Now i am quite curious if the world in which the game 'airships' exists in is a sort of fractured planet. Essentially a planet that for some reason exploded; Leaving a series of continents and islands suspended in a Very close orbit around a very dense core. This is all hypothetical talk, but could it fit into the world of airships lore-wise? You could even make it so that the people in the universe are unaware of what's outside their huge continent. At any rate here is crappy concept art.
I was wondering more about suspendium in relation to peoples knowledge/general beliefs in the world, since suspendium is really important to Airships.
And because it's late right now i'm just going to throw these questions out plain and simple in bullet form (Incoming question barrage).
Is it common knowledge for "them green rocks to float" or do (common) people know more about the science behind it (I think i've asked this before sorry)?
Also does suspendium have it's own known/documented scientific laws? (like the Conservation law on energy/mass) Or is it really unknown why floaty rocks just float?
Why do the floaty rocks just float? Is there some phenomena that doesn't exist here (i know they repulse each other depending on alignment, which answers this but is there anything with more detail right now)?
Is there anything that the people who live in the world of Airships know about suspendium that is wrong?
Those are some excellent worldbuilding questions. I will try to answer them:
Common people have basically zero education, but Suspendium is absolutely everywhere. So they know the green rocks float and that the green dust rises into the air during thunderstorms. They know how to take a crystal and rub it with a cloth to build up a static charge and make it float. Craftsmen who take crystals and use them to build floating lamps and carts are skilled, but not unusual.
What we would consider actual science is just in its infancy, focused more on observing and cataloguing natural phenomena than describing them mathematically. (I'm actually working on figuring out a sensible formula for Suspendium force as a bit of background info, but I'm not quite there yet.)
The floaty rocks have a lot of Suspendium in them, and so natural atmospheric charge makes them float, a bit. I'm pretty certain that this actually doesn't work correctly in terms of the fake physics - they should either stay on the ground or explode from the force, but shrug. :D
Now that's an interesting question. I think some people believe that Suspendium is healthy or somehow "energising", much like they believed about real-life Radium. (It's actually kind of toxic to humans.) But this is actually a stupidity confined to the elite. The peasantry know not to eat the floaty bits.
I'm starting to pick up that if you had fragmented continents/islands in a tight orbit around a very dense planet core then you as a person would most likely orbit aswell opposed to falling down. Meh, i'm just going to cheat and say it would have to be suspendium keeping everything above the dense core.
Is this viable for this universe Zark?
I think the islands wouldn't just explode or not exist but you would most certainly get suspendium erosion through the soil (from them pushing apart) and maybe earthquakes are more common.
Think you could base the formula around the one for lift generated by hydrogen and thrown into a chart something similar to this?
With 'relative humidity' being 'charge%' (say, over 100% a crystal with X mass will explode) and 'temperature' being 'ppm(or equivalent) of suspendium dust'?
Oh yeah also: Any special suspendium weather phenomena? (i assume high concentration/low concentration suspendium currents like high and low temperature drafts would be kicking around, and suspendium majorly affecting the weather system?)
Hey zark, what if the the airships universe exists in a future version of ours?
Remember my fractured planet idea? What if some experiment that was made on earth resulted in the planet being blown inside out and the creation of a ridiculous amount of matter known as suspendium.(which would stop the majority of the planet's matter from being drawn back towards what's left of the planet core)
Thus meaning technology would start over because of their being close to no humans left.
This would also generate a scenario similar to that of the edge chronicles. Except the islands in airships would be fucking massive.(Sometimes the size of a continent.
Now, would it be possible for this to be part of the universe, zark?
Perhaps some sinister force might also be stopping the world of airships from progressing past a certain technological stage?
You see though my knowledge of this world is quite limited i do find it both a pleasure and a necessity that i tell you what i know in the short time we have left. Let’s start at the beginning.
You see early in our world’s history it experienced a cataclysmic event that left it as nothing more than a series of fractured islands and continents drifting over the void.
Little is known about what happened, but it is said an experiment went terribly wrong wrong.
The most intriguing thing however would be the suspendium the the event seemed to create.
The human race was completely wiped from existence, well, not quite. Various small groups of people survived and began to re-build. They were known quite simply as the survivors...
Now the form of civilization they formed was a crude network of tribes which warring constantly over resources.
It has been under scrutiny for quite some time, but it is thought that certain tribes started to utilize suspendium thus gaining the upper hand in warfare. The incredible crystal was not properly utilized at the time, and really only served to help support overloaded wagons, increase arrow/spear range and the like, but it helped none the less.
As time went on the more powerful tribes began developing new uses for suspendium, and even basic machinery. This would come to be known as the age of knowledge since there was far more going on then than there is now.(Scientifically speaking of course)
That actually makes a lot of sense, madking, but I would imagine Earth is still in one piece. Especially when looking at the conquer maps. Not to mention the amount of citystates still thriving. It would make a little more sense to infer that a terrible war wiped out most of the great empires of the world. This left the cities, once under totalitarian rule, independent to attack each other.
The events i came up with were really a long time before airships. The whole era airships is based in actually came before this fictional dude started righting this.
Also, i imagine airships is based in a continent where they know nothing of the outside world due to natural yet crazy obstructions.
The whole history of airships would be thousands of years long. And i did hint at another disaster when the guy pointed out how little time he had left.
Think tainted suspendium zombies. :D
Ooooo, that last part hits hard. Zark should turn the game into a message about the environment XD (actually, don't do that).
What I was thinking was that the Airships Universe is just a really messed up post "WW I" timeline, which fits well, but admittedly isn't as cool as your suggestion.
Here is some more lore that is so bad it should prob be burnt. It has not been edited either.
At this point technology had advanced to such a degree that they could now build airships! Though they could fly these ships were quite crude and had to have several deckhands consistently tending to the suspendium balloon lest it explode.
And, they did not have anything close to a modern form of propulsion; they used a crank operated paddle…
None the less this was a major step forward, unfortunately Emperor Nassanie lord of the empire that invented the ship banned the production of said craft. He most likely did this because he feared it would put his grip on power in jeopardy. The population initially produced more of these ships believing they would make great economic strides, but the emperor discovered this scheme and as punishment he executed the people involved in it. This aswhile as a series of other brutal acts caused a revolt.
Said revolt split the empire into two halves. One was the loyalists and the other was the revolutionaries.
This surprisingly happened without much loss of life.(This was due to half the emperor's army joining the rebels) However the Emperor, pompous as he was would not stand for this and launched a massive military campaign against the rebels, he lost within days. The rebels had superior numbers, and technology nevermind that most of them were not militarily adept. The war ultimately claimed his life.
Both sides of the empire remained separate and as time went on they both became full fledged nations, and the first to fully utilize suspendium.
Each map is a separate floating mass of land, which thinking about if the world was earth sized, fits scale wise with how the maps are drawn.
it as a different era's b/c every time you play your designs improve/create more and the reasoning that the map is so changed is b/c the suspendium alters the landscape quickly and violently.
Now, in my opinion there are several paths for the high level tech to take.
Now the few societies that retain ideas of ancient technology could die out due to Attacking tribes.
Or, they could stick around, but technologically decline to the point where they can only make kinetic machinery.(Still puts them way ahead of the tribes.)
My plan is to include a story and extensive history for each part of the ven diagram. For example i would write about all the major events for the early tribes, sort of create a timeline.
I was thinking about the issue of the suspendium leading to disintegration of
whole islands. It's not necessarily a problem if suspendium is very weakly
attracting over long distance when properly aligned but very strongly repulsive
over moderate distance when misaligned.
Over time, the suspendium particulates in proximity to one another would begin to naturally minimize repulsion and align. This process would continue until all of the suspendium in a continent-sized area is roughly aligned. At this point, the suspendium actually helps hold each land mass together and help prevent the seismic instability that one would normally expect.
What's keeping the continents aloft is the mutual repulsion between these tectonic plates along their edges. Since the repulsive force falls off much faster with distance, the edges are only a few kilometers apart. It probably also has something to do with the core several kilometers below, but the core is a bit of a mystery.
Now you might at first think this means travel between islands is relatively commonplace; you'd be wrong. Airships, the preferred long distance transport on continent, rely on stable misalignment with the continental suspendium field to stay aloft. A lift chamber designed to work on one continent would not be stable on any other. Indeed, any attempt to sail toward the boundary regions would eventually be halted as the lift chambers lose buoyancy and begins pulling the ship in unintended directions. Careful examination of the fields around chasms themselves shows them to be so distorted and unpredictable that any ship capable of making it that far would be ripped apart or promptly bashed against the canyon walls.
Enterprising young engineers and would-be profiteers have also tried to devise ways to secure a bridge of some sort across the span, but their attempts have always been resounding failures in the face of the enormous challenge. Not only is the edge-to-edge distance far greater than any traditional bridge currently in existence, but the ground nearest the edge is horridly sloped toward the abyss and highly prone to shifting and cracking due to the strongly distorted forces at play. The wind and weather, enhanced by those forces and by whatever powers the core, are also not to be underestimated.
That isn't to say nothing ever makes it across. For years, groups along the edges have communicated via great mirrors that reflect sunlight in intricate patterns from one side to the other. That practice goes back generations when early explorers first made contact via a pair of hand mirrors. There's even a widely popular tale of two sun-crossed lovers who fell maddeningly for one another sharing poetry and witty banter across the great void. When one of them took their own life after a misunderstanding resulting from a stray cloud and a dirty mirror, the other trudged irreconcilably to the edge and, with outstretched arms looking for an embrace they would never find, plunged into the abyss.
In recent years, small packages have even been propelled from one side to the other via great cannon that fire in carefully aimed arcs when the weather permits.
There are also rumors of wanderers who have somehow journeyed across, either by their own ingenuity or being carried aloft by some great storm. Then again, there are many crazy rumors these days, including of dragons, and no one takes them very seriously.
Additional note: for this world to really work and not have all of the water simply drain off the edges in a matter of weeks, the core has to be actively giving off heat and enabling the water to evaporate and precipitate back on the continents. Hence, there is a steady updraft of warm and humid air coming from the core. In a normal world, this is powered by the sun, but that's not really viable when the vast majority of the core (or whatever is down there) is mostly shaded by the continents above it.
Since it's much lower than the continents, highly dense, poisonous and opaque gases have settled down there and make careful examination essentially impossible.
Also, pretty waterfalls. Lots of those. Would make a great postcard if such things existed.
--
Additionally, assuming the water cycle can move around the suspendium is useful in explaining why the the suspendium doesn't then simply clump in one place at the center of each continent. Suspendium would probably need to be sparingly soluble in water for this to work. Thus, anyone and anything that drinks (unpurified) water is ingesting at least a trace amount of suspendium.
HOLD UP!
Wait, I feel stupid, Suspendium cannot float unless it is electrically charged...
Take the fact that on our ships we have to use coal to power a steam engine to create electricity, you can realize that a lot of power is required, correct?
Well the solid stuff of Earth (for example) has a negative charge (of about half million coulombs!), so this planet (which is earth like in every way) will undoubtedly remain the same
However, the entire WORLD is not negatively charge, in fact the net electricity of the earth is zero, b/c the atmosphere is electrically charged by almost the same amount! This reasoning disproves the floating continent theory while remaining consistent with what has been observed.
My theory is that when Atmospheric events like storms occur, they can cause electric discharge. We can assume if said discharge is sent into the ground and goes through the suspendium, which has been seen to have a high conductivity, then the particles will float, bringing up the earth and stone and dirt into the air, aka those small islands.
I will note again, this planet is not fragmented, but has strange atmospheric events due to electric storms and its effects on a rare earth mineral.
Has Zarkonnen at any point confirmed the properties of unmanipulated (i.e. uncharged and un-electrified) suspendium? I had the vague impression suspendium was inherently floaty, but applying currents/charge to crystals could be used for enhancement or control of the phenomenon to the scale that ships become viable.
If I understand your explanation correctly, suspendium only repels if it is both oppositely charged and misaligned. That would mean the floating islands are transient anomalies that would quickly become similarly charged to the surrounding ground (since they presumably interact with the air in much the same way as normal ground).
That's fine at first glance, except it means any ground can rather unexpectedly become floating in a storm. That in turn would literally undermine any large scale building or infrastructure project unless an incredible amount of effort was made to remove any suspendium from the surrounding soil. Based on that, it's difficult for me to see any group of people making it far beyond bronze age tech. There's simply not enough advancement carrying over from one generation to the next for them to get anywhere.
--
My take on it enabled floating islands to exist as fragments of ground that simply had a misaligned local field compared to continental field. They would arise from the rare landslide or other movement of ground that resulted in a large scale misalignment to occur. Most of those would break up over over days or months, but a few particularly stable specimens would last for decades or centuries.
Getting hit by lightning would rattle some stuff around right near the strike, but most of the suspendium getting hit is already aligned well with neighboring material, so a very weak attraction is only becoming momentarily slightly stronger. Perhaps it's reason enough to place a lightning rod a few feet away from your house, but it's not earth shattering.
--
In any case, my idea was only intended to make madking's floating continents viable and self-consistent. I wasn't trying to usurp official canon.
All of this stuff is bound to disappear in a puff of logic if you look at it close enough.
Also, maybe the world of airships is future earth? :D
I'm sort of going to base my version of the lore off the scientific hipothosis that civilization only makes it to a certain point before fucking up and starting back at the beginning.
My theories are solely based on the fact that if post WW1, what if this rare earth mineral (suspendium) were to appear. I'm sure these airships would occur, however I think the nature of earth would alter (the turtles, which is consistent science! its diet simply consisted of small fragments of suspendium, which the turtles body utilized for its shell, kinda like suspendium honey (cough pixie-dust cough.
I'm going to come off as a nark, sorry if I seem rude, at least there is science... :/
"Getting hit by lightning would rattle some stuff around right near the strike, but most of the suspendium getting hit is already aligned well with neighboring material"
Assuming that suspendium is a highly conductive material, ala metals, a positive electric field would give the small particles a chance to activate. also how do you know they are well aligned? you do realize they can be microscopic right? its not all about the orientation of the crystal, but whether it is active or not. Suspendium doesn't repel without having a positive electric charge, and I'm sure the ground is jostled enough for there to be suspendium crystals to repel our ships. don't get too hooked up on the fact that they repel via direction
(even if they were aligned then how the hell are these continents repelling each other!)
" misaligned local field compared to continental field"
where does it say supendium is affected by magnetic interference (that is what your referring to, correct? Cause electricity fields don't happen on continental scales in the atmosphere)? it clearly states that it is affected by electric storms, and steam power (which creates electricity!)
Suspendium can exist even in the context of modern science (even if it is breaking the laws of physics...)
Madking321, its a hypothesis for a reason...
If we had to truly quantify the physics I could come up with an explanation that would stand up to scientific logic for suspendium, not just bs reasons.
Honestly man you are no fun, sure it's logical for the planet to be a "solid" object, but then again this is a fictional universe which can have its own properties aswell as new materials.
Who knows maybe the planet has a concentrated suspendium core which it uses to propel the islands with? In other words you can make up crazy things for this universe, just as long as there is an answer for how it works that fits the universes physics. So, the islands can work, but you would have to come up with an equally crazy explanation that hopefully does not break the universes physics.
Ik I'm no fun, but again, all I think is what if earth had this suspendium, what would happen based off of previous science as well as this things properties...
I know you mean well. I'm just a little discontent with the whole: 'electrical charge makes suspendium float' idea.
Even from just the straightforward examination for a lift chamber; if you're pumping several horsepower worth of charge into a crystal via a steam engine, it's going to start dissipating that via electrical arcing. In the absence of some sort of containment, that would be killing crew and starting fires in no time.
Dust tanks are also a complete act of voodoo in this, current, rendition.
If we alter canon to 'passing current from one side of the crystal to the other acts as an enhancement mechanism', it would both justify the use of horsepower-scale electrical inputs and be relatively safe to work around absent any other containment (just don't touch the crystal!). Dust tanks full of swirling microcrystals would still be viable sources of modest lift if you have a bunch.
We could easily write off any previous official mention of 'charging' as simply a poor usage of nomenclature by the largely science illiterate populace that inhabits Airships.
I like science too. It was one of the main reasons I was trying to iron out the biggest inconsistencies.
Actually, suspendium reminds me of "Atlantis: The lost Empire" XD
Even then they have steampunk stuff! woot! I think ill go with whatever lore zark chooses b/c wynaut
Anti Suspendium. I had a Psionic idea but I feel mind powers are useless to the game. I was working in "Future" is "Tesla" in my mod - introduction to electricity, Blue.
But Anti-Suspendium, Purple, could have reverse effects and maybe even radioactive properties harmful to people in large doses. Problem is, Anti Suspendium pulls everything to it - so on the surface it's not so harmful - and mining it requires special tools able to go deep underground && repel the effects.
I think anti-suspendium would just be negatively charged suspendium?
Also it'd be interesting to note how suspedium works in space, given that it repels everything and the earth(?) is full of it I'd bet orbital suspendium would form rings to balance out the repelling property force of suspendium (we need a name for this, like how magnetism is with magnets) + centrifugal force (considering the earth spins) vs gravity.
Considering if the rings were visible like this I'd bet much better navigation technology would exist earlier, as well as them having a reference of scale to other bodies in the solar system without telescopes (they could define a parsec).
Edit: If that is the case with anti-suspendium imagine a battery powered suspendium crystal mine that is negatively charged to fly towards enemy ships, and then flips polarity when it hits something solid and the crystal explodes!
Yeah, i imagine suspendium behaves like a magnet. It would have some sort of field which it would attempt to shift other bits of suspendium to. (On the microscopic level and our level)
Nothing does! They could all be air-pirate-meteor-worshiping-nomads as long as it is logically sound for air-pirate-meteor-worshiping-nomads to exist in that setting.
Also, how the heck do you conduct a siege if everybody has access to floating rocks?
The sailor-to-be is filled with cheap rum and then wakes up to the swaying motions of the airship leaving port.
Er. I mean. Much as in real-world 18th century navies. The officers have training, the rest of the crew just learns "on the job", or tries to.
How do we know if an empire is Stalin-like or Greek-like?
We currently really don't. The vague idea is that there used to be a much more stable world order, but recent advances in electrified Suspendium and the pressures of industrialization have caused it to break apart. Which is why it's your job to re-establish such a stable world order, through the time-honoured method of killing everyone who objects.
How the heck do you conduct a siege if everybody has access to floating rocks?
You don't. Electrified Suspendium has shifted the balance in favour of offence, much like tanks did in World War 2. That's why there isn't a concept of sieges in the game.
Mentality difference, how has being able to easily fly with green floaty rocks changed the way people think?
They probably had air transportation in neolithic times, so ignoring this seems the same as saying "Its exactly like normal life here, but everybody can be invisible at will" (That would never be exactly like normal life here).
I imagine the higher orbits have a lot of suspendium flying around. So the planet from a distance would have a prominently green ring. Battle in-orbit would have deadly shard streams to avoid while navigating - assuming they ever technologically advance that far. All speculation.
Nope, it would probably get stronger as gravity weakens and then stop somewhere where the dust density and the gravity strength meet, making a big band around the planet as it rotates around the sun (it's gravity stretching the sphere of debris into the band shape).
Space travel would be near impossible, space debris today is already a very serious problem. It would be like literal dust particle sized space debris that can maim space stations today were 1000x more common than in that picture and had unpredictable trejectories because of the repulsion.
Seriously, flecks of paint have destroyed some of the triple layered bulletproof glass windows on the ISS before just because they were going so stupidly fast.
Air Admiral
I hope this is alright with you Zark, but i have made a sticky topic for the various bits of of lore people come up with. Is this alright with you?
Aerial Emperor
Yep, that's fine. :D Lore away!
Air Admiral
Now i am quite curious if the world in which the game 'airships' exists in is a sort of fractured planet. Essentially a planet that for some reason exploded; Leaving a series of continents and islands suspended in a Very close orbit around a very dense core. This is all hypothetical talk, but could it fit into the world of airships lore-wise? You could even make it so that the people in the universe are unaware of what's outside their huge continent. At any rate here is crappy concept art.![]()
Air Admiral
On a side note; why cant i see peoples custom banners?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
I was wondering more about suspendium in relation to peoples knowledge/general beliefs in the world, since suspendium is really important to Airships.
And because it's late right now i'm just going to throw these questions out plain and simple in bullet form (Incoming question barrage).
Is it common knowledge for "them green rocks to float" or do (common) people know more about the science behind it (I think i've asked this before sorry)?
Also does suspendium have it's own known/documented scientific laws? (like the Conservation law on energy/mass) Or is it really unknown why floaty rocks just float?
Why do the floaty rocks just float? Is there some phenomena that doesn't exist here (i know they repulse each other depending on alignment, which answers this but is there anything with more detail right now)?
Is there anything that the people who live in the world of Airships know about suspendium that is wrong?
Aerial Emperor
Those are some excellent worldbuilding questions. I will try to answer them:
Air Admiral
I'm starting to pick up that if you had fragmented continents/islands in a tight orbit around a very dense planet core then you as a person would most likely orbit aswell opposed to falling down. Meh, i'm just going to cheat and say it would have to be suspendium keeping everything above the dense core. Is this viable for this universe Zark?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
I think the islands wouldn't just explode or not exist but you would most certainly get suspendium erosion through the soil (from them pushing apart) and maybe earthquakes are more common.
Think you could base the formula around the one for lift generated by hydrogen and thrown into a chart something similar to this?
With 'relative humidity' being 'charge%' (say, over 100% a crystal with X mass will explode) and 'temperature' being 'ppm(or equivalent) of suspendium dust'?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Oh yeah also: Any special suspendium weather phenomena? (i assume high concentration/low concentration suspendium currents like high and low temperature drafts would be kicking around, and suspendium majorly affecting the weather system?)
Air Admiral
Are you talking to Zark?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Yup.
Air Admiral
K
Air Admiral
Hey zark, what if the the airships universe exists in a future version of ours? Remember my fractured planet idea? What if some experiment that was made on earth resulted in the planet being blown inside out and the creation of a ridiculous amount of matter known as suspendium.(which would stop the majority of the planet's matter from being drawn back towards what's left of the planet core) Thus meaning technology would start over because of their being close to no humans left.
This would also generate a scenario similar to that of the edge chronicles. Except the islands in airships would be fucking massive.(Sometimes the size of a continent. Now, would it be possible for this to be part of the universe, zark? Perhaps some sinister force might also be stopping the world of airships from progressing past a certain technological stage?
Air Admiral
Here is some lore i was working on
You see though my knowledge of this world is quite limited i do find it both a pleasure and a necessity that i tell you what i know in the short time we have left. Let’s start at the beginning. You see early in our world’s history it experienced a cataclysmic event that left it as nothing more than a series of fractured islands and continents drifting over the void. Little is known about what happened, but it is said an experiment went terribly wrong wrong. The most intriguing thing however would be the suspendium the the event seemed to create.
The human race was completely wiped from existence, well, not quite. Various small groups of people survived and began to re-build. They were known quite simply as the survivors...
Now the form of civilization they formed was a crude network of tribes which warring constantly over resources. It has been under scrutiny for quite some time, but it is thought that certain tribes started to utilize suspendium thus gaining the upper hand in warfare. The incredible crystal was not properly utilized at the time, and really only served to help support overloaded wagons, increase arrow/spear range and the like, but it helped none the less.
As time went on the more powerful tribes began developing new uses for suspendium, and even basic machinery. This would come to be known as the age of knowledge since there was far more going on then than there is now.(Scientifically speaking of course)
Commodore
That actually makes a lot of sense, madking, but I would imagine Earth is still in one piece. Especially when looking at the conquer maps. Not to mention the amount of citystates still thriving. It would make a little more sense to infer that a terrible war wiped out most of the great empires of the world. This left the cities, once under totalitarian rule, independent to attack each other.
Aerial Emperor
Note that there is a crown coat of arms...
Air Admiral
The events i came up with were really a long time before airships. The whole era airships is based in actually came before this fictional dude started righting this. Also, i imagine airships is based in a continent where they know nothing of the outside world due to natural yet crazy obstructions.
The whole history of airships would be thousands of years long. And i did hint at another disaster when the guy pointed out how little time he had left. Think tainted suspendium zombies. :D
Air Admiral
Also, what if you had an interesting plot twist where the civilization that performed this deadly experiment were the people of today?
Thus bringing technology and civilization back to basics where it restarts.
Commodore
Ooooo, that last part hits hard. Zark should turn the game into a message about the environment XD (actually, don't do that).
What I was thinking was that the Airships Universe is just a really messed up post "WW I" timeline, which fits well, but admittedly isn't as cool as your suggestion.
Air Admiral
Here is some more lore that is so bad it should prob be burnt. It has not been edited either.
At this point technology had advanced to such a degree that they could now build airships! Though they could fly these ships were quite crude and had to have several deckhands consistently tending to the suspendium balloon lest it explode. And, they did not have anything close to a modern form of propulsion; they used a crank operated paddle… None the less this was a major step forward, unfortunately Emperor Nassanie lord of the empire that invented the ship banned the production of said craft. He most likely did this because he feared it would put his grip on power in jeopardy. The population initially produced more of these ships believing they would make great economic strides, but the emperor discovered this scheme and as punishment he executed the people involved in it. This aswhile as a series of other brutal acts caused a revolt.
Said revolt split the empire into two halves. One was the loyalists and the other was the revolutionaries. This surprisingly happened without much loss of life.(This was due to half the emperor's army joining the rebels) However the Emperor, pompous as he was would not stand for this and launched a massive military campaign against the rebels, he lost within days. The rebels had superior numbers, and technology nevermind that most of them were not militarily adept. The war ultimately claimed his life.
Both sides of the empire remained separate and as time went on they both became full fledged nations, and the first to fully utilize suspendium.
Air Admiral
Here is some quick crappy concept art.
Aerial Emperor
I like. Shades of the destruction of Zheng He's Fleet?
What makes an official backstory a bit tricky is that each time the map is randomized. Hmm...
Air Admiral
Well, theoretically each map you are given is just a little bit of the world.
Air Admiral
Well, no. When i made this picture the only thing that was going through my head was steampunk samurai. :D
Air Admiral
Also, what did you mean by "Note that there is a crown coat of arms..."?
Air Admiral
I'm creating a venn diagram for the empires
Midshipman
2 theories
Each map is a separate floating mass of land, which thinking about if the world was earth sized, fits scale wise with how the maps are drawn.
it as a different era's b/c every time you play your designs improve/create more and the reasoning that the map is so changed is b/c the suspendium alters the landscape quickly and violently.
Air Admiral
Ven Diagram start:
Now, in my opinion there are several paths for the high level tech to take.
Now the few societies that retain ideas of ancient technology could die out due to Attacking tribes.
Or, they could stick around, but technologically decline to the point where they can only make kinetic machinery.(Still puts them way ahead of the tribes.)
My plan is to include a story and extensive history for each part of the ven diagram. For example i would write about all the major events for the early tribes, sort of create a timeline.
Commander
I was thinking about the issue of the suspendium leading to disintegration of whole islands. It's not necessarily a problem if suspendium is very weakly attracting over long distance when properly aligned but very strongly repulsive over moderate distance when misaligned.
Over time, the suspendium particulates in proximity to one another would begin to naturally minimize repulsion and align. This process would continue until all of the suspendium in a continent-sized area is roughly aligned. At this point, the suspendium actually helps hold each land mass together and help prevent the seismic instability that one would normally expect.
What's keeping the continents aloft is the mutual repulsion between these tectonic plates along their edges. Since the repulsive force falls off much faster with distance, the edges are only a few kilometers apart. It probably also has something to do with the core several kilometers below, but the core is a bit of a mystery.
Now you might at first think this means travel between islands is relatively commonplace; you'd be wrong. Airships, the preferred long distance transport on continent, rely on stable misalignment with the continental suspendium field to stay aloft. A lift chamber designed to work on one continent would not be stable on any other. Indeed, any attempt to sail toward the boundary regions would eventually be halted as the lift chambers lose buoyancy and begins pulling the ship in unintended directions. Careful examination of the fields around chasms themselves shows them to be so distorted and unpredictable that any ship capable of making it that far would be ripped apart or promptly bashed against the canyon walls.
Enterprising young engineers and would-be profiteers have also tried to devise ways to secure a bridge of some sort across the span, but their attempts have always been resounding failures in the face of the enormous challenge. Not only is the edge-to-edge distance far greater than any traditional bridge currently in existence, but the ground nearest the edge is horridly sloped toward the abyss and highly prone to shifting and cracking due to the strongly distorted forces at play. The wind and weather, enhanced by those forces and by whatever powers the core, are also not to be underestimated.
That isn't to say nothing ever makes it across. For years, groups along the edges have communicated via great mirrors that reflect sunlight in intricate patterns from one side to the other. That practice goes back generations when early explorers first made contact via a pair of hand mirrors. There's even a widely popular tale of two sun-crossed lovers who fell maddeningly for one another sharing poetry and witty banter across the great void. When one of them took their own life after a misunderstanding resulting from a stray cloud and a dirty mirror, the other trudged irreconcilably to the edge and, with outstretched arms looking for an embrace they would never find, plunged into the abyss.
In recent years, small packages have even been propelled from one side to the other via great cannon that fire in carefully aimed arcs when the weather permits.
There are also rumors of wanderers who have somehow journeyed across, either by their own ingenuity or being carried aloft by some great storm. Then again, there are many crazy rumors these days, including of dragons, and no one takes them very seriously.
Commander
Additional note: for this world to really work and not have all of the water simply drain off the edges in a matter of weeks, the core has to be actively giving off heat and enabling the water to evaporate and precipitate back on the continents. Hence, there is a steady updraft of warm and humid air coming from the core. In a normal world, this is powered by the sun, but that's not really viable when the vast majority of the core (or whatever is down there) is mostly shaded by the continents above it.
Since it's much lower than the continents, highly dense, poisonous and opaque gases have settled down there and make careful examination essentially impossible.
Also, pretty waterfalls. Lots of those. Would make a great postcard if such things existed.
--
Additionally, assuming the water cycle can move around the suspendium is useful in explaining why the the suspendium doesn't then simply clump in one place at the center of each continent. Suspendium would probably need to be sparingly soluble in water for this to work. Thus, anyone and anything that drinks (unpurified) water is ingesting at least a trace amount of suspendium.
--
Interesting stuff to think about.
Commander
Oh nice! That means float honey can just be a concentrated solution of suspendium mixed with proteins and sugar. Science!
Midshipman
HOLD UP! Wait, I feel stupid, Suspendium cannot float unless it is electrically charged...
Take the fact that on our ships we have to use coal to power a steam engine to create electricity, you can realize that a lot of power is required, correct?
Well the solid stuff of Earth (for example) has a negative charge (of about half million coulombs!), so this planet (which is earth like in every way) will undoubtedly remain the same
However, the entire WORLD is not negatively charge, in fact the net electricity of the earth is zero, b/c the atmosphere is electrically charged by almost the same amount! This reasoning disproves the floating continent theory while remaining consistent with what has been observed.
My theory is that when Atmospheric events like storms occur, they can cause electric discharge. We can assume if said discharge is sent into the ground and goes through the suspendium, which has been seen to have a high conductivity, then the particles will float, bringing up the earth and stone and dirt into the air, aka those small islands.
I will note again, this planet is not fragmented, but has strange atmospheric events due to electric storms and its effects on a rare earth mineral.
Commander
Has Zarkonnen at any point confirmed the properties of unmanipulated (i.e. uncharged and un-electrified) suspendium? I had the vague impression suspendium was inherently floaty, but applying currents/charge to crystals could be used for enhancement or control of the phenomenon to the scale that ships become viable.
If I understand your explanation correctly, suspendium only repels if it is both oppositely charged and misaligned. That would mean the floating islands are transient anomalies that would quickly become similarly charged to the surrounding ground (since they presumably interact with the air in much the same way as normal ground).
That's fine at first glance, except it means any ground can rather unexpectedly become floating in a storm. That in turn would literally undermine any large scale building or infrastructure project unless an incredible amount of effort was made to remove any suspendium from the surrounding soil. Based on that, it's difficult for me to see any group of people making it far beyond bronze age tech. There's simply not enough advancement carrying over from one generation to the next for them to get anywhere.
--
My take on it enabled floating islands to exist as fragments of ground that simply had a misaligned local field compared to continental field. They would arise from the rare landslide or other movement of ground that resulted in a large scale misalignment to occur. Most of those would break up over over days or months, but a few particularly stable specimens would last for decades or centuries.
Getting hit by lightning would rattle some stuff around right near the strike, but most of the suspendium getting hit is already aligned well with neighboring material, so a very weak attraction is only becoming momentarily slightly stronger. Perhaps it's reason enough to place a lightning rod a few feet away from your house, but it's not earth shattering.
--
In any case, my idea was only intended to make madking's floating continents viable and self-consistent. I wasn't trying to usurp official canon.
All of this stuff is bound to disappear in a puff of logic if you look at it close enough.
Air Admiral
Also, maybe the world of airships is future earth? :D
I'm sort of going to base my version of the lore off the scientific hipothosis that civilization only makes it to a certain point before fucking up and starting back at the beginning.
Midshipman
My theories are solely based on the fact that if post WW1, what if this rare earth mineral (suspendium) were to appear. I'm sure these airships would occur, however I think the nature of earth would alter (the turtles, which is consistent science! its diet simply consisted of small fragments of suspendium, which the turtles body utilized for its shell, kinda like suspendium honey (cough pixie-dust cough.
I'm going to come off as a nark, sorry if I seem rude, at least there is science... :/
"Getting hit by lightning would rattle some stuff around right near the strike, but most of the suspendium getting hit is already aligned well with neighboring material" Assuming that suspendium is a highly conductive material, ala metals, a positive electric field would give the small particles a chance to activate. also how do you know they are well aligned? you do realize they can be microscopic right? its not all about the orientation of the crystal, but whether it is active or not. Suspendium doesn't repel without having a positive electric charge, and I'm sure the ground is jostled enough for there to be suspendium crystals to repel our ships. don't get too hooked up on the fact that they repel via direction
(even if they were aligned then how the hell are these continents repelling each other!)
" misaligned local field compared to continental field" where does it say supendium is affected by magnetic interference (that is what your referring to, correct? Cause electricity fields don't happen on continental scales in the atmosphere)? it clearly states that it is affected by electric storms, and steam power (which creates electricity!)
Suspendium can exist even in the context of modern science (even if it is breaking the laws of physics...)
Madking321, its a hypothesis for a reason...
If we had to truly quantify the physics I could come up with an explanation that would stand up to scientific logic for suspendium, not just bs reasons.
Air Admiral
INdeed it's a hypothesis. YOUR POINT?!
Honestly man you are no fun, sure it's logical for the planet to be a "solid" object, but then again this is a fictional universe which can have its own properties aswell as new materials.
Who knows maybe the planet has a concentrated suspendium core which it uses to propel the islands with? In other words you can make up crazy things for this universe, just as long as there is an answer for how it works that fits the universes physics. So, the islands can work, but you would have to come up with an equally crazy explanation that hopefully does not break the universes physics.
Ultimately, it's up to zark however.
Commander
No fun indeed. :(
--
I wish you luck, madking.
Midshipman
I'm sorry >.<
Ik I'm no fun, but again, all I think is what if earth had this suspendium, what would happen based off of previous science as well as this things properties...
(and to me, that's fun)
Commander
I know you mean well. I'm just a little discontent with the whole: 'electrical charge makes suspendium float' idea.
Even from just the straightforward examination for a lift chamber; if you're pumping several horsepower worth of charge into a crystal via a steam engine, it's going to start dissipating that via electrical arcing. In the absence of some sort of containment, that would be killing crew and starting fires in no time.
Dust tanks are also a complete act of voodoo in this, current, rendition.
If we alter canon to 'passing current from one side of the crystal to the other acts as an enhancement mechanism', it would both justify the use of horsepower-scale electrical inputs and be relatively safe to work around absent any other containment (just don't touch the crystal!). Dust tanks full of swirling microcrystals would still be viable sources of modest lift if you have a bunch.
We could easily write off any previous official mention of 'charging' as simply a poor usage of nomenclature by the largely science illiterate populace that inhabits Airships.
I like science too. It was one of the main reasons I was trying to iron out the biggest inconsistencies.
Midshipman
Actually, suspendium reminds me of "Atlantis: The lost Empire" XD Even then they have steampunk stuff! woot! I think ill go with whatever lore zark chooses b/c wynaut
Air Admiral
Do both crystal fragments have to be charged for shtuff to happen?
Aerial Emperor
Canonically not. The fragments in the ground that the ones on the ship repel are not generally charged.
Air Admiral
Oh! That changes things enormously. If only one of the two fragments needs to be charged then it could be possible to do my floating island idea.
Commodore
Anti Suspendium. I had a Psionic idea but I feel mind powers are useless to the game. I was working in "Future" is "Tesla" in my mod - introduction to electricity, Blue.
But Anti-Suspendium, Purple, could have reverse effects and maybe even radioactive properties harmful to people in large doses. Problem is, Anti Suspendium pulls everything to it - so on the surface it's not so harmful - and mining it requires special tools able to go deep underground && repel the effects.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
I think anti-suspendium would just be negatively charged suspendium?
Also it'd be interesting to note how suspedium works in space, given that it repels everything and the earth(?) is full of it I'd bet orbital suspendium would form rings to balance out the repelling property force of suspendium (we need a name for this, like how magnetism is with magnets) + centrifugal force (considering the earth spins) vs gravity.
Considering if the rings were visible like this I'd bet much better navigation technology would exist earlier, as well as them having a reference of scale to other bodies in the solar system without telescopes (they could define a parsec).
Edit: If that is the case with anti-suspendium imagine a battery powered suspendium crystal mine that is negatively charged to fly towards enemy ships, and then flips polarity when it hits something solid and the crystal explodes!
Air Admiral
Yeah, i imagine suspendium behaves like a magnet. It would have some sort of field which it would attempt to shift other bits of suspendium to. (On the microscopic level and our level)
Midshipman
Lore Questions:
What are the laws of the land? How do we know if an empire is Stalin-like or Greek-like? Airsailor training, how is it undergone?
Air Admiral
I have no idea, but what does Stalin, or greek-like mean? O_o
Who says a culture has to be anything like either.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Nothing does! They could all be air-pirate-meteor-worshiping-nomads as long as it is logically sound for air-pirate-meteor-worshiping-nomads to exist in that setting.
Also, how the heck do you conduct a siege if everybody has access to floating rocks?
Air Admiral
Maybe the castle happens to be on a floating rock...
Aerial Emperor
Airsailor training, how is it undergone?
The sailor-to-be is filled with cheap rum and then wakes up to the swaying motions of the airship leaving port.
Er. I mean. Much as in real-world 18th century navies. The officers have training, the rest of the crew just learns "on the job", or tries to.
How do we know if an empire is Stalin-like or Greek-like?
We currently really don't. The vague idea is that there used to be a much more stable world order, but recent advances in electrified Suspendium and the pressures of industrialization have caused it to break apart. Which is why it's your job to re-establish such a stable world order, through the time-honoured method of killing everyone who objects.
How the heck do you conduct a siege if everybody has access to floating rocks?
You don't. Electrified Suspendium has shifted the balance in favour of offence, much like tanks did in World War 2. That's why there isn't a concept of sieges in the game.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Mentality difference, how has being able to easily fly with green floaty rocks changed the way people think?
They probably had air transportation in neolithic times, so ignoring this seems the same as saying "Its exactly like normal life here, but everybody can be invisible at will" (That would never be exactly like normal life here).
Air Admiral
What's the planet's name?
Commodore
I imagine the higher orbits have a lot of suspendium flying around. So the planet from a distance would have a prominently green ring. Battle in-orbit would have deadly shard streams to avoid while navigating - assuming they ever technologically advance that far. All speculation.
Air Admiral
But, would not the suspendium lose its anti grav abilities as it gets farther away from the planet?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Nope, it would probably get stronger as gravity weakens and then stop somewhere where the dust density and the gravity strength meet, making a big band around the planet as it rotates around the sun (it's gravity stretching the sphere of debris into the band shape).
Space travel would be near impossible, space debris today is already a very serious problem. It would be like literal dust particle sized space debris that can maim space stations today were 1000x more common than in that picture and had unpredictable trejectories because of the repulsion.
Seriously, flecks of paint have destroyed some of the triple layered bulletproof glass windows on the ISS before just because they were going so stupidly fast.
Air Admiral
Huh, but does not the interaction between suspendium get weaker as it gets farther from what it's interacting with?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
yes, but so would gravity which would be the opposite force acting on it.
Air Admiral
Gravity also becoming minor does not cancel out the fact that there's a limit on how far apart crystals can be while still interacting.