Ship Building One
As I have mentioned in previous articles I was hugely influenced as a teenager by the video game ‘Skies of Arcadia’ and the Japanese animation ‘Visions of Escaflowne’.I fell in love with the idea of exploring the worlds on a flying ship, being able to soar over trees and between mountains, to fly among the clouds it is the ultimate vision of freedom.
The first image is taken from an early sketchbook, (which had very thin paper) it shows my initial ideas for a flying airship. To begin with I was going to have my airship without sails, but I abandoned this idea early on.
I used the idea of floating rocks as a means of keeping my airship airborne, just as they did in ‘Visions of Escaflowne’, I even copied the same idea for heating and cooling the rocks as a means of adjusting altitude. It’s possible to see similarities between this early sketch of my airship and the ‘Visions of Escaflowne’ airship ‘The Crusader’.
When I decided to add masts and sails to the airship it’s easier to see the similarity between my traditional looking galleon hull and the Skies of Arcadia airship ‘The Albatross’. The similarities to the Albatross continue with the fins which you can see in the third image. I imagine that the fins were needed as a substitution of the ship’s rudder to allow it to be steered by altering the airflow on either side and it could be used for deceleration.
I knew from these initial drawings that I wanted to copy the look of a catamaran with the two out runners serving as stabilisers, as well as the means of levitation for my fantasy craft. This little airship was supposed to be small enough to give it great speed, but heavily armed enough to make it a threat. It seemed sensible to mount two massive guns one on each of the floating stones, these massive cannons would provide most of the firepower for my airship. It’s only reasonable to presume I would have put in countermeasures to prevent the guns accidentally firing on their own ship and I intended to add gunnery seats and some kind of motorisation to move the massive cannons from one position to another.
I quite ruined the pencil drawing in the third image by trying to paint in some colour, but it is possible to still make out some extra guns mounted on the rails just as in the first image. I later came to realise that this design would work very well on a two-dimensional battlefield, but airships would move three-dimensional, the ship would have no way of defending the underside or prevent attack coming from above. Whilst I later went on to modify my ideas for an airship using floating stones, I still didn’t address some fundamental problems with this design.
In the fourth image you can see my attempt at depicting the figurehead. It was supposed to be a woman in a white robe, with one hand reaching for freedom, whilst her stylised angel wings fanned out behind her.
As much as I loved the idea of finding adventure in the skies of Gear, this kind of airship eventually faded from my ideas, and was replaced by a far more modern airship design.