Unlike the Karadenians and Sondorians, the Arcadians took an entirely different approach to glossarian airships. They started with a small, lightweight, yet heavily-armed patrol craft for the desert at their northern border. This flying gunboat was designed more like a modern metal aeroplane, rather than a ship, and took much longer to develop than the Sondorian siege bireme or the Karadenian galleon that preceded it.
As you can see, the golden compass of the Arcadian Empire is painted on the ship. I've started to make it a point to add decals to my models.
The gunboat is armed with a pair of 125mm guns, one mounted on top of the pilothouse (which can get uncomfortable), and one at the stern. Other weapons are six 75mm guns, four in lower sponsons, and two on top of the deck sponsons, as well as four turrets, each with a pair of heavy machine guns (up to 30mm autocannons can be fitted to these turrets).
At 50 metres long, the gunboat is very small by the standards of both airships and surface ship, and weighs about 700 tonnes. With only four levitators, control of the craft is quite easy, eliminating the need for additional airscrews. Essentially, piloting the gunboat is like piloting a quadcopter without the aid of software (hey, pilots in our world have managed eight-engine jet bombers before computers).
The three "keels" on the bottom, similar to the hull shape of a modern motorboat or the fuselage of an old-fashioned flying boat (type of seaplane), lend a great deal of strength to the comparatively lightweight hull, keeping it rigid in flight, and also allowing the gunboat to land on the ground (usually sand) or water with no additional landing gear.
In the view below, you can see how four 75mm guns, four heavy machine guns, and a 125mm cannon all cover the bow of the vessel, allowing for the gunboat to deliver a massive amount of punishment while approaching a target.
Meanwhile, the gunboat can fire a powerful broadside with most of the same guns, using both 125mm cannons, three 75mm guns, and four heavy machine guns.
With a top speed of 100 knots, the gunboat is comparable to aeroplanes of the day, but with much greater ranger, durability, and firepower. This made it ideal for rapid responses to border incursions, and offered some relief to the massive garrisons that the Arcadians began to build in response to Taressimian expansion to the north.
Against ground targets, the gunboat was a formidable weapon, deadly and agile, though not quite as hard-hitting as the siege ships with their massive mortars. Against other airships, however, their performance was mixed. The gunboat is certainly more advanced than a flying galleon, but the galleon's 105mm guns could still inflict considerable damage on the lightly-armoured gunboat. The Sondorian siege bireme would be even more vulnerable against a gunboat, but it is a much more specialised ship, and by the time that Arcadia and Sondor went to war, the latter had much more advanced armoured airships, including a dedicated interceptor that escorted siege biremes and was designed to take out much more powerful airships. As for the Zaphnora, even an entire squadron of gunboats could forget it, as the Zaphnora is 30 knots faster, has much longer-range weaponry, those 210mm cannons could open up a gunboat like a tin can, the armour can shrug off 150mm shells, you get the idea.
As you can see, I added the flags of the respective countries on the airships. The siege bireme still isn't finished, as I've added two 75mm deck guns, but the remaining 32 gun sockets are still empty.
This will be it for airships for a while. I have another fictional tank to design, per my self-imposed 15mm challenge, as I recently uploaded another historical tank model in that scale. Depending on what else I have to deal with, I might make a video walkthrough of it, or I may simply show it in a vlog along with some other items. It's been a full month since my last BitChute video, and I'd rather not leave my subscribers (all twelve of them) hanging.