There’s zeppelin on the curent banner for this site, and we’re notorious pulp gamers, so it should come as no surprise that zeppelins are amongst our favourite things here on The Warbard. Sure, they’re often explosive, prone to crashing in a stiff wind and all the rest, but let’s face it, zeppelins are just cool.
In A World More Pulpish (which is a much cooler place than reality) there’d be zeppelins everywhere. One glimpse of how A World More Pulpish might have looked, with zepps overhead, is found in this Feb. 2010 post over on Propnomicon, Zeppelin Goldmine.
There’s a link over in that Propnomicon post to a real early 1920s book on proposed trans-Atlantic zeppelin designs (via the Internet Archive’s library), and also to some high-resolution images of individual pages from that book (via Flickr). Go check it out, lots of fun detail in the book, and great graphics including cabin floor plans for a proposed long-distance passenger zeppelin nearly as big as the real-world Graf Zeppelin turned out to be:
One of my medium- to long-range scenery-building plans for pulp gaming is for an airship gondola or cabin assembly as a playing area for pulp skirmish, similar too but not as gloriously insane as this awesome zeppelin build thread over on LAF, and every time I see these plans those ideas reassert themselves in the back of my mind. One of these days… at least the control gondola and passenger area, nothing quite as gigantic as gamer Mac’s project in that LAF thread. Not at first, anyway…
Incidentally, the zeppelin graphics featured (in various versions) on the banners for this site are derived from the scanned PDF of this book; I imported individual pages from the PDF into GIMP, did some cleanup and contrast adjustment, then moved the images over to Inkscape (which we have written about before here on The Warbard) to convert them to SVG vector images (which have the huge advantage that they’re infinitely scalable, and in many ways easier to edit than regular bitmap images) to use in our banners and other projects.
Lots of other good inspiring stuff over on Propnomicon, too, not just zeppelin plans. I highly recommend checking it out!
(Most of this was originally posted as a Lead Adventure Forum post, and I just tripped over it and decided it deserved another airing as a Warbard post. Enjoy! — Brian)