Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9728284" data-attributes="member: 18">You don't even need magic to make a "living X-29" work - a lot of birds and bats have inherently unstable flight configurations in the same way an X-29 does - the brain is doing exactly what "fly by wire" did.That's what makes modern hypermanueverable fighters work (which the X-29 was prototyping, even though we didn't generally go with wings like that in the end) - they essentially have a "brain" which translates the pilot's control inputs into much more complicated reconfigurations of the flight surfaces, any vectoring thrust nozzles they have, and so on. A human manipulating controls couldn't actuate them fast enough to do that and not crash (we basically proved this in the 1950s and 1960s), but with a computer "brain" it's doable, and with an animal (including sentients/sapients) that's just how they work, their brain is controlling all the flight surfaces at once.You still need flight surfaces that function as flight surfaces though i.e. they need to be the right shape. Otherwise you might as well forget flying with flight surfaces at all and just go with pure magical flight like Eastern dragons.Minor note but you may want to change you response colour to blue - red is reserved for mods, even if red is what we'd use in a work email!Also you're totally wrong re: Haste - Haste spells have a massive energy requirement - they're a 3rd level spell - continuously maintaining the equivalent of a much bigger version of a 3rd-level spell is serious business magic-wise. Further, Haste very rapidly ages the people using it (in lore at least) so you might want to work some concept of that into it (like maybe the wings have to be shed and regenerated every day whilst landed? Giving a period of vulnerability!). If had "no energy requirement" it'd be less than a cantrip.</blockquote>

Verification