Love me some high resolution piccies.. keep'em coming!

I just love the Blimps.

This message was deleted by the player at 16:19, Tue 31 May 2011.

here, since your fond of the piccies Ill post the major navies of hte other factions so you can get a feel for their design choices. Note these are just the first wave faction. Theres still the french, ottoman empire, Russian *if im not mistaken* Italian I believe, the Antarctic and possibly the Spanish.

hers the 'Federated States of America" forces. As you can see they are more akin to civil war steam ironclads. They even focus on the paddle-wheel aspect of the design. Actually in game giving them decent maneuverability.



I do love their multiple decked carrier as well. although it may not have the most in terms of firepower, it makes up for it by being able to cycle aircraft squads quicker than any other force. Also its very cheap by carrier point costs allowing you to if you want incorporate more into your game or add it without making it a serious investment choice.

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Then here are the Prussians, the designs are kind of reminiscent of inter-war looks. Although they are also fitted with deadly tesla weaponry. Their ships are decently fast a well as having the advantage at close in firepower. Their boarding rocket troops are the best in the game as well. To fight the Prussians up close is to mean certain devastation.



Also ^^ zeppelin aircraft carrier.

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Lastly there's the Empire of the Blazing Sun. Their army has powerful weaponry in the ways of torpedos, rockets, cannon broadsides and on their larger craft turrets as well. They are also incredibly durable craft, having their critical damage rating higher than the averages of most nations. The only disadvantage is their weapons are usually fixed along their hulls, being torps in the front while their powerful broadsides are of course fixed port and starboard. what this means is a good commander must be well adept at positioning where they can make the most out of the firepower they have. Of course their rocket batteries can fire in any direction. So a commander must know when to bombard their enemy from afar, perhaps dance around them unleashing hellish volleys on select targets, or perhaps risk cutting through the enemies lines to bring all their weapons to bare and smash through enemy formations.

You know, for the aerial launch and landing of other craft, a flight deck wouldn't be ideal.  The weight alone....  More ideally would be a rail system that catches and launches the ships.  You don't need a runway to gain take off speed if you can be launched, for one, or simply use terminal velocity to gain lift. A conveyor belt-like track that launches ships on the bottomside, and retrieves them from the topside, would be quite effective.  You can mount that between two large zeppelins and even internalize it with a canopy and add additional tracks for storing more ships to be deployed, or ordnance loading bays and mechanisms.  Besides, a blimp with a flight deck on top of it would never stay rightside up without even further ungainly ballast.

Alternatively to an aircraft carrier, using that same weight capacity, one could create a hellacious bomber that creeps in like a cloud then suddenly rains mass destruction.  It's always so much simpler to reduce redundancy and put all the umph into one ship.  You spare the pilots, the ships, the sophisticated mechanisms for all the additional logistics, and you get to concentrate on all the onboard gunners you would've wanted in the first place, and now you can deploy weapons as large as you can carry as opposed to as large as your little featherweight deployables can carry.

true but there are a few very distinct sides to the military steampunk coin. The realistic and confined by the technology of the time before other factors and developments come into play (although some expansions on real tech still apply) and the whimsical and fantastic where its the idea of something (as popularized by books and illustrations of the day of future tech) would have one to imagine thus work into the setting by means of 'plot machines'

I for one love both equally and feel there's a place for each, even somewhat together. You have to remember though, the innovators of that era weren't always concerned with efficiency, although they did of course strive to design things that functioned.  really the two crowds are the real designers and the romantics.

I for one gladly dip into the romantic side to allow for sky carriers of not only Uss Akron esc design but more fitting to areal flight decks. Of course in my preferred designs the two aren't mutually exclusive but Out of my preferred genres they allow for both such ways.

When something fantastic and awesome can be clambered together realistically, that's when I'm hooked.  It's the stuff that "could" happen, that hasn't, that poses the most intrigue in this genre for me.

:D that airship has the german symbol on it

The iron/maltese cross?  The other airship has the rising sun flag on it.  Hrm.

Ever one run! the axis powers are back XD

Ah, reminds me of an obscure computer game called "Airpower"

In it there are four potential heirs looking to take the throne. You support one of them with your Zeppelin carrier. Each has a type of fighter and bomber. The gameplay is flying about in the plane shooting, rockets, bombing. Right awesome fun.

Even get to make attack runs on the enemy zeppelins.

It came out like 15 years ago though!
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:07, Sun 05 June 2011.

never heard of it... Sounds fun though :)
Whats so wrong with old games though, Star craft is old and I still play it, along with alot of other people

Well IIRC you need Dos 6.0 to run it...

might be able to emulate it.

Then there is the interface issues if you wanna fly with something other than a keyboard.

Dosbox is the perfect proggie to make all those oldies run. I use it for X-com and things like lost vikings.

Used to run (original) Colonization on DosBox for ages. Still it was better than Colonization for Civilization IV :|

*snicker*

X-Com Steampunk. :-P

dosbox? whats a dosbox, i've never heard of one before

Wouldn't that be cool? Steam powered UFO's ;-)

Anyhow direct link to the proggie.

http://www.dosbox.com/

And here i get most Games. They offer all abandoned games for free.

http://www.abandonia.com

And the Game that started this.

http://drqzone.com/airpower.asp#description

Spotted this one in the players wanted. Seems he looked at the game with blimps ;-)

link to another game

Yep yep yep, and then there's Gursper's link to another game that I'm currently looking at doing my roving wealthy adventurer concept in with all those luscious points he allocated to character creation.  I'm still struggling with my life first and foremost though, but I'm also on the verge of just saying fuck it, locking myself away and just going back to living through the god damned computer -.-

Has anyone tried out the computer game "Victorian Admirals". Got it installed but can't figure out how things work. My particular download purchases seems to not include a manual. Petty ships in a pretty sunsent. But when does the shooting start?

http://strategyfirst.com/games...irals-anthology.html

Some good lookin' ship models!

Just curious are there any fans of Iron Kingdoms RPG version of fantasy/steampunk or Etherpunk's version of Futuristic/Steampunk.

I really enjoy Iron Kingdoms and can't wait for the new non-d20 version to come out.

I thought Etherpunk had so much promise to it, but there were a number of flaws in the logic of the world, or they at least things needed to be explained better.  I loved the look and the feel of that game though.

I did like the Iron Kingdoms, mainly protectorate,  minatures but the warjack rules for the d20 game just didn't make the whole deal interesting enough for me.

D20 wasn't a good fit.  I'm looking forward to seeing what privateer press does with their own system.