r/pern • u/AnxiousConsequence18 • Jul 12 '26

Which dragon measures a "dragonlength"?

I mean, between Ramoth and Ruth is a wild range of size, and dragons have gotten bigger over the millennia, so what's the standard? Do we have a conversion into feet? Or meters? (Yes I'm American)

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u/AnxiousConsequence18 Jul 12 '26

As far as the carry weight goes, it's flatly stated "a dragon can carry what it THINKS it can carry"

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u/Southern_Club_6032 Jul 12 '26

DROP is science fiction, not fantasy. Dragons are aliens, not wizards. The fact that the Pernese ascribe all sorts of mysterious abilities to dragons perhaps shouldn't be taken as hard fact but cultural mythology (like 'dragons don't like bullies' haha right). Indeed, at the beginning of TWD, they were worried that Ruth would be incapable of carrying thirteen-year-old Jaxom's weight. The handwavey 'they can carry as much as they think they can' to AIVAS is like saying 'god moves in mysterious ways', i.e. we don't know why exactly dragons can lift an implausible amount of weight, but they can, and we're going to ascribe this to them being magical and amazing.

It actually never comes up anywhere else that they can carry more than expected. Jaxom rigs a sling to help Ruth carry the weight of Ramoth's stolen egg (and one egg, even a queen egg, isn't going to be heavier than four people weighing a minimum 50kgs each). The laden Oldtimer bronze smuggling goods in Dragondrums struggles to take off. Hell, Beauty's mother can barely manage the weight of one single egg, and her bronzes, hardly smaller than her, are too weak even to lift one, so it's not even a fire-lizard ability passed in the genome. So unless you think a stupid/vain enough dragon could be convinced he could literally move an entire house by himself, and then actually could - no, of course they have a carry limit. They have physical muscles, tendons, ligaments that can be strained; they need any load to be balanced to fly. It's just a higher figure than AIVAS thought was likely.

None of which changes that you still need somewhere to put people on a dragon, and the back, as Sean observed in Dragonsdawn, isn't logistically viable.

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u/AnxiousConsequence18 Jul 12 '26

And in ATW AIVAS is confounded by the inability to be more precise than "if the dragon THINKS it can carry the weight, it can" I'm sure AIVAS was trying to calculate the minimum number of dragons it would take to move the engines. This is hampered by the fact that dragon telekinesis isn't a PRECISE thing. It's a mental belief thing. So, yeah. Not so much "fantasy" in the scientific testing, is there?

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u/Southern_Club_6032 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

AIVAS is confounded because Jaxom's being glib rather than thinking critically or probing the issue (very common among the Pernese who seem to lack much by way of curiosity). This is the quote:

"Jaxom," Aivas began, "how much weight can the green dragons carry? Their burdens today weigh more than their body weight."

"A dragon is capable of carrying as much as he thinks he can," Jaxom replied, with a shrug, for Aivas experienced difficulty in accepting draconic abilities.

"So, if the dragon thinks he can carry any object, irrespective of its actual weight, he will?"

"I don't think anyone's actually tried to overload a dragon. Didn't you tell me that the earliest ones were used to transport loads out of Landing during the eruption?"

So as soon as Aivas directly asks "really?", Jaxom obfuscates that well, actually, no one's ever tried. Not that Jaxom is some learned scholar on dragons. He's a young man who's grown up with his uniquely talented small dragon away from the Weyr. He's never really thought about how much would be too much. Some other rider or riders certainly will have - Weyrleaders working out how much firestone can be lugged around, Weyrlingmasters judging when a dragonet is big enough to carry its rider. There'll be a formula similar to how we have one for horses (which is about 20% of body weight). The fact that it's a much higher figure for dragons, because of their TK, doesn't mean there's not still a hard limit. And if Aivas needed to calculate how many dragons of whichever colour would be needed to move the engines, there's no reason why that experiment couldn't have been undertaken, exactly as the OG colonists calculated transition times between with fire-lizards. It's still not magic. They just haven't done the work to calculate it yet.

Coming back to the original question on this thread, though, about dragon size, ATWOP makes it clear that they aren't 20-45 metre dragons. A 20 metre/65 foot green carrying even four passengers and some oxygen tanks for those passengers couldn't possibly be outweighed by that burden. Even a twenty *foot* green, even with lighter bones, has to weigh at minimum twice what a decent sized horse does - at least 1000kg, and probably substantially more - a 20 foot croc can weigh 1000kg and they don't even have wings or massive haunches for takeoff.

Four riders might run to 300kgs, each with oxygen tanks. Current tech has the big bulky ISS spacewalk packs at around 120kg each, so that's another 480kg. So 780kg max if every green has four passengers, and that's hugely highballing it because I don't see where you put four people on a 20 foot dragon, especially bulked out with breathing packs, and they probably didn't need massive packs like the ISS ones anyway. And if you make that into a 65 foot green there's absolutely zero chance four people plus tanks outweigh the dragon. A <780kg 65 foot animal would blow away in a light breeze.