Hello, welcome back to my blog. This is the second out of three blog posts we are writing in our Metaphor Machines unit. So, in class we are reading a novel called Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, which is in the genre Steampunk. Our unit right now is based on Steampunk and the industrial revolution. For this blog post I needed to find a question on the book leviathan and research it. My question is: “Would the Leviathan airship be an ideal airship nowadays?”

To show this, I made a chart that shows parts of the Leviathan airship, compared to a modern day blimp:

The biggest difference between the two is the fact that the Leviathan Airship is a living creature. It has built in mechanical parts as well, like the engines at the back.

This is definitely very different compared to a blimp. Now, we only use blimps for advertising, tours, and scientific observation, and not as a warship. The main reason I can think of why that is is because if the blimp gets hit with a few bullets, it’s gonna crash. In the book the Leviathan, the airship is shot at, and it gets a few holes in it, but they repair it quickly. The only problem they had was that the engines broke down. So, if we think about it, an airship like that wouldn’t be the greatest in nowadays warfare. It does have its advantages though. It’s quiet in the air, it’s a living creature so it eats to create more hydrogen, it has a whole ecosystem inside of it, and it has decent attack mechanisms. For example, the Leviathan Airship has creature called flechette bats that when scared, let loose all their lunch, which is filled with razor sharp spikes. The bats eat their food, which has those spikes in them, and it doesn’t harm them. Then when they are needed, they fly into the air and are guided with a spotlight to the target. At the right moment, the spotlight turns red in colour, which scares the bats so much that they let loose a rain of spikes.
Blimps don’t have any defence or attack measures because well, who’s going to attack an advertisement blimp? The structure is entirely different because the Leviathan has bones and muscle.

So in conclusion, the Leviathan would not be the absolute greatest ship in the warfare idea nowadays, but it would be good for transportation for important cargo and passengers. That is because it can fly for a very long time since it has its own ecosystem inside of it. And it has small defensive measures to ensure it gets where it needs to go.