Eterna is the capital city and primary spaceport of pr'Sefone, the innermost planet of the Rosa system. Situated near the world's north pole, Eterna serves as a hub for interworld trade, particularly the agricultural exports the planet is best known for. However, there is also significant passenger flow between worlds; the system's compact nature means even low-energy Hohmann transfers take just a few Earth days to complete.
A staple of the fantasy genre, especially when connected to steampunk influences, is the presence of airships. The Rosa system is generally pretty low-tech - although we do have spaceflight and some computers, a lot of our infrastructure has been rebuilt from the ground up. At some point I just chalk it up to rule of cule cool, but there are some practical reasons to use them - they're relatively low energy (good for when your society spends a ton of energy recapturing materials for synthetic fuels), and their moderate payload capacity makes them useful for "shipping" relatively low-density agricultural cargo on a sealess world like pr'Sefone. Their simple VTOL capability is appreciated throughout the system; Orus is incapable of supporting runways. Heavier-than-aircraft are being phased in as society industrializes, but they are less sustainable both in construction and in fuel consumption. Land trains are also being introduced to pr'Sefone, but they threaten to dust-bowlify that delicate sliver of habitable land.
Here we see some sketches of a place I've called an "aircourt." To provide streamlined access to an ornate (spiky!) city, airships are afforded a series of high-altitude mooring platforms to spare them the trouble of navigating low amongst buildings. The linked towers enclose the eponymous "court" space. I imagine a steady stream of ships from all over the planet continuously feeding through the rows, some odd combination of the slowest airport in history and the most graceful aerial ballet ever devised.
What do these vehicles actually look like? I had originally envisioned grand sailing ships taking advantage of the continuous wind, but it turns out that's a bit too physically impossible for me to suspend disbelief. (If it only worked in real life, we'd probably have been flying them for decades.) Instead I pivoted to a cyclorotor design that approaches the original aesthetic and also provides a unique alternative to boring old props.
I'm pretty happy with the general aesthetic here, and the functionality is nice - cyclorotors (or, as they may be named in-universe, "rotor-sails") can produce a thrust vector in any direction within the plane normal to their rotation axis. In other words, airships with these installed can translate with immense precision and responsiveness, great for fighting those pesky winds or performing careful approach maneuvers.
You may be wondering with growing apprehension about the vehicle in the lower right. The catamaran airship above, with smaller rotor-sails, is an airlaunch platform. Smaller planets and a healthy dose of fantasy physics make airlaunched SSTO shuttles the most common passenger transport in the system. After being carried to their target altitude, the shuttles are released and power their way into orbit and beyond, chasing down big interworld cyclers (space stations on permanent transit paths, with accommodations like ocean liners). There they roost during the journey, detaching at their destination to reenter and land on their own.
Except, naturally, they actually deploy a stowed lifting gas envelope to "land" in midair, as illustrated by the sketch near the top there. That vehicle is shown being towed by a small tug balloon. Rides on these shuttles would be harrowing, but they're certainly the cheapest, and thus, most accessible, option for many people.
I have some older, more polished artwork that's relevant here:
This one depicts roughly the same vehicle as above. I may 3D model the design to codify some features; I shied away from the pointy winglets in favor of a stumpier, sturdier design. Also, I'm definitely avoiding naming a fuel type for anything anymore - these are certainly not hydrolox vehicles, and I'm not about to calculate mass fractions for these things.
Here we see a much older airship concept launching one of the shuttles. I'd like the vehicles in Roselight to have this level of whimsy; I'll just need to re-flesh them out beyond just the functional basics. Expect the end result to look pretty similar to this.
One of my favorites I've done, depicting a cycler sailing over Eterna on its way past pr'Sefone. The shuttles shown earlier would be dwarfed by this great liner, serving more as ship's tenders than spaceships on their own. The cycler is spacious and luxurious (results may vary by social class), although nobody stays very long...
I think it's about bedtime tonight, but hopefully this was somewhat interesting! I have a bit of a break coming up so I may try and get a few more posts in then.
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