Okay, I took a quick scroll through my doc to check dragon sizes/lengths and here's a quick few notes from the books: Yellow Reapers are normally 50 feet long, with an 80 foot wingspan. Temeraire is noted to be 20 feet shorter than Maximus, who as a Regal Copper is at most 120 feet long, but also that's mentioned in the second book and I'm pretty sure Temeraire is noted to have grown longer after? As of the second book he is also 30 feet high, but I'm not sure how that's measured. In the fifth book he is also mentioned to have eyes half a foot across, and his (serrated) teeth are the size of a man's hand at smallest. I would link the Google Doc as future reference but I've been intending to update it for years because I definitely missed some notes on my last reread.
oh thank you!! i'll try to use the measurements to see what that'd look like. and if you ever finish up that doc i'd love to see it!
if it might help, after a quick search a yellow reaper would be roughly equal in size to a Boeing 80 (56ft length and 80ft wingspan)
A regal copper is close to a Boeing 737 Classic (102-120ft length, weight 32-35 tons)
(note the door size)
oh, we are fully aware of how unrealistic the weights are. dragon biology is very clearly not novik's strength. this fandom is full of nerds, we know. i was just trying to figure out their sizes so i would know how to draw them. i am also a bit of a paleontology nerd, so i do know about the biggest pterosaurs and that they weighed waaaaayyy less. we weren't even talking about the weight, but the length in this post.
i hope you didn't mean to come off as rude/annoying, because this comes off as if you think we don't know anything about the subject. i'm a know-it-all in recovery myself, and now it's time for me to be a bit of an annoying know-it-all;
it would have been more appropriate to make your own post to complain about the dragon weights, and we would probably have complained with you. it's fandom etiquette to not be negative on other people's posts
I know it's not the point, but honesty the easiest Watsonian explanation for me is that the characters in the novel are simply vastly overestimating their dragons weight. Weighing something that big is very difficult and the infrastructure to build a scale that big very expensive. So it's likely that the weight was calculated based on measurements and data from smaller creatures and guesswork initialy, and over time this "weight" became common knowledge passed down as the truth. Something that big being very heavy also feels right and intuitive to people - even if it's wrong - so most people wouldn't question it. That also makes it less likely for updated more accurate models to catch on - it just feels wrong.
Add in the fact that dragons are highly politically important and a source of national pride and there is probably litte actual desire to admit that your dragons are a lot smaller that previously expected. And in the end it doesn't really matter that much to most people working with dragons anyway, everything has already been calculated and built with the inflated weight in mind and based on experience everyone knows what a "6 ton" vs a "30 ton" dragon looks like so why change it. Later on when the real weight is conclusively found it probably only causes the weight to split into something like "Actual Dragon weight" and "Dragon Ton class" or something.
yeah, i've been thinking along the same lines! it's funny way to explain the problem.
i'm not sure how, or if, they weighed things that big back in the day. i guess water displacement would be a possible way? if you have a big pool with a known amount of water.
