Crow Mail Airship

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by Bahlam

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Children's Stories

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Here's a little idea development sketch for a magically driven airship.  It's not the sort of magic that's explained by 'it's magic.'  It's the Clarke's Law sort of magic involving nanodevices known as 'dæmons' or elsewhere 'nobes' (short for nanobes).  The operation of the Maxwell dæmons, which exist in the surrounding air, is still information-entropic even using reversible processes.  It's still much simpler than using a propane burner or other silly thing.  The idea of recovering energy using coherent 'lux' (aka. an infrared laser beam) to transfer energy came from a paper by David Leigh published a few years ago.  Also note that even though the dæmons are concentrating hot molecules inside the envelope and the pressure is higher inside than outside there are actually fewer molecules per volume inside and thus the air is light enough to lift the craft.  The envelope is intentionally rather small looking.  With this sort of technology it probably wouldn't need to be very big to displace tens of tons of air.  Not that I've done any actual calculations.  I'm way too lazy.  I need to add some more details like mooring lines and other rigging to make it look really complete and convincing.  I may in fact add elevators like the ones on Equestrian air yachts (I picked up one of those awesome closonné pins of the air yacht at Bronycon).  I was thinking of this sort of thing years before they appeared in MLP FiM.

I have yet to write out the principles of thermodæmonics (argh the pun!) in a comprehensive way except in scribbled notes on paper.

I think this sketch is up on my Tumblr too.

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