Rather than an update on airship development, this post is going to be a collection of drawings of some re-designed airships, as well as a new one that I had mentioned earlier and dreamed up, but never got round to rendering until quite recently. If you haven’t seen my previous work on these airships, please check out parts 1, 2, and 3. The previous posts were mostly descriptions of the airships in question, explaining the history of their development and how they operate. Links to Hive posts with full-colour screenshots of these models will be scattered throughout this post.
The first is Frehr’s airship. This plane balloon is among my oldest designs, both in terms of when I created it and how long it has been around within the context of my fictional world. This drawing shows my most recent change to it. When I first re-designed it, there were multiple ropes going all over the place, but I have since managed to render a single-piece rope net to secure the balloon. You can see the earlier rigging here, in the full-colour screenshots of the model.
The next of the re-designed ships is the flying caravel, which looks much less like its earlier incarnation, but still recognisable:
Using the same basic design principles, I will eventually build a heavier version with multiple counter-rotating propellers (I already did once, back when I was making low-detail models for 1:700 scale). Coloured screenshots of this ship can be viewed here.
The Karadenian flying galleon, the first glossarian airship to be built, is the second I re-designed (the first one after the Zaphnora). Since I have this habit of saving my work in stages, I was able to start with an early stage of the hull and take it in a different direction, adding a forward pilothouse, wings with rudders and airscrews, and a much nicer quarter gallery:
There is a missing line on the bottom of the hull in the front view. I’m not sure why, and even though I can easily add lines to the drawing in Inventor, I have no reason to do that until I fully annotate the drawing with labels, dimensions, and a parts list. Coloured screenshots of the flying galleon can be viewed here.
The next airship that I rebuilt was the Sondorian siege bireme, a ship which, in context, was the very next after the galleon to be developed. It was meant to be better than the galleon in every way, and aside from a tiny aspect of the armament, it certainly is.
You can see the work in progress here. I have since finished the ship, adding flags to the outer vertical stabilisers, machine guns to the upper deck, and lengthening the funnels slightly. It is the finished version depicted in the above drawing.
Earlier today, I finished the very next glossarian airship to be developed, which was not one that I had made a model of before, but I had a short description and a general shape in mind since I first mentioned it: the Arcadian gunboat. The only deviation from my original description is the lack of baffles between the levitators. I may eventually make another version of the gunboat with those baffles in place, but it would require a longer hull and greater space between the levitators to make the baffles even necessary.
My virtual model is painted in two colours, grey on the bottom and beige on top, which is consistent with desert camouflage for aircraft. The model is also emblazoned with the golden compass insignia, as you can see here. Of course, the glowing green levitators and the noise they make give it away, but every little bit of camo helps.
I mentioned that I would also start playing around with the cyclogyro design, which I have, but there isn’t much to show other than a craft the size and shape of a small aeroplane. I have some sketches of a much larger vessel that is loosely based on the Hilda Garde III from Final Fantasy IX, but I have no idea when I will finally get around to making it. The airship in question will serve as the Bulmutian regent’s air yacht, a rather ridiculously laid out ship that would, effectively, be the result of an aeronautical engineer showing off. It’s dumb, but as I’ve mentioned in one of my videos, I love taking the piss out of FFIX. In the mean time, I have some totally unrelated models to make.
Kaja's Kreations 