Aircraft Stuff

[Carthaginian]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis

Why not- this fellow was 23 feet wingtip-to-wingtip and 11.5 feet long, weighing in at 170 pounds.
The wingspan is the same as a WWI Nieuport 11!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azhdarchidae

These guys were even more colossal, with wingspans on the order of 40 feet!
This is more like a modern fighter plane's wingspan.


I could easily see these kinds of creatures existing on NewWorld... after all, if there are badass land animals running around, then the birds have to be equally badass to be able to feed on them!

[ctwaterman]

Wow..... we wont go into why humans would not be going outside with things like this flying around.   Nor would explain why we didnt use Artillary on the nesting grounds every nesting season for several decades at the earliest opportunity.

Remember Folks Happiness is achieving the Top of the Food Chain.   The fact that humans have forgotten to remind the Lions, Tigers, and Bears of our dominance more often seems to be a problem that is leading many Bears, Lions, and Tigers into making mistakes like thinking we are back in the early period of Fire where man was still trying to fight his way off the Lunch Menu....

[Carthaginian]

Wow..... we wont go into why humans would not be going outside with things like this flying around.   Nor would explain why we didnt use Artillary on the nesting grounds every nesting season for several decades at the earliest opportunity.

Well, I think the point is that the land is so dangerous that we cant reach the nesting grounds. ;)
As far as just going outside... well, local defense can handle flying things around settlements- so no problems there.

Remember Folks Happiness is achieving the Top of the Food Chain.   The fact that humans have forgotten to remind the Lions, Tigers, and Bears of our dominance more often seems to be a problem that is leading many Bears, Lions, and Tigers into making mistakes like thinking we are back in the early period of Fire where man was still trying to fight his way off the Lunch Menu....

Meh- this is good for Man's constitution.
If we stop fighting, we get soft... and too many people are willing to stop fighting and rest on their laurels at this point. The Lions, Tigers and Bears are doing us a favor by reminding us that if you stop fighting to stay on top, someone is gonna pull you back down.

[Delta Force]

The birds of prey on Earth only attack small birds that eat insects. I do not think that birds have ever tried to attack a flying machine (as opposed to be run into or sucked into a prop or turbine), and they would likely be scared off by the noise generated by the engine and the size of the machine.

Birds would probably avoid airships because they are so large that the bird would likely view them as objects (animals generally avoid running into visible objects, notice how birds will fly into windows but not more visible objects) and avoid airplanes because they are noisy and are hard targets due to their speed and turbulence. We also have to take into account that biology and the requirements of flight limit birds. If the atmosphere has similar oxygen content to Earth animals will reach a certain maximum size, but if levels are higher animals can be larger because energy is easier to acquire. With birds they have to be light enough to fly (hollow bones and light structure), so even lots of oxygen still produces a reasonable upper boundry. The birds would still be birds, so no matter how big and scary they might be, they would not pose a threat to people armed with a 7.62mm service/hunting rifle. I also do not see them carry off people to drop from the air, at worst they might crack someone on the head with something or try to peck or claw them (like a crow).

[Valles]

While I agree that something like Argentavis wouldn't be a particular threat to humans, I was thinking of crows' habit of mobbing any raptor they catch sight of - that is, that this species or cluster of species would recognize 'large flying thing!' and immediately classify it as, well, a megaraptor like Argentavis, and thus an ENEMY and THREAT TO CHICKS and try and drive it away.

It's not that any of them would be individually dangerous to a human on the ground, so much as the crosswired problem of small birds actively trying to dive bomb an intruder that falls out of the air if it eats a bird in the wrong place.

[Carthaginian]

The birds of prey on Earth only attack small birds that eat insects. I do not think that birds have ever tried to attack a flying machine (as opposed to be run into or sucked into a prop or turbine), and they would likely be scared off by the noise generated by the engine and the size of the machine.

Spoken like a man that's never seen a bird of prey attack an animal.
D.F., for years I had a nesting pair of Redtail Hawks living in my backyard; they remain to the same eyrie year after year, and remain mated for life. This gave me ample time to observe them. Over the years, we lost several kittens, a few puppies, dozens of chickens, a couple of ducks and a kid goat to these magnificent creatures  or their offspring. I also saw them take countless squirrels, rabbits and mice.

Truthfully, the only real 'bird hunter' I can think of in the Southeast is the Peregrine Falcon; they are more what you are thinking of here, and are actually fairly unique in their choice of prey.

Perhaps you need to watch some documentaries on raptors... you have a lot to learn.
The vast majority prefer land animals or fish as they take less energy than birds to hunt/kill, and almost all of them will scavenge if given the opportunity... in nature, a meal that doesn't move is free energy. A few of the Redtails I mentioned above got so accustomed to our habit of dumping scraps for our pets that they would wait in the trees nearby and swoop in to take any meat we poured out.

Birds would probably avoid airships because they are so large that the bird would likely view them as objects (animals generally avoid running into visible objects, notice how birds will fly into windows but not more visible objects) and avoid airplanes because they are noisy and are hard targets due to their speed and turbulence. We also have to take into account that biology and the requirements of flight limit birds. If the atmosphere has similar oxygen content to Earth animals will reach a certain maximum size, but if levels are higher animals can be larger because energy is easier to acquire. With birds they have to be light enough to fly (hollow bones and light structure), so even lots of oxygen still produces a reasonable upper boundry. The birds would still be birds, so no matter how big and scary they might be, they would not pose a threat to people armed with a 7.62mm service/hunting rifle. I also do not see them carry off people to drop from the air, at worst they might crack someone on the head with something or try to peck or claw them (like a crow).

Did you notice the links I posted?
While there might have been some variances in oxygen concentrations during the period with the pterosaurs, the actual birds that I linked were present on an Earth largely identical to our own. The basic climate bands that we recognize as 'normal' were laid out, deserts where deserts should be, forests where forests should be, and seas where seas should be (with the exception of the poles, which had not yet suffered such great ice buildup).

Argentavis would really only be a threat to a lone man or a group of unprepared people. A nesting pair could cause trouble for a small group of intruders even if they are prepared (ever had mockingbirds come after you? Mean bastards, ain't they?).

This is why I think about a single large predictor at the top, and also like Valles' idea of a mobbing 'small bird' as well- both have their place.

[Carthaginian]

Let me add that I find a world with a primarily avian-based biome very interesting- prehistoric South America on a large scale!

[Delta Force]

I know birds of prey attack land and sea animals. I didn't know they would attack goats though.

[Carthaginian]

I know birds of prey attack land and sea animals. I didn't know they would attack goats though.

Yes. The goat was days old- just past the wobbly-legged stage- but still small enough to look tasty.
If a bird is big enough, then any animal it perceives as weak enough or young enough becomes a prey animal.


Here is a bonafied scavenger chasing down a gazelle that weighs more than it does.

Animals kill when hungry... hungry enough, they can do some pretty crazy things.

[P3D]

My - totally uncalled for - thoughts on how to make aircrafts less plausible.
There is plenty of coal available. Liquid fuels, however, has to be made from crops - alcohols and vegetable oils. While it is theoretically possible to make liquid fuels economically from indigenous plants, they are big technological hurdles to solve. The same is valid about coal liquefaction technologies - the colonists arrived with nice, clean and feel-good-PC solar arrays in mind, not nasty, dirty fossil fuels. In other words, biofuel production would compete with foodstuff. If you postulate lower yields due to somewhat hostile biosphere, food becomes expensive. As in, either you have that 100 liters of alcohol for a single flight, or enough food to feed one more person a year.

The coal incidentally is necessary to make steel in industrial amounts.

To get those large avians of prey, reduce gravity a bit, a'la Pandora.

[Carthaginian]

No need to diddle with gravity... Earth had her own monsters. Unwieldy on the ground, but then again, we aren't really able to touch their nesting areas easily to kill them there.

I don't believe that aircraft should be non-starters; just that they should take longer to get.
Besides, for one type of carbon-based fuel to exist in the absence of any other... that's a bit of a stretch.

[Valles]

Revising gravity would sprock our-the-players' calculations and calculators for ballistic performance and so forth but hard. I'd prefer to avoid that; such things are complicated enough to work out in the first place.

Chemically speaking, coal liquification is not complicated; certainly it's easier than a lot of the physical and industrial problems already implicit in the City structure! Doing it 'en masse' might require a facility slot, but would, IMHO, be fairly straightforward for anyone willing to dedicate same.

Returning to the birds, there've been two real proposals levied: First, the simple presence of sufficiently large predators given to hunting on the wing, and second, 'mobbing' behavior by flocks of smaller birds. The former is more visually impressive and does a better job of carrying through the 'deathworld' feel, but requires physical strength, flight speed, and sheer size to all meet or exceed known maxima for flying animals. The latter requires only the jump of applying a known behavior from otherwise unexceptional species to aircraft rather than just other birds, but has the downside of seeming kind of trivial until you really think about it.

[P3D]

My next piece of smartassness is to reduce the air pressure (less N2), but that would also play hell with ballistics.

BTW I am aware of the deceptively simple chemistry behind coal gasification. But getting it economical would again take some time.

[Valles]

Of course it would. But such a technology is hardly limited in use to military applications - if our own history is any indication at all, I think it would've been worked out and put into practice long before the reintroduction of the standing army.

[Darman]

My question is why can't we, say, change the air pressure?  You say because it would play hell with ballistics calculations but why can't we pretend that it doesn't effect them at all?  Would it really harm the game?