Funnily enough, the whole steampunk plot thing became exceedingly obvious to me this morning, while I was cooking breakfast for my darling and myself before work. And quite literally, my thought pattern went like this:

"Victorian England would have been such a good time for scientific discoveries, and world exploration and all of that... Everything was still kind of a mystery, waiting to be worked out... I guess that's part of the appeal of steampunk, recreating/imagining that feeling of revelations waiting to be made, continents waiting to be discovered... I bet it would be cool if you had an airship doing that kind of thing... I'VE GOT IT!"

The 'I've got it' part was kinda me screaming it out loud, and waking Dave up a little more violently than I meant to. ^^ So yeah, there's another steampunk idea; world exploration, I guess in the style of Capt Cook, but in an airship and infinitely cooler.