Sandships

This is a discussion of sandships as pertains to the Exalted game.

I was reading Masters of Jade, and pages 22-23 assert that sandships run across the desert on ski-like runners. This brings me, yet again, to my long held view of what sandships "really" look like. It starts with page 48 of Caste Book Eclipse, which is a first edition title. There is artwork there which shows a sandship as a device with wheels, reminiscent perhaps of a dune buggy powered by a wind sail. Of course the example there is a fairly small one, capable of carrying only a handful of people. Nevertheless, this is how I have imagined sandships throughout my Exalted gaming.

I mean to look around more in the setting material to see if there is some older reference to the ski runner approach. However, the wheel approach makes more sense to me for a device which is not an Artifact. I know that Masters of Jade asserts that the ski-runners are aided by thaumaturgy, but I feel like the dune-wheels approach works better on a base mundane level, and therefore would be much easier to improve with sub-sorcery magic.