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In a steampunk world of floating islands, the primary transport mechanism is via Airships - essentially, an open-deck, full-sized ship suspended from a giant gas bag (classic steampunk stuff). The ship is analogous in size and crew to a 18th-century frigate.

The peril that these ships encounter is flocks of feral angels - once human-like, beautiful creatures, corrupted by a mind virus. These creatures have claws and sharp teeth, but no weapons. They travel in flocks of hundreds, and attack these airships mindlessly when they encounter them. They have no intelligence, hive mind or otherwise, and will just attack in blind rage.

In defence, the airships have been fitted with:

  • Gatling guns (on the deck, and on a platform above the gas bag)
  • flak cannons (from platforms attached to the hull)
  • an electrified mesh that covers the gasbag to prevent the angels tearing it to shreds, by electrocuting them
  • an electrified hull, to prevent the angels crawling up the underbelly
  • For nighttime combat, slow-burning light flares (like fireworks)

In addition, the gasbag is made of hundreds of segmented sacs of gas (like cells in an orange), so that if the outer layer is shredded, the inner sacs will remain.

here is a rough illustration - enter image description here

Given the overall design of the ship; given all the weaponry and armament; given the crew compliment;

what is currently this ship's greatest achilles heel?

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    $\begingroup$ Don't shoot the gasbag. (Unless it fits the story :)) $\endgroup$
    – Escaped dental patient.
    Commented Nov 6 at 22:27
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    $\begingroup$ I take it the suspended sailing ship is built out of magical floating island stuff? If you have to suspend an actual thousand-ton 18th century frigate with aerostatic buoyancy, you're going to need a hundred Hindenburgs per hull, not counting the weight of the added envelope armor. $\endgroup$
    – g s
    Commented Nov 7 at 3:43
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    $\begingroup$ Also - did you intend for your ship to have a crew of well over 200 men (like an 18th century frigate)? $\endgroup$
    – g s
    Commented Nov 7 at 3:53
  • $\begingroup$ Electric fences only work because an animal touching the ground and the fence makes a circuit. That won't work for a flying vessel. Note that birds happily sit on live electric wires, as long as they don't bridge two wires with opposing voltages, they are safe. $\endgroup$
    – Brianorca
    Commented Nov 8 at 0:40
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    $\begingroup$ @Brianorca Have you seen electric fly squatters? They just use two meshes of wire close together, anything caught in it closes the circuit. $\endgroup$
    – LazyLizard
    Commented Nov 8 at 15:25

7 Answers 7

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The top platform

Having only gatlings there might not be sufficient; also if taken, even by animals, it can be used to gain access both into the gas bag and into the main hull of the airship. Also you can't make it large, because excess weight on that platform can topple the ship or cave the platform into the gas bag. However, you cannot just remove the top platform, as otherwise your gas bag obscures the zenith from those gunners below it, and such a blind spot is worse than this vulnerability.

The nadir

If your airship's hull is like a 18th century frigate's, it was not designed to oppose threats originating from below; here the ship is aloft, and its nadir is wide open; whatever flying animals attach to it, they can then claw their way inside. A possible solution vs such an attack would be building suspended RC gatling guns (they already have enough recoil to strain the suspension, larger weapons would just tear themselves off the ship) that could control the lower hemisphere, or turrets with a means of direct or indirect control, that would be able to fire against something approaching from the blind zone of your main caliber.

The suspension

Those wires connecting the hull to the gas bag are usually not resistant to enemy fire, and detaching the hull from the bag would cause death for the ship and its crew. Although those suspension wires could be built in numbers with significant redundancy, they still remain a vulnerability. However, if they can withstand those "angels"' claws, they are only an issue to your own battery fire against them (and if you have an "angel" clawing at the suspension, you likely have several more eating your crew, so protecting suspension is less of a problem for your ship right now).

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    $\begingroup$ Your point about guns on the nadir immediately made me think of bomber-style ball turrets. $\endgroup$
    – ConnieMnemonic
    Commented Nov 7 at 10:14
  • $\begingroup$ @ConnieMnemonic actually I thought about a similar device, but your example is much better. Thanks. $\endgroup$
    – Vesper
    Commented Nov 7 at 12:13
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Massive Blind spots in your firing arcs

Most of your ship, is not covered by a sector of fire.

On a traditional ship, the water on the hull provides a reasonable layer of defense (especially before Torpedoes and large calibre shells) - but in your image, everything below what would be the waterline is a massive where an attacker could assault the ship.

Even if they are not attacking the hull directly, the ability to approach the target safe from both gunfire and being spotting (there is no visibility ports on the hull) is a huge problem.

Next up is the Gasbag on top - That works like the hull - it is a massive Deadzone where you cant see through and cannot attack through.

How to Mitigate this

The first is the Hull, well, the simple solution here is to not fly super high - only a few hundred feet off the ground is necessary for most applications and it will mean that any attack from underneath only has a relatively small window of time and space to hide in, making it easier to detect and counter.

Next is quite simple. Build a light-weight crows nest type structure around the balloon, on top and on the sides - so that you have lookouts and gatling positions on top.

Here is some Fan art from the game Crimson Skies, which features Diesel Punk Airships - to give some rough idea

Final thought

These are the two easily addressible weakspots - but the most significant one cannot be dealt with by SteamPunk tech - which is...

It is really hard to hit small fast moving aerial targets

This was a major issue in WW2 with Aircraft vs Ships. The US eventually developed the VT Proximity to explode a shell near an aircraft to solve this problem. Even if your Angels are not flying as fast as modern fighter aircraft

Even the humble Clay Pidgeon, travelling at 100 kph (ish) is difficult to hit, rather than an enraged Angel travelling at full speed on an attack run.

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  • $\begingroup$ You’re right that it is hard to hit fast moving targets at a distance, but these are large creatures engaging in mandatory melee range. And since you mention skeet, a serious competitive score hovers around 90% accuracy across 125 targets, at ranges of ~30 yards. Sure, difficult, but for fire teams of trained soldiers, likely the expected minimum level. This would be a slaughter. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel B
    Commented Nov 6 at 21:43
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    $\begingroup$ @DanielB - I think you overestimate the accuracy of soldiers and underestimate just how much stress and combat effects accuracy. $\endgroup$
    – TheDemonLord
    Commented Nov 6 at 23:29
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Its greatest problem is you, because you badly misunderstand steampunk

The point of steampunk isn't to mindlessly take something out of context and parachute it into this setting unchanged, as you've done with a sailing ship. It's to assume that technology was developed differently (or perhaps that the laws of physics are different in this fictional universe) such that 18th/19th-century mechanical solutions become viable - and especially those enabling 18th/19th-century "futuristic" artwork to be physically constructed.

This is technology, and it's going to be done by intelligent people. What would intelligent people not do in this context? Answer: Hang a ship from a balloon. Why so?

  • Ships are engineered to be supported by water on their underside, and out of water can break apart (or at least be damaged) under their own weight if not properly supported.
  • A ship's keel is a hydrodynamic mechanism, and a counterweight to the mast and sails. You don't have any reason for this to exist, because you've removed both of them.
  • A ship does still need sails to move, unless you've got propellers (which are not shown in your picture). You've taken them away. Oops. (We'll gloss over how an airship can't sail upwind, of course; that's a second-order problem.)
  • A ship is very carefully engineered to give fields of fire onto where the enemy is, which for a ship will be basically horizontal. You don't have this.
  • Actual airships weren't built like this. They were rigid spaceframe structures, with passageways and compartments engineered into them, and the "gas bags" built into the spaces in this structure.

Of course fantasy settings depict these kind of floating ships. In every case, they use magic, because nothing else makes them viable. (The Spelljammer setting might be perhaps the canonical example, but you'll find various examples elsewhere in fantasy fiction.) Magic allows some suspension of disbelief, because the point of any magic system is to establish that its rules are this, and therefore that is possible and the other is not possible, and the plot flows from what cannot be achieved purely by a magician casting one spell to make it so.

Steampunk though has to be at least minimally rooted in physics, even given that it generally plays fast and loose with that physics. It has to at least have covered the first-order issues of someone looking at it for 5 seconds and pointing out a laundry-list of basic failures. I'm afraid your concept can't be justified on any level, because it doesn't make any sense under your own rules of what you're looking for.

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    $\begingroup$ see here. Also, the illustration has prop engines. I take your point about the keel, though. (Although it was, as mentioned, a rough illustration.) Also... "its greatest problem is you"? duuude... $\endgroup$
    – Chani
    Commented Nov 7 at 16:26
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Short Circuits

Your electrified netting would be an adequate deterrent against a normal animal or person like creature that would recoil after the first nice zap, but blind rage is a different problem altogether. As the angels attack they will brave electrocution and just keep going until they are a tangled mess of burned corpses connecting wires in places they should not be connected or ripping them out entirely before succumbing to deadly currents. So, while your rig might zap the first several angels, power surges and broken circuits are bound to fry your system disabling the grid against further attacks.

If enough attack from above, some will get into your ballon, and be able to rip through dozens of air sacs as they try to claw their way through. This will both cause you to lose buoyancy and give them a good attack vector as they emerge from the bottom of the balloon to attack you from a direction were you cannot shoot back without causing a lot more damage to the balloons.

If this happens, all you can to is draw your sabers, fix bayonets, and pray that you can fight them off before your ship takes so much damage that the ensuing crash landing becomes unsurvivable.

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Just extend your electrifying mesh to hang down all around the ship and then close it off at the bottom. You're now invulnerable to these creatures.

Unfasten the bottom and roll it up when you need to do other things outside the confines of the ship.

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A P-class zeppelin mounted several MG 08 machine guns for aircraft defence. The number of guns varied – army Zeppelins carried more as they operated over land and enemy aircraft were a greater threat, navy Zeppelins carried fewer to save weight. The guns were mounted in the two gondolas under the airship, in a tail gun position, and on a dorsal gun platform on the top of the envelope. This upper platform could accommodate three guns and their gunners. The airship's normal complement was 18, but it could be flown with a smaller crew.

It is hard to hit a moving target. If you were shooting birds, you might use a shot gun. For larger flying things, or flocks of attackers, you might use a Punt Gun.

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Easy. Just add an electrocuting barrier to the rest as well...

You write that the airships have:

  • an electrified mesh that covers the gasbag to prevent the angels tearing it to shreds, by electrocuting them
  • an electrified hull, to prevent the angels crawling up the underbelly

Since that seems to work so well there is really no reason to not just add an electrocuting barrier to the last remaining gap, namely the space between the gasbag and the wooden hull. I imagine a net can be hung there that can contain electrocuting wires, seems easy enough. And if it is a deterrent in the other places it will be here as well.

No need to use guns, or do any of that dangerous fighting...

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