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fear not intrepid ben, i have called international rescue, who will have you out in a jiffy.
T.I.L.:
There is a rule that defines a dragon as having four limbs plus wings.
Wyverns are two legged with wings
and Drakes four limbed without wings.
This however is a relatively recent invention. I am not certain where this idea comes from, heraldry perhaps, but it is not consistent with most myths about dragons.
I am not talking about Eastern dragons here. Partly because I know much less about them than I do western ones and partly because the definition of dragon is so radically different.
The defining features of a Western dragon is that it be large and serpentine. Some have limbs, some breathe fire, some breathe poison, some have no limbs at all.
“Ah!” The devil's advocate speaks up “well in that case they aren't dragons, those are myths about different sorts of monsters altogether,”
https://www.quora.com/Should-dragons-have-two-or-four-legs
A luck dragon, such as Falkor from
The Neverending Story, typically has four limbs (legs) and is wingless. They are serpentine and swim through the air like fish in water, needing no wings for flight.
can we get a smorgasbord of mythical monsters, billionaire ben?
@amiserabilist @TheBreadmonkey @cy @SRLevine okay so lemme get this straight
Drake: 4 legs, no wings
Drake: 2 legs, 2 wings, doesn't lay eggs, might have green plumage on its head, quacks
Drake: 😒🤚|😄👍
@amiserabilist @TheBreadmonkey @cy @SRLevine
Ok, but what if it's only got 4 limbs, but the front ones also double as wings like they do with bats? Does that count as a wyvern or a drake?
@amiserabilist @TheBreadmonkey @cy Having referred to wings as if they were limbs in my original response I now feel terribly backward and uninformed.
You can have any kind of dragon. Whatever you want. Cat? Dragon. Horse? Dragon. The only caveat is that it has to be awesome and terrifying.
@nomenloony @TheBreadmonkey @cy @SRLevine
ELI5: if a dragon fly was 1,000 times the size of a normal dragon fly with the exact same proportions and made of the exact same materials, would it still be able to fly?
or any other flying bug or bird.
I'm just curious if flying bugs or birds could fly with the exact same dimensions but being much larger creatures.
Would gravity have a larger effect? etc...
"Size" is ambiguous, so let's say it weighs 1000x as much. Mega-dragonfly isn't any denser than normal dragonfly, so 1000x the volume, also. 1000x is convenient, because it's a cubic number: 1000=1e3. So every dimension is 10x as large. Instead of 6 inch wingspan, 60 inches (5 feet). A dragonfly 1000x the normal size would weigh something like 5 pounds -- more than most hawks.
Wing area is an area -- a square number. So making the dragonfly 10x larger in each dimension makes the wings 100x larger in area. But they have to carry 1000x more weight. 10x more weight loaded per area of wing. Could a regular dragonfly carry around 9 others? I don't think so. It would not be able to fly.
Strength is a material property -- you can only make muscles stronger by making them thicker. Like the wings, the muscles and exoskeleton have cross-sectional area that has only increased 100x and have to carry 1000x the weight. That's 10x the structural load. Ants famously can carry very large objects relative to their body size, but this is because they're tiny, and have lots of material strength left over. Scale up to 1000x, and that reserve strength is all depleted. A mega-dragonfly's legs will probably collapse under its own weight.
The biggest problem for any mega-insect, though, is going to be respiration. Insects don't have lungs or complex circulatory systems. They rely on openings in their skin to allow gas exchange, and diffusion to spread oxygen to their muscles. If the dragonfly is 10x as large in every dimension, those crude functions will break down. There's no way enough oxygen is passively diffusing over that much volume. It would suffocate immediately.
sorry, Nömenlōony; no mega-flies.
In 1999, Elijah Snow, a reclusive centenarian and former adventurer with cryokinesis powers, reluctantly accepts recruitment by the field team of Planetary, an organization that investigates the "secret history" of the twentieth century. The field team, also made up of superhuman Jakita Wagner and a technopath called only the Drummer, is supported by a network of global offices, specialists, and equipment, and unconditionally funded by an unidentified, unseen patron called the "Fourth Man." On their missions, the field team encounter concepts from speculative fiction in the flesh, such as pulp magazine heroes, superheroes, kaiju, wuxia and gun fu, a superspy, B movie monsters, Jules Verne's imaginary technology, and interstellar starships. The team embraces the fantastical nature of their findings, embodied by the mantra: "It's a strange world; let's keep it that way."
@amiserabilist @nomenloony @TheBreadmonkey @cy @SRLevine
Heh. I initially thought you were asking for the ELI5 explanation, but I see you've got it covered.
I was going to add at the end the Wikipedia link to square-cube law, so I'll just leave that instead.
@amiserabilist @nomenloony @TheBreadmonkey @cy @SRLevine a major limitation to the size of insects is getting oxygen around their bodies. Air is pumped to each cell in microscopically branching tubes - it can only travel so far before that mechanism fails.
Fossil dragonflies up to about 18" length have been discovered, but oxygen levels were much higher when they lived - over 30% compared to 20.9% now.
@amiserabilist @nomenloony @cy @SRLevine
This is the sort of content I am here for
@TheBreadmonkey @nomenloony @amiserabilist @cy @SRLevine hold me closer, tiny dragon
@catmisgivings @TheBreadmonkey @nomenloony @amiserabilist @cy @SRLevine This is all leading up to a pitch for your new TV idea, isn't it?
Dragons Ben.
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@TheBreadmonkey @amiserabilist @cy @SRLevine but cute and with huuuuuuuge eyes!