GLOGtober '23 - 6: Wizard Airships

GLOGtober '23 prompts can be found here.

Airships for Wizards

Airships are a common staple in fantasy, often a big wooden sailing ship that soars through the sky or of a large zeppelin drifting along. Here are a few ideas for how to go about this for your wizard looking to sail among the clouds.

Flying Ship

Perhaps the easiest way to soar the skies is to just cast a fly spell on your ship. This requires the fewest moving parts, but also aren’t the easiest to obtain or maintain. Ideally as a highly trained wizard you can just go down to the docks to your boat and cast fly on it, but this assumes you have the arcane power to make a whole ship fly. Likely the enchantment isn’t permanent, or requires massive resources to do so, limiting how common this is.

Once you pull this off though the whole ship can move solely by arcane force, with no need for sails to pull it along. Having the sails open likely will actually cause problems by the drag they generate. In fact, a typical sailing ship is likely not the best shape for your flying vessel. Perhaps something more akin to a large hollow dagger would be more appropriate, or a giant floating sphere. Wizards love spheres. Or if you’re not talented enough to make a whole boat fly you and your buddies can ride around in a floating canoe.

Elemental Balloon

For those wizards who understand how hot air balloons work it isn’t hard to think up some permanently hot device to keep your new invention afloat, and it’s far too common to jump to everyone’s first terrible idea: a fire elemental. Thankfully a lot of wizards realize how silly and dangerous is, but there’s always those who don’t or who want to try it anyways.

Placing a whole fire elemental inside a little heating device requires advanced knowledge of metallurgy, enchantments and binding spells. With effort it can be done however, providing a constant way to keep your balloon afloat. If you pull the feat off it’s quite the mark of prestige among your associates, and lets you arrive at conclaves in style. Steering may be some trouble, however if you can safely bind fire elementals you can probably get an air elemental to blow you along your course.

Levitating Boat

Those wizards who can’t make boats fly under their power but just saw their peers float by in a hot air balloon might turn to a far more common spell, levitation, allowing their boat to fly too. They’ll have to actually use sails, but that can’t be that different, can it?

As these novices will soon learn, they’re rather wrong. Sails are not the simple solution you think they are, not for air boats at least. As it turns out the reasons sails work with normal boats is due to the difference in how resistant the air and the water are. As the wind strikes the sails it wants to push the boat in the same direction, however the resistance of the water and shape of the hull keeps the boat on the actual course you want to travel. Without this dynamic your new levitating ship will be nothing more than a leaf on the wind.

This doesn’t make these types of a ships impossible to use however, they just need some modifications. Some wizards might be aware of the cruelly named “movable rods”, which are what your peers call your creation when you fail to enchant an immovable rod properly. Often times the enchantment isn’t strong enough, allowing the rod to be move just at much slower speeds. Other times you end up with a rod that can’t be moved on one axis, such as a rod that can only be moves horizontally but is locked in the vertical plane.

By placing the right movable rods throughout a modified ship you can create a flying ship of your dreams. Using several rods that can only move horizontally allows the ship to stay in the sky, however this usually requires a separate dinghy to ferry crew between the fixed altitude and the ground. A secondary set of special movable rods are set in the hull, allowing for movement as if the ship were in water. These rods are set to only move along the same axis as the boat should be traveling, almost making it like the airship were on giant invisible rails. With an additional preparation these rods are minorly unenchanted, allow them to slowly rotate horizontally which in turn allows your ship to turn as well.

Currently the major issue with these types of immovable airships are their inability to change elevation. The problem is likely one that can be surmounted with further work, but for now these ships all fly as if on an ocean sky.