Fire-Powered Balloon
Last week, I made it all the way to Vilaen in one flight. Vilaen! Imagine how far these will be able to go once we figure out how to control them better? Maybe I ought to start hiring mages as assistants.Fire-powered balloons are a fairly recent innovation in long-distance transport, allowing travellers to bypass the Current of the World that draws sailing ships towards the World's Edge in favour of battling the winds high above the sea.
Properties
At their core, fire-powered balloons are quite simple. A large balloon is attached to some kind of vessel, be it a basket or a boat, and a fire lit below it. The hot air generated then gradually lifts the balloon and its cargo into the sky, whereupon it will be at the mercy of the wind currents. The most common balloons are intended for quite small travelling crews in order to lighten the load and make fueling more efficient, but some more heavy duty craft have been developed and used to carry cargo at speeds rivalling or exceeding those of traditional sailing ships. No matter the size, all balloons must deal with the "landing problem", necessitating the need for all craft to carry flotation devices for all passengers.History
Balloons have seen use doing much of recorded history, primarily for recreational and cultural reasons. Throughout this time, it has often been suggested that they could be used to fly people long distances, but the difficulty in powering such flight and maintaining altitude with such a weight stymied most attempts. Significant developments in manned flight were only made in the last few decades, particularly after the fall of Taufa 29 years ago. Many Taufans, displaced to neighbouring cities such as Balkehir and Stadeben, wanted to be able to see those in other cities without needing to risk the oceans which had just claimed their homes. Both cities saw a high amount of invention and innovation in this field independently, leading to disputes over who made what when. Whoever was responsible, in 3267 a successful manned flight was made over Balkehir. It was only a few years later that a pilot managed the significant distance between Stadeben and Balkehir, with the only hitch being their crash landing into the ocean just shy of a port. Despite many improvements being made, travelling via fire-powered balloon remains a niche transport, as many passengers seek the perceived reliability of sailing boats.
Placeholder by Isaac Thompson & Luke Stackpoole
Landing Problem
Due to not being steerable in the traditional sense, it is quite difficult to land a fire-powered balloons in a controlled manner. This would not be such a big problem, necessarily, if the destinations such vehicles were intended to land at were not surrounded by ocean. Different designers have come up with ways to mitigate the issues surrounding crash landing in the Finuhit Ocean, ranging from designing the vessels to be simplistic canoes to making the balloons detachable so that they do not deflate on top of the vessel after landing. Nevertheless, it is a decidedly fiddly and occasionally quite fraught affair. Each city has horror stories about poorly controlled landings, ranging from a drowning off the port of Stadeben to the partial collapse of one of Balkehir's eastern lighthouses when a balloon's vessel collided with its peak. With time, it's hoped these issues will be smoothed out.Nup. You can't pay me to get in one of those things. If I was meant to fly, the gods would've made me a sorcerer!
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