Airships Over Horoa By BlastWaves Watch

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"October 20th, 1929. The three largest zeppelins ever built in the Kingdom of Ostania drift quietly past the smoke filled industrial city of Horoa, New Tylivisa. On the ground, two guardsman of Guard Post #54 stand by a photographer of the Ostani Times as he adjusts his camera to take a photograph for this Sunday's paper."

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From nearest to farthest: CZ-02 "Victory", CZ-01 "Triumph", and RZ-129 "Lady Maria".



The Behemoth class of zeppelins was a rather disastrous endeavor for the Ostani Kingdom as a whole. The project started with the King, Oskar Gudmundsson VII, commissioning three zeppelins to be built in September of 1920, two for the military as (at the time) state-of-the-art airborne aircraft-carriers, and one for the royal cabinet to travel in throughout the land as well as prove their superiority to neighboring countries. The entire project was riddled with setbacks and much difficulty in actually constructing the airships as well as also not bankrupting the government, due to the fact the nation was currently recovering from a nearly catastrophic series of plagues throughout the land, with the Ostani Kingdom's money in dire need of being used for recovery and rebuilding. Thus, on a weekly basis the construction and shipping of materials for the ships would simply have to be abandoned until later, leaving the ships to rot in their airdocks for several weeks at a time. As a result of this, despite the airships being commissioned in 1920, it took a rather timely nine years to fully construct and launch each of the ships, and at this point they were already considered rather obsolete in the world of airships.



Of all of the airships however, the RZ-129 Lady Maria in particular was the center of controversy throughout various nations, as despite it being painted in a civilian scheme and described as an "unarmed luxury airship", the zeppelin was still actually built to military specifications, with a working bomb bay door in the aft section and also visibly painted over hangar doors for Marodi PA.28 model fighter aircraft on its underside, the same ones that would be used on the Triumph and Victory aircraft-carriers. Furthermore, the Lady Maria was considered unsafe for the actual royal cabinet to travel in, as undoubtedly the sheer size of it and its military counterparts would be enormous targets for enemy fighter planes and possible sabotage such as bombing or damage to its control surfaces. Eventually, the RZ-129, CZ-01, and CZ-02 were retired to the Royal Museum of Aviation in Tallinberg, with all three airships finally being scrapped in January of 1936 for reuse of parts and metal in the Ostani aviation industry.

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