Skyships, differ from airship dirigibles (non-rigid/blimps, semi-rigid and rigid airships), although they are quite often as large in so far as the later are lighter-then-air aircraft and require compartmentalized cells containing a lifting gas to become airborne, their engines provide directive as well as motive power. Skyships however resemble nautical vessels, although generally smaller then true naval vessels, they can escape the pull of gravity via anti-gravity devices of various designs, the leading type in Europe is the originally Italian (actually the then kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia) derived gravity screw or gravity turbine which was pioneered in the early 1840s and was developed into combat capable if not wholly reliable ariel vessels classed as sky boats, sky vessels and sky sloops or sky corvettes. The Sardinians who had already tested their sky vessels to their satisfaction against Austrian forces during skirmished in the 1840s and 1850s along their common border. The Imperial Russian Navy captured some of the Sardinian craft when they fell out of the air due to mishaps involving their gravity screws, which failed to function if they were not aimed directly at the ground. A heel of more then a few degrees was often enough to cause a sky ship using this method of lift to suddenly be reclaimed by gravity as the drive ceased to intervene and plunge to the earth, often catastrophically for the ship and crew concerned. The Russians copied the gravity drive and managed to get several useful sky boats into service before the end of the First Crimean War of October 1853 to March 1856 and used them to some effect against the French, British, Ottoman and Sardinian forces in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea Fronts.
The British pioneered, a somewhat different system after the Crimean War, then the widely copied and steadily improved Italian Gravity Screw/Turbine. Their system created by Vickers used specially treated plates, panels or slats of metal fixed on gimbal and hinge systems to the underside of a skyship's hull. The more of these panels that were exposed increased the useful lift of the sky vessel and allowed it to cancel the effect of gravity. The hinge/gimbal system allowed greater control of the panels and keep them more evenly trimmed in reference to the ground. The ship as a result could be piloted more easily and agilely and with greater safety, then the screw/turbine, which in it's early models had to be fixed firmly in line with or adjacent to the vessel in question keel. The third method developed by Thomas Edison uses a gravity sphere mounted near or as close as possible to the center of a sky vessels center of mass, which projects a anti-gravity field around the ship, thus cancelling out gravity, allowing the ship to fly using it's engines to propel itself. The Edison Graviton Sphere does however have a problem, if consistent power ceases to charge the sphere, the ship will immediately crash to the ground, further two gravitonic spheres can not operate on the same vessel unless they have been harmonized otherwise they will burn each other out as their fields interact with one another catastrophically.
Landship, great steam and smoke belching war machines rule the lands as turret ships and sky ships rule the waves and skies. The line between super heavy vehicle and a Landship is a thin and sometimes wavering one, although Landships are themselves divided into roughly three classes: (1) Landcruisers, the smallest of the breed, typically between two-hundred and fifty to three hundred tons. (2) Landships (which are divided into subclasses; 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th class similar to naval battleships) proper are heavier being typically in the five-hundred ton ranges although some of the more modern ones are larger. (3) Landfortresses , the largest of this monolithic breed of war machines, often weighing in at over one thousand tons; ponderous, seemingly innoxerable as they traverse a battlefield, crushing everything in their path. All of these vehicles are singular for their thick armour, powerful armament and limited mobility, they typically move on massive wheel, mechanized track assembles or massive multi-jointed legs. A fourth classification does exist, that of Landram, pioneered in the American Civil War of 1861-67 by the Union Army in attempt to deal with British, French and Confederate landships. The typical landram, is a low lying, heavily armoured chassis mounted on six or eight massive, treaded or footed wheels. It's armament which mounted in casemates set at the front typically a heavy cannon of between 9" to 11" caliber, sides and backed typically by several smaller cannon of 3" to 4" calibers and backed up by several .58-caliber Gatling machine guns are secondary to the real weapon of the Landram, the colossal steam powered ram mounted in the front of the vehicle. Union Landram tactics involved stalking a much larger landship and then hurtling down upon it from as short a range as possible at flank speed to collide violently against it, hopefully demolishing the enemy land vessel's suspension system and causing massive kinetic damage to the interior and structure of the enemy from the impact of the steam ram.
While this desperate tactic did work successfully on occasion during the Civil war, it typically also badly damaged the Land ram attempting it by wrecking it's own suspension system, dislodging the ram and dislodging it's own steam engines with the violence of the impact. Consequently the tactic was not widely copied by other nations who observed the American Civil War, most resorted to development of specific and mobile artillery platforms based on heavy or siege artillery guns designed as anti-landship artillery. The Union Army still maintains it's existing Landram fleet for lack of anything better, the bulk of the force being either original Civil War veterans or rebuilds of them.
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