{"id":11095,"date":"2014-06-23T23:38:55","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T03:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/?p=11095"},"modified":"2014-06-24T11:37:15","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T15:37:15","slug":"how-many-dragons-could-a-medieval-country-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/2014\/how-many-dragons-could-a-medieval-country-support\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many Dragons Could A Medieval Country Support?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"game-of-thrones-2-dragon[1]\"Dragons are cool, but you’d probably prefer their diet was something other than 3 year olds<\/a>. While sheep make for a good substitute, the question is how many would you need<\/em>? Well, the easiest way to calculate food requirements is to scale up a komodo dragon to fiery dragon size. A komodo dragon (10 foot long) requires about 816 kg of food per year<\/a>, which is around 18 sheep<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How many komodos in a Drogon? In the novels Drogon is 20 feet from ‘wingtip to wingtip’, but the beasts look bigger than that in the series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"How\"How<\/td>\n<\/i>Mass of food required by a komodo:<\/em><\/p>\n

816 kg\/year<\/p>\n

Size of dragon relative to komodo:<\/em><\/p>\n

3.5<\/p>\n

Mass of food required by dragon:<\/em><\/p>\n

2,840 kg<\/p>\n

Number of sheep for 2,840 kg meat:<\/em><\/p>\n

61<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Drogon looks about five times the length of a man from nose to tail, so we can scale up a komodo to this size. For flying dragons, we also need to add on wings. If Danerys’ dragons have the same ratio of wing: body as a bat<\/a>, then we need to add 16% more mass. This brings our total dragon feeding requirements to about 2,840 kg, or 61 sheep per year.<\/p>\n

But keep in mind that komodo dragons don’t breathe fire, which obviously uses up a lot of energy. If we model dragon breath energy efficiency on a WW2 flamethrower,<\/a> and then consider the energy density of mutton<\/a>, we can calculate that a dragon breathing fire burns through a sheep-worth of energy every 5.8 seconds. (Which means that if Drogon spends 6 seconds cooking a sheep, he’s rather missed the point). If we estimate that an average dragon breathes fire for 2 seconds per day, this brings our ‘sheep per dragon’ number up to 188.<\/p>\n

Which really, isn’t actually that much.<\/p>\n

Between 1294 and 1297 medieval England was having…scuffles… with Wales, France and Scotland. To fund these wars, Edward I raised approximately \u00a350,000<\/a> a year in taxes.<\/p>\n

Sheep cost around<\/a> 1s 5d (1 shilling and five pence), so if Edward had spent say a tenth of his taxes on sheep for his dragons then he could have supported 375 of our fiery friends.<\/p>\n

So when someone asks ‘but could a country really support dragons’? The answer is something along the lines of ‘yes, run’.<\/p>\n

p.s. This also, incidentally, explains why the village of Berk from How To Train Your Dragon <\/a>is on the coast and not a mainland setting; there’s no way a village could feed all those flying lizards on only sheep, so the ocean must be their main source of food.<\/em><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Check out The Discussion<\/a>, a database of Centives-style over analysis of movies and TV shows you watched. Or read about the size of the Wall that protects the Seven Kingdoms<\/a>, and the cost of being an Evil Overlord<\/a>. You can find those and other interesting things in our Editorials <\/a>although if you want a selection of our most popular check out the Greatest Hits<\/a>. And be sure to stay in touch:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dragons are cool, but you’d probably prefer their diet was something other than 3 year olds. While sheep make for a good substitute, the question is how many would you need? Well, the easiest way to calculate food requirements is to scale up a komodo dragon to fiery dragon size. A komodo dragon (10 foot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/How-Many-Dragons-Centives-Banner.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11095"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11122,"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11095\/revisions\/11122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}