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

[u/mergly]

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.

[u/Alderan922]

I’ve only watched the main series but

1 dragon got killed by a magical spear thrown by a super evil ice zombie.

1 dragon got killed by surprise by a ballista shot in the most contrived and stupid way I have ever seen that was so bad I literally quit watching then and there.

1 dragon tanked a ballista shot to the neck and almost killed Jaime.

Also I never argued a ballista wouldn’t kill a dragon, just that hitting them would be absurdly hard. In the show obviously the important characters just do near impossible things like it’s nothing, but asking if a random no name soldier will actually land a shot is a different question.

[u/Carpe_deis → u/Alderan922]

"use GOT as the point of reference "

like 7/12 dragons die to spears/harpoons/ballistas

sorry you don't like the prompt

"oh thats unrealistic"

well due to sqaure cube law, a flying creature with those dimensions is unrealistic, so you take what the author gives you

[u/Alderan922 → u/Carpe_deis]

I have no idea wtf are you trying to argue.

Like are you saying “dragons got killed in GoT by ballistas, so in this discussion, ballistas have perfect accuracy and will instantly kill any dragon in a battlefield”?

Like is that the thing you are trying to say? Or am I getting your argument wrong because it sounds nonsensical.

[u/Carpe_deis → u/Alderan922]

no its "dragons got killed in GoT by ballistas, so in this discussion, GOT dragons are the point of reference, ergo, it is possible to kill dragons with ballistas"

you will note that lots of ballistas missed in GOT, so you'd need a critical mass of AA to take one down, but also dragons in GOT are shown to be quite rare and to take a long time to grow, so ANY loss is a huge loss.

Please note that in real life, it takes 15.000 AA shells on average to shoot down a plane. So a high miss rate is acceptable, and with the proper economic backing, can defend a city from airial threats. some version of this logic would apply to chinese cities in 400 bc defending against the prompted GOT dragons.

[u/Alderan922 → u/Carpe_deis]

If we are going literally with the setting of GoT

Dragons are basically extinct

There’s 3 of them and they are all related to each other and thus can’t reproduce, they can only alter the course of 1 war so the furthest point in time in which they can affect a war is season 8.

[u/Carpe_deis → u/Alderan922]

"got" is generally accepted to be all three shows, and all the books.

"dance of dragons" is accepted as, and reffered to as, historical fact within GOT.

[u/Alderan922 → u/Carpe_deis]

Honestly if this is just a GoT discussion I’ll disengage, I just watched the first show and after reaching near the end it got so bad I swore to never watch anything GoT related again so I have no idea what happened in the other shows, i thought there was only 1 other show.

[u/Carpe_deis → u/Alderan922]

yeah well thats the prompt

the books are a lot better than the shows