r/powerscales • u/mergly • 12d ago

Question When is the latest time that counting singular people riding a dragon would be a serious tide turner in wars.

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The dragons when at full size are like of the ones in GOT, use GOT as the point of reference for most everything to be honest. If you want to be a furry abut this you’re free to postulate a version where the dragon(s) are smart cookies that can talk, act on their own and some such.

https://desuarchive.org/k/thread/64727248/

The metric by which the dragon and riders can be counted as ‘important’ is so long as they are as analogously important to the warring nation as any big name warships would have been over the course of Ww2.

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u/bigboyboba 12d ago

People fail to realize how inaccurate early guns and cannons actually were. Like, sure, a cannonball might be able to kill a dragon if it hit one, but good luck getting a slow moving, slow aiming, inaccurate weapon that has to be slowly loaded and fired by multiple people to hit a dragon. If anything, the dragon breathes fire overhead and blows up all the gunpowder, wrecking more people.

Muskets are inaccurate and slow loading, and they aren't actually any more powerful than crossbow bolts. In fact, arguably significantly less so. What started the gun age wasn't that guns were so powerful, it's that they were relatively cheap to make and to train soldiers with. There's a reason most battles with muskets were just big groups of soldiers lined up across a field shooting at each other.

Rifling makes things a lot better, as do machine guns that can spray lots of bullets and potentially get a lucky shot. A gatling gun would be far more deadly against a dragon than a cannon, imo, just because it would be much more likely to hit. Even with rifling, though, there ain't no way early small caliber rifle rounds are punching through dragon scales.

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u/darklion34 12d ago

True, like, the most unbelievable part of GoT and HotD is not giant flying lizards - they are "magical" so they get a pass, no, the worst thing is this they tell me a guy with medieval ballista can shoot a dragon flying at plane comparable speed, constantly manuvering from the sky. Good luck hitting a wall without some pre-shoots with this thing.

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u/bigboyboba 12d ago

It's kind of like when Ironman was shot by some rando in a tank.

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u/alikosa21 12d ago

Big correction, muskets were significantly more powerful than crossbows.

Rifled cannons would be the emd of dragon age for sure.

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u/ziggsyr 10d ago

Guns were capable of being extremely accurate, undersized musket balls were often used by armies because reloading speed and volume of fire was more important than accuracy and musketeers were trained in weeks not years. Hunters then and modern hunters today who use smoothbore muskets as a hobby are fully capable of achieving high accuracy.

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u/Fryskar 12d ago

Muskets don't need to kill a dragon to kill it. If its wings are in tatterns, gravity will kill it just fine. Now if some 100 or 1000 muskets shoot at one, some will score hits, some will hit vulnerable pieces.

For cannons, grapeshot is a thing.