Is there any realistic way in which a dragon could breathe fire or is the only solution to just hand wave it as magic...

This. Two jets of liquid droplets that violently react. It's the only analogous system in nature.

>giving a damn about realism for an organism that biologically doesn't even make sense.

Really, point me to a single non-insectoid creature that has two sets of legs AND wings. They don't exist. The skeleton and nerve system would be a mess.

plenty of easily organic liquids and gases that catches on fire big time, methane and hydrogen for example.
There are also plenty of biological system that could cause an ignition spark ( a bio-electric spark for exemple).

people who like to overthink things could also say that a large volume of gas would help a dragon keep down his specific weight and be buoyant, but i feel like it's still clear that dragons, as depicted by most western artist, are too fucking heavy to fly with wings that small and non magical-muscles also pose a limit to how easy it is for big things to fly.

So what you're saying is, dragons are really giant insects and that their scales are actually a toothed exoskeleton?

>point me to a single non-insectoid creature that has two sets of legs AND wings. They don't exist. The skeleton and nerve system would be a mess.

of all the things dragons are unrealistic at, this is certainly not a concern.
nerve system would do just fine.
we don't have animals with 4 limbs + wings because all things that fly need to cut down weight and it turned out 2 legs + beak + wings are more than enough for anything you want to do.
Also many evolution lines on earth evolved with 4 limbs and making 2 more pop out is a rare occasion, but possible.

As said.

You only need to look at the working principles of say, a flamethrower, to realise that breathing fire, especially from what could be, in a dragon, quite a large organ, is viable.

FLIGHT on the other hand is fucking impossible. Assuming were using hydrogen sacks or something to lighten their load, they'd need about 2/3rds of their internal volume to be gas tank to be close enough to neutral buoyancy (IE they'd still have a very significant NET weight at that point) that their wings can handle the rest.

Might I direct you to my childhood book "dragonology"?
It was such a neat book about development of dragons in their eggs, their musculoskeletal system, diet, reason for hoarding, and how they breathed fire

But hydrogen is flammable!

That would just mean they have to choose between flying and breathing fire in combat situations, which admittedly forgoes the dramatic flair of a draconic bombing run.

I still have this! Bought it at a middle school book fair years ago.

Theoretically, to achieve flight the bone structure would have to be light, but strong enough to support it's frame and weight to help offset a small fraction of the needs for a being to naturally achieve flight. Those bones also need to be able to withstand the strong muscles in the shoulder needed for the wings, and the other muscle groups that control it. Wingspan is going to be fucking massive in comparison to the rest of the body, so I can't help but think that a dragon in the real world would be some hideous abomination that is small and sinewy everywhere except it's chest and back, with wings that stretch out at least three to four times longer than the dragon is from nose to tail, and that's even if it's only capable of short sustained flight

Sorry if I'm babbling like a dumbass, but I haven't been able to sleep in quite a bit

so what you're saying is that chinese dragons, but with absolutely massive wings, make far more sense that western dragons?

I like the idea that dragons can only really glide for extended periods of time, but use their fire breath to create temporary thermals for lift.

It, and it's smaller "field guide" made my childhood pretty great. Another favorite was the spiderwick guide, which has beautiful watercolor and sketch drawings as well as summaries of the creatures said to have been encountered

I feel like asian-style serpent dragons would be too long for that unless they coiled up like cinnamon roll while flying.

No, no. Eastern dragons are beautiful, but even with wings their body is not meant for flight. Much too long of a body frame. Think a large, scaled Sphynx cat with the chest and shoulder muscles of a very large pit bull and wings three to four times longer than the length of it's body

Dragonbreath is easy peasy

But just try to justify their flight

You could do it like Flight of Dragons, where flight and firebreath both function due to lighter than air flammable gasses inside their bodies. But the more fire they breathe, the more lift they lose.

Who's to say dragons or just these mythical creatures in general don't got physiology with muscles with the robustness and tensile strength of carbon nanotube or similar sillyness. It's like people bringing up square cube law with godzilla. Motherfucker had nuclear breath, his meaty parts probably aren't of the same sort of thing that makes up you and me.

Yes. Look at some bug species.
They usually have 2 sacs with chemicals that ignite when they come into contact with each other.

, There's other weird shit going on with dragons from A Song of Ice and Fire though.
For instance their internal body temperature is ridiculously high for a living being; their blood is apparently hot enough to blacken and warp steel based on what happened to the spear that got stabbed into Drogon, so their internal temperature is roughly equivalent to that of a goddamn blacksmith's forge, or at least their blood is.

They also emit steam in the rain and in cold nights due to the huge temperature difference between them and the air.
I don't think internal chemicals can explain that kind of ridiculous body temperature, and we also know they are explicitly creatures of magic.

Despite what many here say about methane and hydrogen and all that shit, dragons are entirely unrealistic.

Their size doesn't work, look up Quetzalcoatlus and consider it was the biggest flying creature on Earth. The amounts of hydrogen or other lighter than air elements needed for flight would be make them rather undragon like, much more so than what the Flight of Dragons cartoon movie showed.

Dragon fire is a tough subject. Storing hydrogen isn't impossible but exhaling it also the quickest way to get one cooked dragon head and throat. There is a reason no earth creature has evolved anything like it.

Of course it could be some form of hypergolic fluid that it spews out, but we still run into issues of creation, storage, and injury. Frankly, a dragon's mouth wouldn't look anything like we commonly imagine it to be if it used these hypergolic fluids.

youtube.com/watch?v=BwYwAFlvzgc

The dragon contains a biological nuclear reactor.

>Is there any realistic way in which a dragon could breathe fire or is the only solution to just hand wave it as magic bullshit?
Fire, no.
A creature the size of a komodo dragon could totally vomit "napalm" though, if it had someway to ignite animal fat stored in its body.

>That would just mean they have to choose between flying and breathing fire in combat situations, which admittedly forgoes the dramatic flair of a draconic bombing run.

It does, however, give you a good reason for why the Fighter can stab it with a sword instead of just getting burned from the air - if the dragon wants to breath fire, it can no longer fly away.

I don't recall GoT dragons having their breath described. They're also blatantly magical. So much so that their eggs need to be hatched my often magical means, they're bodies are like cooled lava, and their mere existence brings magic into the world

Dragons are small. About the size of a mid sized Van.

When they grow older, and get larger, they lose the ability to fly. The flight is to help protect them in their youth.

Ah damn, I wanted to pitch that idea here, since I've read of it before, and thought it would be quite nice.
As always, I'm too slow

There isn't a realistic way in which a dragon could fly without magic either.

There are several realistic ways for a dragon to breath fire. What's far more problematic is to find a realistic reason for such an ability to evolve in the first place. A dragon wouldn't need a defense mechanism against anything, and for animals, burning their food before eating it would just diminish its nutritional value. Fire breath offers no evolutionary advantage.

That actually gives me a good idea, what would a draong look like if it was insect based rather than reptile-based? Is that more feasible if you assume that Insects could grow that big (they can't)?

What do you even mean by that?

Few higher organisms are nature are radioresistant.

They could have been because they start forest fires to drive their prey in a direction, then fly there and hunt.

...

Damn, that's some good ass thinking. I'm stealing that shit.

Fire seemed to work pretty well for humans.

So basically an organic Hindenburg? This sounds a lot like Pratchett dragons which are incredibly touchy creatures liable to explode at the drop of a hat.

Same reason that humans use fire today:
to kill parasites, microbes, and infectious bacteria

Due to an extremely specific combination of circumstances including the shape of their bodies, the ability to use tools and the exact environmental conditions under which they've developed, which wouldn't exist in the case of dragons. Fun fact: even for humans, meat is less nutritious if cooked. Unfortunately, since discovering fire we've eliminated an evolutionary imperative which applies to almost all creatures (the need to be resistant to the parasites in uncooked food, which we no longer eat anyway) so we've lost the ability to eat it without fear of getting sick. It wouldn't do good to most animals.

Read Most animals do not NEED to kill all those parasites and bacteria, they possess a very high natural immunity (how do you think all the animals who don't cook their food, which is to say all of them, still exist?). It's the humans who have LOST that ability since coming to rely on fire, originally not even for the purpose of food preparation at all (likely for heating and defense) and THEN for food preservation. Over tens of thousands of years it's clear that fire was a good thing but like most revolutionary inventions on that scale (shit like "agriculture") it takes thousands of years for anything good to come out of it.

Wouldn't resistance to parasites in uncooked food still be at a higher risk than eating only cooked food? The vast amount of different bacteria and parasites that are killed off by cooking the food seems like a more safe solution.

Bones and/or muscles made of naturally occurring carbon fibers. Avatar jokes aside, this is not physically impossible. It's extremely unlikely assuming that the ecosystem is otherwise similar to Earth's, since at no point did any animal we know of developed bones made of carbon fibers, but it's the kind of thing that, biologically speaking, COULD have happened. Just say dragons are the latest step in a vast and complex evolutionary history of carbon-fiber-skeleton possessing reptiles in that particular world.

Clearly not enough to matter, since as far as we're aware only one species on Earth has ever cooked their food and quite a few others have survived pretty fine without it. If parasites were such a risk, more animals would've used cooking or they'd have died out. Again, on a scale of millennia it's clear that fire was beneficial, but on the scale of a single generation? Doubtful they even thought about it.

You could even imagine an evolutionary lineage. Initial mutation to tooth physiology allows proto-dragons to create sparks by quickly snapping their jaws. This trait stays because it lets them start fires for hunting.
Later generations develop mouth/gut bacteria that produce small amounts of flammable fuel, allowing the species to start fires even in damp conditions.
Eventually, this evolves into fuel sacs to store larger amounts of fuel and produce larger and more dangerous flame jets. Some species of dragons specialize further, their jaws/teeth/claws shrink as they primarily hunt using flame.

>it was the biggest flying creature on Earth.

I know it's not city spanning huge, but this thing is still pretty scary big, man.

So basically, what I'm getting from you guys is that;

1) Dragons would probably be really long like eastern dragons.

2) There would be multiple sets of huge wings.

3) It'd probably look like that colossus from Shadow of the Colossus.

4) It'd still need some form of ignition.

I mean, I imagine dragons would have some chemical process converting water into oxygen and hydrogen in their body or something, so they can actually maintain their firebreathing capabilities. Perhaps it could allow them to also keep breathing at such high altitudes, as well. Dragons are supposed to be on high mountains, after all. Maybe once every month or so, when they go feed on people's sheep or whatever they eat, towns or something, they also fill up on water and climb their mountain.

And, I'd imagine ignition would be something like their tongue has a natural flint-like effect with the roof of their mouth, causing a spark as it drags along, igniting the escaping gases.

as a side note, dragons that don't have wings (wyrms and such) are easier to explain. They can spray excess fats and oils that are ignited in the same way dragons do.

But that's just my take on it.

That seems quite off, how do you decompose things on a atomic level? Radioactive material itself decomposes naturally hence why it is useful and I can't imagine knights gearing up in radioactive armour for a lark.

Secondly, having massive amounts of rapidly replicating cells in your body does not inure you from radiation. In studies done on children that have been exposed to radiation, there is correlation that the radiation substantially increases the risk of cancer types relating to blood, bone marrow, brain and thyroid where there are rapidly reproducing cells. Having a massive spleen throwing out fresh stems cells combined with constant radiation would cause tumours throughout the body as the fresh stem cells become oncogenic due to the radiation, not to mention the constant prospect of leukemia.

Dragons are made entirely of cancer. Makes sense why nobody likes them.

But the long tail, user! What is a dragon without a long snake tail that makes no aerodynamic sense?

In Guards Guards a character theorizes that the reason the dragon sets all sorts of fires around the city is that it uses the resulting updrafts in order to fly more easily.

This is before she does some math and realizes that that's complete bunk, the aerial maneuvers the dragon pulls off are completely impossible for a creature of its size and configuration, that it is a magic monster that doesn't play by the same rules, and that that is absolutely terrifying.

Depends on the radiation. There are ways for an organism to be extremely resistant to radiation from how their DNA structures itself. These little guys can survive inside nuclear reactors, but probably evolved more to be extremely resistant to transcription errors in the first place:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

In fact the reason there is a limit at all is that the proteins themselves begin to breakdown well above 5k Gy.

Crustaceans, arachnids, whatever the hell centipedes and millipedes are. I get you’re point, and your basically right, but the key thing is the exoskeleton.

It’s not the skeleton but the muscles that make the difference. The wings and forelimbs have the same attach point for their control muscles, so either they share space, meaning each is half as strong and therefore unable to hold the animals weight, one pair is vestigial, or they use the same muscles, meaning whenever the forelegs move the wings move in the same way.

It is possible for a non exoskeleton creature to have more than four working limbs but the chest area of the torso would need to be at least half as long again to accommodate the musculature.

Hence why modern fantasy cinema (such as it exists) likes to present dragons with wings in place of forelegs. It's one of those things that, weirdly enough, people have just gotten used to thinking of as looking "more correct". I doubt the vast majority of those understand the biology behind it, but the growing popularity of the image speaks for itself.

If the party manages to kill a dragon, it had better explode. Bosses deserve unique death animations!

Hmm, looking at its mechanisms there is some potential, but I have some concerns about transferability to higher and eukaryotic organisms. Its an archaea, a relatively primative phylum of life that in truth does not have much commonality with either eu- or pro- karyotes. Secondly, its genome is tiny in comparison to ours and other animals, a mere 3,284,156 base pairs compared to 3.3 x 10^9 for us and ~1.5-.7x10^9 for lizards. So our genome is about a thousand times bigger and lizards around 500 times bigger, which would play a part in ease of genetic repair. In addition, that archaea is extremely specialised to live where it does which doesn't transfer well to an animal that is going to cross biomes.

That being said, to a certain degree, banking up on anti-oxidants and managanese to absorb radiation could help but it would still mean a creature that has a substantially shorter lifespan than anything else of its size that was prone to sterility and genetic mutation.

>it has been nicknamed Conan the Bacterium
Badass

Yes, the wyvern body form is considerably more practical, seeing as how it lines up to birds, bats, and pterosaurs. The body size is still to big, but at least the things can move without breaking biology.

Not to mention the weight of the scales.

But on to musculature, wouldn't dragons have multiple sets of wings to make up for it? Like, literally most of their spine would be accommodating their wings.

... What if their wings had a separate spine, posterior to the original spine? It could also have its own ribcage around and below the first, which would allow its wings to span the body, and would mean that flight would also hold their entire weight along their whole abdomen, not only their "chest". The bones could even potentially loop between the hind legs, and wings could go all the way to near the tail, or even include the tail.

"Fire" is only a metaphorical name, as the dragon's spit is highly acidic and causes a torturous burning sensation on the skin and is capable of corroding stone.

Essentially, they vomit at you.

But for actual flames, go with these:

The long tail is kinda weird, though. You'd notice birds don't usually have those, and the larger they are the less likely. The biologist in me would imagine dragons with a tail covered in very long feathers (not peacock long, but enough for it to look very wide), if anything, but that looks nothing like the dragons we're trying to justify.

youtu.be/8FIDeOOL52Q
I rather enjoy this as a general evolutionary explanation of dragons, even if it isn't entirely explained.
However, it explains dragon fire as being gas given off by digesting meat that is then expelled through the mouth. The ignition comes from chewing on hard minerals and metals (hence hoarding them) to leave residue in the teeth that creates a spark, igniting the gas.

What scientific excuse could I use for my dragons eating virgin maidens?

Because for almost all of recorded history, people are superstitious. Virgin maidens were considered 'pure', and when it comes to ritual sacrifice, the purer the better.

I mean that the dragon can only eat virgin maidens. Nothing else.

Dragons are an entire race of autistic NEETs obsessed with their 2D girlfriends and throw shitfits at the mention of "slutty" non-virginal 3D women.

Think about it like this. If you were going to eat a delicious sandwich, you would prefer that no one had fucked it before hand.

>Sleep all day
>Only eat food other people've worked for (stealing cattle)
>Lie on a pile of shiny garbage they never plan on using but couldn't bear to part with, to which they only add
>Never work
>Condescending and have an overinflated opinion of themselves, leading to their doom
>Obsessed with weird games but throw tantrums when someone defeats them
>Hateful and venomous, no friends
>Weight like, three thousand tons

Dragons are a daikimakura away from being /robot/s

Many dragons are also magical so wizardom achieved.

some kind of bladder where they gather flamable gasses they get from breaking down a specific type of food, ignites when it comes in contact with air and a spark, like teeth gnashing together or something.
That or they produce two chemicals that are harmless on their own, but when combined react violently, they then need to spit it out really far to make sure they don't burn themselves.

I like the gass option better because the gass can also be used to lighten the creature and make it better at flying. It also introduces a limit to its breathweapon & flying ability.

Wizardhood.

A classical geas.

They don't taste like spunk.

Untainted and unused female genitals are preferred because they are muscles that aren't very tough and don't taste all bitter and gross.

Alternatively, they're sentient creatures who instinctively want to rule. As in, it's literally written into their DNA. It's why half-dragons and dragonborn always want to do what they want to, and hate being ordered around. They naturally want to be in charge of things. And the easiest way to rule humans is by killing their king and breaking the rebellion. They don't NEED to eat virgin girls, they do it to scare the peasantry into submission.

It's also why dragons prefer solitude. Can you imagine having multiple ambitious arseholes living under the same roof as you, and you're king ambitious arsehole? Your life expectancy would drop like a rock.

And they only mate like once a millennium.

>Really, point me to a single non-insectoid creature that has two sets of legs AND wings. They don't exist. The skeleton and nerve system would be a mess.
That is the least odd thing about dragons. Sure, you could not begin to guess where they would've evolved from on Earth, but they often share worlds with griffins and other vertebrates with 6 limbs, so it wouldn't be so odd that there would be a neat philological branch for them.

And there are dragons portrayed with only one set of legs, like wyverns.

Adding wings does not solve the problem. Your pectoral muscles move your arms forward and the muscles at your shoulder blades (I forget the name of the muscle group) moves them backwards. There needs to be room on the skeletal system for these muscles to attach or the wings are going to have trouble holding up their own weight, let alone move and flap.

Without extending the torso by a decent margin for each new set of limbs, adding wings just makes the problem worse. And the longer the body gets the more weight it has (as you said scales are heavy, but so is muscle) and the more unwieldy it becomes to maneuver though the air.

There is nothing posterior to the spine; the spine runs from the base of the skull to the tip of the tail, a secondary spine would be redundant in its entirety, no matter where you put it. A second or extended ribcage would give the wing muscles space to attach, but it can’t overlap with the existing ribs because that would reduce the attach points in the overlap area. But adding ribs without lengthening the torso would greatly reduce maneuverability. The ribbed area of your torso doesn't move freely, its one solid block. Bending, twisting, and shifting of your torso happens in the abdomen, where there are no ribs to restrict and prevent movement.

As for bones extending to the hind legs, that just adds more unnecessary weight. Though the wings extending that far back would work, as long as you’re talking about the soft tissue, like how 3.5 gold dragons are. The more surface area the soft tissue covers the easier the dragon can say in the air when it gets there, but that needs no muscle or bone, it’s just thin skin membrane to catch the air.

>My Liege! We must evacuate the castle!
>What is going on, Sergeant?
>I beg your pardon, My Liege, but there's no time to explain! We have to hurry! The city is in flames!
>What happened?
>It is the dragon who lives on the mountain, Sir. He has descended upon the kingdom and shows no mercy! The army will try to hold him back, but the people are dying in droves!
>By the gods... What could've driven it to such fury?
>No one knows, My Liege... but the court wizard believes that mom did not make chicken tendies.

It could fend off other huge animals, huge swarms of smaller animals and parasitic microorganisms.

Some pterosaurs had long tails, but those were mostly sticks with a ball at the end for balance, nothing like the dragon tail. And some just had the long tail, but both examples were stick thing and could only move and twist at the attachment to the hips, the rest was straight and stiff, nothing but light fused bones and skin.

That’s probably the best we could hope for with that. Adding feathers to the tail, but not the rest of the dragon would look horribly weird, and the evolutionary development of something like that makes no sense, seeing as feathers are just scales that have gone through a couple million years of changes, so why would an animal only do that for the tail when feathered wings would theoretically work better than skin ones.

>I forget the name of the muscle group
Serratus, Traps, Rhomboids, take your pick. We have plenty that do bits and pieces.

>adding wings just makes the problem worse.
Perhaps, then, having one pair of wings that extend from T1 to the Sacrum, or even along the tail. One big set of wings that extend along the entire body and span huge.This is why there's the second spine and set of ribs. There would be a part that would wrap around to create a strong sternum, or even connecting to it. And there would obviously be ribs that don't connect to the sternum. They'd be the lower ribs. Hell, even just having the second ribcage and thoracic spine would be enough to make room for the wings, and both spines could connect at the lumbar region. They would need the extra ribcage to separate the shoulders and arm muscles from the wing muscles. I'd imagine their second ribcage would lie around the first one, but be just below the shoulders so they could move their arms. Their two spines could meet up again at the lumbar section, as I mentioned before. That way, they could become one spine for the tail.

>Bending, twisting, and shifting of your torso happens in the abdomen, where there are no ribs to restrict and prevent movement.

Perhaps the wings could have thin bones every few spinal bones, to aid in maneuverability in the air? They'd only have to be small, and perhaps even just cartilage with muscle connections? For greater control in air. Nothing big. Very thin, lightweight muscles and cartilage used to adjust in flight.

>just thin skin membrane to catch the air.
Pretty much what I was thinking, but with a "frame" of cartilage and muscle. Bones at the top, of course.

They're fucking DRAGONS. They're THE archetypal magic bullshit thing.

We know, fuckface. We're talking about this for fun.

Read a story once where Dragon's breathed out microwave radiation.

>dragon descends to set fire to the fields
>popcorn rains over the town

>for fun

If you’re talking about overlapping one spine over another, then you’re adding weight for no reason, there’s no way to attach a second spine and make it as sturdy as the original without effectively making it one, oblong weird shaped spine.

Extending along the tail wouldn’t be something the muscle does, that’s for the membrane. The muscle and bone attach like it does for your arm, all that happens at the shoulder, where the wing bone attaches to the shoulder girdle.

There could, easily, be a modified shoulder formation that allows for the forelimbs and wings on a single set of ribs, the bone structure isn't the problem at all, that works. The problem is that it doesn't allocate space for the muscle, and stacking the ribs, hinders the attachment of one or both limb sets.

Unless you’re talking about this secondary ribcage overlapping the forelimbs themselves, which would almost make them seem more like armor, and because it would be accommodating all the musculature below it, it would not be able to attach to the main frame of the body in a way that would allow this ribcage to support the creature as would be needed in flight. At least, no way to attach it that wouldn’t add insane weight to the system, and adding any significant weight would necessitate a wingspan, and membrane coverage, that is so large it would actually be nothing but a hindrance on the ground, constantly getting caught and torn on trees and such.

Animal planet did something where they said they stored hydrogen produced by bacteria in their bodies and it helped them fly since they were naturally too heavy. But when they chewed platinum it would coat the teeth so when hydrogen was expelled it would ignite but also meant they could no longer fly.

I don't know why I wrong down dog. I meant animal

>wrong down

I had dragons as being giant apex predators living in a volcano. They ate the salt peter rocks to help their digestion like a gizard. The rocks were so flamable that humans could easily combust them just by rubbing them>Therfore they poop ashes
I like it

This was on the Discovery Channel show. Not only would such a dragon still be impractical, it also wouldn't at all resemble the dragons of fiction.

Now we're getting somewhere. Let's start by solving the harder problem: flight. Flying requires immense amounts of energy for something that heavy, so let's start with the most energy-efficient form of flight: soaring. The heaviest birds all do this, too.

Takeoff remains a problem. You need to deliver a considerable amount of power to the muscles. More importantly, you need a considerable amount of oxygen. Oxygen requires lung volume, with a high metabolic cost of its own, plus a circulatory system to deliver it. And that system all has to be there whether it's in use or not.

What if we throw that assumption out and figure out a different way to oxygenate the blood? In the sci fi book "Legacy of Heorot", the alien monsters had a heat gland that released "superhemoglobin" into the blood, giving them short bursts of tremendous speed and strength but also quickly overheating them. The heat glands would slowly recharge with super-oxygenated compounds, and the monster being amphibious would use the water to cool down.

Now you can burn enough calories quickly enough for powered flight, at least until the dragon's airborne and can switch to soaring. The air blowing over its wings then allow it to air-cool in flight.

Bonus: the heat gland can provide bursts of strength and speed in combat, too!

Another bonus: now that we have the oxidizer, we simply put the gland in the mouth along with a fire gland that has the incendiary and an enzyme to ignite it. Poof! You have your fire breath, too. The dragon has a limited supply of Heat: it can spend it for physical feats (including takeoff) or spray it for fire-breathing.

Now we've solved the big metabolic problems, it's time to talk anatomy.