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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5385904" data-attributes="member: 18253">I agree; I don’t think you could have dragons on earth without waiving a lot of known physics. You could do that as part of your necessary suspension of disbelief but it’s a stretch. I don't thnk they really know how much quetzalcoatlus weighed but it was around 200 pounds. Maybe vaguely dragon-ish in looks but not in size. On a related topic, I took a look at what it would take for a griffin to carry a rider in a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/blogs/marcq/2436-can-griffin-really-carry-human.html" target="_blank">blog</a> sometime ago and came to the conclusion that for the equivalent for a 800 pound griffin plus 200 pounds of rider and gear, you couldn’t really get there with just some higher density atmosphere and/or somewhat lower gravity; same analysis applies to dragons. You could do it with moon-like gravity but who has their PCs bouncing all over the place like astronauts on the moon? If you add scale to the mix (say, humans are half earth height), you could make it work with modestly lower gravity and somewhat thicker air and that has the virtue of making apparent flight speed higher, giants no more than “normal” sized humans, etc. It reminds me of Avatar which waived its hands at a lower gravity moon and thicker air but also had the aliens much larger than humans. I’m fine with ignoring the physics for a movie but I don’t think their flying creatures would work. I suppose from the way the aliens were bouncing around their tree and such, you could say gravity was much lower in which case things might work but humans were on Pandora and weren’t bouncing around enough for much lower gravity. Maybe the humans were wearing "heavy boots" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> (Extended aside:Ask someone if an astronaut on the moon dropped a pen, would it float beside him, float away or drop to the ground. If they answer either of the first two, ask, "Why doesn't the astronaut float away?" They will usually answer "Because they were wearing heavy boots." Seemed preposterous to me but I've tried it. My engineer friends all got the right answer but various women in my family have all gone down the heavy boot path. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />)</blockquote>

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