EMP weapons and the destruction of a civilisation
Quite bluntly, I don't have the physics to understand the information I'm getting. I've searched EMP weapons, EMP itself, read some articles about what happens when the sun decides to kill us all, wound up on a couple of survialist websites (fun!), and gone through tags and found semi-relevant questions in weapons, catastrophes, and technology.
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Is there a reason that it needs to have a physical cause vs something like a computer virus? Since the boats and airships are designed to be piloted, they would be more vulnerable to a virus, especially if they were all linked through satellites. Hacker gets into the satellite system, uses that to transmit the virus, boom, every system in contact with them suddenly loses their control systems, for example, and suddenly the engines shut down and the navigational equipment isn't working. A good sailor will be able to figure out how to do basic navigation, and with some ingenuity the crew might eventually figure out some way to propel their ship, but airships wouldn't have time to figure anything out before they went down. Ships that were docked at the time might automatically try to link to the sat system upon startup, infecting them as well if no one realized what was going on in time or if they were unable to access the satellites to disable the virus.
The cities, since they wouldn't be using the sat systems for navigation and would have higher level AI systems (necessary in order for them to be even semi-autonomous) would be less affected, as long as, say, one of those falling airships didn't slam into something irreparable and crash it. If the crash happened in an area which was inhospitable like a desert, that could lead to the city being abandoned.
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Additionally, short of something physically attacking an airplane and damaging its structural integrity, anything you do to them will turn them into gliders by default - EMP or virus. Now, these gliders will still crash, but a few of them being controlled by experienced pilots and which happened to have been over geographically favorable locations at the time might make a controlled crash-landing. Most of them, however, will simply crash and kill everyone onboard.
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I do need it to be a physical event (this depopulates and destroys my city and the area is interdicted) but I can work with not having all the airships fall out of the sky at once. The geographically favorable conditions and experienced pilot points you've made are excellent, thank you.
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