This is the last battle of the "Sky Pirate" Shion Omar (described here) in her prized aerial galleon Empress of the Skies, against the Etrusean ironclad Air Destroyer Despina.

Levistone is buoyant in a dimension which is not directly observable, and provides similar resistance to a hull in the water; the lift is increased if it is heated, and Despina was the first leviship to use coal furnaces instead of wood-burning stoves, hence the trail of smoke from her underside.

If you want to think of this scene from Shion's perspective the theme would of course be this, while if you're rather think of this scene from Despina's perspective try this.

The main reason Empress of the Skies lost, aside from that she could only really damage Despina's wooden bow deck and the stern windows, was that Despina could out-climb her; being higher than one's opponent reduced them to only using their swivel guns while the higher ship could part-load her cannons and drop cannonballs on the opposing ship's deck. Quenching the Levistone on one side and turning sharply did allow a lower ship to fire a broadside upwards, but it required a very skilled crew to pull off such a maneuver at a high angle without cannons tearing loose and sliding the width of the ship.

In general aerial galleons like Empress of the Skies were built to keep a constant cruising altitude with a light heat; heating period Levistone too much would cause impurities to fall out of it as it started to melt, which would generally crack the core and lead to uneven lift which could tear a ship to pieces. Despina used water jackets to heat her cores evenly rather than a copper vessel which only protected the stone from the open flame.

This was the forerunner to later (Victorian-era) pure-stone boilers which would use a structure like a locomotive boiler to heat the core with steam, which was perfected by the Aludrans with their multi-core boilers which allowed the construction of leviathans like Perkunas (630 feet). The Etrusean hybrid Leviships (Dauntless, Fearless and Relentless) were even bigger, but used hydrogen as well as Levistone to make up for the inferior lift of their single-core boilers.

Large Air Destroyers were mostly restricted to land attack missions and later anti-submarine duties after the Chiran fleet carrier Alana shot down the Fearless with heavyweight Stryx-A surface-to-air rockets using 1.5-ton hollow-charge warheads. That was until it was discovered Levistone produces even more lift than it does when heated if you pass an electrical current through it, this leading to battleship-sized modern Leviships with jet engines like the Aludran S-Class (Scorn, Spite, Scourge) that participated in the Fourth Battle of Kythen Ocean.

A little on Despina's history:

(...) The next great step forward occurred due to the genius of Caroline Merrick, Chief Naval Architect of the Etrusean Air Navy. As a child Merrick had heard tales, which would turn out to be quite true, of ships beyond the Chiran Shield Wall that floated despite being clad in iron. As an adult she swore she would see a ship so clad take form before she died. With the ancient secrets of the iron-plated Alcacian Greatships long lost to time, she would have to start from nothing. Her earliest sketches became a series of designs she refined and refined again, waiting for the right time to present them.

She would have her chance when a fierce storm tore the aerial galleons Glory and Fortitude from their moorings and led to a shattering collision; salvage teams wrote off both ships due to damage from the collision and subsequent fire, but their deeply buried Levistone heaters had survived unscathed. Merrick took delivery of both sets of heaters and set to work on her masterpiece.

Despina would be unlike any Leviship yet constructed, the doubled-up lifting power augmented by a switch from wood-fired heaters to coal furnaces. This was used to support a layer of iron plates over a backing of teak, far too heavy for a watercraft, and with wrought iron spars supporting her sails. The iron plating protected the 350-foot Despina's flanks, while teak and oak were used on her bow deck and stern.

Merrick's ingenuity led to a number of unusual innovations, using the strength of Alcacian crew members to operate them; Despina carried both bellows-powered pneumatic grenade launchers and hand-cocked coil-spring mortars, making her the first warship of the Continental Powers able to deploy explosive projectiles. Abandoning the Basram principle of "like for like" which had largely restricted Leviships to being designed to attack one another, she was also equipped with free-falling explosive bombs for attacking surface ships. Merrick's name for her creation, "Air Destroyer," would soon become the preferred term for battle Leviships.

Merrick's plans for Despina can be seen in the Etrusean Museum of Military History in the Aviation Hall; some five hundred designs in all, dating back to her childhood.