Ways to make an airship fly?

[Maldin]

There's always upsidaisium from Rockey and Bullwinkle.

::Maldin suddenly lapses into a nostalgia coma::

Denis, aka "Maldin"
=============================
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com

 

[Stormborn]

More ideas:

1) Telekesis or augmented telekensis. "Piolts" who are bred to control ships, if need be with some augmenting materials that allow them to treat the ships as extensions of themselves. This would be great with GR Psychics HB. Add in Psychoportation (or whatever its called) tied to becon stones or landmarks to "warp" all over the place, maybe even from one world to the next.

2) Planar tensions created by bringing something from another plane into the material but only part way. The forces could be carefully controled to provide movement in this plane that had no relationship to geography or other forces.

 

[Pbartender]

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.

Cavorite didn't create anti-gravity fields, but rather it blocked gravity. Thus the characters in the book, The First Men in the Moon, travel to the moon in a giant spherical cavorite pod covered with portholes with cavorite shutters. If you closed all the shutters, whoever was inside was completely shielded from gravity and became weightless. They traveled to the moon by shutting all the earth-side shutters, and opening those shutters pointed toward the moon... thereby "falling" to the moon.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Why complicate things? Have someone research a Fly spell varient that works on objects. How it would be controlled is another matter...

 

[Klaus]

Why complicate things? Have someone research a Fly spell varient that works on objects. How it would be controlled is another matter...

Even easier is to have a ship that is quite similar to a sailing ship, research a variant of Levitate, and steer it with regular winds or with Gust of Wind.

 

[diaglo]

...or with Gust of Wind.

i already mentioned the beans.

 

[Gregor]

In Final Fantasy 12, for instance, Airships run on this lighter-than-air magic rock, called "skystone."

Jack Whyte would be turning in his grave...um...you know if he was actually dead.

 

[Dr Simon]

While most of the options have been covered I like the idea of living ships. Great Windwhales (to borrow a Black Company term) that aren't so much the means of propulsion as they are the ship itself. Young ones might have a gondola strapped onto the back and special chair for the handler while anceitn ones might have whole fortressess imbedded into their skin.

I'm pretty sure there's something like that in an Iain Banks book. There's always Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs (Dark Sun sourcebook) that has similar things.

In Glorantha, the Lunar Empire uses ships suspended from a small piece of Moon rock, since the natural tendency of the moon rock is to rise towards its origin (in a psuedo-Aristotlean fashion).

 

[Klaus]

i already mentioned the beans.

Gust of Wind, not Stinking Cloud or Cloudkill.

Get on with the program, n00b!