Ballpoint has been established as the only force with reasonable airpower. The SRA has those flimsy gunship things, but up against a Moghopper they're fairly pathetic. Solar Powered airships sound pretty cool though.
Ennnhhhh, do not like. It doesn't make sense. They have time travel, they hop dimensions with ease, and yet somehow, pretty much nobody has airpower? When was this decided?
If time travel is even possible, we're thousands of years from it, and yet we STILL have plenty of airborne combat vehicles. Hitting a target in the air is a lot harder than it sounds, Splint.
edit: if there's any reason that airborne vehicles haven't shown up yet, it's got to be that they don't want to alert the world to the fact they exist. It's hard to hide an airplane in the bushes. But the idea that
nobody has formidable airborne technology frankly seems pretty ridiculous.
reedit: I do agree, though, that airships should be kept completely out of any battles surrounding Spearbreakers, at least for the time being. If the dwarves saw airships overhead, that would cause a ton of shit to go down, and probably mass chaos... which couldn't be explained through game/canon ties. At the same time, I think that the final battle between Parasol and Ballpoint, when all stops were pulled, would probably have airships - and in huge quantities.
triedit (yeah):
above cloud level. costing only 2-3k a year.
Your math doesn't make sense, either, by the way.
Even a jet fighter costs around 100,000,000 US dollars (roughly). If you scale money to food, assuming that a dwarf eats about 10 units of food per year, and a real-life human consumes about $1000 worth of food yearly (roughly) and in DF, food is worth about 2 dorfbucks apiece, that means that same jet fighter in DF ought to cost around
200 billion dorfbucks.
(I could have the numbers off for the fighter jet price, but the bare minimum is 100 billion dorfbucks.)