Lovaena-series Airship (Lo-vae-nah)

Summary

Much to Khaaestra's eternal frustration, she wasn't the first one to crack the design on the once-fantasized 'airship'. That honor belongs to the engineers further south of her, in the lands of Honokom. There they'd built kitolo, skiff-like craft meant to ferry materials up and down sheer vertical cliffsides. Such things were imminently desirable to the Tensokari, who needed to ship materials that cargo lifts, carts, and other mechanical means weren't good for.
The kitolo were very simple things, utilizing specially designed magical arts to move them up and down wind currents. Academics argue over if the kitolo is actually an 'airship' and not another kind of vessel. Many different forms of highly limited, personal transport through the air do exist after all. Still, Khaaestra saw them as the 'first airship', and her legendary regard was enough to write history books.
Not to be outdone, she spent the next 15-years hammering away at the concept of a flying ship. After her first prototypes crashed and blew up in a mountainside, she shelved the project. The principles of the kitolo, while useful in Honokom's context, weren't applicable elsewhere. Khaaestra needed a more universal foundation a flying ship could utilize, or fatal crashes were a certain inevitability. For nearly a century, the idea of an airship stewed on her mind.
Then, one day, Khaaestra watched as an entire palace-city descended from the skies over Laknor. Where she'd once struggled to make a 10-person craft, someone had made an entire city. Once the emissaries came down and made it clear it wasn't an invasion, her stewards found her cussing up a storm. Having been shown up twice, Khaaestra wouldn't abide a third time. Although, no one else really regarded Velandra, Sovereign of the Heavens' palace as an airship per say.
A few short years later, Khaaestra unveiled her Lovaena-series Airship, the mother of (nearly) all future airship designs.
While Velandra and her singularity spheres offered a novel means of magic flight, they weren't reproducible examples. Seeing them work for herself, however, made Khaaestra reconsider once-certain assumptions. Her pivotal breakthrough arose in the creation of the Lovaena Core, a machkin technology that exploits wind magic. Where many designs tried to force a vessel to fly, propel with wind, or otherwise 'always move and never fall', she instead chose to 'hover'.
In essence, the Lovaena Core turned the wind against itself, cushioning the vessel to a state of water-like buoyancy. Unless acted upon, the vessel would hover harmlessly in the air, and the core could be directed to send it upward or downward. Once the eminent problem of 'not falling out the sky' was solved, actually moving the airship was hilariously simple. By casting up magic-enchanted sails–not unlike those found on specialty ships at sea–artificial wind currents could be made. These sails would then be the means of propulsion for the airship itself.
While the prototypes worked quite well, the Lovaena airship struggled with its fuel burning and speed. Guzzling down wind-aspected crysium and still struggling to outspeed a trock, it was a far cry from suitable transportation. Armed with the missing link, Khaaestra and her anktorlas engineers went to work. Were Laknor not such a resource-flooded city, the amount of materials they burned up in prototypes would've bankrupted almost anyone else.
Dozens upon dozens of iterative generations later, the first public model of the Lovaena-series set sail from Laknor.
Built to a 50-person specification, its capabilities stacked against the lighter end of waterborne-ships. While it couldn't haul heavy materials despite its spacious cargo, the likes of fine jewelry, silks, cloths, and other goods could be. As a means of showcasing her work, Khaaestra herself went on the first voyage all the way to Rotalhm. There she set the rachtoh alight with ravenous, chittering conversation about her new vessel. It would be, by buying rachtoh silk on their front doorstep and then flying back to Laknor, that many merchants saw the power of her new airship.

The New Age of Air Travel

Setting her Lovaena airship in stone as the history defining marvel it was, Khaaestra wasted no time in selling its design. Even if she hoarded it, others would invariably copy her ideas or figure out some kind of imitation in due course. Rather wanting to profit while she could, she used the very same airship to ship out blueprints, manuals, and loaned engineers to her customers. Of course, even with her upfront help (for a price), all sorts of problems followed.
For one, virtually no one had the engineering workshops or even technical know-how to work on the Lovaena design. It truly was a groundbreaking thing, and entire schools of knowledge had to be forcefully pushed to study what it demanded. At the same time, workshops to make it, airyards to actually assemble it, and then training the mages, engineers, and other people needed to operate it. Not to mention funding concerns, available people power, and resource costs.
Of special note is the weather itself, though. Veltrona's notorious weather is already difficult to deal with on the ground, nevermind the air. Although made for some resilience, even the Lovaena design cannot withstand storm winds for long. Unless a crew is willing to brave going about the cloud layer, and all its specific problems, it is a formidable foe for all airships to confront.
In the five years since her grand unveiling, many nations remain slow and stumbling in implementing the Lovaena. The frontrunners, like the Aerthen Imperial Federation, Tensokari, and Atenkhet have even manged to innovate newer, easier-to-utilize designs. These much smaller vessels, usually being in the 5-to-15 people range, were their homegrown successes. Unlike the holistic 'build a ship in the air' approach Khaaestra utilized, these small vessels were much more specific. Cartographers, explorers, messengers, military intelligence, and other jobs that could heavily exploit aerial transport were their main purposes.
These cutting-edge innovations haven't seen widespread adoption, but the skies are steadily filling more and more.

Appearance

Modeled after waterborne ships, the Lovaena design is generally an oval shape, with a flared compartment at the rear that makes it more 'arrow headed'. Unlike traditional ships, the 'bridge' is at the front, built into the sturdiest part of the hull where windbreaking occurs. Toward the rear, where cargo and other manifold entrances await, there is a crew top-deck platform and its guard rails. Since the windbreaking frontside protects it, people only have to worry about cross-section winds knocking them off.
Sloping triangular wings run down the sides and top deck of the hull, with the bottom left blank for grounded or yard dockings. These thick, almost stubby wings work in conjunction with air funnels inside the hull to collect wind mana, as well as aerodynamically navigate. To reduce drag, much of the hull is finished to be as smooth as possible. The exactness of that varies depending on the builders, with some leaving grooves or other minor flaws behind.
Some water-based sailors regarded the appearance as almost shark-like in nature. When she heard of this, Khaaestra would later investigate the ocean to see what sort of animal the shark was. It seemed to her that aquatic creatures would be more worthwhile studying, as their forms worked as well in the air.

Power Generation

The airship's namesake, the Lovaena Core, is fueled by wind-aspected crysium. Recognizing its fuel inefficiency problems, Khaaestra worked on finding ways of addressing it. While optimizations to the core itself helped, she also created a series of mana-siphoning 'banks' along the length of the ship. They would draw in ambient wind mana from the high altitude airs, helping to reduce or even eliminate crysium consumption. As a last-ditch resort, mages can directly fuel the core, but many do not have the internal power to do so for long. It helps to stop a deadly crash, though.

Propulsion

While magic-enchanted sails were used for the prototypes, they couldn't survive extreme winds whatsoever. Khaaestra wasn't certain how to tackle the forward momentum problem, and so devised a series of solutions to it. Air funnels through the hull, and along structural wings, could channel the wind directly as a means of direct propulsion. Closable vents allowed them to be redirected, and so could turn the airship in any horizontal direction it needed to go. Collaspable sails were kept, acting as low-speed alternatives that could catch lots of wind mana. Finally, wind mages themselves could suffice to help turn the vessel, brake, or propel it, depending on the skill of the crew itself.
Ultimately, the Lovaena's propulsion methods remained problematic and unsolved. Thanks to the air funnels, though, it could reach the cruising speeds needed for travel to be worthwhile. Turning and braking, though, would always be hair raising problems to deal with. The G-forces from sharp turns at high speed would sheer the hull in half.

Weapons & Armament

The Lovaena design didn't come included with fixed weapon mounts, such as small ballista, crossbows, or other projectile weapons. Khaaestra retained those ideas for herself, and left it to her customers to improvise or figure out a solution. As any added weapons means more weight to the vessel, and less cargo by extension, it is a troublesome proposition. Generally, whatever the crew carries and uses themselves is all they have.

Armor and defense

Minimally armored, the Lovaena doesn't have much more than its raw superstructure. Since armor is weight, and weight affects cargo space (and general aerial characteristics), more could be added on depending on needs. Someone like a dragon would tear through the hull with a modicum of effort. Most aerial predators have trouble damaging the hull itself, but they can get through eventually. The real risk is anything involving breaching crew compartments or the cargo.
Magical wards and other defenses are, thankfully, extremely cheap in the weight department. For what it lacks in physical reinforcement, crew mages handle themselves in protecting or hardening the hull. The effectiveness of this technique varies greatly, both on the mages and the problem they're dealing with.

Creation Date

2430 TD

Owner

Khaaestra zahd Machkin, the Grand Architect