James Ng Art--Imperial Airship

From the Imperial Steam and Light series. Generating mass air pollution in its path, the Empress's airship is big enough to block out the sun as it approaches a village, demonstrating the overwhelming power of the Imperial family.

James Ng Art

Art of Adam Burn

Engage by AdamBurn

©2012-2016 AdamBurn
Once more into the frey.
Into the last good fight I will every know.
Live and die this day.
Live and die... This day.
(The Grey. 2012)

This is another concept illustration for Fortress Earth

This time it shows one of the aliens massive ships moving in on an airbase (out of shot) its compliment of fighters take out some F15's the last one being shot out of the sky just as the huge ship emerges from a large storm cloud. A group of other F15's engage the target with no idea if their missiles will have any effect.

The ships design was meant to seem kind of organic and menacing, the race are called the Drag'oo so I kind of took that and made their large atmospheric carrier ships look like dragons, they have many wing like structures that move to stabalise the ships and many of the surface plates move as well.

Imperial Leviathan – Warhammer 40K

The Imperial Leviathan is a super-heavy mobile command center and assault transport that uses the same chassis as the massive Squat Colossus and Cyclops war-machines. This monstrous vehicle was supplied to the Imperial Guard as part of the mutual exchange of materials and technologies between the Squat homeworlds and the Imperium. The Imperium uses its Leviathans as gigantic mobile army group command centers for coordinating the vast numbers of men and vehicles found in Imperial Guard Regiments. The Squats employed the Leviathan as a massive troop carrier to transport special "Ironbreaker" Brotherhoods of Squat warriors into combat protected by its multiple Void Shields and metres-thick armoured walls. In essence the Leviathan is a giant land-based Battleship on treads. The Leviathan has enough cargo room to hold over 2 full companies of Guardsmen and all their wargear. The Leviathan even features a rear deck landing pad for Imperial transport craft such as the Valkyrie and Aquila Lander. The vehicle is armed with a wide-variety of weaponry, including eight Battle Cannons and twelve sets of twin-linked Heavy Bolters. The Leviathan's main weapon is an extremely powerful weapon called a "Macro Cannon", it is also known as a Doomsday Cannon. The Macro Cannon is said to be big enough to fit a Leman Russ main battle tank inside of the barrel, and when fired its report is clearly audible from several miles away, while the recoil can be felt at similar distances. The Leviathan could be outfitted with Corvus Assault Ramps, turning the massive war machine into a siege tower, allowing its troops to climb onto enemy walls.

Medusa

Title: Medusa
Name: Alex Andreyev
Country: Russia
Software: Photoshop
Personal work, inspired by District 9 and War of the Worlds.

More Brilliant Art Here.

On Lighter-than-Air Craft

By P. Fobbington

To fly the stately airship again, ah, even to be but a passenger on such a vessel is a dream of many and represents flight in its true sense. No need to buzz loudly through the air just to stay aloft, one can float as they like. By some calculations an airship with a 1000 lb lift capacity would cost less than $5000 to build, but before one starts producing their own completely unlicensed and half-airworthy craft, one needs a little physics on their side to guide the design.

For lighter than air craft, no matter whether they use hot air or lifting gases such as hydrogen (or helium, that unexciting, expensive gas in limited availability), the mathematics all comes down to how the density of your lifting gas stacks up against the density of air. The principle of buoyancy holds sway here and it is worth stating formulaically that "The up- wards force on an object suspended in a medium (air, here) is equal to the weight of the volume of medium displaced by the object."

In the derivation given, two equations are presented-the first shows what maximum mass you can have for the structure of your airship's frame, including the material for the balloon, and passengers for a given lifting gas and volume of balloon. The second equation, just a rephrasing of the first, will tell you for a given mass of your craft how much lift you will get.

It is easy to see that if the density of the lifting gas were 0 (a vacuum balloon! …sadly not practical), you would have maximum lift. On the other hand, if your lifting gas was the exact same air as outside the balloon, your lift capacity would be equal to the mass of your balloon-downwards!-and you would obviously go nowhere . Tables are available on the inter- net and in chemistry and physics textbooks for the densities of various gases under different, commonly encountered temperatures and pressures. Please take a look at the example given, where the result calculated is that a cubic meter of hydrogen gas will lift about 1 .2 kg of payload.

Hopefully in times to come we can discuss the derivation of an equation that will let you find the density of any gas (or known mixture of gases) under any temperature and pressure conditions (so long as you have a periodic table handy), the effect of water vapour on gaseous densities, how to design lighter than air craft with lifting gases at higher working temperatures (i. e. hot air balloons. or hot hydrogen balloons!) and ultimately some explorations into more interesting unexplored designs.