USAS Demologos II
From Brass Goggles
The USAS Demologos II is an experimental Dreadnought-class airship from The New World RP.
The ship first appears in West Virginia when it is stolen from Harper's Ferry by a Captain Hildebrandt. The ships is revealed to have been scheduled for dismantling as it breaches a recently signed treaty.
The ship uses, among other state-of-the-art inventions, the MOFF lifting system.
(The following courtesy of MWBailey)
The ship's turbines are partly for propulsion, and partly for the Electromagnetic Suspensor Array; basically, it's (supposedly) a suspensive field created by a spinning array of floating electromagnets contained within, and acted upon by, a supercomplex, spherical motor armature, but the motor lacks an axle (not necessary, it's supposed to create lift, not drive anything). Once the Electromagnetic Array starts spinning (on at least two axes) fast enough, just like with a conventional armature-based motor, it begins to superconduct (In this sense, produce energy as well as consume it). In the next stage, it begins to power itself, and requires only a 'maintenential' or 'influential' current to keep up the suspensive field that results.
Cutting back on the influential current causes loss of altitude, increase causes gain of altitude. Cutting off both maintenential and influential power only causes the system to wreck itself by first cutting off influential control, and then superconducting without any restraint, ultimately spinning so quickly that air friction within the armature housing causes it (both the armature and the array) to literally melt itself.
"Turning off" the system is thus effected not by turning down or severing influential current, but by shorting out or interrupting the polyaxial orbital sequence, which is commonly done by bridging one or more polar-opposite armature segments, effectively short-circuiting and 'freezing' the array, in turn both ceasing lift and avoiding loss of orbital control (much like the old way of shorting the plug in a lawnmower engine to make it stop)
The high temperatures are the reason why it's still a largely experimental system; efforts to vacuumize the housing have so far proven to be futile, and while artificially-cooled and -circulated cooling gas in a closed system works well within normal operational parameters, superheating at loss of influential current has so far caused the gas (of whatever variety) to expand, thus damaging the housing and causing serious vapor leakage, or even causing an assembly-destroying explosion.
The Demologos, like many of its contemporary systems, supplements its own motive steam supply by routing water through special spherical radiators integral to the structures of the armatures, which adds a level of safety as well as utilizing heat that might otherwise go to waste. The result is a system that is not very difficult to manage -- as long as the armor holds and projectiles don't go smashing around destroying the housings, or a spy doesn't get aboard and do some selective sabotage, or the radiators don't leak.
Conventional Armament 1. eight 9-inch guns in four turrets topside; a further 4 in two Nadir (underside) turrets 2. 12 two-pounder steam-driven gatlings deck-mounted along the midline of the hull. 3. Rocket tubes fore (four) and aft (two). Nonconventional Armament -Bow Ram -Arc Projection Arrays(literally, "Lightning Guns") -various rocket- and artillery-delivered countermeasures
