There is now a public beta version of Airships dev 10. You can opt into it by going into the game properties in Steam, selecting the betas tab, and choosing "dev10beta".
It adds a lot of new things, including strategic conquest multiplayer and research. I'll be going over those in detail when it leaves beta.
For now, do try it out, and let me know about any bugs, crashes, or balance issues you encounter. We're coming up to the 1.0 release.
Edit: Did an update, beta 3, that fixed some crashes and desyncs.