Decided I'd take the advise and develop some simpler mods first.
Home Tree - Will have a recipe to make vanilla saplings grow into 100 block high trees and tree poison to tear them down (slight chance to drop wood of tree type)
More Tools - Will allow the crafting of more durable or effective tools and weapons
and after that
Clockwork Craft - lots of gears and mechanical power to operate useful machines
after that I should have the base knowledge to tackle the airship mod/addon
Edit: and something with better boats....
Edit: and probably Civcraft - an npc mod that the npc's are specialized to one task and with randomly spawn (low chance) and will be able to be trade with. What is required to trade is based on realistic needs (ie a farmer will need wood and stone to build a simple house and tools, a farmer will auto search tall grass for seeds). npc's will trade with each other too. As well, possibly morality levels (like if a npc desperately needed something, they might attempt to steal it).
And later cross mod it so the npc's will want and use machines and tools from other mods