PDA

View Full Version : Modern Day: A Dragon Scours the Land



Mr. Mask
2015-06-24, 04:51 PM
Inspired by the the few threads about modern day military monsters, I want to discuss in some detail the idea of the classic of a dragon terrorizing the land, but in modern day.


Premise:

A group stumbles upon the long forgotten horde of a great dragon (archaeologists? Militia? Corporations? Oil drillers?). Taking care of a dragon didn't seem too hard. Get a few missiles, some artillery, maybe a helicopter, and it should die. It really, really should have...

After having its horde thieved, and its long slumber ended, the dragon goes berserk, turning the surrounding area into a literal firestorm. A large military force is assembled to combat the dragon, and it's figured it should be easy this time, other than the issues of the firestorm. It did not work out as planned. Being magical in nature, modern equipment fails to kill the dragon, and it scatters the army which assembled to fight it. Its wrath kindled more than ever, the dragon attacks several cities, putting the event among some of the greatest massacres in history.

Once the dragon's wrath has cooled somewhat, chooses a place to return to its rest--a nuclear weapons facility. Dumbfounded as to why the dragon would choose such a place to rest, and that it knew of the place's existence, the nations of the world felt paralysed to act. With its strange powers, could the dragon launch a nuke? And is that why it took the facilities?

With the existence of the dragon, and the Armageddon it unleashed, the whole nation and in particular the surrounding area was left in a vacuum of chaos. Deserting soldiers, people turned bandit, monsters(?), desperate survivors, and looters, mercenaries, and corporations flooding in to profit. An adventurer's haven.


Questions

Several questions arise from this premise, both for how to improve it, and for details as to how this could or would work.

High Fantasy?: Would the setting work better as high fantasy with monsters, or as a mostly real world with the exception of a dragon?

Dragon Capabilities: Seemingly the dragon would have to be highly magical to pull this off. They can start a pretty good firestorm before others can reaction, I'd figure, which would complicate things. But to prevent being targeted by satellites and long range missiles, or even an ICBM if it really became a threat, it would need something like the ability to disguise its presence, perhaps by summoning a hurricane. There's the question of its personal combat abilities. Is it armoured like a battleship, with flight rivalling modern bombers, with a small volcano-like flamethrower (like, when it breathes fire, there is a shockwave that'll deathen those close by)?

Nuclear: The dragon could instead take refuge in a natural or designed nuclear bunker, without the nuclear weapons, and then the nations of the world may not wish to blast it for fear of inspiring another attack while suffering from fallout. The idea of taking a place with nuclear weapons just to confuse governments is interesting, but it may result in them having an itchy trigger finger instead.

Chaos: Would the adventurer friendly scenario likely arise from the chaos? It's true that the collapsing of great powers has lead to large amounts of banditry and mercenary work, but the dragon's actions may be more akin to a very terrible natural disaster. If other elements cause the local government to lose control of the region, it ought to still have the effect.


What are your thoughts on a campaign/setting like this? Anything you would add, or discuss what has been presented.

noob
2015-06-24, 05:10 PM
First question why would the dragons have dissipated if human weaponry who is better now than in the past can not do anything against him?
Do you have consciousness a small missile is already devastating and that some huge missile can basically entirely destroy anything less than 44 tons no matter of what it is made?
Also an hurricane does not deflects that easily missiles and that a missile who blast everything in a 1000 feets radius(not even a nuclear weapon) does not care about hurricanes when you want to blast things.
I seriously thinks that nothing short of a force wall or a prismatic wall or a more than 3000 feet radius super intense huricane who is so intense it digs deep in the earth or other ridiculously epic magic can protect this dragon.
But if he have a so big hurricane all his other fighting abilities are negligible compared to moving the fastest possible for destroying any built thing in ridiculous areas.
I do not think he should use tornadoes.
If he have powerful defenses like the ones I referenced and that explosives does not works only magic can since I do not know better weapons than nuclear explosives.
Then there is the question: how fast is it destroying things if it only kills one person per second it is manageable by the humanity but if it kills 1000 persons per second it is not manageable and nuclear weapons will be used the fastest possible even if there is citizens nearby.
And also things just destroying for destroying are really weird.

Mr. Mask
2015-06-24, 06:16 PM
First question why would the dragons have dissipated if human weaponry who is better now than in the past can not do anything against him? A god-like figure among its kind, I figure. Possibly kept in line by deities and magic, or its just been getting stronger as it slept or such.


Do you have consciousness a small missile is already devastating and that some huge missile can basically entirely destroy anything less than 44 tons no matter of what it is made? "Do you have any consciousness of X" sounds pretty rude, but I figure you didn't intend it.

The no matter what the target is made of part sounds interesting. Have they done experiments to this effect? I always wondered what'd happen if you could hit a blackhole or the core or a star with explosive force.


Also an hurricane does not deflects that easily missiles and that a missile who blast everything in a 1000 feets radius(not even a nuclear weapon) does not care about hurricanes when you want to blast things. I'm not sure about this. Storms and clouds still cause trouble for satellites and other forms of detection as far as I'm aware. If missiles are no longer effects by interference from storms and high winds, that's pretty impressive. I'm not familiar with cases of trying to hit military targets inside hurricanes, so I can only guess as to this.


I seriously thinks that nothing short of a force wall or a prismatic wall or a more than 3000 feet radius super intense huricane who is so intense it digs deep in the earth or other ridiculously epic magic can protect this dragon. Well, you don't need to tank everything like DnD. If the dragon is concealed, if they have any magical anti-missile capabilities, or if they simply go to populated areas where the military is unwilling to fire, they can negate the effectiveness of long range missiles much the way modern militaries do.


But if he have a so big hurricane all his other fighting abilities are negligible compared to moving the fastest possible for destroying any built thing in ridiculous areas. Well, many hurricanes are survivable, even though they wreak terrible havoc. A hurricane followed by a city-consuming firestorm would be that much worse. but really, it depends on the hurricane powers of the dragon.


I do not think he should use tornadoes. Dragons have been associated with storms in various mythology, so it would be fitting for the dragon to have storm powers.


If he have powerful defenses like the ones I referenced and that explosives does not works only magic can since I do not know better weapons than nuclear explosives. Well, nuking your own countryside would be an extreme action, so it may not be a matter of a nuke not being enough as the dragon successfully denying an opportunity to use one.


Then there is the question: how fast is it destroying things if it only kills one person per second it is manageable by the humanity but if it kills 1000 persons per second it is not manageable and nuclear weapons will be used the fastest possible even if there is citizens nearby. That's not really an answerable question. If the dragon gets into a city and starts a firestorm, it could be killing several million people over the course of a few days. If it's out in the country, it won't be killing so many people.


And also things just destroying for destroying are really weird. Common to monkeys, humans, cats, foxes, and water moccasins. It is pretty weird.

noob
2015-06-24, 06:18 PM
"The no matter what the target is made of part sounds interesting. Have they done experiments to this effect? I always wondered what'd happen if you could hit a blackhole or the core or a star with explosive force."
It weights way more than 44 tons.
I said that thing about things weighting 44 tons I did not spoke of volume.
Black holes are not made of something particular it is just that they are incredibly heavy so much that things can not get at the middle of a black hole because time freeze before.
Stars are also super heavy and the missile will never go to the core of the star it will explode long before reaching it because of the heat the sun is radiating.

Mr. Mask
2015-06-24, 06:21 PM
Yes, but I'm curious about what happens to the section of the core's mass affected by the explosion. How resistant super dense material is to explosive force.

Aliquid
2015-06-24, 06:36 PM
I think mostly real world would work better for the sake of the story.

You could have the dragon be magical, and immune to all non-magical damage. That's why nothing that the military sends out can hurt it. So really, it doesn’t have to be super powerful in the damage it does… it is just impossible to stop.

Magic can be something that existed historically (way back in the days of yore), but modern man has completely forgotten about it, and considers it to be nothing but fairy tales and folk-lore.

One of the first quests for the players is to re-discover the old magic. Maybe a highly intelligent PC can decipher ancient texts about spell casting… and actually get it. Maybe they PCs can discover that some ancient weapons and armor are actually magical in nature (getting possession of these items might be a chore). Maybe the PCs somehow get their hands on part of the Dragon’s original hoard, and they are the only ones that clue in to its magical nature (rather than just the cash value).

Then the PCs will be able to use these new found magical abilities to face the Dragon in face-to-face combat. Although there needs to be lots of stories and quests to deal with before reaching that battle.

Maybe the PCs are dealing with a different issue when they discover magic. Maybe they are dealing with revenge associated with the chaos (their community was destroyed by bandits and they want to get the bandit leader). Maybe they are trying to restore order. Maybe they are profiteering on the chaos. Maybe they work for the military and simply have to follow orders (but keep their magical knowledge secret).

noob
2015-06-24, 06:43 PM
If pc can rediscover magic just by finding some books and that it works why do the scientists did not discovered it?
And why is the government not knowing it if there is still books about it?
And if it can not be found by any scientist research how was it found at the beginning?
Magical entities teaching magic to humans?

Mr. Mask
2015-06-24, 06:49 PM
Real world settings with alternate histories where magic existed are challenging for those sorts of reasons. You can come up with some rather creative answers, from aliens to other dimensional superbeings to time travel, but generally the easiest solution is to hint at the answer and not explain it explicitly, as the players have no reason to know the answers.

You could have it that the dragon's hoard has some of the only surviving magic, or even have it that dragons generate magic and it disappears without them, and so the last dragon is extra powerful as it has all the magic to itself. Or something else which can range from silly to cool.

goto124
2015-06-24, 08:55 PM
I figured that Dragons don't need gold, they just love it a lot, like how some humans can get really greedy...

Erth16
2015-06-24, 10:58 PM
If pc can rediscover magic just by finding some books and that it works why do the scientists did not discovered it?
And why is the government not knowing it if there is still books about it?
And if it can not be found by any scientist research how was it found at the beginning?
Magical entities teaching magic to humans?

They could somehow translate the Voynich Manuscript and have it teach magic to those who can decipher it in the setting. Of course the answer to how the pc's do it when no one else can is simple,it's a story and they are the main characters. Maybe they have special eyes, or one could only speak in tongues for a few years.

NRSASD
2015-06-25, 03:49 AM
I'm not sure that the nation where the dragon is uncovered would still be around, or even inhabited. Something like that would provoke a Chernobyl-style reaction, where everyone and their goat got the heck out of dodge initially, and then only the crazy or desperate returned to settle it. There would definitely be refugee-associated problems in the surrounding regions though, which could see the rise of far-right political parties, economic troubles, general racism, and social unrest. Just take a look at the chaos that's been caused by all the fighting in the Levant and Iraq recently.

As far as the dragon goes, having it settle in a nuclear facility would make the rest of the globe very nervous, but unlikely to act. They could most assuredly hit the facility if they wanted to, but I think they'd be more worried about the ensuing nuclear fallout or provoking the apparently peaceful dragon into conflict again. I'd imagine that there would be a military cordon surrounding the facility about ten miles out, not to mention every anti-air and anti-missile system they could get their hands on laying in wait.

Why the global military could hit the facility pretty much without fail is that unless the "hurricane" disarms incoming explosives, no amount of interference could prevent the missile from hitting its mark. The facility's location is already known, so all one would have to do is punch in its coordinates and let the missile do the rest. A hurricane can and does cause serious interference with aircraft, but missiles are orders of magnitude faster than even the strongest storms.

As far as ancient magic goes..... yeah, it's hard to explain why it was abandoned. One reason that just came to me is that the dragon was "sealing" the magic in, like the explanation for magic in Shadowrun. It had left the world, and now it's back. Short of that, practically any other explanation for magic necessitates the invention of secret societies who have suppressed public knowledge of magic for millennia, and even still there are almost certainly government projects studying magic somewhere. From the 1930's to the 60's the US did all sorts of crazy experiments trying to determine if magic was real, and if the setting is modern day I don't see how it would be different.

Hope this helps!

GloatingSwine
2015-06-25, 04:33 AM
The problem is that the dragon has to be arbitrarily invincible, vulnerable to only things which don't exist, to be able to slightly survive.

If the dragon isn't arbitrarily immune to anything not "magical" then it gets its wings shredded by the first stinger missile fired at it, and probably dies of the shrapnel wounds anyway, but even if it doesn't then it can't fly any more and gets killed by antimateriel rifles.


Even if the dragon is arbitrarily invincible to nonmagical weapons this only lasts until someone manages to make a +1 stinger missile.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-06-25, 04:54 AM
The problem is that the dragon has to be arbitrarily invincible, vulnerable to only things which don't exist, to be able to slightly survive.

If the dragon isn't arbitrarily immune to anything not "magical" then it gets its wings shredded by the first stinger missile fired at it, and probably dies of the shrapnel wounds anyway, but even if it doesn't then it can't fly any more and gets killed by antimateriel rifles.


Even if the dragon is arbitrarily invincible to nonmagical weapons this only lasts until someone manages to make a +1 stinger missile.

Maybe just remotely detonating the nukes in that facility is enough to overcome its damage resistance?

I think the story could be pretty cool if not taken too seriously, but it really needs some cool way to work the heroes in. If they are the only ones that can hurt the dragon, where did they get that power? Is the military trying to take the magic away from them to study it and make the aforementioned +1 stinger missile? Or is the government actively trying to support the heroes with helicopter rides, demolition jobs and covering fire? Maybe their powers even come from the government, a bunch of top military, law enforcement and espionage agents were dipped in a magical fluid found in the lair of the dragon and gained powers weirdly fitting their personalities.

As an alternative, you might be able to solve the "the military can't hurt it" problem in another way. The dragon was found in a small country ruled by a dictator nobody likes or something. Look at the military numbers for Luxembourg or Iceland, than imagine a fictional country 10 times poorer and 20 times crazier. The local military may have some land cruiser mounted .50's, a respectable amount of cheap handheld anti-tank weapons and a bunch of old Russian flak cannons plus one museum piece of a tank which is the pride of their army, but nothing more than that. I'm not sure if that would work together with the nuclear angle, but at least there'd be some excuse for the military not beating it other than being just completely immune to nonmagical damage. The heroes in this version don't even need magic, they could just be better armed than the local military. They're probably mercenaries hired by the dictator or a special ops team from a larger nearby country that doesn't want to talk to this dictator but also doesn't want to be next.

LokiRagnarok
2015-06-25, 05:20 AM
If you have the patience, you may want to get your hands on the manga "Gate - Thus the JSDF Fought There!". It is about a gate to a high fantasy world appearing in midst of modern-day Tokyo (because everything always happens in Tokyo) and contains, among other things, one or two fights of modern military corps against dragons.

GloatingSwine
2015-06-25, 05:23 AM
As an alternative, you might be able to solve the "the military can't hurt it" problem in another way. The dragon was found in a small country ruled by a dictator nobody likes or something. Look at the military numbers for Luxembourg or Iceland, than imagine a fictional country 10 times poorer and 20 times crazier. The local military may have some land cruiser mounted .50's, a respectable amount of cheap handheld anti-tank weapons and a bunch of old Russian flak cannons plus one museum piece of a tank which is the pride of their army, but nothing more than that.

On the other hand, they've also probably got a hell of a lot of surplus RPG-7s.

Which have the slight disadvantage of being unguided and relatively short range, but dragon's gotta sleep sometime, and it won't be any happier about a HEAT warhead than it would about a magic sword or noble knight's lance. (Considerably less happy, probably, considering the massive subsidiary tissue damage that such a high pressure copper jet will inflict).

Again, the dragon still needs to be arbitrarily invincible to not be extinct pretty damn quick.

noob
2015-06-25, 05:34 AM
I think that maybe the error is to choose to have a dragon there is other interesting stuff like for example you could put instead a ghostly necromancer who is able to regenerate other-were each time he is killed and flying underground and erupting inside of random cities and creating a wave of undead from the cemetery(or a giant undead made from thousand of bones and souls) then getting back into the underground.
He would not need to be invulnerable since he can get underground very easily and have 300 meters of earth above him in some seconds.
The resurrection is optional if he is enough good at surprise attacks and stay underground when creating undead.
He could even manage to make people not know he exists if nobody sees him.
He could create all kind of interesting undead who might get blasted fast but who will have made thousand of dead in few time with necrotic novas and other stuff of this kind.
And it would be barely different at all from a dragon.

Khedrac
2015-06-25, 06:50 AM
The easiest way to make the dragon very difficult to kill is to give it some form of contingent insubstantiability - i.e. it is only there when it is hitting you - when you hit it it's not actually there so your attacks pass through harmlessly.

A variant on this (which ties in with some East Asian mythological dragons I think) is that it lives in the earth. It doesn't burrow, it "swims" through the earth. Yes it may be fairly vulnerable to modern weapons when out of the ground, but it could quickly learn from a few panicked near misses when it first wakes not to let itself be caught.
This is also the same sort of dragon that supposedly controls earthquakes...

5ColouredWalker
2015-06-25, 07:03 AM
Biggest thing. Even assuming the Dragon somehow suddenly gained all the knowledge and ability to fire the nukes, nukes are designed not to go off so strenuously that blowing them up with other explosive weapons is a standard way to disable them. You could nuke the nuclear silo it was sitting on, and only the nuke you launched would detonate.

Assuming the Dragon survived the nuke we dropped on him [If we decided to], it's just survived the biggest force we can bring to bear on it [Drop a bigger nuke? What for, it'll do nothing but make a slightly larger and prettier explosion.], at this point we just compare how many casaulties it causes to how many people die due to [chosen common cause of death] yearly and go 'You know what, it's not really a problem. If we need we can send some bulls in it's direction to keep it fed.'.

Incanur
2015-06-25, 07:15 AM
As mentioned in the other thread, I'm fond of a storm dragon with lightning that functions as point defense against missiles. Such a dragon would not need to be overwhelming physically durable to be immune to even nuclear attack because of the lightning point defense. Thus the heroes might be able to slay the dragon if they could figure out a way approach it without getting fried.

GloatingSwine
2015-06-25, 09:45 AM
As mentioned in the other thread, I'm fond of a storm dragon with lightning that functions as point defense against missiles.

Bear in mind that a modern anti air missile has a kill radius of about 10m. They don't actually need to connect with a target, just get close enough and explode where the shrapnel produced by the warhead and casing shreds the target.

(Also, not effective vs. antiaircraft cannon fire or other large bore weapons, armour piercing rounds not particularly affected by lightning)

Incanur
2015-06-25, 10:01 AM
Bear in mind that a modern anti air missile has a kill radius of about 10m. They don't actually need to connect with a target, just get close enough and explode where the shrapnel produced by the warhead and casing shreds the target.

(Also, not effective vs. antiaircraft cannon fire or other large bore weapons, armour piercing rounds not particularly affected by lightning)

Magical lightning (or perhaps high-tech particle beams that mimic lightning) doesn't necessarily care about such issues. Dump enough energy into any projectile and it'll be knocked off course or vaporized. Particle beams travel at nearly the speed of light, so it's theoretically viable in that sense. It would require impressive reflexes for the dragon, however, unless it just generates some sort of electrical field that fries everything in a certain area.

Segev
2015-06-25, 10:12 AM
The issue I have with this as presented (that is, as a forum topic of discussion) is that it establishes early on that we don't know why the dragon is as tough and unbeatable as it is. "It's magic" is not sufficient to build a discussion around.

The centaurs in modern day discussions rely on only a little bit of potential magic to accept that they do, indeed, survive in the real world.

This hypothetical dragon needs rules, whether codified in game mechanics, based on game mechanics, or simply clearly laid out narratively (see Brandon Sanderson's works for good examples of how to do this).


Now, one way we could approach this as presented is as a hypothesizing contest: develop a set of rules that hypothetically govern this dragon and his abilities, given what we've seen. The more nuanced and interesting, the better. The more broad-brush ("he's a god and just wins") or the more convoluted (e.g. random additions of powers and weaknesses with little connection to root biological or rules-of-magic causes), the worse.

noob
2015-06-25, 10:19 AM
if you have a field of lightning enough strong for vaporizing the missile you are going to have problems if someone sends 1000 tons of metal since if you vaporize 1000 tons of metal the gas from metal will probably kill you(and the energy used for vaporizing such a thing risk to create an really huge explosion and potentially be more destructive than the explosion of the same amount of explosive I do not know but the amount of lightning involved could create nuclear reactions) if you are made of organic stuff but if you have a dragon without organism working only with magic it might survive it it have a melting point higher than titanium.
But then the metal risk to cover it entirely and to entomb it and then it will solidify blocking it.
If he have a huge field of lightning he might melt the projectile far enough but then it would mean that he have a so much huge radius of devastation that using a nuclear weapon is surely a good idea since everything is already condemned in a range of some kilometers around him.
The nuclear bomb can be detonated at pretty high range and still obliterate him.
The fireball radius of the current power-fullest nuclear weapon is 3.5 kilometers and the destruction radius is of 35 kilometers so basically it is possible to detonate a nuclear weapon at a good range from the dragon and to obliterate him.

Maglubiyet
2015-06-25, 10:50 AM
What if there's no magic and this "dragon" is really an ultra-powerful alien being composed of exotic particles and Dark Matter. Its physical body and senses extend into hyper-dimensional space, giving it god-like awareness.

Its senses along with its profound understanding and control of physical laws give it what appears to be supernatural abilities. "Force field" generation, weather control, etc.

Of course it looks like what we call a dragon. It's here because it mistook some research in elementary particle physics to be a signal from its long lost masters. Now it's pissed because it can't find them and there's all these lesser beings around gumming up the electromagnetic spectrum with useless signals.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-06-25, 11:33 AM
On the other hand, they've also probably got a hell of a lot of surplus RPG-7s.

Which have the slight disadvantage of being unguided and relatively short range, but dragon's gotta sleep sometime, and it won't be any happier about a HEAT warhead than it would about a magic sword or noble knight's lance. (Considerably less happy, probably, considering the massive subsidiary tissue damage that such a high pressure copper jet will inflict).

Again, the dragon still needs to be arbitrarily invincible to not be extinct pretty damn quick.

Maybe molten metal counts as fire damage and this type of dragon has an extreme resistance to that being a fire breathing creature and all? If it makes it more believable, let the bugger be awakened when the dormant volcano it had been holed up inside becomes active again.

Or maybe the dragon has little helper creatures (think flying JP-raptors or something), or can dominate animals or people and let them keep watch? Or it sleeps really light? Or it attacked the countries main military base first and ate their weapon storage? Or maybe there are D&D-style heroes in this world, more than exceptional human beings who are just so much better at dealing with invincible dragons that yes their punches hurt it more than a bunker buster would. It's silly, but that would just mean it becomes a silly story.

I'm fine with just declaring "no, you can't hurt it with non-magical weapons", but it's a fantasy story either way, and it's not going to end up as one you can take very seriously. As long as it stays more believable than the movie Reign of Fire (Dragon singlehandedly throws humanity back into the stone ages, repopulates its race, is taken out by normal non-magical non-superpowered people on foot using exploding arrows) that's a win as far as I'm concerned.

Or, to put it differently: I think your objections are valid and good points to consider, I also think that handwaving them a little (or a lot, or more than that) should be considered.

(Or at least, that's how I read the opening post, as less "could this really happen?" and more "could this be a cool story/campaign?")

noob
2015-06-25, 11:37 AM
if this is an alien stuff made of high technology
1:There is absolutely no reason for it to look vaguely like a dragon as it is a completely under optimal form who have no use.
2: "Its senses along with its profound understanding and control of physical laws give it what appears to be supernatural abilities. "Force field" generation, weather control, etc."
is just an stupid idea there is no reason it would do those things it would rather just create an antimatter explosion for destroying the entire earth and other kind of simple and efficient use of technology since generally with superior technology you have superior firepower and that doing weather control is not something you put on standard issue machines.
3:Dark matter is just a theory for explaining a phenomenon with gravitic influence and there is alternative theories working without dark matter like many alternate gravitation theories
4:Dark matter is not necessarily more resistant than other matters and anyway the problem is that our explosives are so strong that it would need to be super ultra dense and heavy for resisting and your dragon would end up being crazily heavy if it can face-tank a nuclear bomb so much that in fact its gravitic influence might be felt when you are at some meters and that it would end up collecting dust and dirt and rock around it.

Incanur
2015-06-25, 11:50 AM
if you have a field of lightning enough strong for vaporizing the missile you are going to have problems if someone sends 1000 tons of metal since if you vaporize 1000 tons of metal the gas from metal will probably kill you(and the energy used for vaporizing such a thing risk to create an really huge explosion and potentially be more destructive than the explosion of the same amount of explosive I do not know but the amount of lightning involved could create nuclear reactions) if you are made of organic stuff but if you have a dragon without organism working only with magic it might survive it it have a melting point higher than titanium.

The inverse-square law makes vaporizing things at distance not so dangerous - especially if we're talking about lightning breath or controlled storm lightning that can hit incoming missiles at miles away. But the lightning wouldn't have to completely vaporize incoming missiles to knock them out of the sky. Solid rounds could be deflected by vaporizing only a small amount of material.


The nuclear bomb can be detonated at pretty high range and still obliterate him.
The fireball radius of the current power-fullest nuclear weapon is 3.5 kilometers and the destruction radius is of 35 kilometers so basically it is possible to detonate a nuclear weapon at a good range from the dragon and to obliterate him.

Current nuclear weapons don't "obliterate" things at 35 klicks. Overpressure and heat, sure, but it's not hard to imagine a dragon that could survive that.

VoxRationis
2015-06-25, 12:02 PM
I am going to second the opinion that incredible storm powers would make the storm the primary threat, not the traditional draconic claws and teeth and breath and whatnot.

Lord Torath
2015-06-25, 12:55 PM
The inverse-square law makes vaporizing things at distance not so dangerous - especially if we're talking about lightning breath or controlled storm lightning that can hit incoming missiles at miles away. But the lightning wouldn't have to completely vaporize incoming missiles to knock them out of the sky. Solid rounds could be deflected by vaporizing only a small amount of material.Bullets are FAST[Citation Needed]. They will be in and out of the bolt so quickly it has no effect on them(http://what-if.xkcd.com/16/ bottom of the page). Now this is Magic Dragon Lightning, so the natural laws may not apply. But your storm dragon is going to need to be able to detect hordes of small, very fast-moving projectiles, and then be able to precisely direct lightning bolts at them and keep the bolts on them for a second or so if it's going to rely on lightning as point defense.

noob
2015-06-25, 01:01 PM
"Current nuclear weapons don't "obliterate" things at 35 klicks. Overpressure and heat, sure, but it's not hard to imagine a dragon that could survive that. "
I did not said that we would explode a bomb at 35 kilometers but that we were going to explode it at the limit of the storm and so if you have only a 15 kilometers storm nuclear weapons can kill you rather easily but if you have 35 kilometers storm then people are just going to build a bigger nuclear weapon and some year later there will be a 350 kilometers radius of annihilation nuclear bomb(who will be crazily huge and will have like 6 stages of explosion instead of 3) and if you have such crazy storm the fact that it is a dragon does not change anything it is like speaking of an infinite spaceship and saying there is a potato deep inside: nobody cares.
"The inverse-square law makes vaporizing things at distance not so dangerous - especially if we're talking about lightning breath or controlled storm lightning that can hit incoming missiles at miles away. But the lightning wouldn't have to completely vaporize incoming missiles to knock them out of the sky. Solid rounds could be deflected by vaporizing only a small amount of material."
Do you understand that a lightning is extremely light?
A lightning can not deflect.
It is as simple as that if a lightning had enough energy for weighting enough for deflecting a 1000 tons steel missile the resulting nuclear explosion would end in the destruction of the earth and of the moon.
So lightning can not change the trajectory of my missile who have already a huge speed and stopping its propulsion will not change its trajectory enough for making it not splatter the dragon.
Except if that dragon can explode the earth and the moon all of a sudden but then the rp is just going to be weird.

Incanur
2015-06-25, 01:18 PM
If you vaporize part of a projectile, that's almost always going to knock it off course. Directed lightning certainly could deflect missiles and even solid rounds. Think of it as a particle beam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle-beam_weapon). Actual lightning doesn't hit bullets and missiles - or doesn't do so often - but if it did it could cause plenty of damage. Particle-beam point defenses are staple of hardish science fiction for a reason.

Silus
2015-06-25, 01:29 PM
So a biiiiiit off topic but still related to the whole modern military vs dragon/fantasy elements, I'd like to direct your attention to the light novel/manga (and upcoming anime) of "Gate - Jietai Kare no Chi nite, Kaku Tatakeri" (Gate - Thus the JSDF Fought There) (http://ak-scans.wikia.com/wiki/Gate_-_Thus_the_JSDF_fought_there).

http://s7.postimg.org/qz79fgnaj/gatecov.jpg

One of the story arcs involves taking out a "Flame Dragon". Minor spoiler, they blow off one of its arms with a shoulder mounted RPG fairly early on.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-06-25, 02:39 PM
Actual lightning doesn't hit bullets and missiles - or doesn't do so often - but if it did it could cause plenty of damage.

From what I heard (and yes, I "heard" it at xkcd (https://what-if.xkcd.com/16/)) it doesn't, not in the case of a bullet. I'm not saying this to be the actually guy, but because I think this is really cool.

A lightning bolt lasts for a pretty short period, but still gets quite a lot of energy transferred. But a bullet is so fast that it can pass through a lightning bolt in a much shorter time than the lightning needs for this full discharge. Unless you can find a way to have the path of the lightning constantly contain the bullet rather then just hit it somewhere in its trajectory (which, admittedly sounds like the definition of 'directed lightning', but seems to be a pretty precise job for a weather controlling dragon to do in real time), it only warms it up a few degrees.

And that is why more people should try shooting Thor.

Incanur
2015-06-25, 02:54 PM
Unless you can find a way to have the path of the lightning constantly contain the bullet rather then just hit it somewhere in its trajectory (which, admittedly sounds like the definition of 'directed lightning', but seems to be a pretty precise job for a weather controlling dragon to do in real time)

That's exactly what I'm proposing. It arguably goes beyond the bounds of a weather controlling dragon but fits into roughly the same aesthetics. The sort of the reflexes/precision this would require form the dragon are perhaps excessive, so that's something to consider.

Mr. Mask
2015-06-25, 03:14 PM
Wouldn't the lightning's magnetism naturally draw it to contact nearby projectiles?


Silus: I've seen that one. I wouldn't call the series realistic, but the way they handled the big red dragon seemed plausible.

Maglubiyet
2015-06-25, 04:08 PM
if this is an alien stuff made of high technology
1:There is absolutely no reason for it to look vaguely like a dragon as it is a completely under optimal form who have no use.
2: "Its senses along with its profound understanding and control of physical laws give it what appears to be supernatural abilities. "Force field" generation, weather control, etc."
is just an stupid idea there is no reason it would do those things it would rather just create an antimatter explosion for destroying the entire earth and other kind of simple and efficient use of technology since generally with superior technology you have superior firepower and that doing weather control is not something you put on standard issue machines.
3:Dark matter is just a theory for explaining a phenomenon with gravitic influence and there is alternative theories working without dark matter like many alternate gravitation theories
4:Dark matter is not necessarily more resistant than other matters and anyway the problem is that our explosives are so strong that it would need to be super ultra dense and heavy for resisting and your dragon would end up being crazily heavy if it can face-tank a nuclear bomb so much that in fact its gravitic influence might be felt when you are at some meters and that it would end up collecting dust and dirt and rock around it.

We're talking about magic and dragons and you're going to call me on this? It's a pseudo-scientific explanation in the vein of Star Trek.

I'm not saying it looks exactly like a picture in the Monster Manual, but "dragon" is the closest approximation for what people who manage to see it and live call it. All the images of it are classified by the military.

Lord Torath
2015-06-25, 04:44 PM
Wouldn't the lightning's magnetism naturally draw it to contact nearby projectiles?Natural lightning seeks the "shortest" path between sky and ground. Or more accurately, the path of least resistance between positive and negative charges. Metals generally have much less electrical resistance than the air, and so are a "shorter" path. But bullets are small and fast. Too fast really to be considered by the lightning bolt as a shorter path. Lightning usually takes about a second or so to "choose" its path (from strike to return-strike), in which time your bullet has traveled several meters downrange, to the point that the additional air travel required to hit the bullet and return to the path of least resistance is much "longer" than the amount saved by traveling through the bullet. (What if lightning strikes a bullet (http://what-if.xkcd.com/16/) bottom of the page)

Durkoala
2015-06-27, 06:33 PM
If we can take a diversion from storm control, a very scary ability for this dragon to have would be one attributed to various human wizards: upon death, the body explodes into a swarm of vermin, which run away and change back into the living wizard unless all of them are killed. This could be combined with a similar power of the Lambton Worm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambton_Worm), to reattach severed segments of its body and avoid death, creating a dragon that splits into smaller dragonish creatures, such as Lindworms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindworm), Wyverns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern) and Dragonets, when killed and which can recombine (or just transform) into the original dragon as a form of resurrection.

There's a lot of ways an intelligent dragon could (ab)use this. It could remain as a swarm to have more control over territory, scout out the area before reforming, injure itself to create scouts, reform in all its glory (probably with more physical power, fire or intelligence than the swamlings) when the army/PCs are running low on ammo and even tear off parts of its body when cornered to create reinforcements.

There's not many ways this can be analysed scientifically (unless you want to pay attention to the conservation of mass and have the deaths of the vermin affect the dragon's condition. This could be a way to defeat it, by depriving it of mass, although the dragon/dragonlings will probably start eating everything nearby to compensate) but I thought it was an interesting way to deal with heavier weaponry than most dragons have to deal with.

noob
2015-06-28, 07:25 AM
And so the bomb reduce all its parts to dust and then?
Splitting when harmed does not protects you from being turned to less than ashes by a bomb.
Also stuff does not grows or regenerate fast else if it was possible it would be sure that everything in nature would end up having this property since you are harder to eliminate and would reproduce faster and end up filling all your niche if you have this kind of property and since that dragon evolved from something it means that one time this property appeared into some creatures and since it is ridiculously advantageous selectively it means that if a dragon have this property of growing super fast then probably it would probably mean that there would be a lot of other kind of animals with this property.
Simply if such awesome genes existed why would something survive without it(because humans at the beginning did not had all this technology it would be obvious that if humans did not had those genes in this universe then they would have been extincted because of other animals growing super fast filling up all the niches)
So you can not say that super regeneration and growth speed is a property who appeared on some creature by natural evolution without all the creatures ending up with it.
And also regeneration of body parts in some days only simply does not works for thousand of physical and biological reasons but you probably does not care about that since it is a story.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-06-28, 09:30 AM
So you can not say that super regeneration and growth speed is a property who appeared on some creature by natural evolution without all the creatures ending up with it.

The dragon is magic.

That has to be in any version of this story. You could try to talk him into a natural creature by saying that all of his abilities simply cost a humongous amount of energy and evolution often selects the most efficient and "cheap" creatures (small animals go extinct about twice as slowly as really large ones, despite shorter individual lifes), but that would just lead to a dragon that eats continuously and might still not really work out if you start doing calculations. For instance: I figure transformation into a radically different form costs about as much energy as growing from a baby into an adult does. Human children spend about 2% of their energy intake on growing, which works out to an werewolf burning a whole December worth of food (in adult portions) in one transformation. And then they still need to change back.

So, the dragon, if it evolved at all, is from a radically different line than the rest of us. They split of from the bird line somewhere in the early Triassic, were hugely successful but were all killed by... aliens?... because they were too dangerous. Or maybe there can only be one because they feed on the earths magnetism and a single adult specimen uses up almost the entire supply, which means that when it reproduces a time comes that the dragon must kill its own child or vice versa. Whatever the explanation, it's a creature from a different time. A more handwavy time.

If you can find rules that make this monster work in a modern time, that make it undefeatable by an army but merely a huge challenge for a group of heroes, I wouldn't worry too much about how to explain those rules. Who cares about logic when you have dragons? Most science fiction stories allow themselves one big lie, the dragon is the lie of this story.

That being said, I'm not sure I'd go with the "splits up when hurt" idea. Not because it's a bad property for a monster, but because I'm not sure what it has to do with dragons. Defeating a dragon is about a big climatic fight with an enormously powerful entity, not about chasing lizards all over the world and killing them all before they reassemble in two days. And if anything, that's a task in which militaries would outperform a small group of heroes even more than in fighting a big dragon.

noob
2015-06-28, 10:21 AM
"Most science fiction stories allow themselves one big lie, the dragon is the lie of this story."
No.
Science fiction does not needs to have something incoherent with the rest and I have seen a lot of science fiction stories with coherent technology like the book Project MARS: A Technical Tale made by Wernher von Braun.

The_Tentacle
2015-06-28, 11:39 AM
"Most science fiction stories allow themselves one big lie, the dragon is the lie of this story."
No.
Science fiction does not needs to have something incoherent with the rest and I have seen a lot of science fiction stories with coherent technology like the book Project MARS: A Technical Tale made by Wernher von Braun.

You're missing the point. If you start saying that every single thing about the dragon has to be scientifically accurate there is no longer a point to talking about the dragon, since, by definition, it will not be scientifically accurate. So yes, there is going to be magic inherent in this, which will allow the DM of whatever game to simply indulge in a little hand-waving.

As to the actual dragon, I was thinking that, first of all, I am for some reason attached to the idea of the dragon having been asleep at either the north or south pole, in the ice. This is because it has some kind of links with magnetism and electricity, and wherever it goes it is surrounded by a (magical in nature) magnetic storm that disrupts most technology. I think that the storm could extend over a large area around the dragon, but not actually be that physically damaging. By this I mean that it would just create cloud cover and some lightning, as well as the strong magnetic fields. It probably doesn't really work like this, but just say that because of this no missiles or the like can get a lock on the dragon from outside the storm to inside, and weapons inside the storm malfunction. This limits the focus placed on the storm, which allows it to play the role of scenery or obstacle rather than opponent, keeping the dragon itself the center of attention. Then the dragon itself doesn't really have to have any huge powers other than thick scales, flight, and not even necessarily a breath weapon. Thoughts?

NRSASD
2015-06-28, 03:19 PM
I like it. Although we still have the issue of why we don't just bombard the area with "dumb" weapons like artillery shells to kill the dragon. Maybe modern artillery rounds have critical electronic components within them (components that the storm would disrupt), but good ol' fashioned fuel-air bombs would do the trick. Maybe due to the storm and the electronic interference, and the fact that this is a hurricane class storm with a diameter of 50-100 km, no artillery can get a solid lock on the dragon?

Instead of feeding on magnetic fields, maybe they are the source of the magnetic field? One thing I really like about the magnetic dragon concept is that you can explain why the poles flip every 20,000 years or so. The two dragons (one at each pole) emerge from underground/underwater and migrate past each other, destroying anything electronic and causing category-5 hurricane levels of destruction in a 25-50 km radius as they cross the globe.

Fun fact: even if you kill these dragons, you can still wave modern civilization goodbye as all gps and compasses fail worldwide and never work again

noob
2015-06-28, 03:52 PM
Gps does not need a magnetic north since they rely on the signal of three or more satellites for doing triangulation for knowing your position so in fact magnetism does not do anything to Gps who rely only of receiving signal from satellites.
Anyway a 50 kilometers hurricane would by far create more destruction than any other ability of the dragon so in fact what people would be fighting would only be a hurricane and the fact there is a dragon at the middle change nothing.
Then there is the fact that the hurricane will be a lot weaker when you go high in atmosphere due to the reduction in density of air so that dragon should never fly too high because else its hurricane will not protect it enough against nuclear weapons.
And if he is too near from the ground there could be burrowed nuclear weapons who will be detonated(humans for example know the dragon wants to destroy cities and then they burrow a nuclear weapon under the ground then The the dragon comes the nuclear weapon is detonated and if the dragon was not flying at more than 10 kilometers of altitude he is nearly sure to die)
So that dragon will continuously be forced between a floor of height and a roof of height for surviving.
Also about the dragon being the source of magnetic field there is dozens of proof that it can not be the case because of physics theories.
Feeding of magnetic fields might be one of the hardest and most inefficient ways of getting energy even if you start speaking of magic it will stay way more inefficient than most of the things.
anyway your giant hurricane might not be sufficient for stopping an enough huge and fast rocket with a simple largely dimensioned mechanical clock for causing the explosion when it reach the middle of the hurricane (and we largely have the power of doing such simple calculations) and if the dragon is moving fast we can see the direction it is moving toward and for dozen of reasons a dragons have an hard time changing direction and because of the hurricane and the night he will not be able to know someone is throwing him a giant rocket and so it will probably follow a predictable trajectory.

Incanur
2015-06-28, 04:06 PM
A sf dragon could work for this scenario with some key differences. Theoretically plausible nanotech and so on can produce an entity capable of wrecking circa-2015 Earth with dragon aesthetics. Point-defense particle beams powered by some fairly dense form of antimatter might still be possible. 9e+16 J/kg is a *lot* of energy, even not of all can be used effectively. A cloud of nanobots plus antimatter or antimatter-fusion missiles (styled as breath weapon) would probably be the simplest way for such a sf dragon to defeat armies. And the dragon's diamondoid body would immune to most or all non-nuclear weapons.

The_Tentacle
2015-06-28, 04:55 PM
I wasn't talking about a hurricane or a hurricane class storm, just an electrical storm, like any thunderstorm you might experience, just with tons of magnetic fields and more lightning than normal. It would be VERY large, and wouldn't be staying centered on the dragon. Just, wherever the dragon goes, it generates this storm in a huge area around it (let's say something like several hundred kilometers). In this area, NOTHING electronic would work, not circuits, not communications, nothing. If you launch missiles that rely on any kind of electric component to detonate, they become big rocks. If you bury a nuke and try to set it off with anything electronic, it doesn't detonate. And just because the winds can't extend into the upper atmosphere doesn't mean the electric fields can't. You also wouldn't be able to just shoot at the center of the storm, since the dragon wouldn't be there. In addition, people outside the storm wouldn't know where the dragon is, since they can't see it from outside the storm, and no one inside the storm can communicate with them. It also flavors it nicely, since the dragon will by definition never be anywhere sunny, so there will always be mood weather.

I also like the idea of them being the source of the magnetic poles. Even if GPS wouldn't be affected, there are still tons of things that would be, including many animals that rely on magnetic fields to navigate. Interesting challenge/moral issue for the PCs.

Zale
2015-06-28, 05:02 PM
Also about the dragon being the source of magnetic field there is dozens of proof that it can not be the case because of physics theories.

Modern science has determined that the earth is protected by a magnetic field created by a rotating iron core at the center of our world

This is true.

Ancient lore dictates that the earth is spared the sun empress's wrath by the presence of her children upon the world.

This is also true, and were her children to die, her wrath would wipe clean the world and devour us all from the inside out.

And for entirely unrelated reasons, science would find that the earths magnetic field suddenly weakened as a unforeseen level of solar activity resulted in massive damage to infrastructure and a sudden hike in global temperatures.

noob
2015-06-28, 05:14 PM
"I wasn't talking about a hurricane or a hurricane class storm, just an electrical storm, like any thunderstorm you might experience, just with tons of magnetic fields and more lightning than normal. It would be VERY large, and wouldn't be staying centered on the dragon. Just, wherever the dragon goes, it generates this storm in a huge area around it (let's say something like several hundred kilometers). In this area, NOTHING electronic would work, not circuits, not communications, nothing. If you launch missiles that rely on any kind of electric component to detonate, they become big rocks. If you bury a nuke and try to set it off with anything electronic, it doesn't detonate. And just because the winds can't extend into the upper atmosphere doesn't mean the electric fields can't. You also wouldn't be able to just shoot at the center of the storm, since the dragon wouldn't be there. In addition, people outside the storm wouldn't know where the dragon is, since they can't see it from outside the storm, and no one inside the storm can communicate with them. It also flavors it nicely, since the dragon will by definition never be anywhere sunny, so there will always be mood weather.

I also like the idea of them being the source of the magnetic poles. Even if GPS wouldn't be affected, there are still tons of things that would be, including many animals that rely on magnetic fields to navigate. Interesting challenge/moral issue for the PCs. "

I spoke of a rocket with no electrical things which would work with an delayed explosion and would kill the dragon by exploding at the middle of your storm(simply it is sent in the good direction with a delayed explosion mechanism because you can calculate easily the timer for making the bomb explode at the right moment) and you did not proved it would not work you know there is dozen of ways to have a delayed trigger using no electricity and I said specifically it would work with an over sized clock.
You did not answered any way for allowing your dragon to survive my weapon.
Also those nuclear underground weapons could be human triggered and potentially work without electric components anyway your storm can not prevent something from working if it is 30 meters underground(because of the protection of the earth) and so your magnetic field would be useless against those even if I made them electrical.
So you did not gave any valid argument against those weapons except if you say you have a field so powerful it can work through 10000 meters of air and 30 meters of earth but then the simple clock delayed rocket I spoke of would still work absolutely perfectly.


"Modern science has determined that the earth is protected by a magnetic field created by a rotating iron core at the center of our world

This is true.

Ancient lore dictates that the earth is spared the sun empress's wrath by the presence of her children upon the world.

This is also true, and were her children to die, her wrath would wipe clean the world and devour us all from the inside out.

And for entirely unrelated reasons, science would find that the earths magnetic field suddenly weakened as a unforeseen level of solar activity resulted in massive damage to infrastructure and a sudden hike in global temperatures. "
1: If such event happened there would be a 100% chance(With current knowledge about physics) it is completely unrelated to the death of the dragon.
2: It would be an event happening after the end of the campaign and so it is totally secondary even if the entire humanity die since the single tack in the scenario is to kill the dragon.
3: Ancient lore comes from people telling random stories for entertainment and so people would not even vaguely have even the slightest glimpse of care about it since there is probably also 200 legends saying that the sun empress is going to destroy the world if the dragon is not killed and there will also be a story saying that the sun empress will be angry if humans does not kill everything in fact everything have probably been said and no one can know which one is true.

The_Tentacle
2015-06-28, 05:31 PM
Okay, so if you bury a nuke ahead of time (remember you will have had to have done so far ahead of time since the necessary digging equipment wouldn't work inside the storm) and manage to bait the dragon on top of it and set it off manually, that is one method of killing the dragon. Albeit one that requires incredible prediction skills as well as at least several people to sacrifice their lives, not to mention the populace of whatever nearby city is serving as bait.

As to the timed missile thing, sure the storm wouldn't stop it, but can you imagine how difficult that would be to aim? Remember that the dragon isn't at the center of the storm, and you can't locate hm from outside the storm. So, you have no idea where the dragon is, and you have to launch a missile with a timer precise enough to explode by the dragon, and the dragon will be able to see it coming and avoid it. You would be aiming the missile in 4 dimensions (3 spacial and also time) with the added difficulty of your target being able to actively avoid it.

And, Zale, I think you're being sarcastic, but perhaps increased solar activity could be an explanation for the dragons awakening. Massive infrastructure failure could potentially screen the dragon's awakening by shutting down communications worldwide, so the first that PCs hear of the dragon is scattered tales from people who walked out of affected areas. It could actually take quite some time even for governments to figure out what's going on, beyond there being a massive electrical storm.

noob
2015-06-28, 05:37 PM
" but can you imagine how difficult that would be to aim? "
You know how crazily good are our engineers at aiming.
We do completely crazy stuff with rocket aiming and we succeed.
Also we could create a particularly huge thermobaric rocket we had no reason for creating such things before the dragon but when the dragons comes we could create 500 tons rockets.
also I have looked back to nuclear bombs and I have seen no reasons it could not be made with clockwork mechanism for detonating the chemical detonator for making the fission bomb triggering the fusion bomb explode and then the fusion bomb is triggered.
So we can do an electric less delayed blast nuclear weapon we send at the middle of the storm blasting your dragon because it is so powerful it can destroy everything inside the storm even if the dragon is near a border.

The_Tentacle
2015-06-28, 05:43 PM
It doesn't matter how good any engineer would be at aiming if they have no idea where to aim. It would be on the scale of taking a handgun in a pitch-black 20x20x20 room and shooting a fly somewhere in the room, except the fly can see the bullet coming and move to avoid it.

noob
2015-06-28, 05:45 PM
Everything I was going to do was creating explosions at all the positions inside the storm which is doable and which is easy with mechanical triggered nuclear bomb I spoke in the post above.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-06-28, 05:55 PM
Instead of feeding on magnetic fields, maybe they are the source of the magnetic field? One thing I really like about the magnetic dragon concept is that you can explain why the poles flip every 20,000 years or so. The two dragons (one at each pole) emerge from underground/underwater and migrate past each other, destroying anything electronic and causing category-5 hurricane levels of destruction in a 25-50 km radius as they cross the globe.

Fun fact: even if you kill these dragons, you can still wave modern civilization goodbye as all gps and compasses fail worldwide and never work again

I...

like this idea.

It's not just about compasses, the magnetosphere is one of the things that protect us from all sorts of radiation and particles from the sun and elsewhere. How important it is for that function kind of depends on who you're talking to, but that could be a really cool concept for a game like this. Can you even kill the dragon without dooming us all? The dragons are not getting nuked because nobody who has those is willing to risk it. Thinking beyond that: is there a way to stop the migration or at least get them to stop burning everything in their path?

It's a bit less straightforward than "just" an epic dragon fight set in the modern time, but it could be cool...

(And no, it's not realistic that dragons are the cause of our magnetic field. As someone who has recently been in a very serious discussion about how the earth is both hollow and growing (and full of dinosaur-riding Nazi's carving 60's style movie dinosaurs into stones) I realize that there are people who would contest that statement. However, we're not contesting it, we're giving a different spin on it for the sake of a fantasy game.)

noob
2015-06-28, 06:03 PM
"I...

like this idea.

It's not just about compasses, the magnetosphere is one of the things that protect us from all sorts of radiation and particles from the sun and elsewhere. How important it is for that function kind of depends on who you're talking to, but that could be a really cool concept for a game like this. Can you even kill the dragon without dooming us all? The dragons are not getting nuked because nobody who has those is willing to risk it. Thinking beyond that: is there a way to stop the migration or at least get them to stop burning everything in their path?

It's a bit less straightforward than "just" an epic dragon fight set in the modern time, but it could be cool... "

There is 2000000000000000000 reasons for the humans to believe that the dragons are displacing the poles and that it will be solved if they are killed and also that humans will never know that the field will disappear if they are killed since there is a physical justification of why the poles exist independently of the dragons and there is no way they could get your information so humans will just use nuclear weapon or if they do not it will be only because of you cheating with meta-gaming by magically transferring them incoherent knowledge which should be false and that most scientist would not believe except some religious ones but there would be also some of them believing that if the dragons are killed the poles becomes cheese.
Also about the poles migration everyone know it happens very slowly.

The_Tentacle
2015-06-28, 06:15 PM
I...

like this idea.

It's not just about compasses, the magnetosphere is one of the things that protect us from all sorts of radiation and particles from the sun and elsewhere. How important it is for that function kind of depends on who you're talking to, but that could be a really cool concept for a game like this. Can you even kill the dragon without dooming us all? The dragons are not getting nuked because nobody who has those is willing to risk it. Thinking beyond that: is there a way to stop the migration or at least get them to stop burning everything in their path?

It's a bit less straightforward than "just" an epic dragon fight set in the modern time, but it could be cool...

(And no, it's not realistic that dragons are the cause of our magnetic field. As someone who has recently been in a very serious discussion about how the earth is both hollow and growing (and full of dinosaur-riding Nazi's carving 60's style movie dinosaurs into stones) I realize that there are people who would contest that statement. However, we're not contesting it, we're giving a different spin on it for the sake of a fantasy game.)

I actually didn't think about all that, but it puts an even more drastic spin on it. Perhaps the PCs discover this somehow, and then they have to stop the world's governments from enacting some plan to kill the dragon in order to save us all from death by irradiation. Then they have to find some way to "guide" the dragons to their resting places at the poles and put them back to sleep (lol tucking in the world-destroying monsters for a good long 100,000 year nap).


Everything I was going to do was creating explosions at all the positions inside the storm which is doable and which is easy with mechanical triggered nuclear bomb I spoke in the post above.

So your plan for killing the dragons is to fill hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of atmosphere (actually on the small side, using a 100km by 100 km by 10 km up storm, which is probably smaller than anything a DM following this plan would use) with dragon-killing nuclear explosions? That sounds like it would do far more damage than the dragons alone...

noob
2015-06-28, 06:20 PM
There is no such thing as an overkill when you are facing a dragon you believe able to destroy the earth magnetic poles and who is destroying everything in a 50 kilometers area and who is going to spin around the world killing way more people than my nuclear weapons.
Also if the storm is obscuring to an point where our technology does not allows to see them people are never going to know there is dragons and so in fact players are not going to know either.
But if the storm does not obscure enough for totally hiding the dragon then we can do precision strikes and kill it with total ease with only a dozen of 7 tons rockets who only destroy everything in a 300 foot radius.

dream
2015-06-28, 06:21 PM
Which RPG system is being used? How does the dragon's hide translate to DR or AC? How fast exactly can it fly? How far & hot can it project fire? What level of intelligence does it possess? How heavy is it? What does it eat? Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Does it have DNA?

There's way too much missing information for a meaningful discussion, outside of speculation. Just describing it as "magic" or "probably magic" is no definition at all. Logically-speaking, you can't find real answers to something without having real data on the subject. Sure, you can guess, but even a good guess requires more information than what's been provided. For all we know, the "dragon" could be some sort of hologram (hence it's immunity & sudden appearances/disappearance) and the real damage is being caused by a more "terrestrial" weapon.

Needs some help.

The_Tentacle
2015-06-28, 06:28 PM
There is no such thing as an overkill when you are facing a dragon you believe able to destroy the earth magnetic poles and who is destroying everything in a 50 kilometers area and who is going to spin around the world killing way more people than my nuclear weapons.

1) It creates and sustains the magnetic poles, killing it is what would destroy the magnetic poles.
2) Again, the storm isn't destroying anything, only the things the dragon actively attacks and rampages through are damaged (side note: perhaps the dragon is able to perceive radio waves and the like somehow, and the profusion of them in the modern world is what drove it insane and caused it to begin the rampage).

And I already said that it would be difficult for people to figure out what's going on. Perhaps the PCs are alerted by people who escaped the effected area on foot, or they go in to investigate themselves, or contact is reestablished with a satellite that took pictures of the dragon as it broke free of the ice at the pole, before the obscuring storm formed around it.

noob
2015-06-28, 06:31 PM
I said that humans had all the reasons to believe the dragons needed to be killed and I explained in a previous post why it was more logical for humans to believe they were going to save the magnetic poles by killing the dragons than by not doing it.
Read all my previous post it seems you do not read the edits.

Mr. Mask
2015-06-28, 07:01 PM
The electrical storm shorting out electronics is a pretty interesting idea. Note that you don't really need to go as far as that. If the dragon can command tornadoes, and can sense and react to incoming missiles a few miles ahead of time, there is no missile on Earth capable of weathering a tornado and staying on target. Every nuke you threw at it would be displaced.

Burying nukes would be a better idea, but your ability to react will be pretty bad if you don't have an accurate fix on the dragon's location. Even today, predictions of where storms are headed are rather clumsy, so a storm controlled by a dragon seems all the harder to predict unless it acts very predictably (if it's too predictable, there are less destructive methods to take it out). If you had time, you could just bury nukes all over the country, and root wires in place below the EMP effect's reach, and active all the ones within the quadrants of the storm.

In this case, there isn't that kind of time. The dragon appears, blind-siding the world as it destroys something short of a dozen cities in a few days, then feeling sated it goes back to sleep in a new location.

This gives the nation adequate time to start burying nukes and planning coordinating ICBM strikes should the dragon resurface, though the dragon will have wreaked such destruction that the economy of the nation and area might be somewhat shambled and organization may be poor in certain areas for years. Still, the war effort will probably not be hurt.

The question then, is will the dragon fall for the trap if it resurfaces.

noob
2015-06-28, 07:08 PM
Obviously nothing can see nuclear explosives underground 30 meters under ground.
Also there is still the problem that the nuclear bomb could detonate 10 kilometers above the dragon where the tornado will not be since tornadoes does have an harder time appearing where there is less air.
And also there is the problem that when you see the nuclear bomb it can kill you at any time it explode and so it is too late(a few miles is barely outside the 3.5 kilometers flame-blast range and is largely in the 35 kilometers of destruction of the bomb at 10 kilometers you are really sure of dying).

Incanur
2015-06-28, 07:54 PM
Again, it's not hard to imagine a magical or technological dragon that can endure some heat, overpressure, and radiation. Because of the inverse-square law, nuclear blasts are much less powerful at range. Up close, sure, a nuclear weapon vaporizes any known material. But not at longer ranges.

noob
2015-06-29, 06:18 AM
" Again, it's not hard to imagine a magical or technological dragon that can endure some heat, overpressure, and radiation. Because of the inverse-square law, nuclear blasts are much less powerful at range. Up close, sure, a nuclear weapon vaporizes any known material. But not at longer ranges. "
Being easy to imagine means nothing you could easily imagine a pig destroying a galaxy by throwing it on one other galaxy while it would be ridiculously absurd physically.
Surviving when being at some miles of something who can kill everything in a 35 kilometers radius is not possible for many reasons you would need for surviving multiple things
1: Not needing any organism or mechanism at any scale else they are destroyed and you die.(absolutely impossible)
2: Weighting 5000 tons or more and being able to not die under your own mass simultaneously (impossible except if you look like a thin and very large disk when seen from a distance but then you are not a dragon)
3:Your disk should be able to loose absolutely all its parts and still be alive(because one nuclear blast when you are at some miles distance is nearly sure of removing many parts of your disk and so by throwing enough nuclear bombs you are going to die)
Basically if you want realistic stuff your dragon needs a definition of alive so weird that when it is dead and have no body it is still alive.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-06-29, 07:18 AM
humans will never know that the field will disappear if they are killed since there is a physical justification of why the poles exist independently of the dragons.

Not in this campaign world. It's the modern world except otherwise noted. Either that, or the PC's are or meet researchers with data that proves otherwise and have to get that data out to the world before the bombardment you suggested.

If I may be so bold: you're being the stop having fun guy. We're talking about a flying dragon, as if flapping wings are a viable method of taking off in a creature of whatever huge size everyone here is imagining. Criticism can be very helpful in putting this kind of stories together, but mostly when people phrase it as "these are the inconsistencies with this specific scenario, though you could handwave them like this or use that other suggestion, it has less problems" rather than "dragons are stupid, and you suck at physics", which is kind of what you sound like in this topic.

Hammerfels
2015-06-29, 07:20 AM
Ok, first of all i think that noob is a Troll and we should stop feeding him...
This thread, as i see it, is not about how to kill a dragon with a nuke, but about an interesting (fantasy) story evolving around the reappearance of one in the modern world.
With that said, think about the following.

What if the Dragon got awoken, wreaked havoc, got fought by the military, survived and than fled.
He got down somewhere and while the people thought that he was hiding in this nuclear weapons facility he used his magic to turn himself into his human form.
Think of Shadowrun Dragons or the one from the Nibelung Story for a reference of Dragons doing this easily.
Remember, (nearly) all Dragons are very smart. One can comprehend that the Dragon would realize that he is outnumbered and outgunned and that he needs to know more about the world he is living in now. So he would problably go underground instead of fighting a battle that he doesnt know if he can win it or not.
The military forces would problably bombard the facility and then think they won until years later the dragon would reappear.

Segev
2015-06-29, 09:45 AM
My big thing is that the dragon needs rules by which it operates. If it is magical, and that's why it's not simply blasted apart by modern military hardware impacting its flesh-and-blood body, then its magic needs rules and limitations. I again reference Brandon Sanderson's works, but also point to traditional faerie tales (that is, tales of faeries) and their strange but fast-followed rules.

Dragon Ball Z even had explanations and rules, albeit ones which got ultimately dull in that the "solution" was always just "level up:" Chi power or whatever makes you just that much more tough, physically, as does certain kinds of species-based DNA/makeup (sayins, namekians, Freiza's race, etc.).

The trouble with using that as the sole explanation for this dragon's toughness is that the solution is a simple, boring, "find the right magical macguffin to become powerful enough to overcome the dragon's mystical might." Alternatively, "find the one plot-based kryptonite-style weakness this dragon has."

That CAN be interesting, but at that point you're telling the tale of the quest for the macguffin, not telling a story of how modern man fights a dragon.


Reign of Fire provided rules for their dragons - part of their terrible power was not just each one's individual might, but their sheer number.


Superman-as-a-"dragon" would be an interesting tale not of fighting Superman with the combined might of the world, but either Lex or Batman finding the right kryptonite to use (quest for the MacGuffin) or "how the world is changed" in a "after-the-war" sense.

The mighty plot-immune dragon could be interesting if he set himself up as ruler of some part of the world, and now the tale is about how the world is changed in response. As most of this audience here on these forums is North American, let's say the dragon took over everything from the Rockies to the West Coast of the continent, and was enforcing it with a combination of his own personal might and a keen political acumen that has placed key humans in charge of the US, Mexican, and Canadian military forces which were situated there...after he forced their surrender in the first place.


But if you want a story about fighting the dragon, you need rules for his powers and his limitations. His weaknesses must make sense with what you establish, though being informed by myth and back-tracking what the rules are to establish specific weaknesses is acceptable.

Mr. Mask
2015-06-30, 05:57 AM
I think the dragon's rules can be as thus: The dragon is breaking the laws of physics as we know it, but not exponentially so. In more specifics:

Durability and mass. The dragon is probably larger than any flight of land creature that has existed on Earth as we know it. It's like an armoured, flying battleship, a really well armoured battleship. If a battleship of similar size can weather something, this dragon will weather it somewhat better.

Weather Control: The dragon's most notable ability is being a spirit of the wind, able to control the wind and weather to the extent of unleash massive and terrible storms on an area many miles high and wide.

Flight: This isn't as bad as it seems. Because the dragon can control the wind, and is as tough as a battleship, and can control the wind with great fidelity, they can ride it with amazing grace. They could use wings to give them some extra leverage to glide and turn with, or they could just be a wingless dragon as is more fitting with a storm spirit god. Either way, they have the power of tornadoes to blast them wherever they want to go. This does mean they won't be as fast as a super sonic jet, as air is limited to somewhere around the speed of sound, though the dragon's control of wind may make it possible to bypass this limitation for all I know. The dragon's intense durability and powerful propulsion system will also allow it to be absurdly agile.

Stealth: As it turns out, storms make a pretty effective form of stealth. The dragon might need to hang out in the eye of the storm to keep things going, which weather radar can detect, but weather radar is very vague, not good enough for any military targeting. And while efforts can be concentrated on the eye of the storm in hopes the dragon is presently there, any missile sent against that area can be redirected by tornadoes.

Detection: The air and lighting act as a sort of nervous system for the dragon, an electric spider's web. This gives it many miles of detection range, which combined with it's formidable defences, makes it very hard to stop.


It was mentioned that the Tsar Bomba (well, not directly, but that's the only one with the capabilities described) could easily deal with the dragon's cloud cover. Not really. First, if we go with the battleship statistic, you need to get a nuclear blast within a mile of those to inflict serious damage (even the mighty Tsar has to get within a mile or two). Even if we ignore this, there is a tragic problem to the Tsar Bomba--there isn't a rocket in the world that'll turn that megaton monstrosity into an ICBM, you need to ship them by plane. No plane can get anywhere near a hurricane. You might be able to rig a Tsar on a rocket, but it'd be a feat equivalent to some major space exploration missions, and would take weeks to arrange even if done in a hurry.

Even if the enemy commits to planting most of their nuclear arsenal as mines and detonating the whole storm, there's a chance the dragon will survive for the reasons I mentioned, and the cost to humanity will be grave. That's not to say this won't be attempted, or it couldn't succeed.

That should be enough to make the dragon truly terrifying, unleashing some of the worst storms humanity has seen, tearing up any plane or army that comes near, and throwing missiles at it does more damage to your own countryside than to the dragon.

dream
2015-06-30, 01:59 PM
Doesn't answer my question: is the dragon animal, mineral, or vegetable? And, does it have DNA?

End of the day, all the hurricane in the world can't deflect an onslaught of gps-guided nukes traveling at 4 miles per second. The real issue would be the clean-up & keeping the disintegrated monster's DNA out of the wrong hands.

Mr. Mask
2015-07-03, 04:55 PM
If the missiles lacked mass, then yes, wind would not effect them. Wind does effect missiles, even when they go at very high speeds. Even bullets will be put badly off course, by a few knots of wind, at moderate distances.

Hawkstar
2015-07-04, 11:31 AM
Doesn't answer my question: is the dragon animal, mineral, or vegetable?
Let's ask the Major General! He's an expert on this kind of thing, being the very model of a modern major general.

Mr. Mask
2015-07-04, 02:11 PM
It may explain why they did so poorly against the dragon, as their tactics put them at the beginning of the century. But on naming the dragon vegetable, animal or mineral, they were entirely modern examples (which probably means they googled it).

dream
2015-07-04, 04:29 PM
Let's ask the Major General! He's an expert on this kind of thing, being the very model of a modern major general.
lol:smallsmile:

GPS-guided nukes self-correct trajectory based on satellite guidance. For every deviation, a correction, and with 10-20 missiles flying at the dragon, near-misses = extinction.

Even if it moves at blinding speed, it's being tracked by satellites positioned around the globe to prevent any escape. If the dragon is as tough as a battleship, it wont matter with the amount of devastating force multiple nukes can lay down. More devastating than the dragon's weather or fiery breath.

If planes can fly through hurricanes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-SnxC-BkPo) how can missiles travelling at MACH 10 be bothered?

Your dragon's toast :smallamused:

Mr. Mask
2015-07-04, 09:31 PM
I thought I went over these points.

Yes, missiles have course correcting. No, they will not help them to navigate a supercell storm or directed tornado. The best systems in the world can't handle THAT. I take it you don't live in an area with major hurricanes, since you were impressed by the little one the plane flies into. Look up some footage on the damage caused by an F5 tornado, and you'll get to see an example of what winds can do. Those guys were crazy and nervous enough flying into that storm, but no one would go near a really bad storm--it would rip the plane to shred just like it rips the pavement off the street.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned about weather radar, but perhaps not. No military radar in the world can get a good picture inside a storm, it has far too much reflective rain and other matter. You have to use weather radar, which is nowhere near precise enough for a good military lock on a target. They can identify the eye of the storm, and assume the dragon is there (or probably get an approximation of the dragon's location if it isn't), but the issue is that no missile in the world will stay on course through a directed tornado (if the tornado was not directed, there's a chance the ICBM would end up close enough to target). If you could get a nuke within a mile of the dragon's position, you may destroy it. Sadly, since that is a difficult task, nukes will cause a lot of collateral damage, and questionable damage to the dragon.

dream
2015-07-04, 11:57 PM
You're ignoring that this isn't one missile; it's 10-20. A "directed tornado" can't stop all of them coming from different directions.

You're talking about weather radar and I'm talking about satellite tracking, two totally different technologies. At least three of the nuclear-capable nations have satellites that can identify and track subterranean targets. Weather has no bearing on that level of target-acquisition.

A hurricane hides the dragon? :smalltongue:

Maybe it "magically" detects the incoming missiles moving at MACH 10 and maybe it manages to deflect a few of them with a "magically-created" directed tornado. But the dragon cannot hide from or evade the other nukes it doesn't deflect.

"Puff" the magic dragon ....

NRSASD
2015-07-05, 12:58 AM
This discussion is unfortunately why one cannot put stats on the dragon and expect it to survive an engagement with the modern military. Looking at the United States nuclear arsenal alone, we have enough firepower to kill every living being on this planet 3-4 times. If we really, really wanted to, we could end humanity as a species. And so could Russia, and probably China. There is no singular plausible macroscopic biological entity that could defeat a united global human defense.

If our hypothetical dragon is going to stand a chance, it needs to follow rules not grounded in the real world. Even hurricanes are incapable of thwarting aircraft. Tornadoes can, but do so only because of the shear forces involved. To protect the dragon, it'd need either a gigantic tornado surrounding it (ie a hurricane), or thousands of smaller tornadoes surrounding it. Needless to say, that would prove fatal to pretty much everything involved, as the spot the dragon occupies would be doing some truly exciting things with the air pressure. A dragon radiating a constant emp fares a bit better against modern technology, but even then something as mundane as an anti-missile gun (like the Vulcan), would probably be able to down it. One gun wouldn't be a threat, but if you packed a dozen ships with a dozen Vulcans each beneath the dragon and fired simultaneously, the dragon would be toast.

If you, as the DM, want to rule that a hurricane would stop a coordinated missile strike on a general area, be my guest. But doing so deviates from reality; which isn't really a problem since reality and this topic parted ways loooong ago.

Mr. Mask
2015-07-05, 02:16 AM
You're ignoring that this isn't one missile; it's 10-20. A "directed tornado" can't stop all of them coming from different directions. Why do you say I'm ignoring it, when I talked about just that earlier in the thread? Please read the thread.


You're talking about weather radar and I'm talking about satellite tracking, two totally different technologies. At least three of the nuclear-capable nations have satellites that can identify and track subterranean targets. Weather has no bearing on that level of target-acquisition.

A hurricane hides the dragon? You need to do some more research into satellite imaging. To get a proper subterranean image, you need to put a radar unit on the ground. Satellites do not have sub-surface detection, they use UV, radar and IR to detect anomalies on the ground. None of which will penetrate a large hurricane. What detection method did you think they used to get subterranean imagery and why did you think it'd work with storms?



This discussion is unfortunately why one cannot put stats on the dragon and expect it to survive an engagement with the modern military. Looking at the United States nuclear arsenal alone, we have enough firepower to kill every living being on this planet 3-4 times. If we really, really wanted to, we could end humanity as a species. And so could Russia, and probably China. There is no singular plausible macroscopic biological entity that could defeat a united global human defense.

If our hypothetical dragon is going to stand a chance, it needs to follow rules not grounded in the real world. Even hurricanes are incapable of thwarting aircraft. Tornadoes can, but do so only because of the shear forces involved. To protect the dragon, it'd need either a gigantic tornado surrounding it (ie a hurricane), or thousands of smaller tornadoes surrounding it. Needless to say, that would prove fatal to pretty much everything involved, as the spot the dragon occupies would be doing some truly exciting things with the air pressure. A dragon radiating a constant emp fares a bit better against modern technology, but even then something as mundane as an anti-missile gun (like the Vulcan), would probably be able to down it. One gun wouldn't be a threat, but if you packed a dozen ships with a dozen Vulcans each beneath the dragon and fired simultaneously, the dragon would be toast. Well, you might be able to put the planet into nuclear winter to try and kill the dragon by starving it or the like, but if it was able to hibernate for centuries, then it will likely survive that as well. If you can't hit it effectively with a nuke, the number of nukes doesn't really help (unless there's a point where you can overwhelm its point-defence, which there might be).

For a single biological entity to destroy humanity, they'd have to be deific in nature. This dragon has developed into a god or spirit of storms, inspired by certain legends.

"Even hurricanes are incapable of thwarting aircraft."
This is far from true. The aircraft used for researching storms are specially designed, and can only make a careful approach under careful conditions, staying inside the storm as briefly as possible... and they lose a lot of those even so. There's a hard limit on the kind of storms you can investigate (category 2, I think). Military craft would be torn to pieces, especially moving at speed (the scientific craft are slower by far).

I do figure that the dragon would be doing some interesting things to the air pressure. It's possible parts of the storm would exceed 300 knots (which I think is the fastest recorded). The hurricane would stretch on for miles in all directions, with a few F5 tornadoes (or perhaps the "just in case," F6, when it's attacking or defending). If it detected an incoming threat via the nerve-like electrical impulses of the storm, it'd direct the wind into a tornado to deflect it.


If you, as the DM, want to rule that a hurricane would stop a coordinated missile strike on a general area, be my guest. But doing so deviates from reality; which isn't really a problem since reality and this topic parted ways loooong ago. If you had been correct that hurricanes are incapable of thwarting planes, that would be the case.

NRSASD
2015-07-05, 12:54 PM
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. During Hurricane Katrina, we sent a WP-3D into the storm on August 28th, 2005, during which time it was rated as a category 5. At that point, Hurricane Katrina was rated as one of the strongest hurricanes ever and had windspeeds of 175 mph.

The thing is, most planes are designed to survive entering the jetstream, which flows at about 150 mph. Wind speed isn't the issue; the issue is how sharp of an angle the wind turns at, otherwise known as wind shear. This is a problem because one wing of the plane is moving in a different direction than the other, leading to instability at best and destruction at worst. Missiles dodge the issue of shear forces by not having wings; assuming the missile is able to course correct when buffeted around, it will find its mark unless its guidance system has been disabled. Unless the dragon is creating a storm the likes of which have never been seen on earth (leaving reality far behind once again), planes should be able to negotiate a category 5 storm at considerable risk. Military craft are tougher than one would suspect: in 1983, an Israeli F-15 managed to fly 10 miles and land safely while missing an entire wing.

The United States has been flying hurricane hunting operations since 1944. During that time, only 5 crews have ever been lost. We've been using everything from specifically designed storm chaser planes to lightweight fighter/bombers (the Douglas A-20 Havoc) to enter hurricanes.

Tornadoes are a different story for aircraft. It would be suicide to enter one due to the shear forces involved, but again, missiles wouldn't have that problem. The issue with using tornadoes for point defense is that you would have to create dozens of them simultaneously to deflect an auto-correcting missile (again, this assumes that the missile's guidance is intact). Against a swarm of missiles, whether it be 10, 50, 100, or even 1000+, the number of tornadoes needed reaches truly stupid numbers. Not to mention that the dragon needs to omniscient and be able to form tornadoes instantly (going from still air to 300+ mph wind gusts instantly, no transition). If the dragon radiates an emp field then you can dodge the missile problem, but that still fails to deal with the issue of simply filling the sky with bullets via a large number of miniguns in one location (such as the GAU-8 or the M61 Vulcan). If it can, then your dragon might as well be able to survive getting hit by the missiles anyways, as there are no limits on its abilities whatsoever.

My point for bringing up the global nuclear arsenal was not to advocate nuking the dragon repeatedly, but to demonstrate just how mind-bogglingly powerful the field of modern military hardware is. We no longer bother trying to make bigger weapons, just more precise ones.

In short, I stand by my original statement. If you want a hurricane to stop missiles, go right ahead. Just know that even verisimilitude jumped ship quite a ways back.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina#/media/File:Hurricane_Katrina_Eye_viewed_from_Hurricane_H unter.jpg
http://flightscience.noaa.gov/faqs.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0914_050914_katrina_timeline_2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Hunters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_A-20_Havoc
http://theaviationist.com/2014/09/15/f-15-lands-with-one-wing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M61_Vulcan

Hawkstar
2015-07-05, 08:51 PM
How did we go from big flying lizard that could conceivably be immune to the pressure and heat of a nuke to some deific weathergod?

There was a stone structure at Ground Zero in Hiroshima that survived the Atomic Bomb. Having the dragon be tough enough to withstand the pressure, and resistant/immune to the thermal forces of a nuke isn't entirely implausible if it's heavily armored enough. The nuke simply blows up and the explosion goes around the dragon. (The "Big chunk of metal flying at 8 miles per second" would be the bigger threat to the dragon, I think).

Mr. Mask
2015-07-05, 09:00 PM
NRSASD: Katrina was probably category 3, at its peak--but spent most of its time as a category 2 at most. It's level of destruction is more to do with water level than wind strength.

Again, the maximum I've heard from wind speeds is 300 knots. And missiles do have wings. They're called control fins. And when they hit a wall of extreme turbulence, guidance systems don't function properly.

5 planes from the united states alone, lost to turbulence. I consider that substantial within the context.

If you send 1000 nukes at the dragon, you might overwhelm its point-defence, at some pretty severe ecological costs. But really, you're greatly overestimating the ability of ICBMs to maintain target in the face of turbulance. How much rocket fuel do you think they have, upon re-entry? It's only a few seconds worth, most of it is gliding and the control fins. In the face of extreme turbulance, their guidance systems won't do miracles. And, since they'd have to operate without working military radar, it's making me question how well the guidance would work to begin with. As for hundred of tornadoes... storms do that naturally, no magic involved. If the dragon generates a worse storm, and can be assumed to have some functional control of its behaviour, then there you go.

I believe I mentioned why the dragon would not need to be omniscient, if you could take a look up the thread.

"My point for bringing up the global nuclear arsenal was not to advocate nuking the dragon repeatedly, but to demonstrate just how mind-bogglingly powerful the field of modern military hardware is. We no longer bother trying to make bigger weapons, just more precise ones."
Well, I know you didn't intend it, but that's an emotion argument. Having an impressive number of nukes means nothing, if none of them will get within effective range. If you mean that they can overwhelm the dragon's point-defence with numbers, possibly.

"In short, I stand by my original statement. If you want a hurricane to stop missiles, go right ahead. Just know that even verisimilitude jumped ship quite a ways back."
Well, I could make a magical hurricane, easily enough in the story. As it turns out, that isn't necessary.

Mr. Mask
2015-07-05, 09:03 PM
Hawkstar: Well, modern nukes have improved quite a bit since Hiroshima's, but even today warships will survive nukes that go off, so long as they're more than about a mile away.

Telwar
2015-07-05, 11:02 PM
NRSASD: But really, you're greatly overestimating the ability of ICBMs to maintain target in the face of turbulance.

You might want to read up on ballistic missile warhead re-entry velocities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile#Flight_phases), and consider that they're designed to pass through high-altitude winds that are hurricane-strength and still make it within a 100-meter target radius. Even through a hurricane, they should not be significantly bounced around outside of their burst radius, and you may as well launch a bunch if you're launching one; it's not like the hurricane is going to get any more radioactive, after all, and maybe this will resolve the age-old question of "can't you nuke the hurricane to turn it off?" once and for all, for SCIENCE!!!! :)

Targeting would actually be more of a problem, but not insurmountable.



As a note, you might want to look up the Shadowrun 4e supplement Storm Front (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112346/Shadowrun-Storm-Front), which resolves a very similar in-game storyline, as Sirrurg the Destroyer, one of the setting's more infamous great dragons, has sufficiently pissed off Aztechnology (the megacorp) and Aztlan (the state) that they throw almost literally everything they have at it, short of nukes (which aren't terribly reliable in the setting), but they do use chemical and nanotechnological weapons on him. Amusingly, in a previous supplement, Sirrurg wrapped himself in a hurricane, seeded it with storm spirits, and basically destroyed Puerto Rico. Finding his location was actually the hardest part, since he was continuously on the move in between attacks. Once they were able to pin him down, they kept pounding on him with everything they had, possibly including kitchen sinks.

They actually take him down, but can't confirm the kill, as the "body" disappears.

Mr. Mask
2015-07-06, 12:29 AM
Well, I couldn't find anything on the page you link to related to what you said (I skimmed through it, as yes, I have done some research into ICBMs). There are some details about speed, but nothing much about guidance systems and capabilities against tornadoes. I don't think high altitude winds are any good comparison to tornadoes.

What'd happen if you destroyed a hurricane with a burst of nukes, is that the whole continent would become Chernobyl as the nuclear radiation was scattered around the world. That'd be a pretty interesting way to destroy the dragon. I could use that as the setting (or, realizing this, the military might hold off on using a nuclear burst of more energy than all of mankind's wars combined). I suppose one way of preventing that outcome would be to have the largest storm in recorded history, so it spans such an area that to wipe out most of it would doom humanity--though for now the question of whether to try and wipe out the dragon at the cost of your own continent is more interesting (whichever way it's resolved).


The case you mention is Shadowrun sounds interesting. Did the dragon use some sort of stealth magic since it was so hard to find it?