Universe: Beta
Story: "Cart Wars" (never seen in a strip)
First seen: Only did a few drawings of it, around 1993-4
Type: Airship
Year(s): 1993-4
Crew: 1000
Passengers: 5000
Top Speed: 60mph
Weapons: Hundreds and hundreds of egg and tomato-shooting turrets, numerous turnip bomb bays, and so on.
Defence: None
Capacity: Hundreds of tons of cargo
Length: 6 miles
Width: 1.3 miles
Height: 2 miles
Fuel Type: Petrol
General Info:
There were 3 incarnations of Cart Wars. The first one was more like battles, though they rolled gravity carts down hills, they also fired rotten eggs and fruit at each other. This escalated into them having WW1-type planes, pedal-powered tanks, and so on. Though they still only used rotten fruit as weapons.
The "goodies" in this incarnation, called Circle Ship, first had a modest airship from which to command their forces. This escalated and escalated and ended up in the ridiculousness you see here! At one point I also wanted to have real weapons, namely an "electric force field" and "rapid-fire sidewinder missiles", because a 6-mile-long airship trundling round the skies would no doubt attract attention from boring authority figures in the government and RAF. Anyway, at some point (I seem to recall it was during a nice summery trip to Thetford Forest), I realised this was extremely stupid, and decided to roll back Cart Wars to being only about racing.
Variants:
Only one... which would likely use the world's entire remaining helium reserve to fly.
Origin / Inspiration:
Very childish wishful thinking. Even if you could get the helium to fill it, and engines to propel it, it would probably just buckle and fall apart under it's own weight... and that's if you managed to finish building it before that happened!