How to Fight a Dragon

Question—is gunpowder an option? Not guns. Not rockets. Just actual gunpowder? Because by the middle of the medieval period, gunpowder is readily available first in China, and then the Islamic world.

One book I read, The Hunting of the Last Dragon, which features a dragon not unlike the one that Sabre's Edge has been describing (and the one we sort of have to assume we're dealing with, since if this is Darthlaxyl nobody's getting out alive), and it's killed with gunpowder. The protagonist, Jude, and his girlfriend, Jing-Wei, load up a kite with gunpowder and fly it into the entrance of the dragon's cave. The dragon exhales on the kite, and the gunpowder explodes. The dragon's left crippled, and Jude finishes it off with a sword.

The dragon in question was about a tonne or so in size, flew at a trackable speed, and was not especially intelligent, so it sounds like the dragon Sabre's Edge at least has been describing, and the plan sounds plausibly workable to me.

Clever enough. You could also use the powder to cause a cave in or landslide and let the tons of earth and stone do the dirty work.

Uh...well, let's start with the fact that blackpowder is a really shitty explosive. It's great as a low-tech propellant, but its explosive qualities are rather lacking.

To get a meaningful, dragon-hurting bang you'd have to pack the stuff tightly into a solid shell. And it'd be pretty heavy.

A kite capable of carrying a meaningful "warhead" would be too big to be practical. A kite of reasonable size wouldn't be more than a firecracker.

Keep in mind that I don't have the book in question in front of me. That said, if memory serves, the powder was inside a clay vase and may have had bits of scrap metal shrapnel mixed in as well. When the dragon set fire to the kite and ignited the powder he turned the vase into a grenade, and shredded his own wings.

The dragon in question was, it should be noted, a fairly reasonable size—two cows I think. And the first grenades, capable of killing people, did go into use in the 1200s.

Wish I had the damn book here with me, since I don't think I'm doing it justice.

edited 24th Sep '15 8:58:57 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

If a dragon is that vulnerable to an explosive like gunpowder, there are going to be other, less time-intensive ways to kill it.

Tuefel, you might know what I'm about to say, yeah?

Chemical weapons. Dragon's gotta eat and drink and breathe, right?

no. nononononononono.

we covered medieval chemical weapons in the dragon balloon thread. Short answer: the best you can do with medieval weapons is light it on fire, and dragons are almost by definition fire proof.

A Dragon's metabolism and the fact that they run on magic than sense means that any poison would be hit and miss at best.

Irritants might work but you'd also piss it off.

And some dragons, particularly the flightless variety, tend to be venomous, or even have toxic blood. Generally, I'd say you shouldn't use fire against a fire-breathing dragon, and should probably avoid poison when dealing with a venomous one, but when dealing with magical creatures it's not it's even as cut-and-dried as that (as many people have already noted a lot of the discussion in this thread is highly dependent on the kind of dragon under discussion).

Someone earlier did suggest the use of poison bait, which isn't a bad idea, though if it works it makes for a pretty dull climax to your story.

Okay, so B. and C. are out, and A. is probably not an option. A. ...isn't an option, right?

Except, wait. Even if a dragon's liver and heart are top-of-the-line, what about their immune system? Human immune systems are... well, kickass, in the animal world, and we catch a couple of colds a year.

...no, hang on. I can't confirm that; I've been banging my non-biologist head against it for a half-hour on Google, and I'm getting nowhere. At the very least, we outlive pathogenic mutations, and not all animals have our lifespan - even 40 years is ancient for most species. Larger animals seem to have some trouble adapting as well as smaller ones, for simple reasons like their heads are kept at different levels...

A flying dragon would be susceptible to ground-based pathogens, I think. Force-feeding it ten pounds of our sh*t would be hazardous for its health. (And, uh, for the poor guy who has to actually do the feeding.)

So, question. How much era-appropriate sewage-soaked firepower would it take to give a dragon the worst infection it's ever had? Or, uh, should we just assume they have the immune system necessary to ignore all that?

The unexpectedly pragmatic solution (either what seems best in-story or is just convenient for the writer) can be a proper climax on its own, done right. Ending with an Anti-Climax is a well-established means of leading up to a resolution. "Oh hey, turns out the Martians don't have an appropriate immune response to our rhinovirus," for example. "I did it 35 minutes ago," for another. As long as the story itself follows the three acts design, there will be a "climax"; "dull" is a problem with the writer, not the plot devices they happened to use.

edited 26th Sep '15 10:40:38 PM by DeusDenuo

(spews milk across screen) hold on, lets back up here. You are proposing to fight a dragon: with a sewage gun?

That does not work on multiple levels.

1: How are you gonna deliver pathogens? Arrows dipped in plague victims might work, but then your gonna get your self sick and arrows have a number of problems hitting dragons as we covered earlier.

2: Even if you do get a dragon sick with Ebola it's not gonna keel over dead instantly.

3: and lastly and most crushingly Dragons are likely most closely related to Crocodiles for a number of reasons (such as there false palate that keep water out of there throats and in dragons keeps fire out of theirs), and Crocodiles have Kick ass immune systems.

While I appreciate the imaginative nature of the proposed solution, there's a few potential issues with it.

1) As the poster states, it's not gonna die immediately, which means the poor bastard who delivers the pathogenic load is essentially a dead man.

2) We're dealing with a time period in which people's understanding of disease transmission is loose at best. The odds of the people involved infecting themselves is therefore pretty solid.

3) We're mammals, a dragon is, more or less, a reptile, and many diseases are host or at least taxa specific. Today, we might be able to figure out which disease is appropriate to try and infect it with, but in the middle ages, they'd have no way to determine that.

4) There was a case where a crazed Siberian tiger devoured the contents of an entire town's outhouse, yet survived. If a tiger, which is a) non-magical, and b) a mammal like us, can do that and live through it with no visible signs of illness, I don't like the odds of poisoning the dragon this way.

If gunpowder is optional, could suicide bombing be an application?

...I'm being serious. It's safe to assume that the inside of the dragon's mouth or throat would be very vulnerable. If someone were to carry a large amount of explosives(say, old-school clay pots filled with gunpowder) in a sack, lit one, let the dragon eat them so it would explode inside the dragon.

Admittedly, there is a lot of problems with this. Like finding someone to volunteer...

I don't know if it's possible to do, but it would definitely make for a hilarious/sad ending depending on the direction you were taking the book, and how you decided to play it.

Hurling a barrel of gunpowder into a dragon's mouth might work. Depending on the mix of the powder, the size of the barrel, and the scale of the dragon you could knock it out like a boxer taking a haymaker to the chin or turn the teeth and most of the jaws into a shower of shrapnel.

@Dragon - a "sewage gun" is a whole heck of a lot better an image than I had! I want to be able to use that in a FPS. (It would probably sound more like a Nerf gun than a laser, though, all "pootpoot" instead of "pewpew".)

But yes, why not? It's a (ahem) by-product of existing practices, so materials and production aren't going to be a problem. If the only impediment to a solution is awareness that it exists, it's possible to work a narrative towards it. I've said it before, but an unlikely solution is the hardest to prevent.

The easiest way to introduce an infection to the bloodstream (assuming dragons have blood and a vascular network at all) is intravenously or through inhalation. I'm thinking, some sort of vapor or, yes, contaminated arrows. Predators may evolve to be invulnerable to the strength of their prey, but I'm not familiar with a case in which large surface predators are physically unable to hurt each other (due to how territorial disputes work). So, I take this as there being a threshold of force that will pierce dragon skin, and that being the case there's a way to make Annoying Arrows stick, yeah?

Croc blood is also that way due to needing to survive their habitats (which, as you know, is hospitable to microorganisms), and while I'll concede the point, I thought we were talking about land dragons and not a Dragon!Kraken. There's not much reason for a land-based dragon to have an aquatic-evolved immune system, and even then it's not perfect and can be overwhelmed. That said, with enough lifespan, a dragon would probably have a kickass adaptive immune system as well.

(This does open the door for a dragon's blood-based panacea... Might be a good reason to kill the dragon in the first place. I feel like I've seen that already done though.)

@Ambar - 2) You'd be surprised at how well people can make casual connections between sewage and disease. The earliest toilets date from 2800-2600 BC - the Romans certainly had them - and we're probably discussing an era in AD.

3) Some are, most aren't. Why try to pinpoint a single disease that might work, when you have a steaming pile of them?

4) For every tiger that's torn apart an outhouse and didn't die, there's at least a few billion organisms that have died from a lesser infection.

If you have gunpowder, you necessarily have the technology to launch something with it, and it's more a question of materials and cost. I can't see this as the easy, most probable solution.

I seriously doubt that a dragon would be susceptible to human pathogens given that we have a hard time finding appropriate non-human animal models for numerous diseases. For both species to be able to get the disease they need to have a certain degree of homology. Pathogens tend to specialize at interacting with specific host proteins to either avoid detection or gain entry to cells. Dragons and humans are going to have a very distant most common ancestor and therefor will not have a lot of homology.

Which is why, if it turns out that there is something that can jump species, the dragon isn't likely to have much resistance to it. I think this level of thought about it is more academic than any setting we'd be talking about could be capable of; a real-world justification for something the in-story characters couldn't have known.

Eh. I've been imagining the whole situation as being something that someone came up with in-story as a last, desperate act. Or, in a more comical take, a deliberate anti-climax - the party spends the whole story preparing for a last battle with the dragon... which then dies of septic shock as soon as they reach it. Comedy if they just needed to kill the dragon to get past it (and spent a month preparing an intricate plan), tragedy if there was a pressing need to harvest the dragon.

Actually black powder can and does pack quite a bit of punch even as a low explosive. When used for demolitions they used several barrels in the right spot. You don't need large quantities to cause serious or even lethal harm to living things with explosives especially because of how blast waves behave. Even compact black powder devices called petards were potent explosives used to breach fortress entry ways packed a fair bit of punch. Even medieval siege engineers could make good use of black powder charges when given the chance.

Most caves are not exactly built with structural integrity and many overhangs pack a lot of loose earth or stones. Some well placed black powder charges could bring the whole thing down. Inside the cave even if it didn't collapse a dozen barrels of powder going off at once would be like being trapped in a cannon behind the cannon ball when the powder went off. The cave would magnify and focus the blast likely pulverizing anything inside. The more compact the cave space the worse the effect is. This is why setting off even relatively small explosions at a cave mouth can kill everyone inside.