History and State of Manned Flight in The Steppes

Let's cover some miscellaneous lore topics in to kill some time until the release.


The first manned flight in recorded history above The Steppes was that of an unidentified contraption assumed to be operated by at least 2 beastfolk. The event took place shortly after the foundation of Stallia and involved the sight of what was described at the time as "a fireball or meteor" that streaked across the Stallian airspace and touched ground a few kilometers east in a wheat field. The explosion and subsequent fire caused the device and its occupants to be spread over a 800 meter radius, leaving little to study. Historians to this day argue about whether this was a poorly operated savaged saurian era flying machine or an oddly-shaped rocket with beastfolk strapped to it for some reason.

During the first desperate years of The Steppes no man-made machine significantly lifted off the ground neither in Stallia nor Arrakans. During the construction of the Veshite-Stallian railway there were attempts to use observation balloons as some kind of mobile watchtowers. They were generally tied to escort wagons, but the weather often grounded them as they approached the hieronhortean lands, where they were most direly needed.

During its first years, Ill-Vess also failed to develop a sizable number of aircraft for the same reason. The weather just did not allow a local market of lighter-than-air or wood and canvas machines to develop.

The advances necessary in metallurgy to make air transportation possible, although veshite in origin, did not arrive until the time Nivhar was being constructed. The city received the know-how when veshite industries poured in. The entrepreneurs quickly realized that the mild weather of Nivhar was perfect for the new machines, and so the nivharian aeronautical industry and its flying culture was born.

Soon all the young people in Nivhar were trying to learn how to pilot an aircraft. The "air craze" resulted in landing strips in almost every villa or hamlet surrounding the city and farmers were soon fantasizing about the (mostly imaginary) wonders of airborne agriculture. Acrobatic air shows were all the rage and you could hardly watch an action movie without at least a dogfight in it, sometimes involving no other weapons than the pilots' bare hands.


Presently, because of the coastal location of the main centers of trade, most flying takes place in seaplanes. Ill-Vess is particularly partial to flying boats as their mountainous terrain limits their available space for sizable landing strips. Arrakans, on the other hand, is more interested in floatplanes, with several smugglers already specialized in delivery of small valuables through the use these nimble machines.

Airstrips further inland in The Steppes are mostly reserved for military operations, since neither Stallia nor especially the embargoed Tershelle-Val offer many commerce opportunities. The military's interest is both in logistics and the fact that planes equipped with retractable gears can easily outperform those that are forced to drag their floats around all the time.

Ill-Vess has been forced to solve its spatial problems with the development of rotor aircraft and helicopters, but this technology is still in its infancy and still subject to the weather. The technologies to manufacture turbine engines and metal fuselages approach optimization in The Steppes, but jet engines are still only in the fantasies of reclusive engineering types. The hypothetical invention of a functional jet engine would revolutionize flight and, along with the use of saurian alloys, theoretically allow the creation of much bigger, faster and durable aircraft.