Captain's Log
Looked at the design tonight and just said it out loud: start over. Totally reimagined. Not a tweak, not a fourth pass at the same silhouette — the whole thing.
It wasn't bad. That's what made it hard to admit. It was a perfectly competent airship that happened to look like every other airship in every other game, because I'd been deriving it from military aircraft the whole time without noticing that's where the shape kept coming from.
The actual fix wasn't a better airship. It was stopping and asking what this thing would look like if it came from industrial machinery instead — a hopper, a chute, something that dumps instead of aims. Nothing in this genre looks like that.
Some nights the discipline isn't pushing through. It's admitting the foundation was wrong and eating the cost of starting clean.