Derek Gideon’s Technological Guide

Damocles Imperial Archives

Derek Gideon’s Technological Guide

If you don’t know who I am then let me tell ya. My name is Derek Gideon and I work as Chief Engineer of the Damocles Imperial Fleet and as head of the Research and Development department which is where all the Fleet’s good ideas come from. Mainly cause they are mine. Heh. To understand how all of this work first you need to understand the basic concepts of magic and if you don’t understand magic then join the Axius military. Your in the WRONG nation then if you don’t understand magic. Basic magic focusing theory is that of magic as a energy source and form of light is infused into a crystal. The crystal I will be referring to in all of these instances is Quartz, preferably with a purity level past %80. Anything below that is unstable and has a chance of distorting whatever is infused into it. Other crystals do exist that could be used however quartz shows the best response to magic and exhibits the longest of all lives. A small hand sized quartz crystal of a purity level of %90 can maintain a charge and/or spell for roughly a hundred years however that is purely assumed as Damocles has only been developing crystal technology for 61 years. Or since 653 is your one of those guys just NOW reading this thirty years after it’s been printed. Now if you don’t understand crystals and focusing and magic then you must not get out much do ya? So a crystal by itself is no good. That’s like a burger with no bun or cheese. Hmm..getting hungry.

Anyway so a crystal by itself is bad. Bad like galley cooks that refuse to cook food in the middle of the night. I’ll need to get Emperor Windfire to pass some law or something about that. All night cooks. Yeah. That’s a good one. Anyway what was I talking about? OH! Crystals with no spells. Put a crystal in a communications device with no spells infused into it and you won’t be hearing a damn lot. Unless you like to pretend the Primals talk to ya or something so if you want to imagine that crystal responds to you be my guest. In this I will start out explaining the beginning type of airship and then follow along with my own notes on all different classes of Damocles airships and the various advances that came along with them. If at anytime you find this too hard to understand then give up your commission, take a ferry to Tantallon and sign up as one of old man Scythe’s cooks. Say hi to that Sharga Scuz for me. He can cook a mean steak….when he remembers to cook them that is.

Not much has changed since this engine’s design. All following advances and improvements have come the way from better quality crystals and more efficient ways to improve the output of the engine and speed increases as well. Starting out the DGE-001 Airship Engine is a very basic concept. A series of crystals infused with a Telekinesis spell move along gears and parts within the engine and cause the propeller to spin. All of these are linked to a central crystal within the engine which monitors the other crystals, takes over in the event of a breakdown or fault in one of the crystals, communicates with other engines, engineering and bridge. These relay crystals serve as a middleman for orders from the bridge (More accurately helm control), and with Engineering to tell it the engine’s current speed and condition and with other engines to tell them what it is doing so the rest will know and do the same or do what they have been ordered. Say the helm officer increases speed and goes into a dive. The rear engines would begin to increase their speed while top mounted engines responsible for altitude decrease their speed resulting in a fast dive.

Starting backwards first we focus on a crystal in one of the engines. For this example we will use one of the forward altitude/lift engines. In this engine are several crystals that turn the gears and ultimately turn the prop over it that aids in lift and thrust. For this we will call the crystal “Crystal 2-09”. Crystal #9 in Engine #2. This crystal moves a clamp which would act as a break in the event the ship needed to make an emergency stop. For now it is sitting there and waiting it’s orders while sending pulses now and then to the main control crystal which we will call “Crystal 2-A” being the main control crystal for this engine, (#2 of course). It uses a form of telepathy spells infused into it to communicate information along the crystals. Yes a crystal can have layered spells or more than one which work in relation to each other but these crystals require a Crystal Specialists in the situation of errors, repair, emergency. So back to Crystal 2-A. It has around eleven other crystals in the engine to watch over which control the important gears and parts within including the power crystal in the engine that the others draw from.

All engines are built with their own independent energy source and also a crystal with a direct link to the Core incase extra energy is needed in bad situations. So Crystal 2-A sends messages to three other areas. First is the Helm Control Console on the bridge. It tells this console the engine’s current speed/lift force. To Engineering it tells it’s status and condition as well as energy it is pulling, energy left within and condition of it’s components. To the other engines of it’s type (This type being Lift/Altitude) it tells them what it is doing and they respond back with what they are doing just to make sure they are all following their orders which in this situation is exerting a force to left and maintain the airship at an altitude of 100 feet. The first engines were propeller based and remained as such till around 696 when the thrust-based airship engine was designed for use in the Pegasus class airship but that’s another chapter for later. Right now we are discussing the beginning stages of airship development. At the start of the long line of classes to follow there was….

Yeah I know there was a class before it..the Pigeon but trust me. You don’t want to hear about the Pigeon. It was just engines and all. YAWN. Around Eagle it got semi-interesting. The Eagle class was the first airship built for military use (Meaning we made it to kick butt not just fly in circles). The Eagle used current airship engines (DGE-something of the other..all that you need to know is it had props. Those spinney whirly things) and had several new things that made all cool types of noises and stuff. This was before the bridge was ever thought up so all engine control was from a few consoles on the top deck back where you would find that wheel thing on sailing ships. Ballistas and Catapults were used as the weapons (One fires huge arrows, the other huge rocks. Not sure which but they are both huge and they both hurt). Consoles and panels were pretty basic but that is also a design and idea which really hasn't changed much. I’ll explain that in the next chapter. On the Eagle too was a beginning form of intraship communications (Intercoms or that really loud voice in the back of your head).

The real advances don’t come till halfway in the Defender line with the launch of the D.I.S. (The Empire has it a rule that in ALL books we refer to something as D.I.S. regardless of if it was D.R.S. or whatever. D.I.S. meaning Damocles Imperial Ship and D.R.S. meaning Damocles Royal Ship.) So the only magical things (Or Magi-Tek as some call it) we have on the Eagle is engines, control consoles along the steering area and intraship communications. No shields, ship-to-ship comms, teleports, portal generators. That’s all later. This is now and this being Eagle which is a paperweight compared to the more modern airship types like Valcour, Avenger, Shadowrunner and Shadowrunner MK 2. The Eagle was the very first ship that was made for the Damocles Military and if I remember the specs right the Eagle was 3 decks, 60 feet in length, 30 feet in ship width and from top to bottom was 45 feet in height. The class featured a top speed around 35 miles per hour, a maximum crew of 49 and was armed with two catapults and three ballistas.

At the time of her build she was rushed in as a first type of airship used then the ship class was retired around the end of the First War when the building of the Pegasus, Imperial and Avenger classes made the Eagle and Defenders useless and no longer important. What Eagles that remained were scrapped, decommissioned or stripped down and auctioned off. Not many variants or modifications followed as the Fleet put all newer advances into the following classes. The Eagle class was launched in 686 AD when King Peralay approved the plans for it and ordered construction of the ships. Not much else to say about them so now I’ll explain some features that came from the Eagle. First off are control panels and consoles.

The idea behind a control panel is simple. An easy way to send orders and commands along the ship as well as control parts of a ship all at one point. Take a glass panel and lay out a set of crystals. Each crystal is relayed to send a certain pulse to a crystal beneath the panel and the crystals are programmed for the purposes of that console/panel (Tactical, Helm, Science, Communications and so forth). To explain the buttons and levers on each panel would take way too long and besides each panel’s layout changes per ship class and sometimes ship. The buttons respond to touch and thought when a person touches it and they send a pulse to the main control panel crystal. For the sake of argument we will assume this is a Tactical Console. Okay? So say the officer is ordered to charge weapons to %50 but only the front two cannons. He touches a button on the console which brings up weapons control and power. Four buttons would light up for the four cannons. He would touch the center two then move his hands over to a button for power. Some buttons do work as “sliders” and are fixed to a form of glue-like sap. Push the button forward and it works in positive. Push it down and it works in negative. So he moves it up till it hits %50 then touches the button for firing.

Now before I start explaining what's going on below the panel you need to understand how the rest of the panel works. All the buttons respond to a central console crystal which responds to the signals, uses illusion spells to cast the information onto the panel so a person sees what the buttons do, sends pulses to the parts ordered by the buttons and also maintains a small form of magical programming so it knows what it is doing. So in what just happened the main control crystal responds to the officer’s order then displays weapons control, status and charge on the panel while also communicating to the weapons themselves and the crystals in them. When the order is given for only two to be activated it sends a message to those two cannons which then has them cycle all available power back to the core. All during this the crystal for the panel is using illusion spells to reflect that the orders are being acknowledged and processed. So now the order comes for %50 power to the two active cannons. Power is diverted back from the Core (Airship Engine Core/ Main Power Source) to those cannons in the requested amount. Then the tactical console’s control crystal sends the order to fire, the cannon's control crystal acknowledges, sends back it’s response and orders it’s ammo crystals holding the energy charge to discharge into the barrel thus firing the cannons. That is the basic concept behind control panels and crystals. They are large pieces of glass with crystals in them and display illusions as data and information and status reports. Not many advances have been made besides redesigns in the look except for wall mounted control panels found along the airship corridors. Panels are used to control almost every single part of an airship or are sometimes just used to access information like library control. The other advance found in the Eagle class we will cover next are the ship’s intercom systems.

This is the starting point for all communication systems. Intraship or Intercoms as they are sometimes called is a form of communications from one part of the ship to the other. Wasn't till halfway in the Defender line we actually got ship-to-ship made and established the Damocles Fleet frequencies. So with intraship a crystal was set with spells to relay a voice from one part of the other. By touching it you think to it what part of the ship you want the message to reach. Only part of the ship where you can actually send a intraship message to all parts of the ship was from the bridge (Which also came during the Defender line). For example say your in Engineering. You place your hand on an intercom crystal which is normally found near the door of a section or room. You think of where you want to speak to, in this case, bridge as you touch the crystal and the crystal would active, brightening into a glow. This crystal now establishes a link between it and the communications terminal in the bridge, at which time the officer there acknowledges the message and establishes the link. The sound of the voices travel back and forth in this magical pulse which is more of a beam of light that bounces along all the relay crystals and nodes set among the ship and built into the walls and below the decks and such. This is a minor advancement but it started the road towards communications which I will explain later as the advances come. That pretty much sums it up for all advances in the Eagle class. As you can see by this time the Eagle really wasn't all to brag about so a stronger and better ship line was made to have more punch and also to use some of the latest advances than the Damocles Fleet R&D was cranking out. So now I’ll start yapping about the next ship class.

When the Eagle class was placed out there we realized that bigger is better so a new airship class was placed out there with the design specs of 3 decks and it’s size was increased to 70 feet in length, 45 feet in width and 50 feet in height. Crew compliment was added to 60 and the top speed was increased to 42 miles per hour thanks to recent engine advancements. Defender was commissioned in 686 and used the same technology as the Eagle class did. The real advances didn't come till the following year with the launch of the D.I.S. Victory .

Around 687 AD a few new ideas were brewing in my head and in Fleet R&D so we commissioned an Defender class airship and built her to test these new items and concepts. The Victory served as a test ship for the bridge, automated consoles and crystal automation, energy shielding, energy weaponry, portal generators, thrusters, teleports and different concepts of energy shielding. My good pal Baiganx Windfire was appointed as Captain of this ship and I tagged along for a six month voyage as Chief Engineer of the airship. She was made the front line airship as she was able to respond to any threat almost instantly via the use of her portal generators. Which is what I’ll start talking about first.

The idea behind a Portal Generator was that if a ship needed to reach another destination in an emergency then it should be able to open a portal just as any other person would be able to. I assume you already know what I mean by a portal right? A swirling gateway that serves as a shortcut between one point and another. The energy needed for such a portal is based on it’s distance and any other factors that may inhibit travel. However the point your traveling to must be familiar to you. A portal generator is a device containing various crystals. The two main ones is the crystal with the portal spell in it and a Fleet Archive crystal containing frequencies of known and explored worlds. The spell crystal calls on that archive crystal so it “knows” where it is going and can use the frequency of that world or destination to establish a portal. Portal Generators also have their own power source but sometimes for long range portals will need to call on power from the Core. By this time portal generators were only used to travel to other points of Imperia. It wasn't till the beginning of 688 AD that Damocles Mages discovered the concept of portals outside their world and airship portal generators were then upgraded for this new concept and exploration. The portal generators were set for a frequency which was really a numerical representation of the magic resonance of the location of a certain fixed point along this universe. However the further away distance-wise your destination is then the more power you would need to sap from a core. If the power requirements are too much for your destination then you would need to hop along certain worlds to reach your original destination. I’ll get more into portals on a later date as really that’s the area of the Mages and not us Engineers.

A central point was required to aid in the overall control of a ship and to serve as a focus point for all orders that were needed to be done to be done so quickly and effectively. A bridge simply put is a central room of stations all corresponding to certain parts of the ships. Bridge layouts differ depending on the class of ship and on the Aerial Carriers the bridge is replaced by a C&C Room (Command and Control). Normally on a bridge you would find consoles for the control over Engineering, Tactical, Helm, Security, Library/Archive, Science & Communications. The bridge was later installed on all airships following the success of the bridge on the D.I.S. Victory and is now a regular find on all airships.

The Automated Console and Crystal Automation is the same as normal crystals and consoles except the fact that the magical spells were better written to allow some consoles to completely run themselves. How this was done was thru minor spells normally used in animated object spells and other such creatures. Due to this innovation a bridge could easily be ran by just three people and a lot of safeguards were now enabled on crystals. Such as if a weapon or cannon was in danger of overheating the energy crystal would stop sending power to it and shut down the weapon of It’s own accord. This was more and innovation than an invention as it better improved how ships ran and made them safer.