Editing Skyship Combat (section)

==Armaments==

Skyships can't be armed with large cannons. The recoil exerted by a powerful cannon is enough to set a skyship rocking, swaying back and forth badly enough to make subsequent accurate fire impossible. Recoil compensating systems can't address this issue because they rely on shedding the recoil of the shot into the ground/water below a firing platform, and on a skyship they can only shed recoil into the frame. In addition, the lack of oil or coal and their byproducts means that TNT and Picric Acid can't be manufactured, so only black powder and Poudre B are available as shell fillers, leading to fairly anemic cannon fire. Dynamite is available, but is too temperamental to be fired out of a cannon, as it tends to explode in the barrel.

Rockets, on the other hand, impart negligible recoil on the firing ship, as most of their energy is gained by burning fuel after leaving the firing platform, and they accelerate slowly enough that dynamite can be used as a rocket warhead. Thus, most skyships rely on rockets, mounted in broadside, as their primary weapon.

Accurate firing solutions are all but impossible in a skyship; skyships move relatively fast, as much as sixty miles per hour(though combat speed is often closer to thirty) and can move in three dimensions. The lack of radar or other effective rangefinding equipment forces skyships to rely on weight of numbers to generate hits. This forces a skyship to mount banks on banks of rocket pods, in Katyousha-style arrangements, firing dozens of rockets for a single hit.