D&D General Are dragons wings too small/little?

Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Supporter
The idea of a "real" dragon picking a fight with anything (and being able to fly) is fairly laughable.

Well, if you make dragonbone some really awesome stuff, and make their muscles magical, and you can do it...

Similarly, the idea of a six-limb creature is impossible from our world

It is less "impossible" and more "our animals chose fewer limbs a long, long time ago, and adding functional limbs is so unlikely as to be unthinkable". There is no real engineering reason to not have a six-limbed animal - the only reason we don't is that the tradition of genetics is very, very hard to break.
 

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GreyLord

Legend
And of course, we already have flying insects. None of them are the size of dragons...but they do exist with six limbs and many of them with additional wings.

Maybe Dragons have carbon fiber for wings and their skin is NOT flesh, but aluminum or some light but hard substance (afterall, many of them have armor classes on par with Metal Armor, which means for a beast of that size it probably is NOT their nimble and dodgelike abilities that make them so tough to injure).
 


I dig the movie...only discovered it as an adult, which considering all the other stuff I watched as a kid, surprises me.

I just want to add to the thread that for a long time, gold dragons didn't even bother having wings.

I have not really read the book, but I did see the movie and read up on the book a bit.
 

Mistwell

Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
tenor.gif
 

dave2008

Legend
I agree with everything you said, but...
As far as how durable, I have no clue. But most theropod dinosaurs had hollow bones. I'd still rather not meet a T-Rex in a dark alley*.

...there is a huge difference between the 'hollow' bones of a t-rex and pterosaur. ;)

Personally I wouldn't want to meet a T-rex or a Quetzel in a dark ally!

EDIT: That is not entirely true - I would be really stoked to see a living t-rex, if only for a short while
 
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Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Supporter
Even then you have to make them fly like colossal hummingbirds and create hurricane-force winds all around them.

Sounds like an entirely acceptable result to me. A big honkin' dragon landing in your village knocks down small buildings? Cool!

Isaac Newton is a harsh master.

Well, that's assuming that Isaac Newton is in force. There could be some other model for gravity in our fantasy world.

I mean, a linear 1d6 per 10' fallen is not obviously accurate model of the damaging impact of falling in our world, so maybe fantasy gravity isn't Newtonian/Einsteinian, or mateirals are different, or air resistance is different, or whatever. Things still fall to the ground, but not following the equations you know from physics class. Suck it up - as a result, you get fireballs!
 
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Dausuul

Legend
Even then you have to make them fly like colossal hummingbirds and create hurricane-force winds all around them. Isaac Newton is a harsh master.
Depends on how far you're willing to go. The fundamental problem for dragons is the square-cube law. Basically, if you multiply the dragon's length by X, its flying efficiency is divided by X*. So if you're going to invoke magic to make it a better flier, your magic needs to increase its efficiency by a factor of X.

Let's start with a real-life animal that's roughly where we want dragons to be. Quetzalcoatlus is all very well, but I prefer my dragons a bit more robust. Say we use Haast's eagle, a very big extinct eagle that hunted moa: Weight up to 30 pounds, body length about 4 feet, wingspan up to 10 feet, able to take off from the ground.

How big should dragons be? Let's figure the tail is extremely long and thin, more of a steering vane. For the body, say 40 feet. That's on par with the very largest minis (8x8 base). So, this dragon is 10 times the size of Haast's eagle in every dimension. Thus, it must be 10 times as efficient a flier.

Assuming we want to make the dragon fly without direct levitation, there are two options: Increase its strength (muscles, bones, and tendons) to support bigger wings, or make it lighter. So, let's double the wingspan and cut the weight to 20% of normal. The dragon now has a 200-foot wingspan, and its flesh has about the density of balsa wood. If you pick up the scales or bones of a dragon, they will seem to weigh almost nothing, but they will be nearly impossible to break or bend. Its blood is some weird liquid, far less dense than water, and probably quite volatile when exposed to air.

Now, this dragon does not look a lot like the typical fantasy-art dragon. It's not a sauropod with bat wings glued to the shoulders. This dragon is proportioned like a bird. It has a tapering body with a huge chest, and vast, massively-muscled wings that spread out to near-absurd length, the membranes extending to well down the tail. Its legs are spindly, mostly bone and talon, and its tail is a long thin whip rather than a big heavy crocodilian thing. It looks like it should weigh 15 tons, but in fact it weighs only 3. For all its size, it is scarily fast, its light weight and supernaturally-strong muscles allowing it to move at lightning speed.

It's a different vision of dragons, but I rather like it.

*The dragon's wing muscles are stronger by a factor of X^2, proportional to the cross-section of the muscle, and its wing surface is likewise X^2 larger. But its weight has increased by a factor of X^3. Divide X^2 by X^3 and you get 1/X.
 
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Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
Peter Dickonson in The Flight of Dragons posits a lighter-than-air hypothesis where dragons have evolved so that their stomach acid dissolves large amounts of calcium (from bone and limestone) which releases massive amounts of gas (hydrogen) which gives the dragons body lift and supports the body above the ground.

The dragon's wings arent used for lift, just propulsion and steering (and can thus be smaller). The evolution of fire breathing is a byproduct of the need to remove of excess gas.

It makes sense to me
 

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