At best, methane - or even hydrogen or helium - would only give a dragon about 8% more buoyancy. Some have claimed that it’s possible that dragons produce fire that way, which we might get into in another article, but even taking that into account it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. I even took into account that it could be possible for a dragon to build up gas inside its body, like methane, a naturally produced organic chemical. There is no way that I rationalize a dragon like Alduin flying without some sort of magic involved. In fact, to make up for that loss, the dragon’s wings would probably have to stretch down the length of its tail. In fact, if you take a look at my size comparison chart below, you can see that his wingspan is about 9.75m and his wings as far from estimated 39m2 of surface area to make up for the lost wingspan. This means that to maintain a similar glide ratio Alduin would have to have a wingspan at about three times that of Kyle Hill’s batman scenario.Īny picture of Alduin will show you that he doesn’t have a 16.5m wingspan. My rough estimations first put Alduin at about three times the mass of a human. He postulated that the wingspan would have to be 5.6m to carry a 95kg man at a 7.5m glide ratio. The science editor over at Nerdist, Kyle Hill, talked about something similar in his episode of Because Science about Batman’s suit. So my math was going to revolve around how the mass of a dragon like Alduin couldn’t sustain flight because the surface area of the wings just wasn’t big enough. A good hang glider will have the glide ratio of 15m and something like a glide suit will have a ratio of 2.5m.
This is the number of meters that a winged object could travel horizontally before it falls one meter toward the earth. So let’s science the shit out of Skyrim dragon flight! Glide ratio However, it was Alduin that made me question a few things. There is no way that tiny guy should be able to fly unless his wings were the shape and speed of a hummingbird. There is no way a dragon that big could exist let alone fly, but there are also tiny dragons that shouldn’t exist either like Spyro. And by in large, I was wrong because of a little world-eating monster called Alduin from Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.īear in mind that there certainly situations in dragon lore where I am completely correct. All you dragon lovers out there will be happy to know that I was wrong about the latter part and only halfway wrong about the first part.
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