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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 394738" data-attributes="member: 4937">Upper Krust: Throwing around numbers is probably meaningless but...Hit points are in general proportional to the cross sectional area of a creature or object.  Let's make some assumptions about proportional size.  A big dragon snout to tail is about 120' long (about the size of the longest dinosaurs).   Let's assume that they are no more heavily built than average sauropods of that length (since they have the same genaral body plan), so a body weight of about 50 tons.  Note that at 100,000 lb., my colossal dragon is only half the weight of your gargantuan one.  However, how do the h.p. play out?  Well, lets assume for the sake of arguement that a dragon with a 40' body is as heavily built as a 50 ton scaled up human (which they wouldn't be).  This implies a cross sectional area about 60 times that of a regular human.  An average human takes about 14 h.p. to kill (you got to drop them to -10 remember?), so 14x62=868 h.p.  That is of course a suspicious arguement because h.p. do not equal ability to absorb damage, but also the ability to avoid it.  Perhaps a dragons ability to avoid damage is even higher than an average humans, but for now I'll just assume that a 50 ton critter isn't dodging anything.Armor on the other hand scales to depth, NOT cross sectional area and certainly NOT mass.  (Armor scaled up to mass would quickly weigh more than the creature it protected, needing to become 8 times thicker everytime the creatures dimensions doubled).  Let's assume that dragon armor is a substance like medium armor scaled up to its size and that medium armor provides a DR of about 7, then dragon hide scales up to about DR 55.  In reality, it would probably have to get thinner to allow the dragon to keep moving.A couple of other things.  Bullet damage would scale directly with mass.  A bullet that is eight times heavier (all things being equal) does eight times as much damage.   A 20 mm shell would riddle the above dragon, and because its massive it wouldn't even be protected (if you can call it that) by 'blow through'.  A dozen 30 mm shells (a fractional burst) would probably kill it outright.Strength is proportional to cross sectional area, not mass.  Strength doubles for every 10 points.  So a colossal dragon in theory has about 80 STR, not 300.   Base damage for a colossal 100,000 lb. dragons attack should be around 25d6+35, with an average of about 122 damage.So, how do you kill a 100,000 lb. dragon?  Easily!  With primitive weapons?  Not so easily but it still probably can be done albeit at extraordinary cost.  You wouldn't use anything as clumsy as a 48' balista even if it were possible to construct such a thing (which I don't think it is personally).  You see, the above dragon scaled up has eyes the size of footballs.  A good archer can hit a football sized target at say, 60' yards, fairly consistantly and regularly even further out.  A troop of brave men could first blind the creature, as eyes have no DR.   These arrows should be poisoned.  It's wings are probably equally vunerable, and could be riddled next, causing it much pain and disorientation (being blind) and ultimately tearing them enough that flight was impossible.  At that point it becomes a matter of time.   Of course, I'm sure it would toast archers by the scores or hundreds, but human armies can number in the thousands.</blockquote>

Verification