Damn it, I did. In real life (I know, I know, I'll try not to bring it up again), I have somewhat of an obsession with airships. So I always kind of assume that the coolness of them is implicit in whatever I'm saying. For instance "I'm sorry; I can't come in to work today because I'm sick" is code for "I'm sorry; I can't come in to work today because I'm sick, and also I need to spend 8 hours thinking about how cool airships are. I want one."

When you get into the multi-million dollar range capital recovery contributes more to the price than actual manufacturing cost does, which can be eliminated by nationalizing the manufacturing facilities.

yeah you know the limit on the zeppelin is almost limitless in game terms when your kiting an army with full mill spec guns and support the zeppelin would be a fraction of the forces cost.

Why don't they compress it into tanks? Can they not do it fast enough to matter? Would the compresors/tanks add too much weight?

I've been wondering about this also. Surely there is a better way of reducing lift than venting the gas. Liquefying it with compressors, dissolving it in water or another appropriate solvent, cooling it to reduce it's density.

Anything is better than all that stupid mucking about with ballast and wasting precious, expensive, non-renewable gas.

Ah. I see. In which case my post is a little needlessly sarcastic. Sorry Snow_Fox.

Bound/summoned spirits can make these things easily possible if you want to keep them armored and not extremely huge. Lets face it though in a game setting where there is technology that does not exist in SR (but for some reason exists right now in todays world) + magic why even try at this point? Zeppelins are there, and they may not always make sense but I'm sure anyone can find out a way why they would want to have a large armored attack blimp in the sky (if they put their mind to it.) I mean it's not as bad as cyberzombies imop.

So if zeplins work or not... IT'S MAGIC, and let's leave it at that.

Also an 18 wheeler with a cab has a body of 24, and a skytrain has a body of 30. I might just houserule that a zeppelin has a body of maybe around... 16-24, but can mount 36 body points worth of upgrades due to it's size. Then again this would just be my personal call, because no way rain or shine should a armored out zeppelin have a good chance to totally absorbing a sparrow hawk.

I am not trying to shoot down anyone's ideas, or blimps. But I do believe in an element of realism and if your zep is suddenly a sub orbital CVA, it's got porblems. Affect the ride with what is known and relaistic and this will make it easier to suspend disbelief for the important plot points.

Don't make zeps into go anyplace craft. they have lift and they have an amazing ability to hang in the air forever-compared to heavier than air craft. what they do NOT have is speed and maneuverablity. You can talk about adding lift and tech but the bottom line is the shape, compared with an F-18 Hornet or even a Supermarine Spitfire or even a BE2c they were not and are not, aerodynamic. Their great gift is their 'hang time.'

I'm aware of the cost of the anti-satalite missle on an F-15. My point is that tech levels existed long before the awakening to shoot down stuff at high altatude.

explosive bullets worked just fine on Hydrogen filled zeps. Once you lite one cell, the ship is doomed. The flaming cell loses lift so it goes down, compared to the rest of the ship, that means the flames rise, towards the next cell- and you can't compensate as pilot. it happens too damn fast. Remember the footage of the Hindenberg going up? that's real time! Poof. All gone.

Now Helium don't have that but they do have flaws. Don't go dfor a direct hit with slugs, that will only create small hole (more on that in a momment) but flak or fletches, where a near miss fills the sky with fragments all wripping up the ship? that works just fine. That was the fate of the German Zep the L.15 in March 1, 1916. The ship ended up ditching in the north sea.

For shooting slugs, sure that is going to create holes that will leak slowly but that can still be fatal. The L.12 suffered that fate in August 1915. It gimped out over the channel and they attempted to tow the ship to Ostend but it was too far gone to save. Neither of these ships exploded in a great fireball but they did lose boyancy and ended on the surface.

The botton line is that a zep is a great base, difficult to approach and capable of vetting aporches but it ain't an assault ship.

Someone likened it to an aircraft carrier. Good call. Mighty, powerful but if it takes a hit, it can be killed quickly. The Falklands doens't count because the Argentines pulled their carrier back ratherr than risk a general engagment with the smaller British carriers HMS Ark Royal and the HMS Illustrious after they lost the General Belgrano. But look back to the great carrier battles of WW2.
Lexington, Yorktown, Hiryu, Soryu, Akagi, Kaga, Hornet and Ark Royal were all put out of action and out of the war in short order once they were hit. Most of the great fights were a hide and seek of those ships avoiding being found. Yamoto was destroyed by an air assault but it took far more hits than it took to destroy any carrier.

To carry on the analogy to my point that the more points you add at some point you hit the law of diminishing returns. In the last days of the war the USS Enterprise and HMS Indefatigeable were both hit with kamikaze right on the flight deck. The American ship, with a teak wood flightdeck, comfortable in the tropics was knocked out for the rest of the war. The slower, heavily armored British ship, a horror of heat in the tropics, was back in action with an hour. The american ship was faster by about 10 knots and more comfortable but in a fight, the British warship had the advantage. Both ships could deal out the same blow.

Ok I see where you are going Snow Fox, but this is quite a bit more advanced then WWII when it comes to technology. When you are talking about carriers going down in WWII, what you forget is that most of that is because due to the fact that the carrier battles (dealing with most of the ships you are talking about being destroyed) were so drawn out that the crew started putting the ammo and fuel lines on the top deck of the carrier so that the planes could be armed and fueled as quickly as possible. This led to the biggest problem that they put most of their explosives on the top deck. At that point their entire flight deck was one big open explosive device. One bomb hit the top of the flight deck and they lit up like a 4th of July fireworks display (torched the fuel lines, which in WWII didn't really have awesome failsafes for something like that.) Carriers today are almost floating cities, with high tech weapons, and armor. I think it would be tough to sneak into or successfully attack a fairly new SR carrier especially if it is staffed with high level mages, and anything else they would have in terms of weapons on a carrier.

I actually find that a -3 in handling in a zeppelin makes no sense whatsoever.... well that and you know shrugging off heavy weapons fire. How in the hecky heck can you dodge rockets when you are just that big? Are Zeppelins the 18 wheelers of the sky? I mean they both get a -3 to handling. Their speed is 30 and they are huge lumbering beasts in the sky, but they have the ability to dodge fire from most aircraft that is zooming at them at around 500-800. You are shooting a blimp in the sky, how are you going to miss? Ack! *head explodes*

The British 'heavy carriers' actually had about the same strike capacity as an American CVL at the time. Still, the rest of the analogy is very apt. Using a zeppelin as a high-flying aircraft carrier could work, but you'd really have to work around some substantial technical hurdles. Not least of those hurdles is the sheer logistics of carrying enough fuel and munitions for whatever you were launching from your zeppelin to take advantage of that long duration. Even so, the notion of some monstrous armored zeppelin, launching swarms of attack drones, while deep inside it somewhere rank on rank of riggers sat and ran the drones, is a bit disturbing.

how's that more disturbing than the riggers just sitting in an armored heavy duty street transporter?
the road-train thingies come to mind specifically . . ok, they can not go anywhere and are attackable on the ground, but else?

It's not substantially more disturbing, I suppose, aside from the potential coolness factor of the big zeppelin doing it. It's just visually more appealing to think of duelling zeppelin carriers over Amazonia, with materialized spirits and lesser draco-forms flying around, along with T-birds, choppers, and fighter aircraft.

You do realize that -3 is bad right? Or are you saying it should be worse?

Not sure how close there is in SR4, but in SR3 you could get rechargeable drones on a rechargeable blimp with solar panels. Then you just have to deal with ammo, and if you use Firelances and smaller lasers as the primary weapons (something else as an emergency big bang maybe) your guns are also solar powered.

I'm thinking it should be worse then a -3, or at least you should get a large bonus to hit it being as it is such a large target that moves very very slowly.

Zeppelin pilot: "They are firing a rocket at us!"

Zeppelin captain: "Quick! Slowly list to the left!"

Zeppelin pilot: "Phew I was able to dodge it."

Yeah, I could see things getting a little silly with a min-maxed zeppelin rigger at the helm.

Zeppelin Pilot: "-3 to handling, eh? Hold my beer and watch this..."

Exactly. You have a rigger in hot sim and then it's only a -1. That means if you are a crazy dodge adept rigger you could potentially roll more dice dodging then the fool shooting at you. Should anyone ever be able to dodge rockets, and any type of weapons when you move at 30? I mean your zeppelin is bigger then 30 meters across I'm sure especially if you give it a body of 36... that means if you shoot the center of the zeppelin it should not miss at all. It's like not being able to shoot a really big building laying on its side when you have all sorts of crazy targeting software.

Yeah, and I bet that something that large, and worth that much, is going to have some very nice ECM on it! And other countermeasures as well!

"Wow, you were right, buying reactive armour really was worth the price!"

Dear God, I think I may have wrenched something vital loose laughing at that...

I wouldn't be surprised if this thing looks and operates like the Protoss Carrier from Starcraft.

Also, a great example of 2070 LTA technology to weigh in on this debate is the LTA Drone that everyone loves, the GTS Tower. This is basically a small Blimp (about the size of a subcompact, I imagine.), but look at the Jam, on that thing. It's got a Speed of 120, which comparable to most shadowrun cars, so it's actually pretty fast. It can also hold a bunch of small drones. It seems like what we're talking about is just a giant version of the Tower.


By canon, you DO get a very large bonus to hit it.

Body of 15 = +2? Well, a zeppelin has at least double that, so it's safe to say that on top of the -3 Handling, it would have something like a +4-5 to hit.

And, you know, with a few modifications, you can probably get that Blimp doing a bit better than 30.

Maybe almost to 40!

Three words: Movement Spirit Power?

hmm . . so maybe it ain't tht bad that one can not really max out body of Trolls at least . . you will NEVR get that Bonus against a Troll O.o

Not even your min-maxed trolls are as big as a barn, Stahlseele.

Although, this does seem to highlight that there seems to be no difference between vehicle body and character body. Is this right?

I'm chuckling over this one. I know in game rules it's doablebut think about the scene:
Shaman: Spirit of the air, I command you to move this craft.

Sky Spirit: Are you frasgging kidding? What do I look like? Arnold the Barbarian? You seen the size of this?

In our games our GM tended to give spirits a sense of personality. and more than a few long laughs were had from mouthy spirit.

give me some time to work on them and i think i can make 'em barn-size *g*
but yes, seems as if there's no difference between body and chassis O.o

Not exactly an airship... well it is, but it's being called a helicopter also... wait... but it has the helium thing, but not for lift, but... Sheeesh.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/aviation/boeingbui...thelicopterever

Please note: this still wouldn't carry a single M1 Abrams (40 tons lift vs 65 ton tank) and the JHL-40 is almost the size of a football field.

Two could carry it between them on a piece of creeper...

Thats more like the airships of shadowrun it does say they use vecter trust jets so. They might be able to lift much more than 40tons. Plus the old round body shape could easily be replaced by a more streamlined one for speed as well as being armored they could become millatry support veicals.

wonder why they did not combine with lifting body structure O.o

So the craft has less danger of falling up I guess.

and i still can't bring myself to see going up as being as dangerous as going down for something that's supposed to be up there in the air @.@

Would you like to fall out of orbit in a airship? That what could happen. But normally the ship will bust due to the low pressure out side then you fall down again. I think there is talk about this earlyer in the thread

yes, yes, i know . . but i just can't bring myself to see FALLING and UP in the same sense and being bad for something that is supposed to go up like an elevator anyway *g*
as for falling out of orbit . . huh? o.O oh, you mean, back down . . not falling up out of the orbit heading for the moon ^^#

The former could happen but you would need a space zeppelin XD reinforced enough that this wouldn't bust in low pressure and in the vacuum of space. Witch would be very expensive and mostly pointless as far as I can see.

OK, when did I get off the Dumpshock and onto the Paranoia Forum?

(Old Time Paranoia players/Ultraviolets will get that joke, most likely.).

Ah Paranoia I have heard a lot about it but never had the chance to play. But that's completely off topic. Space Zeppelin have an odd chram to them they have more charm then they made off (excuse the sad particle physics joke).

Lifting body designs aren't particularly useful at low velocities and the downwash from the actual lift engines do a pretty significant number on the overall aeordynamics of the vehicle.

Besides, "high velocity" and "underslung cargo" are not two phrases that inspire confidence together.