here's a link.
http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/dragons/dragons.html
 

Thanks anyway...
 

Just an idea. Or is that what the AP film surmised? Haven't seen it.

You'd also have to explain why a dragon's upper digestive tract produces so much methane. Usually that kind of methane gas concentration isn't produced until the end of the process, in which case your dragon would have to shoot fire out of his...well...er...we won't go there.

[talk about hemmorhoids!]

[This message has been edited by djvdakota (edited April 05, 2005).]
 

Yea... I'd say you could have actually written the program... they said it was platinum that sparked hydrogen... but otherwise... it was the same explanation. And I thought that was kinda dumb... so... I need something better...

"You'd also have to explain why a dragon's upper digestive tract produces so much methane. Usually that kind of methane gas concentration isn't produced until the end of the process"

I already have an explanation for that part. Don't worry, the character that actually needs to state all this is very logical minded, so I basically have to make myself think of everything detail to make sure the logic isn't lost somewhere...

ChrisOwens:
I've considered an organ, considering that many animals, including humans, have extra organs and all, it's not too hard to make that make sense... even for two chemicals to merge and be one... it'd need to be something that they could control and would make sense for it to be natural for any creature (or at least a large reptile) to posses that chemical in their bodies to begin with. I've considered trying to make it some sort of chemical reaction involving body acids... but that's just not working out right. I've asked this question on a science forum, and they're tossing it about with little results too...
 

Then, the gas could be naturally present, and the dragon could ingite by biting down a particular way -- scraping the teeth until a spark occurred. ?

1) burn your behind than your mouth
2) get a bit of a boost during flight
3) use as a flame weapon on someone coming up behind you in a sneak attack in aerial combat
4) use to signal your presence to other dragons at night, "I ####, therefore I live!"

And what about mating season displays?

The possibilities are endless.

One thing we've never discussed here (that I know of) is risk-taking in writing. This is a great opportunity. Let's not lose it.

[This message has been edited by mikemunsil (edited April 05, 2005).]
 

But do your dragons have to use methane? Why not something like the beetle uses, two compartments with stuff in them, and the dragon can shoot them both out its mouth at the same time, at which point they ignite?
 

I don't know if this helps but I seem to recall there is a kind of ant that acts like a suicide bomber, exploding violently if overwhelmed in combat. Probably a similar process to that beetle.

I'm going back to sleep now.

Josh Leone

[This message has been edited by Josh Leone (edited April 05, 2005).]
 

To your question about the methane... basically, I chose methane because that seems to be the most likely combustible chemical to come from a reptilian creature, and it seems to be the easiest to figure out a way for the dragon to have voluntary control over it… even if it's not 100% voluntary…

In a short explanation (which will be among the explanation in my story, simply because I can’t resist a smart-ass line), the dragon farts out the north-end, and basically controls it in relatively the same manner that a person controls burping… in other words… don’t ask a dragon to try burping the alphabet…
 

BTW, Terry Pratchett has flame farting firedrakes in Guards! Guards! Carrot (the main character) uses one as a kind of flamethrower to get out of a tight spot.

BTW2 did you read this bit from the consulting biologist on Animal Planet's Dragons?

quote:

---

Styx3: Did you have any other ideas on how dragons breathed fire besides the platinum theory?

Dr. Hogarth: It's the setting fire to the dragon that's the problem. I think our ideas were hydrogen and air mixing and exploding, and the only way we could think of it to work was the powdered platinum. We wondered if they could strike a spark against their teeth. Large dinosaurs did ingest stones to help digest their food, but the stones couldn't be large enough. There was the possibility of electricity. There are animals that create amounts of electricity — electric eels and electric rays — but they couldn't generate a spark, so the platinum theory seemed to be the best.

---

Edit: rant deleted...

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited April 05, 2005).]
 

This whole topic reminds me of the time my kids came home from their dad's and reported their stepbrother had used a lighter to light his... methane expulsions... and burned all the hair off his behind and left behind a ghastly smell that seared their nostrils and left them gagging for hours.

I'm sure dragon methane smells MUCH better.
 

The dragons great size was due to their basically being blimps.

Of course if it's an ALIEN dragon it could just have undiscovered chemical that burns in the presence of oxygen.

I have seen a cow and a hay bail ignite on their own due to fermentation buildup. That's one reason why you can't bail wet hay- it can burn. As any farm kid tricked into putting their arm into a wet green bail can tell you.
 

Dragons are smart. If there is magic in your milieu, then they can probably do fire magic pretty well. If not, then they probably do the juggler's trick or use a small (relatively speaking, of course) flame thrower. If you're doing dumb dragons, then I can't (or perhaps would rather not) help you.
 

So, what if the dragons sprayed a flammable liquid (i.e. saliva laced with burped-up methane gas) and they can create a static charge with their nostril hairs by hyperventilating.
 

hoptoad:
"Dragons are the fantasy world equivalent of faster-than-light travel. (Impossible at best. But we are willing to ignore that unless you try to explain it.)"

That's what separates fantasy from sci-fi... fantasy is just "magic", where as sci-fi is "science"... to say a creature that is not known to exist on this planet, especially an animal that is at least semi probable, is actually a falsie in logic... traveling faster that light is actually not *proven* impossible either, it's just presently impossible and mostly improbable... but for someone that can create a believable theory of it being possible, they can very easily make it possible in sci-fi.

To your "BTW2"
Actually the thing of the dragon blowing up from it is something that I've taken into consideration... also one of the reasons I've chosen methane over any of the other possible chemicals... granted, it's still possible for it to blow up his head, if it were possibly forced to close its mouth at the wrong time, but otherwise it would be harmless to the dragon... {Um… forget I said that... I might be able to make use of that idea...}

"Edit: rant deleted..."

Don't you rant at me, mister... go to your room!

JBSkaggs:
"Of course if it's an ALIEN dragon it could just have undiscovered chemical that burns in the presence of oxygen."

Actually... a lot of discovered chemicals happen to become highly combustible when mixed with air, so an undiscovered chemical would be unnecessary... like... methane (reference: Swamp Gas)... it only takes a slight spark to make it ignite enough to create a fire that can melt the flesh off a human (the flaw of doing research is having to actually see some of this stuff... fair to say, I have a clear image of what I'm working with now)... hence why I've chosen to go with a sort of flint in the dragon's mouth.

Survivor:
"My own preference is that dragons not breathe fire."

That would kill some key points in the story otherwise, the dragons and their evolution is significantly relevant (and you're not gonna get me to tell you any more).

"From a metabolic standpoint, it's simply far too wasteful."

I don't get why it's "wasteful"... it's about as wasteful as anybody's body already does... hence... it's natural... especially taking into consideration the extra size of the dragon, and its excessive eating, which creates larger amounts of methane (this occurs in real animals even).

"Dragons are smart."

That's a falsie of logic... you mean "Dragons could be smart," but they could just as easily be as stupid as the typical dinosaur (which, by the way, are theorized to have been pretty dumb).

"If there is magic in your milieu, then they can probably do fire magic pretty well."

If I have my character explain the breathing of fire or anything is "just magic", he'd have to pretty much kick his own ass (and I'm not going into anymore detail than that, so stop trying to make me).

"If you're doing dumb dragons, then I can't (or perhaps would rather not) help you."

Um... ok... taking dragons a wee personal on a somewhat creepy level now... but... ok...

Robyn_Hood:
"Okay, this idea was inspired by the flame-thrower bugs in the Starship Troopers movie. Those bugs sprayed a liquid that was ignited by a static charge (not sure where the charge came from exactly, but it looked cool)."

Yea... they were basically spraying Napalm... fun stuff...
 

Obviously.
 

but there was that whole backdraft problem that ended the fart burning...
 

plant material.

If dragons are really plant eaters like cows and termites, then ok. But that doesn't make much of a plot.

The only answer to the problem is that meat eating dragons must produce hydrogen gas, perhaps by a simple evolutionary modification of the proton pump cellular process by which we humans produce hydrogen chloride in our stomachs. The dragon would just have to have a way of releasing its hydrogen before it is caught by a chloride ion, perhaps by the use of excess sodium in the process at the cell membrane level. Perhaps this would explain the yellow color of their flame. Perhaps it is the result of contamination by sodium chloride?

This leads to some interesting possible plot twists, such as a method of capturing dragons by leaving out bait which contains a proton pump inhibitor such as Nexium.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited April 07, 2005).]
 

If they were omnivores they would still have to produce hydrochloric acid lest they risk having the meat portion of their food putrify. The acidity produced might disrupt the methane fermentation process, producing more CO2.

I do seem to recall someone, I believe it was Tolkein, who suggested that dragons were omnivores and ate grain when they coudln't get humans or sheep. This leads to another possibility. What would happen if a dragon developed a taste for grain and his internal plumbing went haywire and produced CO2 and alcohol instead of methane?

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited April 07, 2005).]
 

{I'm not arguing… I really want to know}
 

The proton pump is a natural modification of the sodium/potassium cell membrane pump which operates by recycling adenosine triphosphate, a complex energy producing chemical we all have abundance of. The ATP acts as a shuttle for hydrogen ions.

I think that one point here is that if the process were something intrinsic to the dragon such as the proton pump process it would be more robust but if it were fermentation to make methane it would be dependent upon some sort of unicellular critter which might be very finicky about its own environment. Both alcohol and methane fermentation need a relative poverty of available of oxygen for instance.

The trouble with meat if I recall is that it contains a lot of nitrogen, which is easily diverted by other bacteria to produce putrification.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited April 07, 2005).]
 

I recently saw an episode of Mythbusters (my new favourite show ), that involved looking at the methane production of human waste. I can't remember exactly, but they mentioned something along the lines of only 40 (or was it 60?) percent of humans actually produce methane.

So if humans, which are omnivors, can produce methane as a bio bi-product, why couldn't dragons?

As for the teeth, bears have sharp pointy teeth, but they are omnivors.

Regarding the self-producing alcoholic dragon idea -- that could make for an interesting story. And if the alcohol was potent enough, it would also be flamable.

[This message has been edited by Robyn_Hood (edited April 07, 2005).]
 

It gives me a headache thinking about the possibilities, as things get complex pretty fast. (My 30 year old microbiology, cell physiology and biochemistry textbooks contain a collective 3000 pages and these sciences were very primitive 30 years ago compared to our present knowledge.)

Contamination of fermentation process is a risk with any natural environment and could be catastrophic. For instance what would happen if dragons produced ammonia byproduct and the processs got contaminated and produced poisonous hydrazine? Sure his flames would still burn, but he'd poison the environment as well.

All the variabiliies and possibilities in fermentation (like what do the humans produce who don't make methane?) is one of the things which led me to try to identify a theoretically possible purely intrinsic process which would not rely on microbes.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited April 07, 2005).]
 

[This message has been edited by Lanius (edited April 08, 2005).]
 

Well, this conversation has been fascinating but overall it tends to confirm my own opinion that dumb dragons are...well, dumb.

What the heck is the point of doing a dragon that is too dumb to figure out how to breathe fire the way God intended?
 

[This message has been edited by mikemunsil (edited April 08, 2005).]
 

Survivor, you are a really bizarre person... but that's ok, some of the greatest writers were clinically insane...
 

One last thought on the subject: Komodo dragons don't breath fire but they use bacteria as biological weapons. They eat putrid meat, pre-digested so to speak. So they keep a lot of really bad bacteria in their mouths. Their way of killing game is to bite it then let it crawl off into the jungle to die of wound sepsis. They will let it ripen a few days then eat it. Biologists who've had the misfortune of being bitten by a dragon have found that the wounds are incredibly hard to disinfect.
 

P.S. Okay, so I must have skipped like half the thread.

Maybe a dragon has to be old enough to eat things it doesn't like in order to make the flame. Like termite infested wood.

[This message has been edited by franc li (edited April 09, 2005).]
 

To generate a sense of dread. Just like any other force of nature.

That said, I prefer them intelligent as well, as long as they're benevolent, that is.

mikemunsil
 

http://www.uk.imdb.com/title/tt0083951/

The Flight of Dragons. In this film, the dragons ate limestone which they reacted with acid in their stomach to produce hydrogen; this was then stored in an internal organ, which somehow presumably compressed the hydrogen. They then used this organ somewhat like a fish's swimbladder to control their flight, and expelled the hydrogen across a bioelectric organ in the roof of their mouths to ignite it. Oh, and they had to be careful not to touch it with their tongues, otherwise they got a shock...

Out of interest, you said you didn't like the idea of igniting the gas with platinum... why not?
 

Actually, I thought that was supposed to be rhetorical... it seems more bizarre otherwise... but, ok.

That all depends on the level of "intelligence" in which you're referring… I personally don't care for the level of intelligence in a dragon where they're completely in everyway equal or greater than the intelligence of humans (at least not for this particular story), that works for stories such as "Dragon Heart", but not so much for mine... or quite a few other stories.
But then there are actually different levels of intelligence in animals where they actually can figure things out, even comprehend certain levels of speech (like dogs recognizing commands, an ape using sign-language, etc).

"What the heck is the point of doing a dragon that is too dumb to figure out how to breathe fire the way God intended?"

Basically, I took that question as not only completely rhetorical, but not even close to being serious because... um... it's just crazy. As if there's a fixed manner in which "God" intended for a mythical creature to conduct a mythical activity... not even to get religious about it, it's just silly. Does any creature just "figure out" how they do any defensive/offensive activity "the way God intended"? No… everything has a process... and the acknowledgement of that process is significant to my story for many reasons.
It'd be like Superman's heat-vision being explained as being "just magic"... but as any comic book geek can tell you, there's a scientific explanation to not only his heat-vision, but to every power and weakness he possesses (this is actually the case in pretty much all comic book characters).

[This message has been edited by RavenStarr (edited April 11, 2005).]
 

I'm going to ignore that for now. You didn't answer the question. You just explained why you didn't answer it before.

I was using "the way God intended" in it's colloquial sense to mean "the way we already know experimentally that such a thing can be accomplished". I'll admit that there are a couple of other colloquial meanings to the phrase that could be confusing, such as "the way that long standing tradition or aesthetic tells us the thing should be accomplished". Granted, I meant either of these, since I admitted to being okay with artifices both technological and magical for the breathing of fire. I was in no way aware that you were going to be fundamentally unfamiliar with such a common idiom in the English language. I apologize for not paying attention if you mentioned the fact that you aren't very familiar with the English language elsewhere, I know that people occasionally post that information, but I don't do a good job of keeping track of it.
 

I'd get into the explanation of how that works, but I fear that it would only reveal how much of a geek I truly am... but to sum it up, everything I write pretty much has an explanation of some sort, pretty much due to my comic-book/science-fiction influences... nothing is ever "just magic"...

"You didn't answer the question."

Actually, I did... a couple of times now... I'm ignoring your insults (even be they unintentional) towards my grasp of the English language from a misunderstanding of what you dub to be "common English idioms," but I'm being significantly forced to wonder about your own grasp as well...

"You just explained why you didn't answer it before."

I explained both... did you only read one sentence?

"I was using "the way God intended" in it's colloquial sense to mean "the way we already know experimentally that such a thing can be accomplished""

Yes, I was figuring (or more so, hoping) that "the way God intended" was not intended to be completely literal, hence why I basically gave my reasoning in a sense of it not being taken literal, but even in your present interpretation of what you say to have meant, my answer still stands… we're talking about a mythical creature accomplishing a mythical activity… the statement of "the way we already know experimentally that such a thing can be accomplished" can not even remotely apply beyond what I am already enforcing…

"Granted, I meant either of these, since I admitted to being okay with artifices both technological and magical for the breathing of fire."

I already said that my dragons don't have intellect equal or greater than that of humans... technological use would be more impossible than magic, especially in a setting such as my story, where only one native species has yet mastered metallurgy (and it’s not the dragons)…
 

I'm asking why your story demands stupid dragons. The closest you've come to an answer is saying "because I like my dragons stupid." Given the level of hostility you've shown towards the suggestion that they would be more interesting if they were smart, I believe you. But that doesn't answer the question I'm asking you.

Consider it as a multiple part question. Why do you want these things to be "fire-breathing dragons"? How does that serve your story? Also, how does it serve your story for them to be of sub-human intelligence?

Oh, and I don't quite know what you're claiming now about idiomatic usages. Are you saying that you understood the idiom but simply didn't want to answer the question and took the idiom literally as a way of avoiding the subject? Or are you saying that you didn't understand the idiom but you consider yourself sufficiently competent in English usage that any idiom you don't understand couldn't possibly be in regular usage?

But I don't expect that you have the answers to those questions anymore than I do. I'd rather hear why your story needs to have brutish, fire-breathing dragons.
 

Because they are nothing but "dumb" animals.

I know this isn't my topic, but I personally don't like so-called "smart" dragons in stories. I suppose it depends on how deep the fantasy is and whether there are other fantastical creatures involved, but if the story is set on Earth in the middle ages, then I think they should just be animals. Dinosaurs or other form of giant lizard left over from another time.

I especially think this would be the appropriate route if the story is rooted more in Sci-fi as opposed to Fantasy. As RavenStarr has said this is more Sci-fi based, I can see why the dragons should be treated more as animals than a race of beings.

But that's just one woman's opinion.
 

It doesn't really matter. The thing is that I don't think that advice is helpful without some understanding of the context and purpose of the thing to which the advice is being applied. I just think that it would be helpful to everyone if there were a clear understanding of the purpose of having unintelligent "dragons" which breath fire as part of this story.
 

quote:

---

Dragons are the fantasy world equivalent of faster-than-light travel. (Impossible at best. But we are willing to ignore that unless you try to explain it.)

---

Perhaps I should have said, 'impropable and laughable at best'. Still, firebreathing dragons THAT YOU TRY TO EXPLAIN are the sort of addition to a sci-fi, that turns it from 'hard' to 'soft' as fast as (insert appropriate 'hard to soft' analogy).

IMHO you can't have intelligent dragons because they will disbelieve themselves and vanish in a blinding flash of logic.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited April 12, 2005).]
 

[This message has been edited by Lanius (edited April 12, 2005).]
 

Really, I think that it is horses that tend to be the equivalent of FTL travel in fantasy. Or maybe it's the lusty tavernwenches. I don't know.

IMNSHO you can't have intelligent humans because I'll disbelieve in them and they'll disappear in a flash of logic.

Dragons are okay with me, as long as they serve some purpose in the story. OSC used the dragon in Middle Woman as a wish-granter who was cruel but not evil. A Djinn simply wouldn't have worked well in that story. The dragon Smaug in The Hobbit exists as an embodiment of senseless destruction and greed as well as being the main villian in a more conventional sense. The dragons in the Earthsea trilogy are avatars of magic, serving to show that magic is part of that world rather than an invention of men as well as being characters who move the story along.

The problem I see with dragons that are your typical dragons but aren't bright enough to be characters is that they have a hard time serving any function in the story important enough to justify having them in the story. Particularly if it's supposed to be an SF story.

Even if you make your dragons "varelse", I think that they can still serve your story if they are clearly intelligent (how intelligent? Probably smart enough to keep the details of their secret weapon a secret). But if they are dumb...well, what are they doing in your story? Dumb dragons usually only exist to give fantasy knights errant something to kill, and you claim you aren't writing a fantasy.