Musing: Airships

Airships are awesome, everybody loves them (if you don't, you're not a person obviously, so you don't exist, that was deep), they make for great imagery, and they're just damn cool.

Obviously if you do floating islands as your world, you need airships.
Sean started the ball rolling with some really cool ideas:
"Extrapolating the idea of water based boats out, using the rock as hull material, we could get all kinds of ships,

I'm assuming there are a lot of smaller rocks floating around, aside from the islands, ranging from the size of your fist to large boulders and upwards. They'd probably be fairly scarce around populated areas, as they would be mined for airships and other purposes, but away from the population, it would probably be pretty densely packed. Common shipping routes would be clear of them. Traveling outside of the shipping areas or areas around population centers would require clearing, some sort of scoop that would push the rocks out of the way. I'm thinking reminiscent of the icebreakers in the Arctic."
~Sean

It might be just how I think, but anytime I read cool ideas like this, I immediately see it as images in my head, and this is some really cool stuff, it's a shame I can't draw (if somehow you fell onto here and can and for some reason feel like you don't draw enough, Sean and I could give you material for YEARS and pay you in cookies).

But anyway, how awesome is the idea of using the floating stone as the hull? It's a readily available resource, they know it floats without worrying about some failure sending them crashing into the wasteland below (hopefully), and it would just be intimidating to see.

Of course, I thought of other ways to go about making air ships, I see these as ways that people use to just be different, or show off:
Magic Powered (there have to be a few mages out there with the power to do it)
Elemental Powered (borrowed a bit from Eberron)
Steam Powered (Only for those really along the tech. path, and even they still need floating rock to keep the ship in the air)

Also, Sean's idea of rock fields is where the sense of Age of Discovery and Swashbuckling came about, Sean's mention of vast debris fields is what I see as what's stopping islands from all meeting one another, too much space and scariness out there. Of course Air Pirates would make bases in the fields so they wouldn't get killed, smugglers would know hidden routes through them, and even places where there wasn't rock debris, huge aerial creatures (real or imagined) could end your trip real fast.
So a simple idea about where airships came from, helped create an essential "feel" for our world.