sort of sidekick/henchman level.