|
|
Silver Dragon Breath dragon forums
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
Drakel
Dragonstar
Joined: 30 Sep 2010
Posts: 35
Location: Three steps away from my own grave and two steps from being a legend.
|
 Posted: Wed 30 May 2012 17:18 Post subject: Dragons and Senses |
 |
|
Over all, let's debate on how the Dragon's senses would be like.
How would a Dragon's smell, tongue/taste, hearing, eyesight, and their sense of touch be. How Strong/weak will their senses be, how much will they rely on those senses. and as for taste how would a Dragon's tongue be if the Dragon is going to be breathing fire?
For This Discussion; please be detailed when talking and please try to describe your opinion thoroughly.
_________________
Drakel: Guard the dragon, Hunt the slayers, Master the skills to save the idea.
http://www.dragnix.net/Msg_Board/phpBB/index.php |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Obsidian
Dragonstar
Joined: 08 Jul 2008
Posts: 50
|
| Posted: Thu 31 May 2012 14:26 Post subject: |
|
|
Like any other large carnivore/omnivore/reptile/mammal/four or six limbed/fire or not fire breathing/large/small/ancient/young/sentient/non-sentient animals would be.
Honestly, it's a subjective matter. Making guesses, or making it up is pointless. Working out how different PEOPLE perceive colour alone is a philosophical debate that has been raging for about, ohh, four thousand years now.
Working out how 'dragons' perceive things, would first require a solid handle on what a 'dragon' actually is, and nuh-uh.
Even 'basic' things like fire breath are not universal among DRAGONS. In the opinion of a few, even silly. I know *I* never had it, and it makes me raise an eyebrow when people blithely blether about it as if it was common to every single big scaly flying reptiloid.
_________________
Prey, tell... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Drakel
Dragonstar
Joined: 30 Sep 2010
Posts: 35
Location: Three steps away from my own grave and two steps from being a legend.
|
| Posted: Sun 03 Jun 2012 23:47 Post subject: |
|
|
Well... Quite the was to kill a discussion Obsidian.
Still, Pointless or not, the question still stands. What is one's point of View on how the Dragon's sensory system works?
Eyes; does dragon see in color, or not? Reptilian in appearance, or some other appearance? night vision like cats, or not? eyes as strong as a hawk's?
As for Taste, describe the tongue and what it would be like. how would it not get burned? Describe how strong their sense of taste would be as well.
Smell; The strength of their sense of smell.
Sense of hearing; How well would a Dragon be capable when it comes to hearing and why?
Sense of touch; would a dragon be touch sensitive? or would they have a weak sense of feeling? or maybe some mix of the two? in any case please explain...
These are just some basic questions to help get started in this dragon discussion.
Now, back to your post Obsidian.
This is a Quote I found the most interesting out of your entire post. Mostly because the majority of your post revolves around this one statement.
| Quote: |
| Honestly, it's a subjective matter. Making guesses, or making it up is pointless. |
If I'm correct, your argument on the topic was that it's pointless because it is opinion based. Opinion based or not, IF this is indeed a dragon forum, then almost everything that talks about the subject this forum is made for is also opinion based.
Ergo; your argument is somewhat invalid Obsidian due to the fact that as a dragon forum it is almost all opinion/theory based... if you stay by your point then you might as well leave since what you're saying is that this entire forum is pointless due to being opinion based. Because you're still here even though the forums might be "pointless"to you, that means it is indeed not pointless even though it is opinion based. Contradicting your own statement.
I shall admit that this topic is indeed a subjective matter and is indeed going to be based off of opinions that others give... but here they will be opinions worth reading and either countered, compared, and/or improved by other opinions.
_________________
Drakel: Guard the dragon, Hunt the slayers, Master the skills to save the idea.
http://www.dragnix.net/Msg_Board/phpBB/index.php |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Obsidian
Dragonstar
Joined: 08 Jul 2008
Posts: 50
|
| Posted: Wed 06 Jun 2012 9:53 Post subject: |
|
|
| Drakel wrote: |
Now, back to your post Obsidian.
This is a Quote I found the most interesting out of your entire post. Mostly because the majority of your post revolves around this one statement.
| Quote: |
| Honestly, it's a subjective matter. Making guesses, or making it up is pointless. |
If I'm correct, your argument on the topic was that it's pointless because it is opinion based. Opinion based or not, IF this is indeed a dragon forum, then almost everything that talks about the subject this forum is made for is also opinion based.
Ergo; your argument is somewhat invalid Obsidian due to the fact that as a dragon forum it is almost all opinion/theory based... if you stay by your point then you might as well leave since what you're saying is that this entire forum is pointless due to being opinion based. Because you're still here even though the forums might be "pointless"to you, that means it is indeed not pointless even though it is opinion based. Contradicting your own statement.
I shall admit that this topic is indeed a subjective matter and is indeed going to be based off of opinions that others give... but here they will be opinions worth reading and either countered, compared, and/or improved by other opinions. |
No, I think you should find that discussion on memories, belief, past life experience, feelings, and how our past or other selves are perfectly valid topics of discussion. Not so much OPINION as our own, individual experience.
Opinion comes into it when people try to invent things. Or to apply labels to things they can have no knowledge or real understanding of.
Unless some members have specific past-life memories of seeing everything in shades of purple or being able to taste magic, and can describe it in a manner that makes sense to a being that is currently operating within a human sensory framework, then any speculation about senses is somewhat silly.
Deciding how strong or weak a sense of touch is for a dragon? Fine. I can stay on topic when I need to, even if I do think it somewhat pointless. Perhaps once I finish writing this, you might understand why I feel that way.
For scaly dragons, it must suck, because the scales would get in the way, unless they have pads. Now in mammals, pads are thick, essentially callouses, and so are also poor indicators of 'touch' however, mammals (such as dogs) have hairs between their toes to transmit delicate sensations (hence some dogs disliking having their feet touched). Of course, some dragons are feathered, or furred, but the same applies. Unless they have skin underneath as delicate and nerve laden as human skin then their relative sense of touch will also be lower than human norm.
Human norm in any case is a delicate issue in itself. Some individuals have very poor nerves in their hands, leading to both poor senses of fine touch, and motor control. On the other hand, other people may be able to distinguish words on a page of paper merely by stroking the surface of the sheet. Assuming human norm falls somewhere between these extremes (I know I can feel the imprint of printed text, but have no hope of distinguishing words), we can assume that most dragon forms would have below average human touch senses.
Unless you take additional structures into account. There are after all many dragons that have some form of magic, perhaps allowing access to several additional methods of sensing physicality, none of which I would like to try and describe. Or, alternatively, something like a whales, or a bats, 'sonar', allowing for gross overall shape and texture mapping without any need for actual physical contact. (Some accounts of blind humans being able to do this exist, along with some compelling video evidence to go with it), so it is well within the bounds of possibility.
Further, dragons with wings may be able to sense air currents and movement, or be able to stretch a wing membrane taught enough to act as a VERY large ear-drum, assuming there are suitable internal structures for the dragon to be able to translate air vibrations into intelligible 'sound' and further translate those sounds into a representation of the physical world based on the waveform of reflected noises as opposed to those directly created by background life/objects/wind.
This of course would not be possible for furred/feathered dragons, as the soft covering would baffle and disrupt the sounds further.
Such speculation about sonar type abilities would also tie into 'hearing' etc
One could simply say "Dragon A can sense things with his mind, and Dragon B can sense things by pinging it with Sonar, by making a pipping sound and receiving the echo via his wings, and Dragon C runs his claws over everything in order to better understand it", but this would ignore all the other, linked senses. A sonar using dragon may or may not have a heightened sense of hearing (being able to distinguish shapes with your ears does not mean you can understand opera any better), and/or a lowered ability to see, and depending on those factors, a greater or lesser sense of smell to go with it.
Without actually being able to study the animal in question, it becomes impossible to define those other senses based merely on the characteristics of one of them.
All in my opinion, of course. 
----------------------------
Speaking for myself, my past self, my dead and gone self now existing as a memory, in a human mind so far removed from my previous existence that it no longer even hurts, my flight capable, scaled, non-fire breathing, non-sentient carnivorous self had normal senses for his species. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, pack awareness. As to the relative strength of each of those, I cannot say. He could hunt well enough to live comfortably, reach adulthood, seek a mate, but missed detecting the creature that killed him until it was too late (A prey species I think, defending itself/territory or young. It had a horn on it's head for stabbing with (getting stabbed in a meditation memory doesn't hurt as such, but is as unpleasant indeed!), thick shaggy fur, and a temper but lacked obvious fangs or claws...)
How that creature compared in sensory ability to him, well, I will never know. He was too stupid to take note of those attributes, or, if he DID know them, *I* don't remember them. How those senses he possessed compare to my human ones, is also impossible to guess, being that I lack knowledge of the power of that worlds gravity, air composition, organic base etc, because I existed in an animal state.
We can make judgements about the life of this world, because as humans we have worked out many, if not most, of the rules about how this world, and the life on it, must function. Some things are still weird, deep ocean trenches hold many secrets about the origin of life, and parallel evolution in hostile environments, but even those have a set of rules upon which we can make some safe assumptions about how they perceive the world they live in, based on physics, and the environment we can perceive.
_________________
Prey, tell... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Wingstorm
Dragonstar
Joined: 09 Oct 2012
Posts: 3
|
| Posted: Mon 15 Oct 2012 5:17 Post subject: |
|
|
Hello Drakel
It's not easy to create a biological blueprint of a dragon, but there's some stuff around.
I try to give you a more or less detailed interpolation of a 30 foot dragon:
As far as old history sources tell, do dragons see in colour. It's possible that they even can see UV-light. Dragons should have a pretty good capability of night vision. Their pupils can reach approx 50 mm (2 inch) in diameter. If the light receptors in the eye are guessed to be as sensitive as human ones (100 photons per second to detect a light source in a dark night).
Compared to a human eye can a dragon eye collect about 60 times more light. That means, that a 30 foot dragon can see weaker light sources and has a sharper picture of his surrounding.
How sharp a dragon sees, is hard to estimate. Physically could a dragon eye see a difference of 0.2 arcseconds. A dragon eyes sees things 75 times sharper, than a human eye. Here is a big but. Here is not mentioned, how the brain processes the picture from the eyes. The human brain is not very good in that, thus the human eye has 120 megapixel (well, more or less). The human brain cuts down these 120 megapixel extremely. Probably to gain a softer picture with less noise from the light sensitive cells? I don't know. The dragon brain might behave in the same way.
If the dragon brain would use the full resolution a dragon could read a newspaper in 1 mile distance (including the small footnotes!). That is well over the vision capabilities of an eagle.
If a dragon has a mirrored backeye side is hard to say. Historical sources tell about „glowing eyes like a daemon“, so that could be pretty plausible.
The sense of taste is normally strongly connected to the sense of smell. How sensitive the tounge is, can't be said well. But dragons also knew, what tastes good and bad. It's said, that they even use herbs to better their meals.
The smelling sense ist definetly better than the human one, but not so good, than those of dogs.
Why does a dragon not burn himself when he breathes fire? The answer is pretty simple. A dragon isn't a gas burner, which fires for hours. A dragon can breathe fire for a few seconds. The burnable gas emits the dragon out of his mouth. The burning process takes place outside of his mouth. And the small amount of heat, that arches the inner of his mouth is compensated by the water, that can withstand the heat for this few seconds, outside do the scales and the thick skin its jobs.
In more or less reliable historical sources is not described, that a dragon breathes fire. That seems only in religion stuff.
Dragons do hear better than humans and that because of at least 2 features: First is the distance between the 2 dragon ears. The 2 human ears have a distance of approx 10 inch (30 cm). Physically can a human detect the source of a deep sound down to 100 Hz. At 80 Hz is it nearly impossible to localize the sound source. A 30 foot dragon could aim in the direction of a sound source below to 25 Hz (of course: If the dragon brain uses the same kind of timer than the human brain does to interpret sound signals).
Secondly is the covering of the ears. Western dragon have eye shields, eastern dragon have fur. This covering reduces the noise caused by wind extremely. For a dragon is that an important fact. It's very likely that dragons hear better in subsonic (below 30 Hz) than humans do. If they hear good in ultrasonic (above 20,000 Hz) is hard to say.
Dragons have a bad touch sense in general. That is the disadvantage of a thick skin and scales – a dragon is equipped almost as a knight.
Dragons are the only known creatures, which extend the lifetime-to-body-energy-ratio by far compared to the average known in nature. This ratio means that a bilogical organism has a limited lifetime, which is given by his body weigh, the energy consumption during his whole lifetime and the complete lifetime the organism has. That explains why flies live a few weeks and turtles for hundreds of years. The less energy they consume per day, the longer they live.
Dragons should theoretical get as old as ravens. But as we know do dragons live multiple times longer than those.
A human has a short time energy output of 2 kW (2.6 hp). The long time output during sports activities is approx 0.5 kW (0.8 hp) – that is the thermal and physical output. The human body is bad in converting food energy to mechanical energy – that is no wonder, because heat is the important power, that the human body has always to supply.
The power output of a dragon is of course much much higher. But the dragon body has the opposite problem of the human body. A human body has to warm itself constantly, except you do sports activities of you are in a very hot environment, like the Sahara Desert. A dragon body needs to cool down itself even if it's pretty cool around him.
Even dragons can have a power output of well above 500kW(700 hp), is the most astonishing possibility, that they use natural radioactive isotops in their food for generating energy. A 30 foot dragon eats about half a boar per day. As we know are dragons pretty active and some say, that the „standby“ energy output of a dragon is so enormous, that ice melts in a few feet distance around him. Dragons have to have an additional energy source than normal chemical food burning as the human body does. Such a high energy output can't be generated just by burning half a boar (approx. 700kWh or 2.4 mmBTU thermal energy).
Well, dragons are magical creatures. Probably there is an energy source, which we don't know yet.
I hope that's the stuff you wanna know ^^ |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Jaden
Global Moderator
Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 1000
Location: NC
|
| Posted: Sat 11 Feb 2017 7:25 Post subject: |
|
|
Thread Bump.
SDB is active again; come on back and join us!
_________________
The salmon sisters: bringers of justice, harbingers of the smelly fish <* )) ><
---Thanks to Dfangd for my new Avatar--again!!! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
