In this article I’m expanding on some of the ideas and designs I had for my airship with levitation rocks. As I mentioned in the first article on this topic, I drew my inspiration from Skies of Arcadia’ and ‘Visions of Escaflowne’.

Upper Deck plan

With these technical drawings I tried to work out some of the physical aspects of the airship, the first image shows a deck plan. Here I’ve included rails on which the port and starboard main guns are mounted and webbing linking the three sections together. There is a forward deck which covers the anchors and their motors, this deck is only a metre above the main deck and has a single pivoting deck gun. There is a stern deck which is two meters above the main deck providing a clear view for the crewmember at the ships wheel. The stern deck also has three deck guns.

Cross-section

In the cross-section you can see the general layout below deck. The room off the main deck which I have labelled as bridge should be more accurately described as meeting room. I included cargo hatches as a means of moving supplies around the ship.

Lower Deck plan

I drew this breakdown of the individual decks, to help me understand how the ship worked. It’s important in fantasy writing to be consistent about the layout of a small intimate place. I also wanted to consider how people would live on this ship with different cabins, a sick bay, the eating area and of course the ships galley. Although the air ship follows the traditional structure for a wooden vessel, there are modern comforts such as hot showers and toilets. I estimated that this ship could support a crew of about twenty, as the vessel is twenty-three meters in length, with four decks including the upper/open deck providing enough space to hold the complexed boiler room and the ship’s engines. The complexed boiler room was necessary when I considered using hot and cold water to adjust the altitude of the air ship, in the diagram below you can see the boilers, the various pipes that heated and cooled the levitation stones and provided hot and cold water throughout the ship. There is also a large water tank, that spans between three decks, as an airship would need to carry a substantial supply. I imagine that the engine would have a liquid cooling system when flying at low altitudes or in hot climates, but air cooling could be used at high altitudes if necessary.

Even at this stage I imagined that the ship would be powered in part by magic, as I left no room for any kind of fuel. Just as in the ‘Visions of Escaflowne’ I intended to use Dragon heart stones which provide magical energy for a long period, as they do in the animation these heart stones have a finite capacity, and will crumble to dust just as Arten Kiy stones do.

In the end little of this design made it into my final story, but these pictures show the level of detail needed to fully visualise a location.