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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Laurefindel" data-source="post: 9728382" data-attributes="member: 67296">I was about to say that most modern fighter planes with more conventional wing designs like the F-35 cannot fly without heavy computer assistance either, but that’s besides the point now I think.I can imagine ways for the dragon to fly with reverse wings, as I wrote in the rest of my last post. I can also imagine what type of transformation the wing would need to become helpful in flight assuming a « backward » ossature, but the latter is hard to reconcile with the image of the Topaz Dragon. Basically, the wing would need to become aerodynamic, and the musculature would need to allow powerful and sustained forward motions, so ultimately they wouldn’t look like that. I guess that magic can provide all this instead, but then that’s not an evolutionary advantage, it’s just catching up to a handicap, which in turns raises two questions.1) Why do they have backward wings in the first place? Was it a cruel gods idea of a joke, a righteous god’s curse on a whole species, or a jealous god’s revenge on another god’s creation? Did some uber wizard lost a bet, or is this the result of a drunken wizards’ dare game? The backwards wings probably didn’t happen naturally, for what natural evolution is worth in D&D.2) what kind of environment allowed such a dragon to survive and thrive despite its handicap? Perhaps they didn’t need to fly much and thus wasn’t that much of a disadvantage, but then why haven’t the wings atrophied? Did they need their wings for other things then? Sunbathing? Absorbing some kind of energy or magical radiation? If that’s the case, why to they use their wings at all when flying? Wouldn’t it be simpler to use magic to fly and tuck those aweful airbrakes tight against your back instead? Obviously not because that’s what they would do otherwise and the illustration shows them flying with wings spread.(An an aside, I just realized that all this time, I’ve been assuming that the image showed the dragon flying but perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps the dragon isn’t intended to be capable of flight but the silhouette is simply showing it all stretched up for proportion and comparisons, like pinned butterflies and insects)</blockquote>

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