Generic Space Opera Bestiary: the Space Dragon

 

So, we have our space megapredators, but they don’t seem exactly like dragons, do they? They’re massive and they’re terrifying, but are they dragons? We could be more explicit with our dragons, couldn’t we? We could take actual dragon stats and apply them to space, right?

 

Space Dragons in GURPS Space

No, no we can’t. At least, not directly.

See, the problem is that Dragons aren’t realistic. Not even a little bit. None of the biology is even close to right. It’s purely a fairy-tale animal. Can we trim down some of the crazy, though, to make it biologically more plausible? Yes, a little, but then you begin to push at the edge of what a dragon is. Still, if we pull out our copy of GURPS Dragons in addition to GURPS Space, while we won’t come up with a biologically plausible dragon (better men than me have tried), we can see what we can learn about dragons.

First, where do dragons live? Such a massive creature implies “Plains,” but in myth, we tend to see them in “forbidden places:” mountains, jungles, forests and swamps and, in particular, in watery places (setting aside the rather unique medieval traditions of the dragon, most dragons seem to be water creatures, or associated with water on some level). If we’re going to claim fire-breathing and flight as a core component of dragon-ness, that suggests mountains, but a more plausible dragon might “just” be especially venemous and serpentine, which suggests the swamp or the jungle.

A dragon is certainly a predator, but what sort of predator? Probably a pouncing carnivore. If we assume a flying dragon, it tends to literally pounce, or at least dive on its prey. A lot of myths describe dragons as cunning and full of tricks, lurking just out of sight. All of that sounds like a pouncing predator to me.

Primary form of locomotion? Well, dragons have legs, so they walk. They seem to often associate with water, so they might swim. And, of course, they fly. They also end up in caves, but they don’t seem to create them, so they probably don’t dig. So, swimming, walking and flying. Incidentally, the “creature of three worlds” is something that comes up often in mythology, so that might explain the three different forms of locomotion.

As for size, we’re talking a Large creature. Yes, that’s utterly implausible for a winged flier. We’ll have to invoke something like psychokinesis or mutter something about caustic lighter-than-air gases which it breaths out and ignites to set others on fire, but never seems to hurt the dragon itself. The smallest GURPS DF Dragon is SM +3 (and ST 25), Medium is +4 (ST 35), Large is +5 (ST 50) and Giant is +6 (ST 75). Incidentally Template Toolkits suggests these ST values should be 35, 50, 75 and 100 respectively, and GURPS Space definitely finds these too light. This might suggest that dragons tend to be rather low in density or that DF is more conservative than necessary for its ST values (or that Space is overly heavy in its estimations).

Dragons have bilateral symmetry, of course, and they tend to have interesting tails, though Striker is by far the most common. Manipulators seem to be common as well: even the least dextrous dragons tend to have forepaws capable of some level of grip. We also expect them to have internal skeletons and heavy scales (DR 3+).

Are dragons warm-blooded? They’re distinctly reptilian, but I can’t find any templates in Dragons that uses cold-blooded. Indeed, I see a lot of increased consumption, which suggests a voracious metabolism, which fits with a creature capable of flight, rapid strikes and a burning heart that can spill forth fire from its maw. Even the tendency to settle down for a long slumber suggests some level of metabolism control.

Dragons are, of course, egg-laying. Everything seems to agree on that point. And given how very, very rare dragons seem to be, Strong-K is highly plausible.

Senses tends to vary, but dragons are supposed to be highly perceptive in most myths. Extraordinary vision fits with a flying predator: telescopic vision might be a nice touch. Hearing isn’t especially important, nor is touch (with all those scales they might have inferior sense of touch). Taste and smell seems typically very common: they seem to have pronounced nostrils in most depictions, and capable of sniffing out hobbits, though some dragons seem to taste the air with their tongue, like snakes do. Peripheral vision might be possible given some depictions; night vision seems a must-have, given all their lurking in caves, and IR vision might make sense, given their association with fire, or Ultravision if we associate them with the water and/or stars.

I should note that GURPS Space grudgingly admits that breath weapons are possible, but improbable. Poisonous sprays or poisonous spitting is quite plausible, or creating some form of flammable liquid and igniting it are possible too. However, blasts of plasma breath are probably beyond the biologically plausible. But we knew that going into this.

We expect dragons to be quite smart. They’re large, they have a K-strategy, they have extended lifespans, and while they’re not gathering herbivores or omnivores (though some dragons have universal digestion with matter eater) pouncing carnivores are often smart. This suggests the lowest IQ would be 3, 5 is very likely, and sapient dragons are entirely plausible. We would expect them to be loners, though.

This gives them a generic Psychological Profile of Chauvinism -1 (Broad-Minded), Concentration +2 (Single-Minded), Curiosity +1 (Curiosity), Egoism +2 (Selfish), Empathy +0, Gregariousness -2 (Loner), Imagination +2 (Imaginative, Dreamer) and Suspicion -1 (Fearlessness).

Generic Space Dragon Stats

You can use GURPS DF 4: Dragons, I suppose. The stats aren’t great for a variety of reasons, mostly because it has a strong focus on fantasy, and even the largest dragons are an amusing distraction to a TL 11 soldier, unsurprisingly, so we’d really want to change some things if we wanted them to be an interesting contest.

Variations

Lava Dragon

The first semi-plausible stab at a space dragon might be to toy with some alternate chemistries, or at least play at doing so. Space will grudgingly allow us to create Silocon-based life that is stable at much higher temperatures, so we can plausibly claim that a dragon might be a creature that is very comfortable at extraordinarily high temperatures. Of course, we wouldn’t want it to freeze solid at normal temperatures, so we might argue that it “merely” has a huge range of temperatures but that they tend towards very high levels (it might consider normal temperatures cold, and warm temperatures “a bit chilly” and cold temperatures lethally cold). This makes fire breath somewhat more plausible. It also means they could probably eat straight up minerals, as they have a furnace-like stomach, suggesting Universal Digestion (Matter Eater). Of course, this would require some rather intense teeth, but GURPS Space notes that organisms that incorporate metal armor isn’t implausible, so the minerals they eat could armor their teeth and skin. We might use this to justify an armor divisor (at least 2) on their teeth and claws, and give UT-levels of armor on their skin, if we wanted.

Of course, if we have a creature that eats rocks all day, what we have is the equivalent to an herbivore, not a pouncing carnivore, so it needs some sort of prey. Ideally, that prey would be human or human-like, as the problem with dragons is they keep eating all your cattle. So this starts to move us away from a strict silicon-based lifeform, as it would have no reason to tread on the bitterly cold surface world of frozen-solid rock, surrounded by the cold-chemistry of carbon-based life. How would it gain nourishment from them? I’ve seen rubber sci-fi works mutter something about the iron in blood but, first, that’s not how blood works and, second, there’s more iron in iron ore so… there needs to be something in carbon-based life that the lava dragon needs, which would probably be proteins, but those proteins would denature under its intense heat.

If we set all of that aside, we can plausibly keep a breath weapon: Acid (DFM4 p7), Fire (DFM4 p10), or Heat (DFM4 p10) are all plausible. We could go with Sulfuric Acid-based Life-form (TTK2 p20) though we’d want to give it lots of temperature tolerance to allow it to endure normal temperatures modestly well. We’d expect them to be much stronger, and far denser: a “Medium” DF dragon would go from the roughly 5000 lbs its implied to be to nearly 5 tons and clocks in at ST 45, which would give it claws that did something like 5d(2) cut, which isn’t too bad. We can plausibly multiply the DR by 5 (giving a medium dragon DR 30) and they’d start to fit decently into a UT environment. They were already too heavy to fly, but now they’re definitely too heavy to fly, so this would be more like a wyrm than a wyvern. We’d also give it highly acidic blood, which is both necesitated by its biology, and fits the idea of the burning lethality of dragon-blood. They would also react badly to water, which also fits certain dragon themes.

Venom Dragon

I suspect dragons were originally extraordinarily venemous. The hydra certainly was, and most of your early medieval monsters were more venemous than fiery. I suspect somewhere along the line the metaphorical burning of venom turned into the literal burning of fire and we got the fire drake. If we return to that original concept, what we end up with is a dragon whose bite (or breath) is lethal. If we keep the long, serpentine neck, the sinuous form, the powerful tail, we get a giant, venomous lizard; if we put it into a swamp, we get an amphibious super-predator. The swamp has the biomass necessary to support it, the shape is ideal for snaking through all sort of heavy undergrowth, the sprawling posture is ideal for shifting between water and land with ease, and the venom allows it to kill its prey without a fight, and then its size allows it to dominate the corpse, preventing other scavengers from getting at it until it has finished its kill.

In short, this is just a run-of-the-mill, completely plausible megapredator. We’d replace the fire breath with a poison gas or mist breath (DFM4 p8). There’s nothing here that makes flying more plausible, though.

Wyvern

If you really want a flying dragon and you want it to be remotely plausible, you need to optmize the creature around flight. Most dragons are designed as clearly land animals with wings pasted on. Only the wyvern seems optimized to fly and more closely resembles the pteradon in size and construction. You might even plausibly give it a breath attack as a hunting strategy, especially if its a poison mist or cloud: the wyvern swoops down, spreads its poison over an area, waits on a nearby perch, and then once the mist clears, goes and eats whatever it killed.

Such a wyvern would need pretty limited. It wouldn’t have the weight budget for heavy scales (but we might plausibly say they have extremely lightweight, but hard scales, something like a naturally occuring ceramic) and it wouldn’t need a lot of power to fight a target head on. It needs to spend a lot of its metabolism on creating all of that poison gas, but you can fit a lethal cloud of nerve gas in a pretty small container, so a sufficiently large creature could pull it off with a single gland, but you’re likely talking about one single shot of the breath attack a day, and it would need some pretty intense defenses against its own attack. But this pushes at the edges of plausibility too.

Magical Space Dragons

Okay, but how do we make implausible dragons plausible? How do we make giant dragons that fly, have nuclear breath, shapeshift into humans, and so on? Well, you don’t, and you don’t worry about it that much. This is, after all, space opera, and in space opera we don’t really stop and ask why people don’t make guns that shoot lightsaber bullets, or talk at length of the economic sustainability of death stars vs relativistic kill missiles. So why not space dragons?

If people really, really need some sort of underlying reason, there’s some:

Psionic Space Dragons: This is really just another way of saying they’re magic. It’s not fire-breath, it’s pyrokinesis. It’s not implausible flight, it’s wing-assisted TK levitation. It’s not implausibly tough scales, it’s scale-assisted PK shield, and so on. Such dragongs are likely highly intelligent, sport psychic crystlas in the middle of their brow, and speak to others with their minds. We might even make them a nexus of the force Communion, somehow, as deeply symbolic creatures whose very biology is steeped in psychic power, which explains why they’re so rare, and why their bones and scales and teeth are such valuable reagants and materials for space sorcery and necromantic technologies.

Engineered Dragons: Much of the less plausible elements of a dragon go away if they’re biotech constructs. They have scales that can stand up to blaster fire because they’re nano-carbide armor that’s grown rather than manufactured. They have optimized muscular power with optimally constructed bones for lightness, allowing them to exert a great deal of force for their size and weight, which makes flight much more plausible. They have the ability to collect caustic, flammable chemicals and spill them forth not because of ferocious evolution, but because someone designed them that way. Who would design them that way? Why design a dragon like that and not, say, a tank? Well, it’s not important. What matters is that a dragon is a lot more plausible when you put away your GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 4, and pick up Biotech instead.

Literal Space Dragon: I don’t really want to address this here, because space monsters literally in space deserves its own post. We already touched on space whales, and we could have space serpents that feed on them. Flight isn’t an issue in zero-G, and solar-sail “wings” make sense. Similarly, ranged attacks make sense given the distances involved. I don’t think such a creature would look much like a dragon, though, certainly not with a “top” and a “bottom” as that’s not especially relevant, and it wouldn’t need legs that allowed it to walk around on land. It would probably look more like a winged space eel than a space dragon.