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[Evil One]

As to the 'Dragons shouldn't be able to fly' that's from "The Cleric Quintet" by R.A. Salvatore, it's said by Cadderly Bonaduce as being the reason druids dislike dragons (and yes characters created by Salvatore including Cadderly, Drizzt, ETC ARE part of D&D lore).

So it is just the opinion of a person.  Just because a character exists in lore does not mean that everything he says is actually a correct statement about that world. 

Additionally: http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Miniature-Figurines-Tyranny/dp/B00MJ1BWYQ

Official D&D figures, note that the Dragon's are in flight.



As for D&D Dragons being magical creatures, that's how they all have innate magical ability AND why instead of only breathing fire, each dragon type breathes a unique breath attack.

In the D&D Wiki on the Black Dragon, you'll notice in the abilities by age, it lists flight as a viable ability http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Black_Dragon

I fail to see the relevance of particular figures depicting dragons in flight.  I am not arguing after all that dragons cannot fly, the figure of the dragon as shown in the picture would quite likely able to fly in reality because it's body is rather slim while it's wingspan is quite extensive.  Once you are in flight basically only two things matter, your wingspan compared to the total weight of your body, if your wingspan is big enough as appears to be the case for our dragon figure then you can fly. 

The limitations of flight for a large creature are quite explicitly recognized by the way that the in brackets 'average' wingspan degrades to poor and then clumsy as the black dragon gets bigger.  Since the limitations of flight for a large creature are clearly part of the mechanics, therefore there is no reason to think that there anything magical about the dragon's ability to fly as presumably that would allow them to fly equally well regardless of how big they are.

It is not 'in the lore' that dragons can take off vertically like pigeons.  The bigger a dragon is, the worse it's flying ability is; which fits the notion that dragon flight is actually governed by the normal laws of physics, thus there is no VTOL for dragons in lore unless you can prove that there is.

But their size doesn't ever prevent them from flying... Interestingly you completely missed the point that Black dragons can still use their flight ability anywhere (there's no limitations in the lore for launching from flat ground), with that in mind and given that they're not built for high speed running, how exactly do you propose they lift off?

Couldn't be VTOL could it? /sarcasm

Plus dragons in D&D are known for having incredibly touch scales, and for being very strong... A creature with such strength, with scales as hard as metal and a solid skeletal structure could not fly even with a wingspan like that.

In addition to which, Clumsy refers to the on land maneuverability of a black dragon (you must've missed the full stop between the two)., not it's flight ability (which, surprise, surprise is unaffected by their age or size)... Otherwise it'd be marked as 'flight (clumsy)'.

[dwarobaki]

In addition to which, Clumsy refers to the on land maneuverability of a black dragon (you must've missed the full stop between the two)., not it's flight ability (which, surprise, surprise is unaffected by their age or size)... Otherwise it'd be marked as 'flight (clumsy)'.

Clumsy refers to flying maneuverability.
http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD3e:Movement

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Fly
The creature can fly at the listed speed if carrying no more than a medium load. All fly speeds include a parenthetical note indicating maneuverability, as follows:
Perfect
    The creature can perform almost any aerial maneuver it wishes.
Good
    The creature is very agile in the air (like a housefly or hummingbird), but cannot change direction as readily as those with perfect maneuverability.
Average
    The creature can fly as adroitly as a small bird.
Poor
    The creature flies as well as a very large bird.
Clumsy
    The creature can barely fly at all.
Creatures can use the run action while flying, provided they fly in a straight line.
Most flying creatures have to slow down at least a little to make a turn, and many are limited to fairly wide turns and must maintain a minimum forward speed. Each flying creature has a maneuverability rating that defines how it moves when flying."

[Evil One]

In addition to which, Clumsy refers to the on land maneuverability of a black dragon (you must've missed the full stop between the two)., not it's flight ability (which, surprise, surprise is unaffected by their age or size)... Otherwise it'd be marked as 'flight (clumsy)'.

Clumsy refers to flying maneuverability.
http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD3e:Movement

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Fly
The creature can fly at the listed speed if carrying no more than a medium load. All fly speeds include a parenthetical note indicating maneuverability, as follows:
Perfect
    The creature can perform almost any aerial maneuver it wishes.
Good
    The creature is very agile in the air (like a housefly or hummingbird), but cannot change direction as readily as those with perfect maneuverability.
Average
    The creature can fly as adroitly as a small bird.
Poor
    The creature flies as well as a very large bird.
Clumsy
    The creature can barely fly at all.
Creatures can use the run action while flying, provided they fly in a straight line.
Most flying creatures have to slow down at least a little to make a turn, and many are limited to fairly wide turns and must maintain a minimum forward speed. Each flying creature has a maneuverability rating that defines how it moves when flying."

Hmm, I wonder why they put a full stop between the flight and the (Clumsy), or how clumsy translates to it's flight ability... Perhaps a larger dragons size and mass means it can't turn as well.

Oh well, I've amended the post.

Strange though, I've seen dragons hovering (usually to cast spells or use their breath weapon, although sometimes with the latter they do a strafing run)in a number of D&D games, both tabletop and computer games (I've also read about it in books too)... It does however describe them as have magical abilities: http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Dragon

[GoblinCookie]

But their size doesn't ever prevent them from flying... Interestingly you completely missed the point that Black dragons can still use their flight ability anywhere (there's no limitations in the lore for launching from flat ground), with that in mind and given that they're not built for high speed running, how exactly do you propose they lift off?

Couldn't be VTOL could it? /sarcasm

Plus dragons in D&D are known for having incredibly touch scales, and for being very strong... A creature with such strength, with scales as hard as metal and a solid skeletal structure could not fly even with a wingspan like that.

In addition to which, Clumsy refers to the on land maneuverability of a black dragon (you must've missed the full stop between the two)., not it's flight ability (which, surprise, surprise is unaffected by their age or size)... Otherwise it'd be marked as 'flight (clumsy)'.

Well there is no specific reference to the mechanics of actually taking flight anywhere that I can see.  However because they have taken into account the realistic limitations of flying as a large creature to start with, such as not being to hover.  Perhaps however the mechanics of taking flight are covered as the following.

Between Down and Up    0    0    5 ft.    10 ft.    20 ft.

By that token a dragon would have to run 20 feet before taking off. 

[Evil One]

But their size doesn't ever prevent them from flying... Interestingly you completely missed the point that Black dragons can still use their flight ability anywhere (there's no limitations in the lore for launching from flat ground), with that in mind and given that they're not built for high speed running, how exactly do you propose they lift off?

Couldn't be VTOL could it? /sarcasm

Plus dragons in D&D are known for having incredibly touch scales, and for being very strong... A creature with such strength, with scales as hard as metal and a solid skeletal structure could not fly even with a wingspan like that.

In addition to which, Clumsy refers to the on land maneuverability of a black dragon (you must've missed the full stop between the two)., not it's flight ability (which, surprise, surprise is unaffected by their age or size)... Otherwise it'd be marked as 'flight (clumsy)'.

Well there is no specific reference to the mechanics of actually taking flight anywhere that I can see.  However because they have taken into account the realistic limitations of flying as a large creature to start with, such as not being to hover.  Perhaps however the mechanics of taking flight are covered as the following.

Between Down and Up    0    0    5 ft.    10 ft.    20 ft.

By that token a dragon would have to run 20 feet before taking off.

But considering by that stage the dragon itself may be more than 100ft long, 20 feet running distance isn't that far from VTOL.

[Inevitability]

In DF dragons can neither fly nor do they have wings.
D&D doesn't factor into it - this is the suggestions forum for Dwarf Fortress.

Rocs however can fly and have wings.
I have no idea of the physics involved, but I'd imagine that they wouldn't be able to fly in RL.

I also apologize if I come off as hostile or something, English isn't my first language.

[Dirst]

There are different modes of flight such as take-off, landing, flight and soaring, that could each have their own GAIT-like characteristics.  This lets you treat insects differently than birds differently than wyverns and so on.

All birds need some airflow to get them airborne, and for tiny ones it's sufficient to just jump.  Larger birds could run to get the airflow but this is almost never observed in the real world.  They use some combination of facing into the wind and jumping off of an incline/cliff.  Wings involve trade-offs between speed, maneuverability and efficiency, but it should suffice to handle this with arbitrary GAITS rather than try to bake biomechanics into the game.  The game does have a concept of wind for windmills, but I'm not sure if it has a direction.

Stereotypical European dragons are simply strong enough relative to their size that they can use the jump method.  Some other creatures just float around by magic.  Winged serpents (Oriental dragons, coatls, etc.) are basically magical floaters that have wings.

Edit: Corrected the autocorrect.

[Mel_Vixen]

Let me bullshit here a bit and think of a few limiting biological factors for flight which might be broken by a roc/dragon:

Lift vs. weight or energy

You need more lift if you have more weight. You get either lift by speed or wingarea.

Lift is defined as: L = 1/2airpresure*Airspeed^2*area*liftcoeficient   

The obvious thing here is to get Airspeed. There are 2 ways to get that powered or unpowered. Unpowered for example is used say with Kites, a strong wind, ridgelift (air flowing up a hill), jumping of a cliff from there you can go into a soar say thermals. This is thought limited by windspeed (you are F*ed if you need Tornadospeeds) or the hight of your drop. To stay aloft you either need constant winds or thermals that push you up. 

Powered is done by running, flapping your wings etc. . It has a few constraints thought. Stored energy in the form of fat means that you need more fat if you need more energy thus weight. The energy-density of fat isnt really great. Secondly oxygen, you want to burn your fat somehow after all. A birds lungstructure is wildly different from a mammal and more efficient generally but the available oxygen is still limited by lungsurface. For a bigger bird you need bigger lungs and the volume (thus weight of the tissue) goes quicker up then your surface. You also need more muscles (weight again) to move air around all that air.
Speaking of muscles the power of a muscle (25-33  Newtons/cm²) grows with its crosssection-area but thanks to the Square-cube-law if you double the size of your muscle you get only 4 times the strength but 8 (?) times the Mass. So at some point your muscles get to big to move themselves, your legs or wings around.

So a roc shouldnt be able to start at all because its to heavy and not powerful enough to accelerate to a velocity that would generate enough lift.

Mechanical loads

Materials brake. If you take a long narrow piece of wood it might bend under its own weight if you hold it on one end, wave it around and it might even brake. Same goes for long bones. Or wings on wing on wings in KSP.
First of you want to hold your wings straight since you need that lift carrying you. Keeping your bones straight without flex at a given length means that you need a certain thickness which goes into mass. Even so turning, acceleration and deceleration puts stresses on them that are amplified by the length so at some point of your wing is to long it snaps because you wanted to do a turn.
Worse still then using bones in your wings is the decision of having "joints". At those points you have either to evolve a locking mechanism (which some birds did) or your wing flexes around them. You have to counteract that with muscles, so even in gliding/soaring you are using energy.

Molting

Feathers degrade with time and have to be replaced this costs comparatively huge amounts of energy and time. From one article i found: "The length of a bird's flight feathers is proportional to its body mass raised to the one-third power, so that feather length roughly doubles with a tenfold increase in the bird's weight. But feather growth rate is proportional to body mass raised only to the one-sixth power."

So if the bird gets bigger you have factor in more time to regrow feathers and how much lift you lose from not having that feather. There are ways around it, stretching molting times or Molting all at once but these come with costs like less efficient flight to being flightless for a time. The bigest bird ever,   Argentavis magnificens, with a wingspan of 6 meters and a weight of 70kilograms is theorised to having molted all at once subsiding on accumulated bodyfat for its flightless time.





Anyway my takeaway would be the following: Base the running start distance of birds on its acceleration and wingarea. Subtract jumping heights and existing winds from those starts. A similar thing can be done with landing if you can calculate a birds drag and stalling. This way you would get the right behaviour for all bird at all ages. Thermics would be cool but i guess they will be out for a long time.

[MDFification]

I think that would actually be less realistic, rather than more so.  Birds aren't like airplanes - they don't depend on air speed to get lift.  A lot of large birds prefer to save energy by gliding when they can, and will use updrafts to get more elevation, but they still rely on flapping to take off.  I know ravens don't run to get off the ground, and I don't think things like eagles and condors do either.  Many waterbirds 'run' in the water to get high enough to take off, and some ground-dwelling birds like quail will start running away, then take off if they decide they need more speed, but I can't think of anything that runs on the ground in order to build up speed for flight.

Large birds certainly need more time and effort to get off the ground, and I'd support some sort of takeoff delay, but I don't think it makes sense to link it to running.  I would love to see soaring added, and large fliers leaping from trees and cliffs to get into the air.

The exact same laws of physics govern birds and govern airplanes.  The reason that most birds can vertical takeoff is because most are very small, small enough for VTOL.  There is a reason why this is the case, VTOL is a massive advantage for a creature to keep while the advantages of getting slightly larger are not very great in comparison. 

As a result the large birds that cannot VTOL tend to be birds that either spend pretty much all their time in the air or birds that spend pretty much all their time on the ground.

This runs into the problem of defining how large a DF tile is. A tile, in this game, can hold a bloody giant sperm whale, but you can only put one chair in it at a time. Seeing as the definitions are so wonky already, you really have no metric to say which birds are big enough that their take-off is larger than a single tile. Sure, they may not have VTOL, but if they can take off in less than one tile (and remember, we don't have a working definition of what that is, but until [if?] multi-tile creatures are implemented you can't set an upper limit larger than giant sperm whale).

Basically, I see no reason for Toady to redo pathing for flyers, potentially breaking things and causing additional lag as the path a flyer has to take just got a lot more complex (essentially it'll need to constantly check the potential runways in addition to potential paths) for something that a) won't be noticeable for all but the largest flyers in all likelihood and b) is completely and utterly irrelevant to how immersed I'm going to get in the simulation.

I mean, realism and all that. But most of the creatures that I think would end up large enough that they'd need to take off in multiple tiles (considering how absolutely gargantuan creatures we already have are compared to creatures whose size we can verify IRL) if/when Toady implements multi-tile creatures and we get an actual idea of how big these tiles are are also have too much mass to fly in this atmosphere. Strength doubles, weight triples and whatnot. So they're *already* going to be some magic supercreature, and for everything that is actually realistic, to see them take off in multiple tiles you'd need to scale the other creatures up to the point that they'd be taking up dozens of map tiles if not more.

tl;dr I don't know how much thought was put into what changes this would require to how DF represents scale.

[Dirst]

When minecarts were added, the size of a tile was fixed at 2m long by 2m wide by 3m high.  Which makes it even sillier that you can fit a giant sperm whale in there.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

It is a tile based game, not everything has to be realistic.
But it makes sense a larger bird can't fly out of a vertical well if it is narrow enough.

[Adragis]

If this WERE to be implemented, it'd have to be based on a weight calculation or similar, as flying Fbs vary greatly in structure.

[Putnam]

Nah, magic's a thing. Bronze Colossuses exist.

[Dirst]

Nah, magic's a thing. Bronze Colossuses exist.

"That's not flying!  That's... falling with style!"

[Evil One]

I still don't understand why GoblinCookie wants realistic take-off and landing physics in DF... A game where you can decapitate a bronze colossus by throwing a Hoary marmot Fluffy Wambler at it.

Since when has anything in the air been realistic in DF?