Ways to make an airship fly?

[bodhi]

(twenty eyeless beholders strapped to the deck)

That is awesomely creepy.

BBEG's mobile throne, powered by beholders, blinded, eyestalks ripped out, teeth broken or yanked, all shackled in steel cages welded around them. A flying slave barge that makes you feel sorry for beholders.

Or.

The beholders worship their ruler, such that the carriage bearers sacrifice their sight for the honor of service. This BBEG inspires not fear, but fanatical loyalty.

Mmmm. Yoinked!

 

[takyris]

A few ideas that haven't been tossed around:

1) Once loaded, the airship and everything on it is turned into gaseous form.

2) Once loaded, the airship and everything on it is made incorporeal.

3) The airship isn't floating -- it's teleporting very short distances (inches, if that) several times per second, so that anyone on deck feels a constant tremble from the ship doing these little lurches and beginning to fall and then getting teleported back up a few inches into the air. (All fear the the Dimensional Anchor spell!)

4) The airship hovers by the power of a constant-application of a specially tailored "Repel" type spell (like Repel Metal, Repel Life, etc) that is cast every round, and can be tailored for different distances to control altitude. This means that ships cannot go under each other without catastrophic consequences, and ship battles involve trying to maneuver above your opponent so that your own repulsion field slams into that ship, causing it to fly up and hit your very well-protected hull, which likely kills anyone on the top deck of the victim ship and definitely wreaks havoc with the sails and mast.

5) The ship uses a combination of magically created matter (think Decanter of Endless Water) and matter destruction (think Sphere of Annihilation) to generate vast amounts of force. If the drive hold has ten decanters set into the hull and firing water at full force, with a Sphere of Annihilation to catch and remove the water, the ship is lifted into the air by the force of the decanters.

 

[WayneLigon]

HG Wells had a character who created an alloy called Cavorite. It created an anti-gravity field, and the A-G field's strength depended upon the angle of the alloy relative to the force of gravity.

In the one campaign I have that had flying ships, I used something very much like that.

I love Imperialus' idea. I am probably either going to steal that wholesale, or adapt it into the 'Cavorite' idea.

 

[lukelightning]

It's easy to make an airship float. All you need is an airship, rootbeer, and some icecream.

 

[Klaus]

Mmmm. . . shades of Arduin. I love it!

Lost me there. What's this Arduin?

Just to give a broader view of the setting, the main races were the subterranean Dock Alfar (you could say they're a mix of elf and dwarf), the Chevaliers (centaurs with a medieval society: full plate, jousts and stuff), humans (with a mercantile/Renaissance society, magic-depleting pistols and the big inventors of the setting), the ren long (dragon/human hybrid emissaries of a distant eastern kingdom beset by fiends) and the aquillan (magic-enginnered griffon-descended race that escaped slavery and established their own lands, the Sky Tribes).

 

[diaglo]

Any others?

take a lesson from Jack in the Beanstalk and a paraphrase of the classic Heinz beans jingle.


Beans, beans the magical fruit
the more you eat them
the more you toot
the more you toot
the higher you fly
they're magic don't ask why.

 

[lukelightning]

Beans, beans the magical fruit...

I dunno about flying, but at least this jingle correctly identifies beans as being fruit (botanically speaking), not a vegetable.

 

[diaglo]

I dunno about flying, but at least this jingle correctly identifies beans as being fruit (botanically speaking), not a vegetable.

well the real version is musical not magical.

 

[Nadaka]

Gravatite. Its a naturally occuring mineral in my CS, it has functionality similar to some of the other suggestions.

The stone projects a natural directional gravatational field. If two pieces of the material are inverted so that the "down" side faces each other, a propulsive force is generated that can lift the material and ships attached into the air.

Coincedentally this material has been excavated for thousands of years by humans in a place called Dwar. Countless centuries of exposure to increased gravity of the mines has caused the human populations height to be stunted, while thier bodies have become more resilient. These people are now called dwarves.

 

[lukelightning]

There's always upsidaisium from Rockey and Bullwinkle.