Could dragons ever really defeat the military?

[Iroscato]

In the latest version of this scenario, dragons are discovered by a mining expedition somewhere in the USA. The initial colony consists of approximately 10,000 dragons, each having been in hibernation for several centuries before being awoken by the prying machines of man. They vary in size, speed, intelligence and strength, though even the weakest requires a sustained barrage of firepower to slow down, let alone kill. The largest and most common (making up 60% of the total population), at 30-40 metres long, have scales impervious to gunfire smaller than that found mounted on an F-22, and are capable of flying at speeds of around 300 miles per hour. Their manouverability is roughly on par with that of a Supermarine Spitfire, proportianate to their size. The rest range from 8 - 30 metres and their durability and power is scaled appropriately.

Every dragon possesses the abilities commonly found in legend and literature: fire-breathing, a lust for gold and jewels, the ability to fly and a deeply-ingrained superiority complex.
Though every dragon aims to climb the ladder and eventually be proclaimed the Dragon King or Queen, they all recognise that the human race poses the biggest threat to their plans of world domination and are working more or less together towards the common goal of our destruction. The collective plan of the dragon race is to eradicate most of humanity and enslave the rest, serving their new reptilian overlords' purposes for the rest of time. They will then gradually become complacent, and infighting will be more and more common as each dragon schemes against each other dragon.

There is a 50/50 split between males and females, with females each able to lay 15-20 eggs per year, with 80% of all eggs surviving to hatch dragon younglings, if they are not discovered and destroyed first.

All dragons breathe fire starting at around 6 months old - a mature dragon will be able to emit flames that exceed 2000 degree C. Older, larger dragons can emit sustained bursts of up to 10 seconds, though the effort makes them dizzy and disorientated for up to a minute afterward. They can also spit fireballs, accurate to around 250 metres. Larger dragons can spit 1 fireball every minute, smaller dragons one every 5 minutes.

That's all the parameters I can think of for now. If 10,000 dragons of the above description are woefully inadequate then an alternative scenario details 100 colonies of 10,000 dragons being awoken around the world, giving a total of 1 million dragons eager to brutalise and enslave the human race.

Hopefully the above information is detailed enough, this is pretty much my first time doing this sort of thing. As is, what are the dragon's chances of triumphing over the armies of mankind, in either scenario?

[Gaidin]

Are you basically looking at a functional race of Smaug wannabes? You know...well placed shot will probably do it, but it's an utter bitch and a half to get that shot and god knows what's getting destroyed as you try?

Or is it more the Dragonlance trilogy style dragons. Which is DnD style dragons.

Because I'll grant I don't see you going the primal elemental force of nature that some worlds favor.

[Borgholio]

10k dragons would be even easier to defeat than Zombies or Skeletons. While they may be heavily armored, they would be easy prey for weapons that are designed to take out large armored "vehicles". SAMs could be fired large numbers if they are in flight, as could infantry armed with stinger missiles. While they may be able to fly at 300mph, that still leaves them sitting ducks for modern jet fighters. Slower planes such as the A-10 or the AC-130 can still match their speed and would probably be a dragon's worst nightmare...anti-tank aircraft vs a flying tank.

On the ground they would be vulnerable to tanks, anti-tank missiles, and artillery. Anti-ship missiles would work great vs any that get too close to the coast.

Any large groupings or colonies of dragons would be easy prey for carpet, precision, or nuclear bombing.

So the only scenario where I see dragons doing well is if they had 100 colones of 10k instead of simply 10k. That would be a lot of dragons, but on a global scale even a million "tanks" would be gradually whittled down and contained.

[Iroscato]

Are you basically looking at a functional race of Smaug wannabes? You know...well placed shot will probably do it, but it's an utter bitch and a half to get that shot and god knows what's getting destroyed as you try?

Or is it more the Dragonlance trilogy style dragons. Which is DnD style dragons.

Because I'll grant I don't see you going the primal elemental force of nature that some worlds favor.

Guess Skyrim's taken root in my brain, I just started playing it/becoming deeply obsessed with it recently
I suppose the dragons would be most comparable to those feckers, even if it's a videogame with videogame logic. I must admit, my experience with fantasy is...limited.
Also, my scenario is partially inspired by the movie Reign of Fire, but we don't mention that ._.

[Tribble]

Well, you could have a couple of dragons at Ancalagon the Black size, which would give us some serious problems. Anything short of a nuclear weapon probably wouldn't do much.

[Joun_Lord]

The military could probably defeat them with a bit of trouble. Though they are pretty durable, ridiculously so, and can probably fly way faster then something that size should be able to without a rocket engine up its pooter, our jets are much faster then any dragon and presumably have far greater range (I can't see fire breath going much farther then a few hundred feet if even that). The 20mm M61 vulcan cannon is a pretty common gun on planes (not mention its anti-air version M167 VADS) and its considered the weakest and shortest ranged weapon on most fighters. Air to air missiles are going to instakill most any dragon. Plus other planes carry bigger guns like the 25mm GAU-12 mounted on the AC-130 gunship, Harrier jump jet, and Cobra attack choppa and the 30mm GAU-8 Avenger mounted on the A-10 Warthog. Combine that with specialized ammo like depleted uranium and its game over.

The only real problem will be getting enough planes after the fuckers (especially bad if its a million) and having enough ordinance to throw at them as I remember reading about pretty much all countries including the US have a severely depleted stock of aerial munitions.

But we got a ton of ground vehicles that could ruin the day of the dragons too.

[Iroscato]

*Googles Ancalagon the Black* Good lord...

Hmm... how's about 100 dragons appearing through a portal above the 100 largest cities in the world? 10,000 in total, same durability and abilities as described in the OP. Somewhere above the USA and China, two Ancalagon-sized dragons (roughly the same size as Everest) also appear, and immediately make a beeline for the largest city in each country.

[/bloodthirsty]

[mr friendly guy]

How do the dragons derive sustenance? Some big dinosaurs where thought to feed almost the whole day just to sustain themselves. The dragons are presumably dense to have such strong armour, yet have muscles sufficient to carry the high mass in the air. So I imagine they would need a lot of food. Denying them a food source, we could starve them out or force them back into hibernation. Or perhaps poisoning a food source if we don't use a direct chemical attack against them. Atropine is a relatively cheap drug to produce, and while its normally injected, it is found naturally on plants so I assumed it could be ingested. Although the ingested form presumably requires higher quantities than the injected dose.

[Iroscato]

How do the dragons derive sustenance? Some big dinosaurs where thought to feed almost the whole day just to sustain themselves. The dragons are presumably dense to have such strong armour, yet have muscles sufficient to carry the high mass in the air. So I imagine they would need a lot of food. Denying them a food source, we could starve them out or force them back into hibernation. Or perhaps poisoning a food source if we don't use a direct chemical attack against them. Atropine is a relatively cheap drug to produce, and while its normally injected, it is found naturally on plants so I assumed it could be ingested, albeit at higher quantities than the injected dose.

Sunlight, because fuck it, why not

Or slightly more sensibly, they do derive sustenance from prey (ranging from goats to elephants, depending on the size), but can also convert sunlight into energy. A kind of back-up food source.

[mr friendly guy]

So dragons will weaken over cold places, like Siberia, Northern China, Finland, Antarctica etc due to less sunlight?

[Iroscato]

So dragons will weaken over cold places, like Siberia, Northern China, Finland, Antarctica etc due to less sunlight?

If there's nothing to eat, yes, they'll be weaker, slower and clumsier.

[Gaidin]

*Googles Ancalagon the Black* Good lord...

Personally I like the primal force of nature dragons better. If you want them to only have 10,000 as a number and pit them against modern technology...minus their ability to form a ground army anyway. Then again, maybe maybe that's the size you were shooting for in scale anyway.

I'm still trying to work a visual in my head here.

[LaCroix]

How do the dragons derive sustenance? Some big dinosaurs where thought to feed almost the whole day just to sustain themselves. The dragons are presumably dense to have such strong armour, yet have muscles sufficient to carry the high mass in the air. So I imagine they would need a lot of food. Denying them a food source, we could starve them out or force them back into hibernation. Or perhaps poisoning a food source if we don't use a direct chemical attack against them. Atropine is a relatively cheap drug to produce, and while its normally injected, it is found naturally on plants so I assumed it could be ingested, albeit at higher quantities than the injected dose.

Sunlight, because fuck it, why not

Or slightly more sensibly, they do derive sustenance from prey (ranging from goats to elephants, depending on the size), but can also convert sunlight into energy. A kind of back-up food source.

I once used "Magisynthesis" as sustennance for dragons - they use "magic" (aka unknown energy source) to convert C, H2O, and CO2 into gasoline, kerosene and stuff. So they draw sustenance with every breath they take, and can eat everything containing carbon - the more pure, the better. Their body runs on gasoline, so to speak. The only food source able to create the energy needed for such a huge beast.

Their blood contains a nice percentage of carbohydrogen volatiles (Dragon blood is often depicted as flammable or at least irritant in fiction), is which is also why they can breath fire - they mix their own napalm in glands located in the mouth that accumulate the volatile stuff while filtering the blood. (They most probably use N as well, multi -N- bonds create highly energetic and volatile compounds, which carry a lot of energy (maybe sustennance) and could be used to ignite the fire breath, too.)

[TheFeniX]

Guess Skyrim's taken root in my brain, I just started playing it/becoming deeply obsessed with it recently
I suppose the dragons would be most comparable to those feckers, even if it's a videogame with videogame logic. I must admit, my experience with fantasy is...limited.
Also, my scenario is partially inspired by the movie Reign of Fire, but we don't mention that ._.

Skyrim dragon's are pretty low on the power-scale dragon-wise. They are small and get killed by city guards wielding normal bows/arrows. A few rednecks with shotguns could take them down. Their one trump-card is their immortality: killing one only destroys it's physical body. However, this doesn't mean you can't dump it's bones into a hole and fill it with tons of concrete as they don't seem to be able to actually come-back to life without some kind of catalyst.

though even the weakest requires a sustained barrage of firepower to slow down, let alone kill. The largest and most common (making up 60% of the total population), at 30-40 metres long, have scales impervious to gunfire smaller than that found mounted on an F-22,

That puts them well above the power of Skyrim dragons. Requiring sustained fire from a 20mm cannon to off a dragon would make them rather annoying to deal with. That said, I think the US alone has more combat aircraft than there would be dragons. We also have all sorts of other cool weapons to blow stuff up. I would assume that, for a creature that can spew fire, their IR signature would be easy to spot. They've got to be running hot, have a unique silhouette and flight-pattern, and aren't all that fast. Militaries would have little issue shooting them out of the sky.

Considering how arrogant they are, we might off a considerable portion of them as they try to terrorize their new subjects, setup lairs in high-profile places, or general just fuck off because Dragons are assholes. The losses would suck, but I don't see why Murrica can't win this through missile spam, then spend a few years tracking down and cleaning out nests from those dragons smart enough to lay low.

[Vendetta]

If it's just big angry lizards, then the answer is no.

If they're high-op D&D dragons then they're not even there, because they're all high level spellcasters sitting in their personal demiplanes sending their astral projections out to wreak havoc and even if they're "killed" they just come back the next day.

[Borgholio]

So dragons will weaken over cold places, like Siberia, Northern China, Finland, Antarctica etc due to less sunlight?

If there's nothing to eat, yes, they'll be weaker, slower and clumsier.

If they're solar powered, they'd be especially vulnerable at night. They land to rest, we see them as clear as day with night vision and bomb the hell out of them.

Their blood contains a nice percentage of carbohydrogen volatiles (Dragon blood is often depicted as flammable or at least irritant in fiction), is which is also why they can breath fire - they mix their own napalm in glands located in the mouth that accumulate the volatile stuff while filtering the blood. (They most probably use N as well, multi -N- bonds create highly energetic and volatile compounds, which carry a lot of energy (maybe sustennance) and could be used to ignite the fire breath, too.)

If they are flammable, then they're even easier to take out. Tracer rounds or a couple armor penetrating missiles detonating inside them will Hindenburg the whole beast.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Assuming they are actually here and killable, and in the "one colony of 10k" dragons scenario, depending on where exactly this colony is I can see a lot of people in the military saying "ah fuck, just nuke em."

The Op said it's somewhere in the US and they were found by a mining expedition. So, send your anti-tank planes to clear a path, then lob a megaton-range nuke down th mine and seal the fuckers in, if not outright kill them.

Even if a majority of the male dragons are out fighting at the time, odds on the female dragons would be home looking after their nests. Boom, no more dragon reinforcements.

[Iroscato]

Assuming they are actually here and killable, and in the "one colony of 10k" dragons scenario, depending on where exactly this colony is I can see a lot of people in the military saying "ah fuck, just nuke em."

The Op said it's somewhere in the US and they were found by a mining expedition. So, send your anti-tank planes to clear a path, then lob a megaton-range nuke down th mine and seal the fuckers in, if not outright kill them.

Even if a majority of the male dragons are out fighting at the time, odds on the female dragons would be home looking after their nests. Boom, no more dragon reinforcements.

I like the way you nuke... *nods approvingly*

[Eternal_Freedom]

And being a subsurface explosion, you wouldn't even have fallout or a big mushroom cloud to worry about. Just a nice new crater.

[Adam Reynolds]

If a 20mm cannon can kill it, then so can Sidewinders or AMRAAMs. Something that big and hot will be an extremely easy target. A-10s and AC-130s would be pointless. Just load up any of the teen series fighters full of missiles and deliver repeated sorties to the target with large numbers of air to air missiles. There are more than 10,000 AMRAAMs alone. Especially if you can also just bomb the nest(nuke or otherwise).

1 million such dragons would indeed be a serious problem due to raw numbers. Though in that case it wouldn't just be the USAF against them. In that case nuclear weapons would almost certainly be needed against at least some of the nests, depending on where they are.

[Purple]

Introducing the ZSU-23-4. It fires 23mm projectiles from a 152mm case making it powerful enough by your definition to penetrate and kill the scales of a dragon. The guns are radar directed so it'll be able to easily pick up and track the body of a giant beast covered in a coat of shiny metallic trinkets. And it can fire 4000 rounds per minute accurately on the move on rough ground.

Available since the 1960's in any 3rd world country near you.

[Iroscato]

Dammit...I was rooting for Team Drake as well >:C

[Ted C]

Are they smart enough to avoid confronting military forces and concentrate on infrastructure? Would they know to target things like refineries, pipelines, power grids, agricultural lands, and other resources to starve the military of resources? It would probably still take more than 10,000 dragons, but a million flying tanks going after soft targets would be more of a threat than a direct attack on military bases or the like.

[Gaidin]

Dammit...I was rooting for Team Drake as well >:C

You seriously have to make a few of the dragons quintessential gods. And that's not to say modern technology won't be able to make mince meat of their...well...mooks. But you seriously have to look at the worlds that have colored outside the lines of what a dragon is.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Are they smart enough to avoid confronting military forces and concentrate on infrastructure? Would they know to target things like refineries, pipelines, power grids, agricultural lands, and other resources to starve the military of resources? It would probably still take more than 10,000 dragons, but a million flying tanks going after soft targets would be more of a threat than a direct attack on military bases or the like.

While that's certainly true, that wouldn't be defeating the military, which is kinda the point of the thread.

You make a good point though. The dragons as described almost certainly can't actually conquer the Earth, because of a lack of numbers of nothing else (even in the "100 colonies" scenario there's only 1 dragon per 7,000 humans). So as with the zombies, the question becomes not "can they win?" but more "how much damage can they do before they lose?"