Airship Models for Colonial-era Gaming

Airships
"Such machines as well may run
...............Gainst the Horses of the Sun"
...........................--Kipling, A Song of Travel

The airship is based loosely on Count Zeppelin's Z-III of 1912, one of the first zeppelins in the German army. The original had three open gondolas, but the model was selectively compressed to two. It was painted grey, as aluminized fabric, for military airships at least, was still in the future.

The airship's fuselage is made from three Shasta 20-oz. drink bottles from the dollar store. Two one-liter bottles would produce a slightly chubbier zeppelin. With the necks and two of the bases cut off, the bottles press-fit into one another. Drill holes into the remaining base, make sure the fuselage is straight, and fill the bottles with spray-in-place foam insulation, allowing it to swell out slightly at the nose and tail. When it is fully cured, carve and sand a round end at the nose and tail, fill the carved foam with spackling putty and sand smooth.

The ribs are thin basswood strips which were originally intended to be covered with an outer surface. Several attempted methods of covering or filling produced disappointing results so I left the ribs bare. If I were doing it again, planning for no covering. I would use Evergreen's .060"/1.5mm half-round styrene strips (from the railroad hobby shop), since the square strips stand out far too sharply.

The tail surfaces are balsa sheet, tapered by sanding the edges. The upper surfaces are ridged with basswood strips and the lower surfaces should be too, but aren't.

The walkway/keel is thin posterboard with basswood-strip bracing glued on the surface.

Everything is glued to the fuselage with Walthers' Goo, a rubber-based contact cement used in model railroading.

The gondolas are simply thin posterboard, scored and folded. They are attached to the keel by triangles of posterboard. Brass rods support the propellors, which are clear acetate disks, sanded with a circular motion to give the impression of a spinning prop. The early zeppelins' motors were not hung outside, but were housed in the gondolas and connected to the propellor by a shaft, so they are not modeled.

The crewmen are 1:72 (20mm) soft-plastic American Civil War infantrymen, with inappropriate items cut off, and the kepis squared off on top. The thin 1:72 figures strike a reasonable balance between 25/30mm figures (which would be grossly oversize for the model) and something that is more visually in scale with the hull.

The model's support legs are made from coathanger wire. They are mounted in lengths of copper tubing which are epoxied into holes drilled in the fuselage. The legs should be painted to match the table, so as to be inconspicuous from the players' point of view (only the front leg is painted this way in these photos, since the original rear legs were replaced just before the photos were taken).

It is amazing how thoroughly legs can destroy the visual illusion of flight if they go straight down to the ground. Instead, the rear legs are slightly curved back and outward, and the front leg is curved backward, approximating the shapes of dangling landing lines. Note that the legs will lever and flex along the curve, so the front leg must be sharply recurved forward at the foot, so that it will be in opposition to the forces on the back legs. If it is not, the model falls forward since all legs lever in the same direction.

Size and Playability
The Z-III, if properly scaled for 25mm figures, would be almost 80" long (2 meters). The model (or more accurately, toy) is 15.5" long (40cm) and 3" wide (7.6cm). It is a cartoon version of the original, twice as thick for its length and lacking one of its gondolas and several less obvious details. Even compressed to this extent, the model was still large enough to be awkward on our 4'x 6.5' table (1.2 x 2m) during the Sher-Li game. Ranges to and from the zeppelin are measured from the gondolas.

For those who are unwilling to undertake the considerable fiddling involved in the construction of a pop-bottle zeppelin, there is the
Lego Air Zeppelin.

You can see the airship in action during the Raid on the Sher-Li Temple.
Airship designed and built by David. Photos by Steve.

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