Colonel Bombast’s Walking Skiff

The inestimable Colonel Thomas Bombast presents his amazing rotary cannon-armed walking skiff.

Built around the hull of a sturdy small Atlantic boat, the good Colonel’s feat of engineering utilises advanced mechanical gearing and gyroscopic self-balancing.

The two-legged design is the speediest of the several available steam walker platforms, and the Colonel’s patented Mechanogyrotropic Self-Balancer utterly counteracts the inherent instability of other bipedal platforms.

Advanced gearing allows the use of a relatively small steam engine for power, with plenty of steam left under normal usage conditions to power the mechanical rotary cannon slung under the skiff’s hull.

A six-barreled, two-inch-calibre weapon, the rotary cannon uses a steam-driven version or Mr. Gatling’s patented automatic gun mechanism, and at the limits of its gearing can fire nearly 200 shots per minute.

The secondary weapon is a swivel-mounted repeating blunderbuss which can be loaded with lead shot for unarmoured targets or steel slugs for use against more protected opponents.

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I quite like the look of this walker, with the boat hull and everything, but buildwise it’s nothing particularly special. No major interesting part use or special technique on display; just another steampunk walking machine.

Colonel Bombast may prove useful as a character. He looks a bit grim, but I expect even I’d be marginally uncheerful with a pegleg and a hook hand. On the other hand, he gets to stomp around in a steampunk walking boat, which I don’t.