New answers tagged dragons
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Eggy weggs.
What if they lay their eggs inside people. If they're sentient they could probably torture folks into doing whatever they desired, while slowly eating them from the inside.
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It is a fatal mistake to think that the bigger the organisms the more dangerous they are. It is actually quite the opposite, especially when organisms are very small or intelligent.
Consider bacteria or viruses that we can't get rid of. Consider most pests, such as rats or ticks.
The best we can do (and that is 21th century!) is limit them in a particular ...
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Think electric eels. Now give them wings and make them hummingbird size and highly aggressive--if it sees/smells/hears you, it zips over and kills or stuns you with the shock. Then it shocks anyone it encounters while escaping. Sure, throw in poison and fire if it fits the plot, but if I had evolved in a world with fast, flying creatures that could zap me ...
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People are pretty terrified of:
snakes
scorpions
tarantulas
wasps
Which, I think, proves that size doesn't matter. You have the size of the dragon in your head as part of what makes it terrifying, but those people don't (although they might have stories of huge dragons like we would of huge tarantulas). You need to think of it like a scorpion or ...
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You could use learned behavior to make something scary, even without giving it weapons.
For example, what if all the forest animals are afraid of small dragons? They start to flee or hide when they see one, or fall silent when one is near. This would make their presence ominous. Humans would copy this behavior.
But if it's all bark and no bite, people ...
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Speed.
Hummingbird-like dragonets would be impossible to catch or stop. As soon as you spot one it has surrounded you with a ring of dozens of small (and rapidly-growing) fires and flitted away.
They can perch on arrows mid-air, zip through the narrowest opening in the blink of an eye, burn the clothes off your back as you try to swat them.
Just stay ...
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It's as if you didn't spend any time in a tavern, lad. Otherwise, you would have heard plenty of stories by minstrels and all kind of travellers about all the nasty things dragons can do. They may seem small and harmless, but they will grow . There are also those that . Do you remember the Great Fire of Rome? That was caused by a dragon. The Sinking of ...
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I want you to meet: The Gimpy Dragon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides
Like the Gimpy tree this tiny dragon grows hairs with neurotoxins in it that cause extreme pain for a few hours to days and then will keep hurting you to a lesser extend for months to years. And if you look at one of the names of this tree you can take a guess how ...
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just to add to the other answers: Tiny dragons setting an entire city on fire not only is realistic, we have something similar in our world too:
Let me introduce you to the Australian Firehawk Raptor
This little sh*t not only does start fires to force its prey to come out of hiding, they were HELPING spread the Australian bush fires.
So just replace ...
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AUGH AUGH AUGH ANKLE BITERS. Personally, i jump and attempt to swat at anything that starts biting my ankles thanks to an unfortunate encounter with a cat a few year prior of this writing, and i would be pretty terrified of something that could set my ankles and also me on fire. not to mention that small dragons can usually go real fast and there would be ...
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There is a story told in several different settings of armies catching birds from cities they besiege and attaching burning materials to the birds and setting them loose to go back to their homes in the cities and set fire to the thatched roofs of those homes.
I don't know if that was ever tried, but ancient and medieval buildings and communities containing ...
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They spit a napalm-like substance (or Greek fire, if you prefer.) Sticky, somewhat gelatinous and burning at relatively high temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius or higher. Even small amounts could cause serious injury or death if it landed on the wrong part of the body. If it got onto a flammable material like wood, the fire could quickly get out of control.
...
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Cities in the Middle Ages were flammable. Like, really flammable. London suffered from two devastating fires and several smaller ones before the Great Fire of 1666 that destroyed most of the inner city. Amsterdam suffered two massive fires in 1421 and 1452, the latter of which destroyed three-quarters of the city. Lubeck in Germany burned to the ground three ...
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Of course they can burn down cities. Cities are made of wood. All it takes is one puff of flame and everything can go up in smoke. There is some reason to believe that Mrs. O'Leary's cow did not cause the Great Chicago Fire, but that springs from evidence not from any inherent implausibility in a kicked-over lantern causing all that death and destruction.
...
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Make the beasts look like spiders.
Source for the image above: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sculpture/comments/eqtld5/self_dragonspider_dont_ask_how_it_happened/
I would totally freak out and scream like a little child if I saw something like that.
Make it look like a [REDACTED] ROACH instead, and I swear that if one ever made it into my house, I would move ...
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Are psychic effects an option? You could make the tiny little guys have a cosmic-horror-style soul-piercing gaze that brings forth the darkest, most twisted fears of their targets. Or mind-control and a twisted tendency to play with it's victims by making them kill their families or something.
Alternatively, they might breathe a hallucinogenic gas that did ...
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This is no different to the fight over legal "canned" hunting today
Adam Ruins Everything did an episode on it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUA8i5S0YMU
Basically canned hunting upsets the do-gooders but in reality is good for the species and banning it increases poaching which wipes the species out, so by trying to save the species, people are actually ...
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They charge an arm and a leg for every trophy. Then they repay any damage the dragon did during its life span, and split up the rest among the population.
This has to be more money than the people can get by poaching, or by accepting bribes from illegal hunters. (In particular, the egg situation makes it appear that people were attacking the nests as ...
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If you have an army, and a scorpion bolt can penetrate its skin, then this is what I would suggest.
Prepare a hoard of decent size, something to make the Dragon drooling when they see it.
Near the hoard prepare a large amount of scorpions and ballistae, manned with enough men to reload quickly and such. Hide them as best as you can, their scent and noise ...
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Physical attack would be dumb. Poisoning the dragon would seem to be the simplest solution. It would also have the advantage of not being traceable to a particular person or faction.
Alternatively, a trap of some sort (even if only a camouflaged sharpened stake) might well do the job. Especially if poisoned.
The other approach would be to recruit a ...
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So, what advantage (logistical or strategical) would allow a human army to have a shot at pre-emptively slaying this dragon?
1) You have set out some predictable behaviors, ie chasing thieves, not engaged in combat unless needed. This can be exploited
2) Infinite planning, preparation, organizational, training rehearsal time.
3) Known weaknesses, heavy ...
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Humans by nature are persistence hunters. Repeatedly attack the dragon every thirty minutes or so with a small number of hunters so that it never gets any rest. Simply swap out injured or tired hunters and eventually the dragon will have to A. retreat away from its den to rest or B. die trying to protect its hoard.
Dragons are proud creature if you force on ...
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Where there is a will there is a way
Humans have been quite smart and actually have always faced insurmountable odds to slay large creatures (such as mammoths) and do dangerous tasks (such as voyages into the unknown over the Atlantic).
In particular this is possible when motivation is strong, and dare I say, self-motivation such as the following:
Profit -...
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A few other things to note:
Diffraction
There is an optical property that when light passes through a small opening, it gets blurry. A human eye, at half a mile, cannot distinguish a 6 foot human as more than a single point. (I haven't seen the math since about 1980, so I don't remember it at all.)
Refraction
Another optical property, used in lenses. ...
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Build a wrapper.
The idea is fairly simple: you put the "inner eye" into a spherical "outer eye", which allows the normally immobile eagle-type eye to freely rotate as if it were a human eye.
The only downside with this method, is that it wastes space. Unfortunately, I have no idea what kind of evolutionary pressure would have your dragons evolve 2 ...
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You see, apparently the main reasons behind that lack of movement is the tight fit that the eye is in their skull and the presence of a sclerotic ring. The eyes of the eagle can be as large as a humans despite them having much smaller skulls. The owls took this eye to head ratio further, to the point that the back of their eyes can be seen from the inside of ...
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Have their eyes atop of a structure resembling snail eyes, scaled up for the dragon eye size.
Moving the protuberance around is less energy consuming than moving the entire head, plus the very protuberance can offer the eyes additional protection when needed, by simply retracting the eyes inside the body.
Additional point: it's cool!
answered May 8 at 9:24
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Eagle eyes are, indeed, fixed in the head and unable to move, but the important features of the eye that allow clear images of distant objects are only the power (thickness/curvature) of the lens and the density of the photoreceptors on the retina. You can see from the images in the question how much more focusing power the eagle lens has to work with, but ...
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Transparent nictitating membrane, with a variable lens like properties.
Fine fibers like those in the eye's crystalline can thicken/thin the membrane on localized areas (perhaps acting in vertical slices), bringing other things into focus. The nerves responsible with moving the eyeball in other animals will take the responsibility of "focus shifting by ...
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Gunpowder heavily change european medieval society, expect your magic to do as well.
Gunpowder is probably the technology that had the most impact on late medieval ages, not only making chivalry much less effective, but leading to the end of feudalism.
Feudalism is a hierarchical system, where each noble swear fealty to its upper rank noble, in exchange of ...
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Living in deep subterranean lava caves, largely considered inhospitable. Dragons are immune to fire damage, so they're right at home.
Surface access comes in the form of deep canyons and fissures. When a dragon wants to hunt on the surface, it crawls up a large dug underground tunnel to the bottom of a canyon, then flies or climbs up - only at night, to ...
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Build torches with an ergonomic handle specifically designed for a wyvern's tail. Light the torches before takeoff, land on enemy ships, jam the torches into the wood, then return.
You could also have the wyverns rip or bite the sails off enemy ships. Or ram the masts down. You mentioned that the technology is "age of sail"; losing the sails or masts is ...
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They live in deep caves far below the earth -- like many animals, including assorted lizards dragons are surprisingly adept are squeezing through spaces that look much too small for them.
Down undreground, they may have to traverse underwater sections of tunnel (they don't mind holding their breath for a few hours) or vast caverns with a floor hundreds of ...
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