The World Dragon's Heir - Chapter 458

Chapter 458: Faster Deliveries
“If we’re going to have airships that fast, I think that we’re going to be able to sell them even if the maintenance costs are higher. At a hundred kilometres an hour, they could make Mitfield to Cygnia City in under a day. They could reach most of the Axbridge cities in the same, or anywhere in the northeastern nations in under twenty-four hours.

You’re all from the Merchant’s Guild, you know the value we could offer if we could offer thirty or fifty tonnes of goods for next day delivery anywhere in the region.” Dominic insisted.

The Dwarves were silent as they did the mental math.

“Yeah, that sort of speed and weight should be right in our target range with a boiler setup and four steam turbines. If the structure works out, we should have the thrust to actually push it closer to a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, but it’ll all depend on how much stress the materials can take.

The outer cloth, the rubberized silk to keep the helium in, is going to be the limiting factor. But once we’ve got the models built, we will have a better idea.

I’m tempted to go for helium outer with a hydrogen envelope inner buoyancy, for more cargo capacity, but you know how that goes.”

One of the others laughed, “Boom. That’s how that goes. It’s a great theory, but everyone is too paranoid of explosions to go for it again. It’s definitely worth the ten percent loss in capacity to stay away from that sort of bad press.”

During the early days of airship development, simply getting ships to fly was the focus, and they had tried everything from baskets under hot air balloons with a fan to actual ships under a hydrogen envelope.

That had worked, but there had been a number of catastrophic failures when they were attacked, or something went wrong with the engines and a spark caused the hydrogen to catch fire.

While it had much more buoyancy than helium, it simply wasn’t in any way safe for daily use.

“Well, just adding a levitation spell would be a big start to making the new airships exactly what buyers want.

A large cargo hold, that they can fill to the brim with anything but the most dense of goods.

If we’re making the ship a hundred metres long, we could reasonably design it to have forty metres of cargo space. Roughly equal to four caravan trucks. I don’t know the logistics of the rest of the continent, but around here, that’s a pretty standard convoy, so it should be enough to keep the bills paid.” Dominic agreed.

The Techno Wizards nodded. “It’s not going to be cheap, but they can hire fewer guards, just a few cannoneers. That will save ongoing expenses to help pay for the techno wizard or mage that will keep it going at full output.

Perhaps once we start making them money directly, they’ll start giving us some damned respect.”

The others grumbled an assortment of annoyed responses. They had all dealt with plenty of arrogance and condescension in their past, and despite their skills being highly valued, they were not treated as well as other professionals at their pay grade would have been.

And that was a large part of the reason they had chosen to come to Wistover.

The other half being that every other option they had come across would involve them either living in hiding or in a nation that hadn’t even begun to embrace advanced technology at all.

For the Techno Wizards, that would have been pure torture.

Everyone worked in silence for a while, and Dominic took careful notes as the Techno Wizards laid out the designs for the various magitech orbs that they would use to keep the airships aloft.

The basics would be just the water creation and fire spells for the steam boiler. Those were both ones that Dominic already knew, and ones that he had a spell gem for.

But after that was the [Levitation] magitech orb, which the Dwarves called a [Load Bearing Orb], due to the practical use of the spell.

It wouldn’t fully lift a hundred tonnes of airship, but nobody expected it to. It just had to be cast on the helium envelope, and it would increase the lift over a large area.

Apparently that was much easier than trying to lift a smaller heavy object, but Dominic wasn’t one hundred percent confident in the application.

It wasn’t a spell that was normally used on airships, so it was very much an experimental practice. But the theory sounded solid. Helium was very light to begin with. So, the spell only had to apply a small upward force on a huge area, much like sweeping up leaves.

Then the extra lift from the spell would be applied to the structure by the helium, instead of trying to lift the structure directly.

That should allow them to scale the lift much more smoothly, and use only as much mana as they could spare, or as much as they needed to get the lift required for an overloaded airship.

“It could be an upcharge for heavy cargo, you know? Charge them to keep the spell active so they can load heavier stuff in the ship.” Gully joked as the two teams worked on their designs.

The extra lift would let them fly higher, where the air was thinner, and the resistance lower, so they could fly faster. But it was a tradeoff, as they still needed to load the ship, and a cargo airship didn’t go anywhere empty.

Compared to that, the wind magic was pure luxury.

Yes, it could be used to lift the ship, but it was primarily used to propel it forward.

With so much wind resistance on the airship, a good tailwind or headwind would make a massive difference in performance, and the ground level winds tended to be worse than they were a little further off the ground.

Plus, if they were further up, they were harder to ambush, as Cygnia had learned during the war.

“Are we going to arm the merchant vessels heavily? It seems like a waste to put more than a few cannons on them.” Gully asked.

“I was thinking two cannons per side. I have the plans for the self-loading cannon orbs that Cygnia developed during the war, and we can use them to remove the need for munitions, as long as there is a qualified techno wizard on board.” Dominic suggested.

“That will be wonderful. The merchant’s guild has been clamouring to get their hands on that spell for some time now.”