It's very cool how things work out sometimes. I'm writing a steampunk fantasy for Nano, and my airship features sails, levitation magic, and a combustion engine, instead of the more traditional balloon and propellers model.
Just now I'm writing them passing through storm clouds. Their engines are spent, their sails are shredded and they're moving on inertia alone. I decide to make the craft have some kind of lightning channel to direct the damage away from the ship, and possibly stored as energy for later.
Debating what role that much electricity would play on the ship, I realised that generally speaking a jet engine needs a charge to jump start it. The kind of charge my combustion engine (which makes up part of a jet engine - if I got this right) could well make use of.
All of a sudden I realise that the situation feeds perfectly into the circumstances of the story. And while I couldn't understand quite as much as I wanted in my engine research, it sounds close enough to fudge. After all, although I have magic for buoyancy, I still want some things to be grounded in reality. I mean, I can't pretend a ley line is a superconductor, can I?
Can I?
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Ahoy Thar Shipmaet! We be sailin' t3h failboat seas!