Dreadnaught

Imagine the skies. Imagine set against the setting suns, a massive creature undulating with power and majesty. Imagine the light playing over its many bioluminescant fins as they bathe the creature in rippling fuschia.

All this to say that the dreadnaught is a sight to behold. Spanning from between 13m to night on 51m, the creature sprouts thin whiskers and a massive beaked and toothed maw (like an earth octopus). The creature has 8 large slitted eyes, covered in multiple sets of shuttered eyelids that increasingly block out more and more sunlight. The thick skinned beings have thin digits on broad hands with massive webbing between the digits, with fingertips ending in puckered suckers.

Their spines elongate into a long filiment covered tail that they use for guidance in flight.

Domestication.

Several of the institutions and rich people in Levis own their own vessel that they attatch to dreadnaught. These derigible are grown ad customised and attached as harnesses to the dreadnaught.

Domesticated dreadnaught refill their water sacks in stations around Levis that are themselves refilled by employees hired to a singular firm.

The Academy of Natare owns a dreadnaught called the Extracant. This is the oldest derigible vessel, remodelled and regrown twice to maintain the same specifications in a very 'the same model is the same vessel' kind of way.

Basic Information

Anatomy

Dreadnaught have both and internal ion bank for creating the hydrolysis reaction consisting of two pools of aquious liquid. It uses the generated bioelectricity to generate hydrogen and oxygen which it then pushes into a gas bank, while the oxygen is pushed out a spinal blowhole with side products to produce a blue plume of gas.

Water tanks exist in pouches off the flanks of the dreadnaught. These become empty as they are converted to gas, and are refilled in massive gulps in a lake or river.

Genetics and Reproduction

The dreadnaught species reproduces through the amphibian method ofexternal fertilisation. Female dreadnaught seek the largest body of water they can find to lay a large cloud of aqueous eggs. While male dreadnaught then follow up with a cloud of their own deposit much later. This whole process is complicated by their massive sizes and the tiny size of each deposit, even if hundreds of eggs are floated on the water.

Captive dreadnaught are retired around the mating season, putting a seasonal pause on air travel.

Growth Rate & Stages

Dreadnaught have 4 stages.

Egg

Fearling: Hatching at a size of 4 to 5cm, these creatures could be considered their own creature if not for the rest of their life cycle, as they grow their bodies to enhance the size of their gas sacks, consuming a mix of small insects, fish and waterside mammals. They mainly swim but have the ability for brief hoplight flights as they utalise excess gas formed in their growth. They are mainly beak, body, and tail in this form, whiskers still absent as they alternate between water floor and bright sky.

Menace: In this stage the menace is seeking to putting all their energy in growing eyes, legs and building the ion banks within their bodies.

The dreadnaught.

Additional Information

Perception and Sensory Capabilities

Dreadnaught feel currents (both air and water) through their whiskers, while their skin also provides extra sensor input that allows them to see independant of their eyes.

Civilization and Culture

Naming Traditions

While wild dreadnaughts might have names given to them by locals of their area, that that man the dirigibles are namedafter the vessel they carry.

Beauty Ideals

Dreadnaughts are seen as beautiful by their colouration, namely how bright their non bioluminescent sections are and how long their wind whiskers grow to. The ground species that use the dirigibles, priority is spent on the gourds that the dreadnaught carry.

History

While foliads have a need to hold to the natural order of things and to not strip the land, they have an increasingly liberal definition of such since they have entered their age of bioengineering.

Taking small frog-like amphibians and forcefully evolving them up, the biomages in a joint effort between the Kingdom of Solaris and the Academy of Natare sought to manifest a species that could be used for flight.