Airships of the Far West
With the vast distances that separate settlements in the Far West, the Chartered Houses of the Empire cannot lay rail fast enough to serve their needs – rail lines are easy enough to build in more civilized areas (The Empire proper, The Periphery, even the eastern portions of the Far West itself), but to lay rail across the untracked frontier requires far more than just material – it requires security, and more than that, it requires volume. Bluntly, most of