Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sonerohi]

I believe than I misunderstood. The way I took their explanation in Flight of the
Dragons was that the hydrogen pouches worked on it like a hot air balloon, in some sense. It wasn't heated, but it simply aided in keeping the dragon light enough to fly. In order to descend it merely had to pipe out some hydrogen, not necesarily set it on fire. But then, I've yet to study swim bladders on fish so I have no frame of reference.

[Orange Drink]

I know you guys won't like this idea for being unrealistic, but:

What if certain dragons could shoot superheated plasma? The dragon fires a concentrated electrical pulse from it's brain (nerves do use electrical pulses, right?) through a pouch filled with hydrogen. The superheated plasma is then somehow channeled through the dragon's mouth (screw reality, it's DF!).
 It would have the same ranges as Inaluct's suggestion, except that anything 100 tiles away will be completely vaporised, including the ground, leaving a crater.
It would have to be paralyzed after using a plasma blast, because it's used almost all of it's brain power to fire it.
This should apply only to certain dragons, and these dragons will only attack you once you have a pretty huge fort, or younger plasma dragons can attack your fort earlier on, except have lower ranges of utter annihilation.
Ordinary hydrogen dragons would still exist, who use hydrogen stored in a pouch somewhere in the throat. The dragon barfs up some hydrogen, and using a flint-like material in their mouth, makes sparks and sets the hydrogen alight.

[Silverionmox]

That's an attempt to give a realistic explanation for the destructive power of a dragon's breath using modern science, buy you give up halfway through, and so we sadly end up with an explanation that's neither helpful for the suspension of disbelief, nor flavourful, because of the modern terminology.

Once proper temperature interactions are in, you'll be able to set the temperature as high as you want though, with possibly a similar effect.

[RavingManiac]

I think a realistic dragon ought to be supported by both its wings and its hydrogen bladder rather than solely relying on the latter for lift, considering that with the volume of hydrogen you'd need, there would be lots of balloon shaped dragons floating around. A hollow skeleton, with the air inside the bones displaced with hydrogen, would further reduce weight.

That probably puts the upper limit of dragon size at about the size of a small car at best, so anything larger would have to be powered by magic.

[Bricks]

I'm all for different varieties of dragons.  Plasma might be an overly modern explanation for what dwarfs could call thunder drakes or likewise.  Sea dragons would be nice too, maybe without a breath attack, but with the obvious advantage of being nigh-unassailable while in its element.  Or frost dragons.  All things easily modded in eventually, esp once the magic arc is completed.

Someone mentioned that dragonfire shouldn't melt metal.  I agree - for a single hit.  A concentrated breath attack should be able to rapidly disintegrate any unlucky target to succumb to its full wrath, with the detriment of exhausting the dragon's fire-breathing abilities temporarily.  A dragon should be defeated through its own folly - abusing its fire breath, or flying too low to try and grasp a target, bringing it into range, or being distracted by a shiny bit of jewelry it wants for its horde.  Then - we STRIKE!

[Jakkarra]

for the people that need some way of ignition, hows about having the dragons' tounges be tipped with some sort of flint-like object, and the roof of the mouth or somesuch be of an organic metal, and it just clucks it tongue to make a small spark, enough to ignite the compound (that would be best as some organic, impure thing, rather than just pure hydrogen, which would be less awesome.

yes? no? improvements? hmmmm?

love, jakkarra

[Rysith]

for the people that need some way of ignition, hows about having the dragons' tounges be tipped with some sort of flint-like object, and the roof of the mouth or somesuch be of an organic metal, and it just clucks it tongue to make a small spark, enough to ignite the compound (that would be best as some organic, impure thing, rather than just pure hydrogen, which would be less awesome.

yes? no? improvements? hmmmm?

love, jakkarra

Yeah, you definitely don't want pure hydrogen: it would both burn and rise away too fast to be used effectively, especially against ground targets. However, a hydrogen/methane + flint ignition system to light an otherwise-flammable material that most of the flames came from would work fine. My personal vote, given their traditional association with volcanoes, would be burning sulfur. That might mesh well with the earlier flame/acid/poison suggestion, since there could easily be sulfuric acid and hydrogen sulfide in there, too. Biologically, it would mean that Dragons would be omnivores that supplemented their diet with brimstone, and then vomited flaming half-decayed acidic mess on their enemies.

Although I haven't read Flight of the Dragons, I'm going to have to disagree with the idea of hydrogen-bladder dragons. Lighter-than-air things tend to need huge volumes, and move slowly. You'd end up with zeppelin-dragons, which would not be good. You're much better off going with the large wingspan/low body mass/dense muscle traditional model. This also likely means that dragon-scale armor would be extremely light and extremely hard, and thus very valuable even if you didn't need to be fighting dragons.

[sonerohi]

Well now we need both. Zeppelin dragons giving rides to paratrooping orcs is a must, but so is a powerful dragon that could fire a flaming rabbit carcas at you.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I totally agree about the zeppelin dragons. That's just awesome-sauce!

Different kinds/breeds/subspecies of dragons are a must.

[Rysith]

I totally agree about the zeppelin dragons. That's just awesome-sauce!

Different kinds/breeds/subspecies of dragons are a must.

Definitely. I wonder if the dragons could start out small (~20 foot wingspan small) and, as they age, grow larger (and grow additional flotation bladders), so that really old dragons of each type were zeppelin dragons? My point was just that having only zeppelin dragons would be a bad thing, because they would be slow and vulnerable. If, by virtue of their age (and alliances with smaller creatures) they were actually lumbering heavily-armored flying death machines, they would be awesome.

And, as long as we are talking about subspecies, there need to be swamp dragons a la discworld. Somewhere between chickens and dogs in size, mostly non-functional wings, and the ability to explode when threatened, angry, excited, or bored.

[LegoLord]

Funny you should mention zeppelin dragons.  I recall the author of the book calling dragons "natural zeppelins".

Lighter-than-air things are actually faster than they appear;  it's just that they aren't too fast compared to, say, a plane, which actually requires speed to stay up.

Also, according to old myth (not fantasy games, or modern myth), dragons were huge - that size coming from the hydrogen bladders, as the author proposes.

That's the point - they were large solely because of the flight bladders.  That's all they'd need.  They wouldn't have just one, they would have many throughout their entire body, tapering off in size at either end (hence the lack of balloon shape).

[Rysith]

Funny you should mention zeppelin dragons.  I recall the author of the book calling dragons "natural zeppelins".

Lighter-than-air things are actually faster than they appear;  it's just that they aren't too fast compared to, say, a plane, which actually requires speed to stay up.

Also, according to old myth (not fantasy games, or modern myth), dragons were huge - that size coming from the hydrogen bladders, as the author proposes.

That's the point - they were large solely because of the flight bladders.  That's all they'd need.  They wouldn't have just one, they would have many throughout their entire body, tapering off in size at either end (hence the lack of balloon shape).

Multiple bladders would be a requirement, to allow the dragon to grow additional bladders as it aged and prevent the failure of a single bladder (from, say, a crossbow bolt) from grounding it. Zeppelin (over blimp) implies that there is some internal structure to the bladders, too (rather than having them be pressure-supported), which is good.

The problem with them, though, is the size of the bladders in relation to the "actual" dragon. Air has a density of 1.2 g/L, water has a density of 1000 g/L, and hydrogen has a density of 0.08 g/L. That means that (if I've done my math right, and we assume that dragon body is made of water) the ratio of hydrogen to dragon needs to be almost 900:1, which means that zeppelin-dragons will end up looking like zeppelins: a tiny body suspended from an enormous (series) of bladders. Packing any kind of reasonable strength (and thus maneuverability or speed) onto a body like that would be difficult, to say the least, especially using wings rather than fairly light and compact propellers. Muscles, in particular, need bones to pull against, which means a full internal structure. You'd also have maneuverability issues with the air resistance from your envelope, which would prevent classic dragon activities like snatching things from the ground, strafing runs, etc. High winds would also likely present a problem for them.

Speed is also an issue, both in terms of top speed and turning speed. A modern zeppelin can get up to 35mph or so, which is slower than many birds, and the turning time is measured in minutes - too slow for hunting, certainly, since a zeppelin isn't going to be ambushing anything. Zeppelin-dragons, then, would have to be large aerial herbivores, which doesn't fit well with their traditional role at all.

Magic etc. lets us fudge the numbers a bit, they might get a bit of a boost from having wings,  but you are still looking at a massive volume to lift stuff. My vision of a dragon would be much more like a slightly enlarged version of one of the larger flying dinosaurs: Enormous (~60ft) wingspan, fairly small (~200 kg) body, very high metabolism. The addition of small flight bladders could help them lift themselves, but trying to support the entire creature with them would prevent them from doing a lot of "dragony" things.

[LegoLord]

I can't type the whole book onto the internet, you know.  For one thing, I can't find it. 

There's more to it that what I've already put up.

[Craftling]

for the people that need some way of ignition, hows about having the dragons' tounges be tipped with some sort of flint-like object, and the roof of the mouth or somesuch be of an organic metal, and it just clucks it tongue to make a small spark, enough to ignite the compound (that would be best as some organic, impure thing, rather than just pure hydrogen, which would be less awesome.

Dragons could have a kind of flamable gas that builds up in their stomachs(like methane) and then they burp it out and click their tounge and volia, dragonfire.
Methane would probably be the easiest way to go.

[Fieari]

I'm less interested in how dragons would work in real life, and more how dragons could work in DF, and the implications thereof.

For example, an implication of the dragon-zepplin theory would be that by peircing the bladders, you could down the dragon, but piercing the wings would only hinder it's manueverability.  I'm not sure that's a gameplay mechanic that is interesting to me-- I'd prefer the wings to be the primary mover of the thing, so that injury to the wings would down the dragon.

Furthermore, the explosive gas theory has Terry Pratchett's swamp dragon problem... the dragon itself might become explosive under certain circumstances.  I -definitely- don't want that, because I want dragons to be bloody hard to kill monsters.  (I do support swamp dragons as a seperate creature though)

Keep these sorts of things in mind during this discussion.