Skyship Combat

Skyship Combat

In the world of the Former Aquilonese Empire, airfleets are a decisive arm of a nation's military, thanks to their ability to project power at land and at sea and to attack cities with relative impunity unless protected by other skyships. This article is a discussion of the history of skyship design and warfare and a look at the state of the art as of 179 AE.

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.

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.

Naval vs. Aerial

An enormous debate rages, with battles fought in bureaucracy and on actual battlefields, on the balance between traditional naval ships and skyships. Without a large war in recent history to answer questions, no one can really be sure which side will actually be supreme. Astaria and Nzemya seem to have outright accepted the skyship's primacy, while nations such as Varangia and Aquileon still prefer navies. Landlocked powers, such as the several states of the Usheri Alliance, of course prefer the skyship to wet navy ships. What experiments have been performed indicate that a wet navy ship, despite its turreted guns, will have an incredibly difficult time scoring a hit on a target against which bracketing fire is impossible, but a hit from a single naval gun is likely to cause crippling or fatal damage to all but the largest skyships.

Classes of Skyship

Skyships are found in four broad classes.

Destroyers: Small, short air time, but with a heavy throw weight for their size. Used as flankers in fleet engagements. Destroyers are considered obsolete by some, especially the Principality of Astaria, which has abandoned them for LCs.

Light Cruisers: Unlike destroyers, these skyships are able to stay airborne for weeks on end. LCs are larger than destroyers, but less capable in a fight since they give so much volume over to provisions. Often used in commerce protection and/or raiding roles

Heavy Cruisers: A crossbreed between the two above, Heavy Cruisers have the throw weight to serve in the wing of battle, while also having the endurance to operate far beyond their home territory

Dreadnoughts: Larger than a heavy cruiser, it devotes less percentage of its volume to provisions, giving it the short operating span of a destroyer. But a Dreadnought is the single most powerful ship in most country's fleets, the center of the wing of battle. Dreadnoughts are the real accepted measure of fleet strength.

Formation Combat

The standard formation for skyship combat is the Wing of Battle, essentially three wedges of skyships stacked vertically, with the points facing towards the enemy. Doctrine dictates that the heaviest ships available(Ideally Dreadnoughts) be placed front and center of the wing, to take the initial shock of battle and do the close-range brawling they're designed to do. Heavy Cruisers fill out the sides of the formation, while the edges are filled by destroyers. Flankers are important because as the wedges collide, the more numerous fleet's flankers will wrap around the enemy's wing, cutting off their line of retreat and engaging them from several directions at once.