Airships
A catchall term for mechanical craft with the capability for powered flight. Early designs were simple aerostats, which relied on lighter-than-air gases to rise into the sky. With the discovery of Cavorite, airships have become faster and heavier, with many designs replacing gas cells with sleek and aerodynamic wings. Small, single and two-seater airships have become much more common with the implementation of wings and high-powered combustion engines, while larger airships have gained enough armor and weaponry to directly fight their wet-navy equivalents.
The Appachian Strongholds flew the first successful aerostats in 14 BV, and adapted designs in limited quantities during the Great War. It took decades for this new type of transport to catch on with the rest of the world, and became much sleeker with the incorporation of Cavorite chambers. Lighter-than-air gases remain in use with larger airship designs as a source of lift, but are much less prominent than they were in these early aerostats.
The basis for the "escort" class was pioneered by the Savoi Nations' Air Defence Fleet, and resulted in the creation of dozens of designs for compact and lightly-armed airships carrying heavy single-use ordnance. While such craft certainly have not rendered the mighty dreadnoughts and battlecruisers of the world obsolete, every modern airfleet has a substantial number of skirmishers, interceptors, and strikers in service. Civilian enterprises have found escort airships to excel in the role of transporting time-sensitive cargos and VIPs quickly and discreetly, although miniscule cargo bays and prohibitively high costs have limited their usefulness to the general public of most countries.
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