Odahviing got captured using a giant yoke. Of course it helps that he could be convinced not to eat you after being released.
What, you want me to solve everything? Bellerophon did it by riding a flying horse, and after peppering it with darts first, to distract it.
Next you’ll want me to tell you where to get the flying horse.
That’s easy. You go down to the Pirene Flying Horse dealership to get one.
That also spoils my idea, which is similar: vying “scorched earth” strategies. He burns my crops? I kill all the prey animals in his range. We both starve, but he’s bigger, so he’ll starve first. The survivors of my people can then begin re-planting.
In combat? Arrows. Ballista were mentioned; we could modify one to throw a scattering of lighter bolts.
A thrown net, or a strung net between trees, might also work. Entangle the puppy, then beat him to death with clubs.
If we’re essentially at a pre-gunpowder level of tech here and dealing with an intelligent flying flamethrower, he will quite likely burn our cities as well as our crops and there will be little we will be able to do about it. If he has sufficiently good night vision to permit him to make night attacks, has has us completely scrod.
From Glory Road:
[QUOTE=Robert Heinlein]
There are only four places to put an arrow into a Nevian dragon; the rest is armored like a rhino only heavier. Those four are his mouth (when open), his eyes (a difficult shot; they are little and piggish), and that spot right under his tail where almost any animal is vulnerable. I had figured that an arrow placed in that tender area should add mightily to that “itching, burning” sensation featured in small ads in the backs of newspapers, the ones that say, AVOID SURGERY!
[/QUOTE]
What kind of lair does the dragon have?
I was thinking about stringing cable across to slow the dragon down as he leaves, and then shoot with ballista while he’s stopped (since normal ballista use would be too inaccurate). Then I remember medieval tech, so I doubt you’d have steel cable, just rope that would burn easily. Maybe not fast enough to prevent the ballista assault.
Then I thought about pouring pitch on the dragon as he leaves. Not to kill him, but to slow him down so he can’t fly, allowing knights on horseback to attack in a pincer and, presuming the lances can penetrate the hide, kill the dragon that way. You might have better luck with a weighted net rather than pitch though.
Or, while the dragon is out and burninating the countryside, sneak into his lair, wait for him to return, and then peg him in the vulnerable eye as he’s laying down to nap. Dunno if that violates the “fight” constraint.
The hard part, IMHO, is not the intelligence or the firebreathing, but the flight. If you can’t hit the dragon and he can wing you, he’s going to win a fight. That means getting him to ground (or at least trapped).
Send him bundles of giant cigarettes. Eventually he’ll die of lung cancer.
Ah, the Gary Larson method.
Load elephants with the best explody stuff you have, or failing that with barrels of pitch. Light the barrels on fire, and drive the elephants into the lair.Backup teams of elephants deliver materials to further stop up the lair. Hope for death by asphyxiation.
Alternate plan: if there’s one dragon, there’s two dragons. Recruit a dragon to help you kill the one you want dead.
I’d got the Roman route, I think the Scorpio - a light ballista, basically, would be ideal for this sort of task. You’d want lots, though, and you’d want groups of them spaced at distances so he can’t just land and eat everyone at once.
So the dragon gets strength, flight, flames, intelligence, armor, and poison immunity. And we get rocks.
Why don’t you go whole hog and say the dragons get high potency acid for blood and can adapt to any environment. And swim real good.
Meh. I say just blow it out the airlock.
Yeah, at this point the wyrm has all the cards. Our best bet for continued survival is to hope that, since it is intelligent, we can persuade it to accept tribute in return for not destroying us. We’re a bunch of primitive, agricultural screwheads and it is a flying, armored, self-directing flame weapon. It will burn our crops, eat our cattle, burn our farms, burn our cities, and fly at will around the kingdom faster than we can react. We have nothing faster than a horse, no gunpowder based weapons, and no reliable methods of communicating quickly even at battlefield distances.
If it will not accept tribute, we’re finished living in whatever territory it has decided to claim.
This is why I say we recruit another dragon. One thing dragons almost never have is the ability to cooperate with one another. If we can convince another dragon that we serve it, we might replace one wyrm-tyrant with another. And if we’re very good at it, when our wounded victorious ally comes home and demands we tend to its wounds, that’s when we fall on it with our spears.
What do we have to offer the hypothetical second dragon that it will desire enough to fight one of its own kind to gain it? Why do we not just offer that as tribute to the one that is already destroying us?
Will any dragon do or are you looking at a particular one?
If you looking to scrap with Tiamat, well, good luck with that.
Hell, those dragons from Reign of Fire triggered an apocalypse.
The treasure of the first dragon. Our annual tribute. Also, that first dragon called the second dragon a bastard offspring of a garden snake and a chihuahua, so he might want to do something about that.
While I commend your attempt to have some kind of solution, we are just about exactly in the position of a nest of mice trying to persuade one cat to do battle with another cat on our behalf. Hell, to an intelligent dragon we probably aren’t even just food…we are vermin. Maybe we are more like the rats in my cellar trying to convince you to kill me on their behalf so that you can have my stuff and their eternal gratitude.
Note: I don’t actually have rats in my cellar.
No, we should also give the dragons a fully social nature (that is, amongst each other). And telepathy.
If we require no magic, anything that can fly is going to be somewhat fragile. There are just physical limits on how big and bulky a flying animal can be. There have been flying animals bigger than today’s birds, but not all that much bigger. I have a hard time seeing anything getting much heavier than a person. Nothing elephant sized certainly.
At that point, bows are the way to go.
I could also imagine a ground-based animal, maybe with some vestigial wings, that could be very dangerous. Something like an elephant or hippo, with pretty tough skin, is hard to kill anyways. Throw in some fire breathing and things get dicy. You’re probably running something like that over a cliff, and if it’s intelligent I bet that’s a lot harder to do.