Size of a world with airships
I'm making a world with magic and most if not all tech will run on mana. I have airships in this world but I'm having a hard time deciding how large across the world should be. I want - even with airships - for long distance travel to take months (cross a continent or from one continent to another). Should I set a slower airspeed than airplanes now, and have the world the same size as Earth, or increase the size of the world, or both?
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1 answer
Since all the tech (including the airship engines I assume) runs on mana, then in addition to bowlturners ideas, you could limit speed by the need to "refuel".
I'll have to make a few assumptions since you didn't specify how mana works, but if mana isn't a constant, unlimited resource, then it'll have to be replentished.
So the airship could be able to travel at 89km/hr, but only be able to travel for 6 hours before having to stop and recharge for a few hours. This could limit the ship to 1000km a day. Less if the engines aren't as efficient.
Add to that high mountain ranges that need to be navigated around so straight line travel is impossible. So a straight "as the crow flies" distance of 10,000km could end up being 30,000km of distance needed to travel.
Another thing that could slow it down is scheduled stops.
Say the world is heavily forested, and mountainous, so ground travel is difficult. You still have settlements and towns that need supplies and people that want to move around. The airships are the obvious choice for this, meaning that airships would have routes and have to make stops at each location along the way. Docking, unloading, and loading could take a while depending on what's being moved around. This would slow down the travel time too. You could still have express airships that only make a few stops.
One other thing would be weather. Airships have trouble in high winds, so if your world has frequent storms, or even something like the Santa Ana Winds or Chinook winds where the wind will blow hard for days/weeks at a time. The airships would have to anchor and wait for things to die down. Either that or travel really slowly, fighting the wind the whole way, and making frequent stops.
Edit
Another weather issue could be fog or low clouds full of things like tall trees and rocks. It could even be kind of like river navigation, where you had to have a navigator that knew where all the sand banks were in order not to run-aground. If this happened frequently, they would be forced to travel very slowly or risk crashing until the clouds lifted.
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