Subject:
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Re: Enter the Dragon... or a fun teaser part deux
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.castle
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Date:
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Sat, 14 Apr 2001 21:04:43 GMT
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Viewed:
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552 times
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In lugnet.castle, Anthony Sava writes:
> ...
> Ok, so the dragon is like a dionsaur. Well, we know that a 30 foot dinosaur,
> like the Allosaurus, would need about 200 lbs of meet a week to survive.
> Given that a lego man is roughly 5 studs high, we can get a rough guesstamet
> from that. Now the picture I took with my knight in the picture, my knight's
> character is a little less than six feet tall. With his helm, he is, and is
> also just about 5 studs tall (with a lego brick on end sitting next to him.
> So, knowing this, we can say that for ever 5 studs long, my dragon gains 6 >feet in length.
Uh oh... details time... [I love these, sorry to nitpick, but it just got me
thinking] :)
Just to be 'fairer' on length, avg. people are 5'6"
(men/women/ethnicity/etc). Now, a way back in Medieval times, people weren't
very healthy-- and consequently, they were actually shorter. I don't know
offhand how short. 'Course minifig scale if wierd anyway, even WITH a set of
'proper' measurements. You can say anything from something like 12mm (could
be just 10mm? I did a 'study' once) to 7mm = 1 minifig foot and still be
"right" depending on what measurement (height, width, depth) you're basing
on a minifig (I think that's roughly a max in each case-- the 12mm and 7mm).
& studs are 8mm wide-- bricks 9.6mm high...
> So, my dragon is 154 studs long. Apply basic algebra and you come up with my
> dragon being 184.8 feet long.
Actually, that's a *little* much-- I get a max of 176, and more
realistically, say 154 feet (makes people 5'3", which is a little short, as
'medieval man' "should be"). Probably somewhere inbetween...
> 185 feet for the sake of argument, even thought that is counting the spikes on
> the end of its tail, I'll STILL give that to you.
Well, since I think the measurement for Allosaurus includes the tail, we'll
have to use that full measurement for the dragon too... :)
> OK, so the dragon is 185 feet long. Since it is like a dinosaur, we can then
> expand the 30 foot carnisaur to the 185 feet length. Porpotionally, the
> carnisaur at 185 feet would need rougly 1234 lbs of meat a week to survive.
Hmm... I think this was just a mistake-- since we're going by overall size,
not just by length, by the 185 feet logic it'd be about 46,900 lbs per
week... think about when a cube gets bigger by 1 foot-- it gets wider and
taller too. And when talking proportions, it'll be the same proportion wider
and taller...
Using the 154 feet guess, that tones it down to about 27,054 lbs per week...
> Unfortunately, we cannot use that number, because we cannot use porportions
> like that, the dragon gains different metabolic needs as it gets bigger.
Hmm... I dunno-- I might actually argue the opposite since gliding arguably
takes less effort than walking... although going by the average kill size,
since the dragon has to eat WAY more bison than an allosaurus would, it DOES
have to expend more energy catching them, unless it can, say, burn up the
equivalent amount in one blow, so to speak :) Anyway, that's your call...
But almost 1,406,800 lbs of meat per year. That is most certainly a lot of meat.
> However, the average cow in the US weighs 900 lbs.
That's a lot of cows. (1563 per year-- so, a little more than 4 cows per day?)
> In Amercia, the american bison roamed in great heards of over 2 million heads.
> Let us say, again for the sake of arguement, that only one sixth of the
> population was of breading age, and only produced one calf every year.
> ...
> So thats a net population growth of
> 75,000 head a year.
Hmm... I dunno much about how realistic any of the population guesses were,
but my best guess would be that a herd of 2 million would stay roughly that
size, implying that the population was pretty much constant with all the
factors already calculated (food source, disease, predators, birth defects,
old-age & accidental death, fluctuating birth rates, etc). So unless the
dragon impacts that 2 million by say, oh, more than a couple percent,
there's not much chance the food source will die out...
> The american bison is larger than the average cow, and thus could reach >weights of up to 1200 lbs.
Assuming that's an average weight, that's about 1172 bison each year...
Closer to 3 per day. About a 20th of a percent of the herd per year.
Shouldn't be much of a problem. At least not until 20 or more dragons start
sharing the food supply. (so no BIG parties! Besides, where you find the
necessary booze? :)
> So there you go, not only is it possible for my dragon to surive, but it could
> thrive, and have parties and invite friends over.
Yeah, it could do it... Although chasing down 22 bison a week (especially
when the herd was migrating around to different savannahs), it would most
likely cut a good chunk of time out of guarding its hoard... not that it
couldn't only do it once a week or so... But it's just so much more fun when
it's just big and cool and runs on magic instead of meat :)
DaveE
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Enter the Dragon... or a fun teaser part deux
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| (...) HAH! You think you can stump me on this one, well let's just see who's stumped. TO answer your question, we must first look at the biological requirements of the dragon. Now, most people see dragons lying on their horde of gold, guarding it. (...) (24 years ago, 14-Apr-01, to lugnet.castle)
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