New answers tagged dragons
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For a creature that has a similar sound-producing range to humans, but has a very different face/throat anatomy, you'll want to look at "talking" birds- parrots, mynas, and corvids. Lacking lips or vocal cords, they produce sounds using an organ at the base of their trachea known as the syrinx. It operates on similar mechanisms of airflow and ...
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Make them mind-controlling parasites. The book series (not the movie series) of How to Train Your Dragon, by Cressida Cowell, has distinct subspecies of dragons that fall under the 'nanodragon' category. The vast majority of naondragons are based off insects.
These dragons would be the same way, but based off parasitic wasps (oh, and Xenomorphs). One of ...
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Flip them Over.
It is well known that ants bounce but elephants go splat. When fighting large animals Judo is more effective than Karate. When fighting a bear you should, rather than batter it to death, try and flip it over so it falls and gets injured.
True, you don't want to use the delicate wing surfaces to fight. But you do want to use the massive ...
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"A spot. Where it's voonerable. My grandad used to tell me stories. Hit a dragon in its voonerables, he said, and you've killed it." - Guards Guards, Terry Pratchett
Dragon martial arts are for fighting other dragons. A dragon against a bear is closer to hunting.
The dragon is going to strike from above and behind, any time the bear puts its head ...
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assuming this is mean for unarmed combat(its another story if you mean armed combat), as other has say, they have sharp claws and teeth, but i also want to include grappling just like in this komodo dragon do for example.
or you can grab them and carry them high enough and drop /slam them down, can also include spinning to make them dizzy like in pokemon ...
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I'm no expert in martial arts, but I think you're starting with a faulty assumption about how your dragons would fight. 25% of the dragon's mass is in the muscles driving the wings, you stated: for a flying creature, that's a reasonable or even necessary figure. Some quick Googling tells me that arms make up about 5-6% of a human's body mass, and obviously ...
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Armed to the Teeth:
Seriously? These things have claws, many are shown with a wing claw, they have fangs, and let's not forget the classical barbed tail (possibly poisonous). A completely untrained dragon could overwhelm a ninja master through sheer VOLUME of attacks. A lot of what I am presenting here is based on an article in Dragon Magazine #134 or from ...
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Side note: "Martial arts" may be the wrong term here; maybe "fighting style." Martial arts are how humans try to make bodies that are built for armed tool using combat work in unarmed combat.
Dragons are built for "unarmed" combat: claws, teeth, wings, tail... Perhaps we can draw inspiration from how other animals fight.
...
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I don't really know martial arts, but since sheer power isn't an option, dragon martial arts would therefore be about precision.
Stab someone in the right spot, and they're dead. Strength has very little to do with it. Sure, air blubbers resist tearing, and I'm sure these dragons have tough scaly hide, but if that were the case, these dragons would likely ...
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Well, that's going to be a BIG problem.
Mass
The largest creature that has ever flown was about 250 kg. Now, while your creature is double its weight, a 250 kg pterosaur still had people questioning the limitations of biological flight.
Indeed, burst-flight performance seems not to intrinsically degrade with increasing size.
So, let's talk wings
While ...
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In places where controlled burns are a regular occurrence, this encourages the growth of fire-tolerant plants. Indeed, some species become fire-dependant, and cannot reproduce without fire.
In such a place, a massive burn to flush out or kill a dragon would still be a disaster to the people living there, as it would also kill people and destroy crops and ...
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Burning an entire section of forest might not be terrible in the long-term, but for the people living there in the short-term, it would be a nightmare.
If they gather food in the woods, or hunt there, then burning everything down takes away at least part of their food supply. If they use wood as a building material, burning all of the wood in a several-mile-...
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The fire, being draconic, is far hotter than your usual controlled burn, or even ordinary forest fires. It burns up all the organic material. There is little ash left and basically you have scorched rock.
It is not only a disaster when it happens but leaves the land ruined for generations.
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Scare the sheep out of the depressions using fire. Also, do you even need to fly? The giant pterosaurs of the Cretaceous period spent more time walking then flying, so you could make your dragons attack on the ground.
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piezoelectricity, and a process to remove electrons from materials (the scales to be exact) so the scales have positive charge, so, if anything touches the dragon, it is shocked, then, the thing that touched them can also get shocked again, from touvhing something else, the breath is the expulsion of copper, iron or other materials that are eaten at caves, ...
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any, as long as the creature does not let any material that it reacts with it go near, another could by chlorine trifluoride, while it does not burn in contact with oxygen, it does with water
edit: this is also something i used for my dragon model
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Controlled burns are not massive fires.
Several commenters have already mentioned this, but I thought it was worth fleshing out in an answer.
Controlled burns typically cover a few hectars to a couple thousand hectares. A thousand hectares is about 10 sq km (4 sq miles). A dragon's territory is likely to be 40-1000 sq km. The minimum size would overlap with ...
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Conditions and technology don't allow for controlled burning.
As noted in Ash's answer, controlled burns (aka "hazard reduction") are low-intensity operations that may not be enough to flush out a dragon. But also, even with 21st-century technology and fire science, controlled burns often aren't an option.
Contra some of the post-mortem discussion ...
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A couple of details to help set the scene.
There isn't really an economy as we'd now think of it in the area you're describing. There may be people living there but they'll probably be hunter gatherers, or at best subsistence farmers. You're describing wild forest, which isn't specifically economically productive, it becomes woodland once it's managed and ...
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Water Cycle
Forest are an important piece in the water lifecycle, as their ground absorbs water and their trees produce water also. Removing an massive forest could lead to unstable climate, inducing dries and floods all over the world.
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You can have a controlled forest burn, it wont be intense enough, but it might work for other reasons.
I'll link you to a document outlining how a culture millennia ago was able to tame the Australian Bush using fire. They were able to shape the landscape using controlled burns before they were able to create fire on their own.
However those fires are cool. ...
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the combined forces of thousands of men could chop down some trees to create a buffer zone
creating a buffer zone is a sensible choice when trying to control a fire. However...
100 square km is a square with 10 km side, so 40 km perimeter. 35 km if it's a circle.
chopping down trees in about 10 meters of the perimeter to create the buffer means cleaning ...
answered Dec 21 '20 at 6:17
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Lots of good points but missing a key point, I think. The Dragons won't be reliant on just their claws, firebreath, speed & agility. They will have human riders, crews ...spotters, archers/shooters, grenadiers, bombardiers. In a world that had dragons that were domesticated/trained /allied with humans ...the arms race would have involved breeding of ...
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Two words: nuclear autumn
A 2019 study[1] examined the effects of a limited nuclear conflict on world climate with updated modeling, and concluded that a relatively modest nuclear exchange would yield enough aerosols to cause a decrease in global temperatures for years afterward. That in turn would lead to decreased agricultural output, and consequently ...
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The forest is not random wildness. The people who live there have made the forest what it is.
Amazon forest 'shaped by pre-Columbian indigenous peoples'
Your forest dwellers do not cut trees and plant corn where trees used to be. They live in the forest. The forest provides what they need. This is not by accident. The forest is not a random wild growth. ...
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I am not very hopeful about 6750 kilogram (14,881 pound) heavier than air flying creatures on a planet like Earth.
See my answer to the question:
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96644/plausibility-of-floating-whales/191717#191717[1]
For a discussion of the heaviest possible flying creatures on Earth.
My answer here:
https://worldbuilding....
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minerals in the stones could help the dragon's breath, as well as also providing shelter from humans, also caves tend to have different temperatures than outside, a better alternative would be cliffs, more speciffically caves on cliffs, these could help the dragon be harder to reach, while also giving the dragon an easier time getting of the ground, also, as ...
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ice could be compressed methane/CO2 spued in a vortex motion, the methane idea could continue the fire, as methane catches fire easyly, and piezoelectricity stored somewhere would give the spark to light it up, now if the dragon removes the flammable materials, and adds conductors or superconductors to its breath, and possibly make it more watergun-like, ...
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Metal poisoning
Today I happened on an article about metal smelting in trees: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/metal-plants-farm.html
This seems incredibly cool to me and might assist your answer. The ground might be easily polluted by nickel in that area. Much of the trees and vegetation remove it from the soil, storing it in themselves. The ...
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By burning the forest, you not only decrease oxygen production, but you kill many animals, if it gets out of control (which still happens today) whole forests would burn down, and if this was in a medieval society, there were no such things as controlled fires.
Edit: Also, a rainforest burning is so hard to put out because the thickness, as shown by the ...
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The 445 Australians who died of smoke inhalation from the 2019/2020 bushfire season couldn't be contacted for comment.
Big forest burning is a terrible thing: My state (South Australia) had a higher death toll from bushfires this year than we did from COVID-19.
(Let that sink in: WORSE THAN COVID19!)
I'll direct you to the Australian Institute of Health and ...
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chlorine trifluoride, it would make explosions, and possibly burn the heck out of all materials, even glass, which is a fire retardant, has no power against this monster, which explodes in water, but if your dragon protects the fine thread spued out from the water by covering it in some solution which is not easyly washed away, so the chlorine trifluoride ...
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well, chlorine trifluoride would turn many things into a fire fuel which normally dont burn, glass is a good example, once you ignite it, you could make human flesh a fire fuel, and no, when you burn a human, with normal fire, flesh heats up very high, but it does not catch fire, with this, it would
edit: you could also use aqua regia, nasty stuff, as well ...
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it could have very slow metabolism, meaning one catch could last long, and it should be able to hunt at night, plus, if it has super accurate thermal vision/echolocation/sense of smell/vibrations it would more likely be able to track prey succesfully, this dragon would not likely fly, for the energy consumption would be great, it could borrow itself into ...
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