Airships In The Necklace

So Klax and I talked last night about airships and vehicles in the Necklace. The common mode of transportation in the torus is atmospheric fusion jets. This uses a compact fusion reactor on the ship to compress ambient air with a turbine. At higher speeds the air path can switch to direct heating by heat exchanger as a ram jet. This affords highly fuel efficient travel over very long distances at relatively high speeds. Since the Torus is insanely huge, travel - even high speed travel - takes a long time. These airships are constructed much like space ships rather than airplanes - spaceships with lift surfaces and airflow controls, which are not necessarily air tight.

That led to me looking through StarCluster 3's spaceship construction section. great chunks of it were perfect, along with the overall structure of how one builds ships. But I came to the section on weapons and was struck with how much the expectation of space combat underlay much of SC3. Matter/Antimatter missiles and powerful lasers were a big chunk of the options available - and SC3 is a civilian game! I put all the *big* weapons into a completely separate game!

So - that will not do for the Necklace! It's not about that level of conflict. I talked it over with Klax, and he said the exact same thing! At least it proves we are on the same wavelength! Conflict in The Necklace is on a PERSONAL level. Weapons available for civilian airships would be things like machine guns in turrets, not M/AM missiles! Something to discourage the occasional pirate or swarm or airsharks. The only people in the Necklace to have anything like a fighting force is the Rasi, who have the Rangers- sort of a cross between militia and SWAT police. They have access to laselets and small missiles - the armor piercing or high explosive kind, not nukes, let alone M/AM!

There are other smaller, short range vehicles, but these airships are a big step.