If dragons were real, how would medieval military technology adapt to face them?
>>16797438How big are they? Can they breathe fire?Smaug is managable for a large force but Anacalagon would enact Total Human Death.
>>16797490I could see either playing out like Skyrim with dragon cults.
>>16797438Lots and lots of siege weapons.
>>16797490They can fly and breath fire. Let's say they are as big as an elephant or a dinosaur.We could elaborate scenarios were they are simple animals vs them having human level intelligence
>>16797438Humans would pay off dragons to ravage enemy kingdoms and make it their problem.
How would history change if there was a giant disembodied hand that zooms around the planet and crushes one random person with its index finger every day. It's called the Hand and it's always slightly faster than you.
>>16797438It would be worth it to produce massive cannons even if their size made them break after a couple of shots.>>16797490Ancalagon = big is a meme that was spread by people who misunderstood the text.
>>16797543>>16797506are cannons or siege weapons accurate enough to hit flying targets?
>>16797549Historical ones? No. >If dragons were real, how would medieval military technology adapt to face them?People will have LOTS of practice in getting getting accurate, and also makes it easy to reload.
>>16797532That's supposed to be a seperate thread, anon. Come to think of it, it's been a while since we've had a hand thread. Someone want to start one?
>>16797508>Let's say they are as big as an elephant or a dinosaur.Depending on how common and agreeable to domestication they are, they would either had been used for war and be extinct by now or an endangered species relegated to isolated middle of nowhere unga bunga places.
>>16797584How would human societies cope with the mobility and damage provided by flight and fire breath?
>>16797438How intelligent are they? Can you make deals with them? Do they have separate societies from our own with their own personal conflicts and how do they intersect with our own?
>>16797438A single dragon that breathes fire could easily wipe out all of humanity if it wanted to. Humanity would probably resemble a mongol-horde on a civilisational level. Not that different from other prey animals. Having cities that are known locations for the dragons would become unfeasible.
>>16797438fight fire with fire
>>16797624Why would a dragon attack a well organized relatively skinny social animal that could actually organize to hurt him back instead of juicy fat herbivores?
>if dragons were real>if>wereDon't tell me you don't know...Livy: >Regulus, chosen by lot for the Carthaginian War, marched with his army to a point not far from the Bagrada River and there pitched his camp. In that place a reptile of astonishing size devoured many of the soldiers as they went down to the river to get water. >Regulus set out with his army to attack the reptile. Neither the javelins they hurled nor the darts they rained upon its back had any effect. These glided off its horrible scaly fins as if from a slanting testudo of shields and were in some miraculous fashion turned away from its body so that the creature suffered no injury.>Finally, when Regulus saw that it was killing a great number of his soldiers with its bites, was trampling them down by its charge, and driving them mad by its poisonous breath, he ordered ballistae brought up. A stone taken from a wall was hurled by a ballista; this struck the spine of the serpent and caused its entire body to become numb. >Tubero in his Histories has recorded that in the first Punic war the consul Atilius Regulus, when encamped at the Bagradas river in Africa, fought a stubborn and fierce battle with a single serpent of extraordinary size, which had its lair in that region; that in a mighty struggle with the entire army the reptile was attacked for a long time with hurling engines and catapults; and that when it was finally killed, its skin, a hundred and twenty feet long, was sent to Rome.
>>16797508If they are simple animals with elephant sized bodies then i hope their scales are thicker then 80cm of granite. As soon as these drakes land and go in their nest a couple of sabot guns and grape shots will absolutely pulverish it. I guess if they dwell in caves you could also collapse the entrance with timed charges
>>16797633>In 330BC, Alexander the Great reportedly saw a dragon while invading India. It was described as a hissing creature living in a cave, which the local people worshipped as a god. As his army passed by the cavern, the dragon hissed and snorted furiously, terrifying them all. Although they could not see the rest of the body for only the head was visible outside the cave, the dragon reportedly measured 70 cubits long, which is about 100 feet. Its eyes were large, about the size of a round Macedonian shield.
>>16797587Seeing as it is a big ass carnivorous reptile, the logistics of using them in long campaigns or in big numbers would be fucked up. I can see warfare (both defensive and offensive) developing more around missile weaponry (and/or about getting your own dragons- not ot actually use them most of the time, but to scare the enemy into not risking theirs; just like an even more retarded version of the ancient chariot or the early-modern dreadnought races)
>>16797632Maybe humans just taste better.On a serious note I think the idea of a dragon is the same as many modern horror-movies/books; to imagine what it would be like if we were not the apex predator. I think that's more interesting than humans still being on top and domesticating the dragon for our own uses.
>>16797543>Ancalagon = big is a meme that was spread by people who misunderstood theI dunno man, not a lot of room to misinterpret a dragon being so big he was "as tall as a mountain" ("tall" here probably meaning head-to-tail length), and that he levelled the three peaks of the Thangorodrim, the three tallest peaks in the setting (and the tallest on Middle-Earth) behind Manwë's Taniquetil, just by crashing into them
>>16797508>They can fly and breath fireIndustrialization never happens because farms and ranches are continuously burnt to the ground.It might be difficult to get TO the bronze age, past it might not happen.
>>16797664Nothing short of an even more adaptable intelligent species, a fulminating plague or a xenomorph/thing tier pseud-parasite would have stopped us from becoming the dominant species on the planet. Breathing fire and flying seems impressive but such an apex predator would need enormous territory ranges (making them relatively rare) and prefer to go for prey that can't attack it back; and after humanity starts appropiating land and multiplying like rabbits -such a species would gradually start to get shadow realmed (due to a mix of starvation and hunting; even big scary animals need to rest and are vulnerable as infants/eggs); see how the ranges of bears, lions and tigers changed throughout the years for real life examples.
>>16797532God bless Peter Molyneux
>>16797438My dick.
>>16797438The answers you’ll get to that depend on so much grainular detail and mix & match dragonology details so as to be a completely hopeless for coming to anything approaching a serious answer. >>16797700Living for thousands of years isolated from inter human competition, the Tasmanians become more primitive over time. They *lost* the knowledge/will to fish, to make fire, had no clothes, and never got around to making boats all because….well we’re not sure but the thrust I’m getting at is that y ou mistake how things turned out for an inevitability when even comparatively small changes in environment totally change the rules of the game for primitive existence.https://x.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1802650863502303631There’s not a chance in frozen hell humans of prehistory could exist as more that wandering bands in any context where dragons would be overhead.Your examples of bears and tigers or just all the megafauna that got hunted are not analogous. I don’t know what you think as the baseline for what a dragon in fiction amounts to, maybe a flying crocodile/venomous snake mix with an aerosol flame breath & cat-like senses/agility/claws to match the whole ‘dragons as a combination of all the animals/things primeval man feared most’ sentiment but that alone would be utterly worldbendingly oppressive as a creature. Any kind of dragon that can talk is just flat out out going to adapt humans into being a species of servile groveling minion-creatures
>>16797438Realistically they would probably poison them. Farmers do it to eagles and other large predators irl.
>if/his/ isn't ready for the dracoid pill
>>16797700>prefer to go for prey that can't attack it backLike livestock.
>>16797496If they existed since or before humans then it's inevitable they'd be considered Gods to some extent.
>>16797438We don't have any evidence that dragons didn't exist at one point. We have evidence that saint George, Sigurd, Beowulf, Ragnar, etc existed. Do the math.
>>16798163>burns the poisoned foodWhat now?
>>16799719“Dinosaur” bones are very obviously dragon bones in reality. The question is why big science insists on mislabeling them and hiding the truth behind them.
>>16797438Face them?
>>16797532Is Jojo ancestral memory?
>>16797607A dragon society does not function. They do not create great artwork, they do not build empires or monuments, they don't cultivate culture or enrich the masses, a dragon is all the sins laid bare in their most indulgent forms. Dragons are all 7 deadly sins:>PrideObviously They love touting themselves as the pinnacle. All received gifts are categorized as tribute and they’ll start a fight over any slight.>GreedThey love to hoard gold(wealth), even though they don't even do anything with it. Any justification later authors give for why are revisionist. Dragons are cartoon villains when it comes to wealth. They do it to have it and to actively take it away from others.>EnvyIf you have something that a dragon wants they’ll hate you for having it.>LustLike with treasure hoarding, all later explanations are revisionist. The plain answer to dragons & princesses is the most basic. They steal maidens to indulge their lusts.>WrathNo comment. >SlothThey literally spend over 90% of their time doing absolutely nothing. Again, it’s revisionism to handwave it off as some kind of hibernation. They’re lounging around because they are layabouts. A dragon wouldn’t want to take on the work of managing a state.>CowardiceIt’s not a 7 sins but yeah, dragons are cowards as well. Don’t expect your dragon lord to show up for a serious battle where he knows he’ll be in real danger. An 'inteligent' dragon is not a long-term wisened custodian of power, they’re a broiling cocktail of all the worst traits of a person imaginable and their forming a petty little kingdom for themselves would see their realm dead on arrival, only being held together by the capacity of the dragon to force everyone around it to play pretend. Their performance as stateslizards would be them grasping failures from the jaws of success at every turn. All successions would be warring siblings & regicides by impatient dragon sons. It’d be an impossibility.
>>16797549>>16797560This, cannons got accurate FAST when it became financially viable to bring them onto the battlefield. I'd expect the same for Ballistas, which would become smaller and cart driven to counter dragons in infested areas.
>>16803156Where do you base your dragon lore on?
>>16797438Sigurthr from the heroci lays in the poetic edda had a pretty neat and realistic idea.He dug a foxhole in an area where Fafnir lurked. He waited for Fafnir to slither over the hole, then he shanked him in the guts, rinse and repeat until Fafnir bled to death.Of course, that's assuming that we're dealing with mythological (flightless) dragons, not gay fantasy dinosaurs with bat wings.
