War in airships normally involve cannons. These cannons are not like the ships that exist in the seas. Those cannons work using a black powder which they use in fireworks called as gunpowder. That is enough for skirmishes in the water where you need to be able to get close to the enemy in order to fight them.
The cannons of the sky are formations. They are usually magic of a more volatile nature. Mostly they tend to be of the fire element, mostly fireball at various levels of strength. These formations can be locked on to enemy targets too in all directions too. So if the enemy were to suddenly rise or descend you could still make sure that your cannon can be aimed at them, though that takes quite a bit of skill.
One could try and use cannons of the sea in an airship battle, but the problem with such ships is the range of these cannons. Most would not be able to touch the ship even when the other ship ended up in boarding range. After all, just being a bit above the enemy or a bit below them, would be enough to make them essentially useless.
Fighting in the sky then becomes the process of trading blow using our cannons and dodging said cannon shots, while trying to board the other sides ship and prevent boarding into our ship. Boarding into the widows tear will certainly be a impossibility in the sky, so if you manage the cannons of the enemy, our chances of survival are quite high.
Thankfully such cannons are costly and most new pirates are not able to afford it. The pirates nearer to my home will be much better equipped. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a dedicated flagship (every pirate group usually has one. Most of them tend to be the older ships of the armies in the south. They might be kld but they are hard to fight.)
Anyways, I have given all of this explanation to explain why a ship needs a cannon. You would be surprised how many do not tend to know even the basics of a battle in the sky and how important some of these people tend to be. They usually are the people that end up deciding how the people in the sky end up being equipped.
I have three such cannons that I need to add to the ship. Two cannons are mid range cannons of the fire element and one of them is a large cannon of the light element. Sadly, these cannons are not the creations of my master. The man seemed to have acquired it as a spoil of war. I don't know which unfortunate pirate ship encountered my master, but the cannons have barely been used and they are supposed to give quite a bit of decent firepower too.
They are quite useable at my level, but they are still a step below the working of the ship itself and that is where my work has grown to be so troublesome.
These cannons need to be linked to the formations in the third floor of the ship. My masters formation can work both on the ambient mana and also work on a separate source of mana.
The cannons naturally will need to be linked to the formations that power the ship or I will have to individually go and charge each of these cannons. Thay would certainly eat up a lot of my time. I will also have to manually shoot the cannon. For that purpose though I would need a proper troop that has been trained for aerial battles which is something that I can certainly not imagine happening in my case. I am actually not sure if the head office even has a troop that has been trained in aerial warfare.
Even if I had a troop, then there would be the issue of soldiers living space. The widows tear is not particularly large. It has three floors with a storage area in the first floor. The second floor is the living quarters with what I count to be twelve room. I could stuff like two people in one room, though I will have to admit that is going to be quite a tight fit and that would still be enough to only fit half of one troop, which is roughly about fifty soldiers. All of this is discounting the fact that soldiers will need to eat too, which would be another massive storage issue.
Instead this ship is destined to be a speedy bugger, with a majority of the controls under the control of the mage that will be controlling the ship. This is a kind of ship that I have always wanted to pilot so you won't find me complaining in that case. Well, it is stuff like this that end up leaving me wondering if I should really be so mad at my master.
Then he does something that he only does to make living a pain for me that I end up wanted to strangle him. Anyway returning to my present situation, where I have been spending the last couple of weeks in the simple process of trying to understand how to link the cannons to the ships formation so that the ship will be able to control the cannons under my command.
Normally this is a pretty easy task, with skilled formation mages able to link thousands of cannons on their own in one of the larger ships. They have the two benefits though. First is a group of underlings who are actually willing to do all the grunt work and secondly, a standard design of formation which makes the process of such an addition quite a mechanical process. Hundreds of mages have used and perfected the processes of such a linking to make our work quite easy.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The formations on the ship are all my masters work, not the result of the creations of any of the Titans down south so it is impossible for him to actually follow a standard method. The man would work better using his own designs. That also means compared to those somewhat trashy formations that you can find on most ships, these formations are infinitely better.
This difference exists at the very basic level of a formation. If I create a formation, I will need ten runes to do something my master is able to fit hundreds in the same spell. The final spell might be same but there is a marked difference in speed, efficiency and the simple raw output of the formation.
Such a formation cannot be generalised into a standard structure that would be easily understood by even a normal pirate. My masters work is naturally not that simple. Even me, a man that has spent nearly half of my life with formations is not able to understand much of this, let alone a outsider who has never seen formations like this. Only another formation master of my masters calibre will be able to even figure out my masters designs correctly.
Anyway, returning to the present case Those extra runes are what is causing problem in my present case. If it is a normal formation It would be quite easy to figure out which runes I need to tweak to link the ship to the cannons even if nobody has a easy solution for it.
Among these hundreds, the purpose of each rune is something that I have little idea about and I cannot go about wantonly messing with these runes. That means that I have to study each formations from the very basic runes, getting an idea on their structure atleast. This way, I will understand the core components of the formation that I don't want to be messing with.
At best, I might mess with whatever additional bonuses that my master has built into the ship and at worst I can completely collapse the propulsion Matrix in the ship, causing the ship to crash to the ground and then my master would be the only person that would be able to fix that.
You can say for certain that my master won't be pleased about that since he has left clear instructions that he does not want to be disturbed. He has impisoned himself in the storage area, studying the new magic that he encountered here. He calls it tattoo magic, which means that it must have some relation to the tattoo tribe.
That could certainly explain some of the animosity they felt for sages. We are not told much about them but they are supposed to skilled at more technical magics, much like formation magic, warlock magic and other such magics.
After all, who would like to have competitors when they hold a monopoly over a region and I I also have to assume that the sages must have left quite the trail of destruction behind too. I can't say for certain, but it seems to me that formations have quite a negative effect in the truelands.
Anyways, that is not my place to wonder about such things. After the last time I provoked the old man, it would be wise for me to not remain in his radar for too long. The man is not one for direct punishments. Instead he will find the method that will seem the funniest to him, which often is the cruelest method of punishment.
After all you need to remember. The man took away all my formations and made essentially go defenseless into enemy territory as training. His punishment certainly will be a step beyond that. I honestly can't predict the man's reaction sometimes though.
Once he calms down enough, we would already be at the hex mountain and my master is a pretty busy man. I will be frank, that I honestly dint understand what is his work since he is quite protective about it but he certainly will not have the time to do it for me. He must be quite interested in this new magic that he even travelled this far north.
Without the ship, he would still come north, mind you, but the man is quite good at showing his annoyance.
Now, to leave my master aside. The addition of the cannon has been quite a success, atleast in my eyes. That is why I had even forgotten to add a log in the last half a week. My master has nearly traveled half of the distance on his own, after which he modified the ship and is using it to return.
That means we have roughly about another week and half of traveling left to return to the hexnountain. I am sure that my master can make it a much shorter trip, but he is busy in his own thing.
That leaves me with one final thing to do that I have to assume will take nearly the remaining time that I am left and that would be linking my sword to the ship. This is technique called as formation linking that seems to be quite unique to my master. I have atleast not seen anything like that in any other formation created by other formation mages.
With it, my master is able to link all of his formation with that one formation called as the key formation. Once the link is established, one is able to control all his formations directly with the key formation granted he is physically close enough to the formation. He can make use of the key formation like a control stick, essentially. No other person will be able to then make use of the formation.
Other formation mages tend to have other techniques to achieve something like this, but none are able to achieve my masters feat of remote control that he can achieve with a key formation.
While all of that is nice, the only problem is that I only know the theory of this technique. My master claims that it is supposed to be easier than building a class eight formation but I won't believe until I achieve it on my own first.