Editing Skyship Combat (section)

==Skyship Design==

The basic tenets of a skyship design are familiar to anyone who's seen a zeppelin or other rigid airship; a large, roughly cigar shaped body with gasbags inside which produce lift via buoyancy. However, skyships are distinct from zeppelins and real-world airships by the fact that they use hot air as their lift gas rather than expensive helium or volatile hydrogen.

Thanks to the surprisingly advanced state of physics in the Former Aquilonese Empire, power sources capable of providing the heat needed for this design are available. The most common options are Shoshkepal's direct power transmission, Astaria's nuclear reactors, and Kiserre's power crystals. However, for our purposes, these are roughly identical. While massive, each of these power sources is light enough and provides enough heat to keep the air in the zeppelins' gasbags as hot as needed.

The first generation of skyships were ungainly creatures, mostly manufactured in Astaria; the ship relied on propellers for propulsion and onboard water tanks for cooling the reactor. While the potential of aviation was obvious to everyone, especially thanks to the well known impossibility of heavier-than-air fixed-wing flight, new developments were needed. The second generation of skyship used ducted fans to suck in cool air from outside, pass it through the reactor in copper pipes, and expel hot air to carry excess heat away. Experiments with these designs, however, lead to a very interesting discovery; compressing the air via the fans and heating it via the reactor caused it to exert force on the skyship when expelled. This was originally looked at as a problem, but a clever engineer in the Kiserre Free State realized that it could be the basis of an engine. So the jet engine had been independently invented, leading to the sleek, propeller-free look of modern skyships.