The World Dragon's Heir

Chapter 500: Better than Expected

Dominic stared at the airship, and its modular compartments. They had not only built the airship with the cargo container that they had discussed with the Merchant’s Guild, they had made a second cargo compartment that was fitted with cannon doors and blocks.

That way, it could be switched between cargo and military uses in under an hour. It was brilliant, and the way that it was designed, only a magitech engineer familiar with the design would figure out how to do it, even though it was actually quite simple to operate once you knew how.

"This is brilliant, I did not expect you to have this ready for another few months." Dominic congratulated the team.

"Honestly, neither did we. But once we started assembling the ribs in sections on the ground, it just got so much faster to do the job. All we had to do was lift them into position and put a dozen bolts in.

We considered using hot press rivets, but Stover nuts were easier, and then we didn’t have to put hot metal in the air to finish the work.

Everything is made with the cart bright metal, at least everything structural is. So, we don’t need to worry much about the strength, even with the lightened structure.

We got it down to under a half the expected weight of a conventional airframe, and we’re up nearly fifteen tonnes on cargo capacity, which is why we’re struggling to get it heavy enough with the ballast bladders.

The current plan is just to increase the amount of water normally carried in the steam tanks that drive the turbines. That gives us most of our ballast, but we can also put a bit of plate steel in the bottom as both armour and ballast.

Making it bottom heavy will help with stability as well.

The other cabin is armoured. It had to be, given its purpose. But it’s only intended to load cannons into, not cargo, so there will be a lot of extra capacity, no matter how you look at it."

"We can load it with paratroopers as well. Putting a bunch more people in there will add some weight, and give the airships a secondary purpose.

Airdropping riflemen behind enemy lines is a brilliantly effective tactic." Dominic suggested.

The dwarves nodded. "You can do that with this setup. The cargo doors slide, so you can open them in motion if you really want.

They do double lock, so they don’t come open by accident, but they could be used to airdrop troops. Given the space, and the capacity, there is no reason that you couldn’t get hundreds of paratroopers with their gear into the airship.

It would be more than enough to turn the tides in a battle with the new style rifles that we saw you and the Princess’ guards using.

The rapid firing, the mana bullets, the spell gem embedded in the rifle for extra effect. With all that going for it, they’re pretty near perfect for paratroopers, especially the shorter barrelled ones.

Long rifles might be more accurate over long distances, but from what the riflemen tell us, most engagements that aren’t from a city wall don’t happen over distances longer than fifty or a hundred metres."

"You have a point. Most of the time we’re firing from under fifty metres away, so all the fancy optics and long barrels aren’t practical. The reload speed and ammunition capacity matters much more to their effectiveness.

We considered making rifle racks for the military compartment, but we didn’t have dimensions. There is a storage locker, though. It’s easy enough to put any sort of hangers or racks that you want in them, and they can be locked for security."

"That’s good for staff gear and other stuff you don’t want floating around the hold. But the customers will want to do a lot of the customization themselves. Especially the military units,

They will want the main hull, and likely the self-loading cannons. But the rest will be altered to their specifications so that they’re not too easily predicted by enemy forces." Dominic reminded them.

"Oh, good point, we will have more than one customer for these. But we’ve got it ready for a test flight now. The only issue is that the winds are picking up, and that’s not protocol for a first flight.

It’s supposed to be done under clear skies in case of loss of communication or control.

We know that the turbines work, we test ran them, and the thrust is within our design parameters. If everything works the way that the math says that it should, we are looking at close to a hundred kilometres an hour cruising speed, with seventy-five percent thrust.

Going faster than that causes extreme air resistance, as we optimized for cargo, not for streamlining. But if we alter the envelope for the military ships, we should be able to have them cruise at close to a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour.

That’s fast enough to run down our cargo airships, as well as anything that we are aware of the other nations fielding at this point.

That likely means that we should make something that can run down our airships if we need it, in case someone reverse engineers them. But that can come later.

The important part is that we have an airship ready to go, and we can tell all the Nobles about it before they go home. That will give us a chance to show off for our customers, and if we get a bunch of Royals here before the end of the event, we can send them home in the airship, then take back a load of cargo as proof of capability.

Once the Guild sees that we really can safely move the fifty tonnes that we promised, and more, we should start getting more orders than we can fill."

Dominic smiled. "They’re looking forward to having it up and running. The storms will be a hassle, but I suspect that we’re going to see more issues coming out of this extreme weather than just a few more guests and some rain.

The feeling that I get is that there is going to be a fundamental change to the region."