>>725437747
I get what you mean anon, but in general people usually get interested in / hooked by a certain thing. Like, say, big ass airships. Sure dieselpunk can have them, but they fit steampunk better. In steampunk the whole industry chain makes sense from some heavily industrialized society with its coalmines and brass manufactury, both of which you need for the boilers on the ship. But those boilers need a mechanic, and now you have an excuse to establish a middleclass with higher-ish education. And that's a gateway to the rest of the niche characters, like pilots and a military industry to airship captains and pirates, which is a gateway to trading and economy, political intrigue, etc. For which you already have the backdrop from the bottom up.
Comparatively, and I mean no offense, dieselpunk feels like a knock-off. It's not practical to keep enough diesel/petrol fuel on a vehicle designed to fly, as opposed to land or water based transportation. But even if you take that for granted and suspend your disbelief, now it becomes a question of how that fuel gets there and how these ships will even dock. Steampunk airships just float, so medieval ports except in the air make sense and look cool. Here you'll need landing strips, and based on real life, those are reasonably high maintenance for cutting edge technology (I don't mean some rural airstrip for dusting crops). It makes sense those would be government property if not all military, both of which implies the fuel getting there is also done through government property. It just unnecessarily complicates things, and makes it harder for roleplayers to get into this sort of world without a highly specialized character for whom it makes sense to access this kind of infrastructure, but that's limiting.
