In accordance with my intention to make certain airships more realistic, primarily by moving the pilothouses to more reasonable locations, I have finally finished rebuilding the Karadenian flying galleon. This is the first glossarian airship, lifted into the air not by gas or rotors, but by advanced magnetic drives called glossarion levitators (colloquially known to aeronauts as "bells"). The technology borders on sorcery, as it requires bizarre crystals called neticine, which appear to defy the laws of physics. Glossarion levitators are tricky contraptions, and their control systems allow for them to fly in any direction. However, the more bells a ship has, the harder it is for a single pilot to control without advanced analog electrical systems. The Karadenian Empire possessed no such technology, hence the new version having a much larger pilothouse, as well as airscrews and rudders for navigation:
Originally, the recessed centre deck had three boxes in it, but I have since replaced them with four vent stacks. The baffles above them direct airflow over the ship down into the louvres of the vent stacks.
The original model had two simple square gunports in the bow. The new model has sponson-mounted turrets in the bow, much like the Zaphnora. Each of these turrets has a 105mm cannon and a coaxial 57mm autocannon. The deck guns, incidentally, are 57mm single-shot cannons, though I plan to make some anti-aircraft machine guns for the deck as well.
The structure mounted on the quarterdeck used to be the pilothouse, but has since been re-purposed as a command post and fire-control room.
The gunports in the bottom of the hull are still there, but I've added 280mm mortars to them.
For those of you who have read my earlier steampunk airship rebuild posts, you may have noticed that none of them were actually steam-powered. This one is, however. Steam-powered generators are needed to supply electricity to the bells. The engines for the screws, however, are hot-air engines, just as on the other airships. On this one, however, the cylinders are heated with steam, rather than hot air.
The quarter galleries on the stern of the ship are the entry points. The lower one is for the crew, the upper one is for the officers. The lower quarter gallery is also a maintenance deck for the airscrews and bells.
This is the fifth model of this ship that I've made. The first version looked nothing like it, the second lacked many of the smaller details in the first picture, the third is the one you saw at the beginning, and the fourth was a fancy version meant to be a flagship. That being said, with only relatively minor changes across versions two through five, this is still a "second generation" model. There are other airships I've made that I plan to make much more radical changes to, and the next one I share may very well be a "third-generation" model. I'll leave you with a comparison of all the high-detail flying machines I've done so far:
