Let me know your favourite Dragon, and weather you think the cost of owning one is justified! Also side note! Imagine the amount of food they would need if they are more active in war time when they literally burn energy with every fiery breath!
mine would have to be Melys and if I had the gold of the Targaryens then I think it could be justified in the sense that our modern governments spend up to billions in defence and diplomacy measures and dragons in Westeros were the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and if you had enough could provide a good deterrent to avoid serious conflict with them. Also I want to fly so….:
I love how each dragon has its own dietary preferences. Vermithor eats bulls, the Cannibal prefers dragon hatchlings and eggs, greyghost loves to hunt fish, Sheepstealer loves his mutton and Caraxes loves his piggies.
Grey ghost is best bcz in books it's said he is shy and don't threaten smallfolks don't eat their livestock and just dive to hunt fish without hurting or annoying fishermen . Best and cheapest dragon
Oh so Rhaenyra is RICH rich to be feeding Syrax so well. No wonder she was able to send so much food to Kings Landing. I love when a universe has this much detail in it
Except that makes no sense since she only really has Dragonstone to fund them. Unless the Velaryons also funded her, but that's not typically how feudal systems work at all.
@@HakaiKaien Yeah they kept the cattle for themselves and they fed them the old slaves. Or even dragons when they start to become too numerous and unmanageable.
This is without including the fact that dragons require more food during times of war. In episode 2x01 Otto mentions how the extra movement takes up more energy so the dragons need more food than usual.
@@tiringsarcasm it's no wonder how there's only 40 dragonlords houses in valyria. and the targaryens are considered as a minor house. think of how rich the freehold was. i think the highest record of valyrian dragon count so far is the 300 dragons unleashed upon rhoynar. imagine the wealth needed to sustain that
@@AzureFyre8967 Mayhaps this is why they had to expand so quickly, they were literally devouring resources at a rate that required them to conquer and amass wealth. Even with the fertile volcanic soil of Valyria they would have needed more food for themselves and the ever increasing number and size of dragons.
I was about to comment that the cost of dragons isn't actually as high as it sounds compared to the cost of maintaining an army. But the Iron Throne doesn't actually maintain an army of its own, it relies on their vassals to provide the troops, while the cost of dragons is entirely borne by the crown itself. So keeping dragons probably comprises the main expense for the Targaryen Kings.
11 millions US dollars is not that much actually,it is mentioned that kingslanding has 500 thousand people so around 22 dollars for each person (anually),id be more than happy to pay that price to have dragons defending me
If anyone *SOMEHOW* able to claim Greyghost (unlike in the book where no one can), it would be one of the cheapest dragon to feed as all you need to do is let the animals soars above the sea daily and let it hunt for fishes and most of the time you won't have to worry about the cost of feeding it.
@@mohammadhosseini6675 fish #'s decline in real life due to overfishing. A dragon who solely eats fish would surely have a better shot at ridding the sea of them, at least in the area it resides.
@@N.E.TGamingNo, not even close. Overfishing even with modern technology and thousands upon thousands of huge thrawlers and hundrerds of thousands of smaller fishermen are not enough to truly extinct the common fish species. 1 dragon will not do anything.
@@N.E.TGaming You clearly lack perspective of how many human beings there are on earth consuming fish and other seafood. I recommend you look into the ecology of fish... Because even a thousand dragons could NEVER deplete the Narrow Sea of fish and is absolutely nothing compared to hundreds of millions of humans being sustained by industrial level fishing.
Just to put it into perspective of just how much the US defense budget ($820.03 Billion) is, the military would be able to afford 421,051 dragons if they all ate cows.
You forgot about the square cube law. A dragon half the size (length wise) would be only a eight in weight. Since weight increases exponentially. So Caraxes would weigh something about 127 Tons
Add to that: Caraxes may be half her length, but he's a very streamlined dragon and much of his length is neck and tail beyond the normal proportions. Might even be closer to 100 tons.
Also i think its mentioned? But even if it isnt it still makes sense, growing dragons need more food. And dragons like caraxes and vermithor are growing wayy slower than they were when young.
@@eternalifyshorts Watched a House of the Dragon clip six weeks ago and it's all I see on the TL now lol. This was a solid video though! Fun stuff for authors to consider if they want to feel more grounded.
Agreed. I would assume Targaryans would never be paying for their livestock. Yes, as they had Royal forests during medieval times, I imagine crown land devoted to pasture solely for this purpose. Additionally, Kings could demand beasts as taxes. Injured horses would serve this purpose deliciously!
Pigs, are probably the animal they invested the most money, in. With knowledge of the pigs life cycle, I can see a large part of the diet. Being pigs. Cows are are good too. This would mainly be for tamed dragons, less so for the wild ones. As I can see house targaryen paying a lot in compensation.
probablly a caveat for the Crownlands is "Our Dragon's will steal from your Farms. With the Strength of Dragon's, you will not complain or you will answer to said dragon." You have to understand, when the Targaryen's had Dragon's, no one in their right mind would rebel unless that rebel force had dragon's of its own, or they're stupid. Dragon Era Targaryen Kingship is less a "Feudal" government and more of a "Absolutionist Monarch" government, since they literally have Flying Medieval Nukes.
@@josephvisnovsky1462 fun fact: Qing Dynasty (remember Qings or Manchus are originated from manchuria which was habitated by Mongolic nomads and later immigrated into chinese culture after they conquered Chinese and Mongolians.) They had Iron herd in Mongolia which specificly herd livestocks of Emperor and his army. In China if i remember there were farmlands that also purposed to make food to stock in governor in case of crisis. So Targaryens were absolute monarchs with their dragons. Taken those real life facts and Targaryen's greater power, Targaryens must have so many lands in crownlands as their personal farms
2:10 - Using a crocodile is an interesting choice, but you have to wonder if it's very accurate. Crocodiles have relatively slow metabolic rates. Maybe a bird could actually be more accurate. Birds need to eat a lot because they fly, with small birds having to eat up to 30% of their body weight every week. This is less extreme for larger birds but significantly more than crocodiles. Dragons are probably also not cold-bloooded since their blood when they are cut is literally boiling.
Dragons are magical too so I don't really think there is a way to effectively know what amount of food they need, but there is wild dragons whic managed to survive on fish or wild sheep so I think they don't need as much food as an animal, maybe they are using magic to spend less energy idk
@@gabrielbaieel8073 they would have to be jet powered if they weighed that much tho. You can’t just get a million pounds into the air without an extreme amount of energy. And that’s not coming from they’re wings
This is amazing work that nerds like us love. One thing I want to add is that despite the considerable costs to feeding and housing around 1 dragons such as Caraxes costing only around 1 thousand of gold dragons per dragon per annum and millions of dollars IRL, its probably substantially cheaper than maintaining a professional standing army for House Tagaryaen. To use the professional 5000 legionnaires of a roman legion for comparison, their salaries alone were estimated to cost around 9.7 million seceteres (roughly 9.7 million dollars) or 97,000 golden aurues (equivalent to a gold dragon). The estimated costs of merely the salaries of the entire roman army of around 380,000 men was 1.67 million gold aurei per year which took up nearly 80% of the entire empire's government budget. Plus a dragon is worth more than any army as we saw that 3 dragons wiped the floor with around 60,000 men easily in the field of fire. This probably explains why House Tagarayen never established a professional standing army.
Roughly 3 million dollars per year for a dragon you can reuse as much as you want and can transport you around isn't so bad when you know that firing a single Tomahawk Missile costs 1.5 million dollars
Did you happen to calculate that bonus nutrition dragons get from "cooking their food"? Using other apex predators in our natural world might not account for thus.
IIRC calories are typically calculated by burning the food, so I would imagine it's the theoretical maximum. Many foods may yield less net calories due to the thermogenic effects of ingestion and digestion. Think celery being net negative due to the low caloric content and need to be chewed.
in Fire and Blood, there's the situation of princess Rhaena and her dragon Dreamfyre in Fair isle ( she was married to lord Farman's son), and Lord Farman at the time complained to her how expensive it was getting to feed her dragon everyday. To put in perspective, at the time, Dreamfyre wasnt a big dragon yet.
This is a cool thought experiment. Now I'm going to add in a but...I see the dragons as giant reptiles. Reptiles don't eat everyday. They may only eat once or twice a week. Sometimes the older ones only eat once every 2 weeks. As a reptile gets older they need less feedings. You said Vermithor's morning meal. That could be another way to say he takes his meals in the morning. It didn't say every morning his meal was a bull, so maybe he only eats a few times a week. Also some snake breeders over feed their breeder snakes to get them to grow quicker to breeding weight. So I could see them overfeeding the dragons to bulk them up. Also G.G.R Martin says dragon that are riderless don't roam. They stick to one spot, so again less calorie output.
This, big time. If true it also solves a big problem with the math. We're basing vermithors weight off of food intake. The model in the video ends up with a larger dragon weighing 3 times the max weight of a boeing 787 dreamliner. Magic or no magic, that's simply far too heavy.
@@Myrcella_Rykker ummmmmmm You…. Do realize …. Bc their food is so very low and nutrition and calories… all they can do is eat eat eat then sleep for digestion. You MUST be joking, right? Right?!
@@rynfornow3411 how is entire animal carcass low in calories. Fat is high in calories. Plus yes they sleep all the time because what else is a dragon going to do all day and night when they are shoved into a dragon pit
no wonder old valyria kept on conquering. those hundreds of dragons that they had probably needed a lot of food that they couldn't sustain themselves. so they just conquer beighboring cities
keep in mind the targaryens were one of the weaker houses and balerion was one of the biggest dragons in westeros history makes you wonder how large the dragons of old valyria were
Feeding dragons humans isn't really sustainable at all, humans take forever to grow to full size, pigs would probably be the ideal livestock for feeding dragons because pigs reproduce and grow extremely quickly and they can also reach a large size in under a year
@@Dell-ol6hb yes but most of the Valyrians are cruel and see other humans as beneath them akin to cattles to be feed to their beloved dragons like a special desserts.
Wow, I thought this channel would at least have 100k subs for such quality. One thing I have to give props to the show for is the fact they do mention multiple times the upkeep costs of keeping dragons and the toll it puts on the people. That the more they are used the hungrier they get because like other reptiles they can conserve energy for a while doing nothing. So not only are they expensive to keep but expensive to field into battle. They are worth their weight in gold x100 though as even a small dragon can instantly turn the tide as even today air superiority is the baseline of any modern army and thats with anti-aircraft weapons, Dragons really are fantasy WMD’s. Daerons young dragon tessarion SPOILERS: Winning the battle of honeywine and routing a massive black army.
Caraxes may be the Prince's Dragon, but this Murder Noodle definitely likes to eat the least expensive livestock. Definitely a lot of money to feed him still, but at least he doesn't break the Tagaryen bank account xp. That honor probably goes Syrax [relative to caraxes' size] who hasn't hunted on her own in years. Rhaenyra def spoiled her dragon.
Good thing dragons on Dragonstone hunted for some of their food from the sea. Not good news for the fish and dolpin population in the area, but great news for House Targaryen's treasury.
thanks now i realise that even if dragons existed i couldnt afford to have one This video also fully supports the theory that high towers and maesters caused the dance of dragons, adding to the list of targ problems : their flying private jets who are more expensive than modern day planes
Well, it cost about 4 million a year to upkeep a dragon and about $1.5 million to shoot one Tomahawk missile. And that’s just one missile from one jet, so I imagine the cost of the US military. Or even just one aircraft carrier. Considering that a dragon is more powerful then an aircraft carrier, I think the cost is way more efficient and worth it.
I just want to say, a crocodile might not be the closest animal to a dragon, dragons are hot blooded, VERY hot blooded, so they probably consum way more calories than a crocodile on a pound for pound basis. Amazing video btw 😊
Thank you! I had to stop watching once he compared them to cold-blooded reptiles. Horrible. Dragon’s body temperature is literally boiling, so you realize the insane caloric intake it would require to maintain that metabolic rate?
Not only that but the metabolic rate of an almost sedimentary reptile vs a flying hot blooded one would be extremely different. The amount of calories needed for something that massive to enter flight and sustain it as we know dragons can do for days on end is insane.
@@bobydean1839Dude, come on, magical creatures mitigate this by using magic as an energy source. If you want to evaluate their energy expenditure on real world physics terms, then the first thing you have to understand is that a creature that big and heavy could never fly on those tiny wings. Pratchett goes into this too, saying that for something that massive to fly that effortlessly, a strong magic field is an absolute necessity.
@@MurasakiMonogatari We are all well aware that it’s fantasy, we referring to the video trying use a real cold blooded almost sedentary reptile to compare with the dragons to get it’s predicted calorie count. But crocs just aren’t a good comparison.
Fun video man! Though I do think the math is based on some inaccurate assumptions 😅 I think the metabolism wasn't considered properly, especially since from size estimates in the shows and books, a 14-year old dragon (Vermax and Arrax are 15 and 14), they are nowhere near 68 tonnes, more like 4-5 tons. Therapod dinosaurs and elephants are good examples of what sizes make sense. 68.6 tons would be a massive sauropod dinosaur like Argentinosaurus. We should consider that crocodiles and alligators are sluggish, cold-blooded animals, whereas therapod dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and the dragons are similarly relatively active. Fire and flying both likely require huge amounts of that caloric intake, as does their general body temperature being so high that their blood boils water. This is metabolism, and far more of the caloric intake from so much food is used for that than growth.
Good points, yea some creative liberties were taken however, i did do so much research and went through countless theories, the truth is through all the books and show references there are so many discrepancies that made things hard. Another thing is dragons had different growth rates depending on its captivity level and, just because it seems. So I went with what I could find. But yes you are totally right I had not considered the metabolism of each dragon, I think my brain would explode trying to make sense it all😂
Then there is also the issue of weight in regards to bones etc. are they 'solid' like they would be for a Crocodile or are they hollow like that of a bird? I believe there is one section in one of the books where Tyrion is doing some research regarding Dragons aswell. I also think the values when it comes to weight might be a bit inflated, but all in all decent research. However... while a Dragon DOES seem VERY expensive, one shouldnt forget that nowadays a Jet Fighter is also redicilously expensive and by Westeros standards that it's not cheap to maintain a Men at Arms, let alone a Knight or a Household Knight either. Ultimately it's a question of Power Projection, military capabilities and Prestiege aswell I suppose.
not to mention, being that most dragons are assumed to be in the Reptile kingdom, Reptiles don't need to eat every day. So they might not need as much livestock to keep em satisfied each week
Just found your channel, watched almost every vid good stuff. Westeros stuff is cool but also enjoyed the historical topics. You deserve way bigger audience if we’re measuring by quality sir. Cheers.
You know what's funny is that, When I read a Fanfiction that an Oc Character allows his Dragon to Hunt large Whales which are Called Levyatans and even giant squids that are krakkens. Overtime the Oc even convinces the other characters for their dragons to hunt large prey like the Whales and Squids so that they don't have to pay the expenses of feeding the dragons with pigs, bulls or sheep 😅😅😅 Which is a very good strategy in my opinion. And the Dragons are very full after eating a giant whale which is 100x times more efficient than eating small animals.
We see that dragons like grey ghost can be adept fishers and one can assume that most of the coastal dragons subsist off of fish as well like sea smoke. Only issue is that in the GOT universe their leviathans are essentially ultra-massive sperm whales probably inspired by the real life extinct Livyatan as its confirmed that there are velociraptors in the southern continent of southyros(they have official art as well) and the sealord of braavos has tasmanian tiger like animals and of course direwolves so george is very willing to input prehistoric animals into his fantasy world as inspiration. Following that information we can theorize they act similar making GOT’s leviathans DEEP sea whales which hunt DEEP sea krakens. Trying to force them into the surface would be difficult and dragons do not like water as they hate to fly when its raining and the rhoynar with water magic drowned 3 valyrian war dragons so they don’t do well in water. Its a good plan on paper but dangerous in execution.
Agreed my man, and thanks for this well informed and thought provoking comment. Its great hearing all these comments about things that I hadn’t even thought of while making the video, makes it all worth it!
@@Banished-rx4ol But in the Fanfic the reason why is how the OC's Dragon hunted down Whales I forgot to mention are not as large as the Adults, and they don't hunt in a storm or in the rain in the fanfic. And the reason why his Dragon was able to hunt Levyatans was because it wasn't kept in a cage or chained, he allowed him to grow. They say that Dragons can grow large as long as they are not kept in captivity. Which explains he hunted the Levyatans in the fanfic, even taught the Dragons how to hunt them efficiently like eagles hunt fish.
@@bizarreconvos Now that is a great and realistic explanation, many predatory animals avoid hunting the adults of prey species but will go after the old, young, and the sick which coincidentally are the ones most likely to be at the surface. Fun fact for some reason(we don’t know why) many deep sea animals will go to the surface when they are close to death like giant and colossal squids, frilled sharks, Oarfish, etc. Also sperm whales raise their young in shallower water because they haven’t developed the blubber and muscle to traverse the deep sea which would make them ample prey for large dragons. Many whale species also float to the top when they die becoming a good food source. One thing I will say if the GOT world is anything like our own there should be safer whale species to hunt than extra-giant sperm whales. Smaller sharks, seals, and even schools of fish can be ample dragon prey as well. I know I’m probably way overthinking it but I can’t help it I have a love of both worldbuilding and speculative biology
They seem cheaper than a fighter jet with similar destructive power. The Seven Kingdoms are about the same area as the USA. The annual cost of maintaining 6 dragons is 48k gold dragons. Compare this to 80k gold dragons that Ned Stark's Hand of the King tourney was to cost and 6 million gold dragons that the Crown was in debt at the start of GOT.
I just want to point out how the seasons effect the price of things. In "aGoT," it's been summer for 10 years, so the production of things was high, while "tHK" takes place in the spring.
I would suggest to use a logistic growth curve like from well researched carnivorous dinosaurs such as t-rex. exponential growth throught its entire lifespan is probably way over the top. Also flying requires much more energy than "chillin" like a croc, so the amount of food required to grow should probably based on big birdies than crocs.
It's even worse than that because dragons do more energy intensive things such as flying, breathing fire and are just straight up implied to be hot/warm blooded meaning their caloric requirement far exceeds that of a model animal like cold blooded crocodile which makes their metabolism more akin to that of a large bird/bat.
@@oguzkaganonder1331 This video was about estimating their caloric and financial needs based on real world model animals. Without this baseline you can just say everything is magic. They just feed them with magic and this video would then be moot lol.
I disagree on the reptile percentage base. Dragons in HotD are "fire made flesh". The run hot, grow fast, but have indeterminate growth, but cannibalism is not unknown to them (Vhagar swallowed part of Arrax). Bird metabolism at first, then they probably slowed down. Vermithor, Silverwing, Vhagar, Balerion were all quite sluggish as they got older. They could be riled up, yes, but sleeping so much probably wasn't natural (as Sheepstealer and Grey Ghost were so much more active and we're probably the same age). I would posit that the old house dragons were a overfed so they wouldn't wander.
Interestingly enough, in the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game, thoses costs are massively reduced A Cow costs 9 Silver Stags, a Pig costs 2 Silver Stags while a Sheep costs as low as 48 Copper Pennies Granted, they do say that those prices vary greatly in times of war and whatnot. Using those prices, that would bring the yearly costs for Cows to a measly 23 Gold Dragons, for Pigs to 14 and Sheep to 21 Using the values of Wealth in the same book tells us that a single point of Wealth is worth 200 Gold Dragons and a House having between 1-10 Wealth is considered Impoverished Thus the likes of House Corbray, House Osgrey or the infamous House Whocares would be able to maintain about 8 Dragons the size of Caraxes ... they probably miscalculated some stuff
How did Dragon Stone, a small island used mostly for grazing livestock, manage to support that number of animals being eaten each year for so long I wonder? Even the untamed/wild dragons that lived there too.
Great video! Great narration, entertaining and informative! I would like to offer some counterpoints on the math side just off the top of my head^^ The sizes you were ending up of something like 500 tonnes per dragon just don't make much biological sense (and I'm trying for a non entirely magic dependent answer here). Flying is an especially energy demanding type of locomotion, and most animals that engage in it consume anywhere from 20 to well over 100% of their body weight per day. I think the breakdown is using a croc's 5%/week as the number base here. A flying fox is a relatively small flying mammal which can eat around 25% of their body weight/day. Let's go off the supposition from casual research that bigger creatures and dragons, being less mobile, need less and thus someone like Vermithor actually only eats about 2% of their body weight per day. I'm going to agree with your food intake assessment in that Vermithor eats 2 bulls at 245kg x 2 per day. With our new 2%/day figure that means Vermithor is actually closer to 24,500kg (54,000 pounds) or about 4 times a male adult african elephant's maximum of 6,300kg. Dragonology has all these theories on how Dragons can be so large while being relatively lightweight enough that lift can be generated through other means. I won't go into that tangent but I will just say from watching the show that Vermithor certainly feels at least as heavy as 4 elephants, I would wager he might weigh a bit more even just visually but not by a giant margin. I'll still follow your dragon size relations for Vhagar and Caraxes, and I'll throw in my own guesses with a healthy dose of watching Glidus on the side. So these would be my general dragon weights under these different assumptions Vhagar: 36,7 tonnes Vermithor: 24,5 tonnes Dreamfyre: 22 tonnes Meleys: 20 tonnes Caraxes: 18,4 tonnes Syrax: 16 tonnes Seasmoke: 15 tonnes Sunfyre: 13 tonnes Vermax: 10 tonnes Moondancer: 8 tonnes Arrax: 5 tonnes It's hard to get a sense of most of these because their size changes slightly throughout the show and trying to apply a square cube law to animals, especially fictional flying ones, means some of these feel more accurate at certain points of the show than others. I welcome earnest disagreements and alternate suggestions! All this is just fun speculating drawn upon the excellent work in your video, so well done again! ^^
Wow, thanks for this great and well informed comment. Yea the math in this video was done so many times, your estimates would be more plausible in real life most likely, but dang the discrepancies in the lore an the countless fan theories all have different estimates, and also a side note, according to the vfx team of house of the dragon Vhagar is around 90 meters and 150 meters wingspan, which is just insane😂
As far as I know ancient Valyrians dabbled in genetics and creating different chimeras. I always wondered if they tried to create new creatures of “war”, but thanks to your video I now realize that they probably tried to come up with something that could be easily sustained, fatten up fast on anything, like waste, and fed to dragons later. Essentially all their experiments were to create big mutant piggies, that can survive on rocks or smsh🐷
Not sure if a crocodile is a good example of the caloric intake for a dragon because crocodiles are much less active animals and as a result have a slower metabolism, dragons being flying animals will have far greater caloric needs compared to a same-sized crocodile. Birds would probably be a closer analog (at least among living animals, pterosaurs would be even closer but we have no living examples) but I assume dragons aren't endothermic like birds are since their internal body seems to be supernaturally hot, so they would have lower caloric needs than birds since they don't need to worry about burning calories to keep their body temperature up.
Considering the amount of animals they would need to feed dragons is likely many farmers would create new, bigger breeds that get fat quickly. Even after there went extinct this new breeds of farm animals would still be useful for feeding people, making them resist better during the long winters.
Dragons seem to be much more active and have higher metabolic rate than crocodiles. making the whole situation much worse than calculated here. But a medieval ox was probably gonna be heavier than 275Kg, of course it depend on the breed, but many of them were quite large and bulky used to plow field and as draft animals, it's only more recently in history that there has been a generall decrease in mass, then a increase caused by the new indutrialisation of farming and food production. Of course this depended on times, breed and region, and could sometime get very low, like in 1000 in england, were those noumber used in the video as reference were taken from. It's also fair to assume Westeros would have larger breed than that
Great content I appreciate it. Even though dragons are expensive to upkeep one can argue that they can pay for themselves if riders are cruel enough. And also you don't need large army when you have dragons on your disposal. I would argue that keeping a dragon for a year is much cheaper then keeping and army of 10000 soldiers. Controlling armies are harder too. Loyalties were often fickle. But a dragon is always loyal to its rider as far as I know. So dragons are better for enviorement when you think about it. Because people can go work in production, education etc instead of enlisting in an army.
A fun idea is part of why dragons domesticated is a more steady supply of food. I don’t believe they actually need to eat every day, half the time we just see them snoozing around a castle or hibernating in a cave. But they’re practically pampered pets, so ofc they’ll be fed every day.
my favorite dragon is a tie between seasmoke and terression. not a shock since both dragons are the more heroic from the dance. this video also brought up the thought that why the dragons died out when they did. at the growth rate of dragons by the time of game thrones there would have been at least a hundred dragons living in westeroes. think about how many cows that would take feed. side note dragons also eat fish as noted by grey ghost who dined regualy on fish and was a menace to fishermen on dragonstone which also explains how the tarageryegns fed their dragons before ruling westeroes. also given the cost it does become a question about how the lannisters never got dragons as they have the money and even a gaint castle that built from soild rock that could easily been outfitted as a dragon pit. it was even mentioned in house of the dragon.
Thanks for letting me know your favourite dragons👌🏻 Imagine Robert complain about the eating habits of dragons. He probably would not need the breastplate stretcher then.
The Targaryens wanted to keep the dragon advantage to themselves because a dragon was a power advantage that trumped pretty much all answers and if the Lannisters had dragons they could easily challenge the Iron Throne, no payment was worth kingdom ending conflict generations down the line. If the Lannisters had managed to purchase dragons the Dance of the Dragons likely would’ve happened sooner if not twice.
@@MrAlepedroza ((Potential HOTD SPOILER)) Nettles was a character in the books who was a dragon rider but I don't think she was a Dragon Seed bastard or a descendant of Valyria, like I think her character was to hint that it wasn't necessarily just Targaryen blood that could control dragons. I may be misremembering however so if I'm wrong discard this comment. Either way, the point I'm trying to make is the Lannisters could eventually get dragons under their control given time and effort.
This guy is crazy. You’re diving into the economics of Westeros? My man Grrm is infamous at how bad he is with numbers, either way fantastic video and I betcha your going to be at 10k subs before the year ends
for practicality the Targaryens probably had a sort of tax in kind to keep their dragons fed, think of the way the modern military & industrial complex works or perhaps the crownlands have a system where small folk pay their taxes in livestock - you want to hold onto your croft/farm? provide x amount of pigs or a cow per year - a bit like the cinque ports were taxed in England i.e. various towns and cities had to provide money to support the royal navy or there might be a levee from the paramount lords, to provide a certain amount of cattle to support the Westeros equivalent of the War Department or nuclear weapons program!
We probably can't get a decent estimate on diet, crocodiles are fine but while they're both large predatory reptiles, crocodiles are far more sedentary. They're sit and wait predators, and spend a large portion of their time stationary conserving energy. Dragons are active hunters, and as such would require far more energy to maintain that lifestyle. (Obviously a dragon kept by a house isn't actively hunting all the time so that is worth noting, so it will consume less food. However during war they do mention that the dragons require more food due to the increase in activity). Because of this, it's likely that the 5% of body weight rule is significantly underestimating the intake of a dragon. A better example may be a large active hunting bird, like an eagle owl which generally require around 6-10% of their body weight in food every day, but can sometimes eat up to 20%. Another thing to note, is that crocodiles are ectotherms (cold blooded) like most reptiles. However, when you get to the size that dragons get to, you have to be warm blooded to survive at such a size. Dinosaurs come to mind as an example. Despite being reptiles, the size of large dinosaurs like T-Rex, Spinosaurs and large sauropods meant that they would have been what we would call "warm blooded", as their size causes them to generate their own internal body heat regardless. Dragons, being even larger than dinosaurs, would also have to be warm blooded. An ectotherm simply cannot survive at such a large size as their body is just too big to be warmed by the environment. Even using a magical explanation, that their internal fire keeps them warm would still mean they are not cold blooded as they are able to generate their own body heat and regulate their temperature, which again would require more energy to maintain such a process. As such, dragons would have a metabolism likely more similar to warm blooded animals like birds and mammals. Another thing to note, unless I'm remembering wrong and it is explicitly stated that dragons double in size every 25 years, then the growth would likely be the opposite way round. Crocodiles again, grow continuously throughout their lives, however that growth slows significantly the older they get. Dragons would likely be similar, only growing slower the older they get, rather than somehow growing faster as they age, which makes sense as you see dragons like Vermax grow significantly over the course of the story while Caraxes, over that same period of time, doesn't grow much at all. All this to say very entertaining video still, and I don't have an issue with any of the analysis, this is just my 2cents on the matter as I've been studying reptiles for years.
I think the line about Caraxes preferring pork was more of a lightly-veiled threat to the portly man he was speaking to. I wanna say that human meat has been compared to pork in the books too.
During the Liberation of Malvinas, a former soldier told me "we stole 30 sheep from a local farmer each day" they were 'kind' enough to ask the farmer how many should they steal without this becoming his ruin in the short term. So, 29 pigs a week sounds pretty affordable. And yes, war sucks )=
Birds of prey have hollow bones and thus weigh a lot less for the size don't they? And less muscle mass than a reptile compared to GOT dragons which look kinda bulky and heavy most times.
@@mrct592Yeah but that probably means they have to eat even more. I would say that Caraxes weekly snack should be 3x that value maybe split between 2 or 3 meals per week.
Unironically, dragons would be amazing for agriculture. The sheer amount of money the crown would have to invest in buying animals would mean the peasantry would possibly become wealthier than merchants and craftsmen.
I love how you give this realistic and grounded aproach in a fantasy series. Nevertheless, the weights you obtain are so big because you use a crocodile for scale. Crocodiles need to eat much less than warm blooded animals and judgin by the level of activity of the dragons in the show they are more near warm blooded in the spectrum ( like some reptiles) . So the percetage of weight that vermintor is eating weekly is more than its 5 % body weight. Again as you have said this is fantasy there's no need to take this seriusly
Where are you getting these values from? Caraxes is approximately the same length as a blue whale and much thinner, if a blue whale weighs a maximum of 200 tonnes, there is not way that caraxes weighs 550 tonnes.
Thanks for the comment. Short answer “Its Magic”, the thing is how do you know that Caraxes is the size of a blue whale. And to add, according to the vfx department Vhagar is 90meters in length and a wingspan of 150meters, throws the calculations off from the blue whale theory. Since a blue whale is roughly 30meters in length that would make Vhagar 3x the size of a blue whale and Caraxes is half the size of Vhagar which would make him larger than a blue whale. And dragons most likely had large dense bones and you also have to take in account the scales and the massive wings
@@ProbablyTrueTalesTrue enough, but even with magic they still have to be at least somewhat believable in order to fly. Maybe they had hollow bones, like birds, and hollow bones contrary to popular belief are actually much stronger than dense bones. So for all we know Caraxes could be far lighter than what you had suggested, which would considerably cut the cost of feeding him
@@ProbablyTrueTales Yes, but you still forget to mention that any aerial animal is comparatively lighter than its terrestrial and aquatic counterparts. A Blue Whale is huge in mass because its weight is supported by the buoyancy of water. The same whale would not survive on land as its internal organs would collapse due to its own weight. Similarly, lets take the largest aerial animal of all time, Quetzalcoatlus, which had a wingspan of 40 feet, but weighed less than a ton or perhaps a shade over a ton. I understand that the dragons in GRRM's world are ruled by magic, but there is no way that even a 300 foot dragon like Vhagar weighs a 1000 tons.The wings are basically hollow, the tail of the dragon tapers and is slender and the only meaty portion is the chest region. But again, Dragon bones could be a factor as they are said to be very heavy, so I give it to you.
@@ProbablyTrueTales Thx for the reply! It would make him longer maybe, but the volume is more relevant to weight than the length. I was going from estimates that caraxes is about 30- 40 meters long, much of that being tail which does not end up being very heavy. I guess you could assume higher bone density but even so 550 tonnes would necessitate a bone density that is virtually unachievable, even if we assume a total length of 45 metres. Scales would be included in a volumetric calculation of mass, unless their density greatly differs and the wings would definitely add a lot of weight but if you compare most winged creatures, even with wings they weighed less than their non-flying counterparts (e.g. Quetzelcoatlus weighing about 250kg at the height of a girraffe). I guess I was wondering if you had anything that the showrunners said regarding the weight or if these are your own estimates?
@@ProbablyTrueTales The main problem here is that you assume the animals would grow at the same speed during their lives. Or did you even say "exponentially" in the video? Which is not how any animal in our world works. Some grow continuously sure, but the rate of growth diminishes as they get older. I assume this to be the most likely scenario for SOIAF dragons.
So happy this has been to certain extent been incorporated in the AGOT CK3 mod game❤. Also very nice video, liked it a lot and hopefully we get more. Like how much treasury was needed to have on te baggage when moving armies from one place to another ?
this reminds me when I was little and read my dragon info book (you know the one) and it said something that a young dragon would have to eat a whole chicken per day and I realized how expensive it would be to keep 😭😂
I looked at the weight estimates for the dragons, and thought 'Ouch!' Even if the dragons had some magical means to aid them in flight, that is still a great deal of weight to get off the ground. I can understand why crocodiles were used to estimate mass, but in doing so, one important factor was either ignored or neglected, and that is that any vertebrate that evolved powered flight (as opposed to gliding) would have also evolved weight saving adaptations... and the bigger the creature was/is, the more important this is. I assume the content maker chose crocodiles as their model because they are cold-blooded, rather than birds or bats, which are warm blooded, and mostly require some form of insulation. The dragons, however, wouldn't have ( think of sauropod dinosaurs) with their size allowing them to retain body heat. Which brings up another point: the dragons may not have been truly 'cold-blooded', getting the heat they required from their environment. WE have learned in the last decade or so that there may be a spectrum of metabolism, from ectothermy to endothermy, with certain significant animals such as great white sharks and bluefin tuna being both mesothermic and employing facultative endothermy. On top of that, flight is an energetic activity that generates a lot of heat, so rather than being warm blooded so they can fly, dragons may well be hot blooded because they do fly. It's true that endothermic creatures need vast amounts of calories compared to cold blooded creatures of similar size, but powered flight needs even more. This is another reason i suspect that the dragons were far less massive than estimated here: There would be a point where a dragon couldn't consume enough calories to get airborne above a certain mass. Not only that, but the amount of muscle needed would make it impossible to fly. No, I think an estimate of over a thousand tonnes for a dragon is far, far too high, given the biomechanical restraints and energy consumption.
This is why I think any fantasy story with dragons also needs fantasy livestock. The larger the predator the larger its prey. There are also some other ways to solve this problem. Keep the dragons at a more reasonable size- about the size of a small plane or quetzalcoatlus (largest flying animal ever). This is what I decided to do for most of the dragons in my fantasy story. Like a lot of people though, I think large kaiju dragons can be cool. So, I'm glad I can just use magic as the explanation for why some dragons are larger than others. Smaller dragons are far more common because it's easier for them to survive since they require less food. However, some species can become especially large. Of course, the larger a dragon is the more it must eat. To justify their size, I expand their diet. Not only can they eat livestock including a fantasy creature around the size of a hippo, but they'll also eat other monsters including smaller dragons, and also crops. A large flock of dragons could easily wipeout a cities entire food supply. Personally, I think dragons being omnivores that are also opportunistic eaters- being more than willing to eat any corpses they find- makes the most sense since they are less limited for food. I do want to have species of dragons with specific attributes. This will likely include diet among other behaviors. These dragon species will probably not be as big as what we see in GoT, Harry Potter, or LotR. Yet, they are still dangerous.
I love this kind of video. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford a dragon. Now an important question (and I'm serious): I have a horse, and I'm always amazed to see the amount of poo I have to clean every week. Now imagine what it must be like to clean the dragon's pit from the humongus amount of poop? However, I guess it would be a great fertilizer, and a great asset to agriculture. You could even sell it tp neighboring countries.
You literally forgot to mention the most important source of food for Targaryen dragons, that being fish in the Narrow Sea. Dragonstone is the main home of the dragons even after the construction of the Dragon pit. This is for a reason as it is mentioned multiple times that the dragons fly off on their own from Dragonstone at their leisure pretty much. It is to be expected that most of this time away from Dragonstone is spent on hunting and fishing. You dont need to pay a single copper for that and before the conquest Dragonstone had no capability of feeding the dragons with any of the livestock mentioned in the video anyway, meaning there must have been another way for them to feed.
2:00 Crocodiles are cold blooded predators which means their caloric intake needs are not as intensive as a warm blooded predator… in order for dragons to be as agile, intelligent and active for an animal their size this means they must be a warm blooded animal, with higher caloric needs in order to keep their body in optimal temperature at all times. All this means that not only they need to eat way more % of the stated body weight to stay healthy, but that they are way lighter than suggested
I also think that you got the weight of Vermithor wrong. First of all I don’t think that dragons would be exothermic like crocodile and require little food in comparison to their body weight. Instead I would suggest that they like birds and dinosaurs are endothermic and would therefore have a way higher caloric intake like 5-10% every day. So your calculations in for of how many animals they would eat is still correct but the dragons would be way lighter. Syrax from the first episode is 14 years old and you can’t tell me that she weighs 70 tons. That would be equivalent to 7 very large T-Rex. I would guess 10% -20 %daily intake would give 14 year old Vermithor a weight of 2500kg -5000kg. And from that you can use the square cube law when increasing the size of the dragons.
Using the crocodiles might be a bad metric. Crocodiles are cold-blooded, while Dragons are probably warm-blooded. They move around a lot (unlike crocs and cold-blooded reptiles), and they produce fire. All of that probably requires a massive intake of calories. They probably also have hollow bones, like the Sauropod dinosaurs (to support their own weight because they were massive) and like the birds (in order to fly) so they are probably lighter than what we think. All of that to say that the weight estimation should be revised...
Hey there, I'm an economics grad in university who also found the currency conversions of westeros "interesting". You did a pretty decent job with your conversions, but in case you're curious I made an excel file that does a pretty decent job of converting westerosi currency into current-day values. If you'd like I can send it to your channels business email along with a little info packet on the methods used in the calculations - might help you with future content. Respond to this comment if you want me to send it.
I feel like the crocodile comparison wouldn’t be that good since crocodiles only need to eat that little due to the fact that their cold blooded. Dragons though reptiles are not cold blooded and therefore would require much more food, a better animal to compare them to would be large birds of prey when it comes to thermodynamics.
Thats fairly resonable. The Targarians took in a LOT of money, and feeding it to their dangerous rides would be a significant reinvestment of wealth into their economy. The livestock industries would be booming!
Let me know your favourite Dragon, and weather you think the cost of owning one is justified! Also side note! Imagine the amount of food they would need if they are more active in war time when they literally burn energy with every fiery breath!
mine would have to be Melys and if I had the gold of the Targaryens then I think it could be justified in the sense that our modern governments spend up to billions in defence and diplomacy measures and dragons in Westeros were the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and if you had enough could provide a good deterrent to avoid serious conflict with them. Also I want to fly so….:
Of course my fav dragon also is the Blood Wyrm itself💥💥💥... Very informative and entertaining especially for the fantasy enjoyer like me
Sunfyre, the eternal Doggo
Of course, the bronze fury is my favorite dragon. The dragon of the good old king. Long live Vermithor!
Caraxes
I love how each dragon has its own dietary preferences. Vermithor eats bulls, the Cannibal prefers dragon hatchlings and eggs, greyghost loves to hunt fish, Sheepstealer loves his mutton and Caraxes loves his piggies.
Just another detail that makes you love the book and shows more and more
I also think it a way for the dragons to avoid competition with each other
The Cannibal should have been slaughtered for being a cannibal.
Grey ghost is best bcz in books it's said he is shy and don't threaten smallfolks don't eat their livestock and just dive to hunt fish without hurting or annoying fishermen . Best and cheapest dragon
And Sunfyre prefers, well, let's just say he has a particular favourite dish
Oh so Rhaenyra is RICH rich to be feeding Syrax so well. No wonder she was able to send so much food to Kings Landing. I love when a universe has this much detail in it
Except that makes no sense since she only really has Dragonstone to fund them. Unless the Velaryons also funded her, but that's not typically how feudal systems work at all.
Dragonstone has LOTS of gold stored up by previous Targaryen heirs and rulers even before Aegon's conquest.
You could say corlys velaryon is rich. It's his war as much as it is rhaenyra afterall it's his "GRANDSON" who will sit on the throne
@@ratikantrout1865e doesn't have a grandson
Imagine The Valyrian freehold with it's 1000 dragons at it's peak
They had free labor 🤣
@@HakaiKaien Yeah they kept the cattle for themselves and they fed them the old slaves. Or even dragons when they start to become too numerous and unmanageable.
No wonder they had to keep invading and expanding 😭
Still probably cheaper than the us military tho😅
@@vexxas5633 true
This is without including the fact that dragons require more food during times of war. In episode 2x01 Otto mentions how the extra movement takes up more energy so the dragons need more food than usual.
The poor people of Westeros, they might just riot or something😂
Even if a minor house had a dragon, unless they’re rich like the Velaryons then it would literally eat them out of house and home.
Like a gifted White Elephant
@@tiringsarcasm it's no wonder how there's only 40 dragonlords houses in valyria. and the targaryens are considered as a minor house. think of how rich the freehold was. i think the highest record of valyrian dragon count so far is the 300 dragons unleashed upon rhoynar. imagine the wealth needed to sustain that
@@AzureFyre8967 Mayhaps this is why they had to expand so quickly, they were literally devouring resources at a rate that required them to conquer and amass wealth.
Even with the fertile volcanic soil of Valyria they would have needed more food for themselves and the ever increasing number and size of dragons.
I was about to comment that the cost of dragons isn't actually as high as it sounds compared to the cost of maintaining an army. But the Iron Throne doesn't actually maintain an army of its own, it relies on their vassals to provide the troops, while the cost of dragons is entirely borne by the crown itself. So keeping dragons probably comprises the main expense for the Targaryen Kings.
11 millions US dollars is not that much actually,it is mentioned that kingslanding has 500 thousand people so around 22 dollars for each person (anually),id be more than happy to pay that price to have dragons defending me
@@arthurservilheri4311 King's Landing has a population of 1 million people.
Edit: I was wrong, it is 500,000.
@@Dell-ol6hb from what i can remember it is half a mil,jaime said it when asked how many lives did he save
@@arthurservilheri4311 Yea you're right I misremembered, it is around 500,000 people, Tyrion says it in Storm of Swords.
Wow that actually makes sense and answers every thing
If anyone *SOMEHOW* able to claim Greyghost (unlike in the book where no one can), it would be one of the cheapest dragon to feed as all you need to do is let the animals soars above the sea daily and let it hunt for fishes and most of the time you won't have to worry about the cost of feeding it.
Until you run out of fish
@@N.E.TGamingthat’s impossible fish reproduce far too quickly
@@mohammadhosseini6675 fish #'s decline in real life due to overfishing. A dragon who solely eats fish would surely have a better shot at ridding the sea of them, at least in the area it resides.
@@N.E.TGamingNo, not even close. Overfishing even with modern technology and thousands upon thousands of huge thrawlers and hundrerds of thousands of smaller fishermen are not enough to truly extinct the common fish species.
1 dragon will not do anything.
@@N.E.TGaming You clearly lack perspective of how many human beings there are on earth consuming fish and other seafood. I recommend you look into the ecology of fish... Because even a thousand dragons could NEVER deplete the Narrow Sea of fish and is absolutely nothing compared to hundreds of millions of humans being sustained by industrial level fishing.
Just to put it into perspective of just how much the US defense budget ($820.03 Billion) is, the military would be able to afford 421,051 dragons if they all ate cows.
That part 😂😂😂
In modern context they'd probably eat chickens and pigs, and a lot of food waste
The real question is could 400 thousand dragons defeat the us military
@@spencer4679spread out all over america yeah
🤣🤣🤣
You forgot about the square cube law. A dragon half the size (length wise) would be only a eight in weight. Since weight increases exponentially. So Caraxes would weigh something about 127 Tons
Add to that: Caraxes may be half her length, but he's a very streamlined dragon and much of his length is neck and tail beyond the normal proportions. Might even be closer to 100 tons.
man I hate math and physics
Also i think its mentioned? But even if it isnt it still makes sense, growing dragons need more food. And dragons like caraxes and vermithor are growing wayy slower than they were when young.
@@TalesofKaimere Yo! didn't expect to find you here!
@@eternalifyshorts Watched a House of the Dragon clip six weeks ago and it's all I see on the TL now lol. This was a solid video though! Fun stuff for authors to consider if they want to feel more grounded.
It would make sense if the crown had its own animal farm specifically for the dragons.
Agreed. I would assume Targaryans would never be paying for their livestock. Yes, as they had Royal forests during medieval times, I imagine crown land devoted to pasture solely for this purpose.
Additionally, Kings could demand beasts as taxes.
Injured horses would serve this purpose deliciously!
Pigs, are probably the animal they invested the most money, in. With knowledge of the pigs life cycle, I can see a large part of the diet. Being pigs. Cows are are good too. This would mainly be for tamed dragons, less so for the wild ones. As I can see house targaryen paying a lot in compensation.
I always wondered why they didn't have royal stock farms dedicated to dragon fodder, too.
probablly a caveat for the Crownlands is "Our Dragon's will steal from your Farms. With the Strength of Dragon's, you will not complain or you will answer to said dragon." You have to understand, when the Targaryen's had Dragon's, no one in their right mind would rebel unless that rebel force had dragon's of its own, or they're stupid. Dragon Era Targaryen Kingship is less a "Feudal" government and more of a "Absolutionist Monarch" government, since they literally have Flying Medieval Nukes.
@@josephvisnovsky1462 fun fact:
Qing Dynasty (remember Qings or Manchus are originated from manchuria which was habitated by Mongolic nomads and later immigrated into chinese culture after they conquered Chinese and Mongolians.) They had Iron herd in Mongolia which specificly herd livestocks of Emperor and his army. In China if i remember there were farmlands that also purposed to make food to stock in governor in case of crisis.
So Targaryens were absolute monarchs with their dragons. Taken those real life facts and Targaryen's greater power, Targaryens must have so many lands in crownlands as their personal farms
For flying nuke lizards, they are far cheaper than an actual nuclear arsenal... Also my favourite dragon is Seasmoke
2:10 - Using a crocodile is an interesting choice, but you have to wonder if it's very accurate. Crocodiles have relatively slow metabolic rates. Maybe a bird could actually be more accurate. Birds need to eat a lot because they fly, with small birds having to eat up to 30% of their body weight every week. This is less extreme for larger birds but significantly more than crocodiles. Dragons are probably also not cold-bloooded since their blood when they are cut is literally boiling.
Dragons are magical too so I don't really think there is a way to effectively know what amount of food they need, but there is wild dragons whic managed to survive on fish or wild sheep so I think they don't need as much food as an animal, maybe they are using magic to spend less energy idk
Yea 500 tones is also probably not that accurate either LMAO
@@floridamanfishes9085i think Vhagar is around 500t. Caraxes could be around 200t
@@gabrielbaieel8073 they would have to be jet powered if they weighed that much tho. You can’t just get a million pounds into the air without an extreme amount of energy. And that’s not coming from they’re wings
@@floridamanfishes9085maybe the rear end then? If they can breathe fire, who says they can’t fart on take off. 😎✨
This is amazing work that nerds like us love. One thing I want to add is that despite the considerable costs to feeding and housing around 1 dragons such as Caraxes costing only around 1 thousand of gold dragons per dragon per annum and millions of dollars IRL, its probably substantially cheaper than maintaining a professional standing army for House Tagaryaen. To use the professional 5000 legionnaires of a roman legion for comparison, their salaries alone were estimated to cost around 9.7 million seceteres (roughly 9.7 million dollars) or 97,000 golden aurues (equivalent to a gold dragon). The estimated costs of merely the salaries of the entire roman army of around 380,000 men was 1.67 million gold aurei per year which took up nearly 80% of the entire empire's government budget. Plus a dragon is worth more than any army as we saw that 3 dragons wiped the floor with around 60,000 men easily in the field of fire. This probably explains why House Tagarayen never established a professional standing army.
Nice thanks for the info, and yea I agree that is probably why the Targaryens did not need an army
And not to mention. The logistics needed to actually mobilize an army.
Roughly 3 million dollars per year for a dragon you can reuse as much as you want and can transport you around isn't so bad when you know that firing a single Tomahawk Missile costs 1.5 million dollars
Wow 😳😳😳
If your going to be moving around more it's gonna cost more calories and money in the show in peace it seems like the dragons are rarely ridden
Did you happen to calculate that bonus nutrition dragons get from "cooking their food"? Using other apex predators in our natural world might not account for thus.
IIRC calories are typically calculated by burning the food, so I would imagine it's the theoretical maximum. Many foods may yield less net calories due to the thermogenic effects of ingestion and digestion. Think celery being net negative due to the low caloric content and need to be chewed.
in Fire and Blood, there's the situation of princess Rhaena and her dragon Dreamfyre in Fair isle ( she was married to lord Farman's son), and Lord Farman at the time complained to her how expensive it was getting to feed her dragon everyday. To put in perspective, at the time, Dreamfyre wasnt a big dragon yet.
This is a cool thought experiment. Now I'm going to add in a but...I see the dragons as giant reptiles. Reptiles don't eat everyday. They may only eat once or twice a week. Sometimes the older ones only eat once every 2 weeks. As a reptile gets older they need less feedings. You said Vermithor's morning meal. That could be another way to say he takes his meals in the morning. It didn't say every morning his meal was a bull, so maybe he only eats a few times a week.
Also some snake breeders over feed their breeder snakes to get them to grow quicker to breeding weight. So I could see them overfeeding the dragons to bulk them up. Also G.G.R Martin says dragon that are riderless don't roam. They stick to one spot, so again less calorie output.
This, big time. If true it also solves a big problem with the math. We're basing vermithors weight off of food intake. The model in the video ends up with a larger dragon weighing 3 times the max weight of a boeing 787 dreamliner. Magic or no magic, that's simply far too heavy.
They’re warm-blooded. Actually BOILING blooded. So yes lots of food.
@@rynfornow3411 lots of warm blooded creatures don't need a lot of calories. Pandas and Sloths off the top of my head, go look up their diets
@@Myrcella_Rykker ummmmmmm
You…. Do realize …. Bc their food is so very low and nutrition and calories… all they can do is eat eat eat then sleep for digestion.
You MUST be joking, right? Right?!
@@rynfornow3411 how is entire animal carcass low in calories. Fat is high in calories. Plus yes they sleep all the time because what else is a dragon going to do all day and night when they are shoved into a dragon pit
now imagine that of old Valyria with hundreds of dragons. probably some of them cruel houses feed their dragons with human slaves.
I wonder how much humans they have to eat to stay well fed😂
no wonder old valyria kept on conquering. those hundreds of dragons that they had probably needed a lot of food that they couldn't sustain themselves. so they just conquer beighboring cities
keep in mind the targaryens were one of the weaker houses and balerion was one of the biggest dragons in westeros history
makes you wonder how large the dragons of old valyria were
Feeding dragons humans isn't really sustainable at all, humans take forever to grow to full size, pigs would probably be the ideal livestock for feeding dragons because pigs reproduce and grow extremely quickly and they can also reach a large size in under a year
@@Dell-ol6hb yes but most of the Valyrians are cruel and see other humans as beneath them akin to cattles to be feed to their beloved dragons like a special desserts.
Wow, I thought this channel would at least have 100k subs for such quality. One thing I have to give props to the show for is the fact they do mention multiple times the upkeep costs of keeping dragons and the toll it puts on the people.
That the more they are used the hungrier they get because like other reptiles they can conserve energy for a while doing nothing. So not only are they expensive to keep but expensive to field into battle. They are worth their weight in gold x100 though as even a small dragon can instantly turn the tide as even today air superiority is the baseline of any modern army and thats with anti-aircraft weapons, Dragons really are fantasy WMD’s.
Daerons young dragon tessarion SPOILERS:
Winning the battle of honeywine and routing a massive black army.
Thanks for the compliment, it really means alot. An yea lets just say if I were a peasant I probably would join about 4-5 peasant rabbles and revolts😂
Caraxes may be the Prince's Dragon, but this Murder Noodle definitely likes to eat the least expensive livestock. Definitely a lot of money to feed him still, but at least he doesn't break the Tagaryen bank account xp.
That honor probably goes Syrax [relative to caraxes' size] who hasn't hunted on her own in years. Rhaenyra def spoiled her dragon.
this is the type of realism and math that i love in fantasy. it sounds odd, but i love REALISM in fantasy
Glad you liked it, stay tuned more coming soon🎉
Good thing dragons on Dragonstone hunted for some of their food from the sea. Not good news for the fish and dolpin population in the area, but great news for House Targaryen's treasury.
thanks now i realise that even if dragons existed i couldnt afford to have one
This video also fully supports the theory that high towers and maesters caused the dance of dragons, adding to the list of targ problems : their flying private jets who are more expensive than modern day planes
Just tame one and make it catch its own sheep, pigs, and the odd child(allegedly)
So basically Sheepstealer or Cannibal
Well, it cost about 4 million a year to upkeep a dragon and about $1.5 million to shoot one Tomahawk missile. And that’s just one missile from one jet, so I imagine the cost of the US military. Or even just one aircraft carrier. Considering that a dragon is more powerful then an aircraft carrier, I think the cost is way more efficient and worth it.
I just want to say, a crocodile might not be the closest animal to a dragon, dragons are hot blooded, VERY hot blooded, so they probably consum way more calories than a crocodile on a pound for pound basis.
Amazing video btw 😊
Thank you! I had to stop watching once he compared them to cold-blooded reptiles. Horrible. Dragon’s body temperature is literally boiling, so you realize the insane caloric intake it would require to maintain that metabolic rate?
Not only that but the metabolic rate of an almost sedimentary reptile vs a flying hot blooded one would be extremely different. The amount of calories needed for something that massive to enter flight and sustain it as we know dragons can do for days on end is insane.
@@bobydean1839Dude, come on, magical creatures mitigate this by using magic as an energy source. If you want to evaluate their energy expenditure on real world physics terms, then the first thing you have to understand is that a creature that big and heavy could never fly on those tiny wings. Pratchett goes into this too, saying that for something that massive to fly that effortlessly, a strong magic field is an absolute necessity.
@@MurasakiMonogatari dude, i completely agree with you
@@MurasakiMonogatari We are all well aware that it’s fantasy, we referring to the video trying use a real cold blooded almost sedentary reptile to compare with the dragons to get it’s predicted calorie count. But crocs just aren’t a good comparison.
Ngl i feel honoured that a fellow 🇿🇦 is making content like this! Keep it up 🎉
Thanks so much! I feel honoured that you watched my video👌🏻
Fun video man! Though I do think the math is based on some inaccurate assumptions 😅
I think the metabolism wasn't considered properly, especially since from size estimates in the shows and books, a 14-year old dragon (Vermax and Arrax are 15 and 14), they are nowhere near 68 tonnes, more like 4-5 tons. Therapod dinosaurs and elephants are good examples of what sizes make sense. 68.6 tons would be a massive sauropod dinosaur like Argentinosaurus. We should consider that crocodiles and alligators are sluggish, cold-blooded animals, whereas therapod dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and the dragons are similarly relatively active. Fire and flying both likely require huge amounts of that caloric intake, as does their general body temperature being so high that their blood boils water. This is metabolism, and far more of the caloric intake from so much food is used for that than growth.
Good points, yea some creative liberties were taken however, i did do so much research and went through countless theories, the truth is through all the books and show references there are so many discrepancies that made things hard. Another thing is dragons had different growth rates depending on its captivity level and, just because it seems. So I went with what I could find. But yes you are totally right I had not considered the metabolism of each dragon, I think my brain would explode trying to make sense it all😂
Then there is also the issue of weight in regards to bones etc. are they 'solid' like they would be for a Crocodile or are they hollow like that of a bird?
I believe there is one section in one of the books where Tyrion is doing some research regarding Dragons aswell.
I also think the values when it comes to weight might be a bit inflated, but all in all decent research.
However... while a Dragon DOES seem VERY expensive, one shouldnt forget that nowadays a Jet Fighter is also redicilously expensive and by Westeros standards that it's not cheap to maintain a Men at Arms, let alone a Knight or a Household Knight either. Ultimately it's a question of Power Projection, military capabilities and Prestiege aswell I suppose.
Very true point you bring up here, maybe we will get more hints and references in the future
not to mention, being that most dragons are assumed to be in the Reptile kingdom, Reptiles don't need to eat every day. So they might not need as much livestock to keep em satisfied each week
@@GarryDKing Dragons are NOT cold blooded like modern reptiles, but warm blooded like dinosaurs.
Just found your channel, watched almost every vid good stuff. Westeros stuff is cool but also enjoyed the historical topics. You deserve way bigger audience if we’re measuring by quality sir. Cheers.
Thank you so much for the support and nice words, it means a lot👌🏻 Stick around more coming🎉
Tbh i think Cannibal is the most cost effective. Being it eats almost everything and after a fight he can basically eat the dead
You know what's funny is that, When I read a Fanfiction that an Oc Character allows his Dragon to Hunt large Whales which are Called Levyatans and even giant squids that are krakkens. Overtime the Oc even convinces the other characters for their dragons to hunt large prey like the Whales and Squids so that they don't have to pay the expenses of feeding the dragons with pigs, bulls or sheep 😅😅😅
Which is a very good strategy in my opinion. And the Dragons are very full after eating a giant whale which is 100x times more efficient than eating small animals.
Imagine seeing a dragon hauling a whale across the sky, fingers crossed for season 3 of HOT D😂
We see that dragons like grey ghost can be adept fishers and one can assume that most of the coastal dragons subsist off of fish as well like sea smoke. Only issue is that in the GOT universe their leviathans are essentially ultra-massive sperm whales probably inspired by the real life extinct Livyatan as its confirmed that there are velociraptors in the southern continent of southyros(they have official art as well) and the sealord of braavos has tasmanian tiger like animals and of course direwolves so george is very willing to input prehistoric animals into his fantasy world as inspiration.
Following that information we can theorize they act similar making GOT’s leviathans DEEP sea whales which hunt DEEP sea krakens. Trying to force them into the surface would be difficult and dragons do not like water as they hate to fly when its raining and the rhoynar with water magic drowned 3 valyrian war dragons so they don’t do well in water. Its a good plan on paper but dangerous in execution.
Agreed my man, and thanks for this well informed and thought provoking comment. Its great hearing all these comments about things that I hadn’t even thought of while making the video, makes it all worth it!
@@Banished-rx4ol But in the Fanfic the reason why is how the OC's Dragon hunted down Whales I forgot to mention are not as large as the Adults, and they don't hunt in a storm or in the rain in the fanfic. And the reason why his Dragon was able to hunt Levyatans was because it wasn't kept in a cage or chained, he allowed him to grow. They say that Dragons can grow large as long as they are not kept in captivity. Which explains he hunted the Levyatans in the fanfic, even taught the Dragons how to hunt them efficiently like eagles hunt fish.
@@bizarreconvos Now that is a great and realistic explanation, many predatory animals avoid hunting the adults of prey species but will go after the old, young, and the sick which coincidentally are the ones most likely to be at the surface. Fun fact for some reason(we don’t know why) many deep sea animals will go to the surface when they are close to death like giant and colossal squids, frilled sharks, Oarfish, etc.
Also sperm whales raise their young in shallower water because they haven’t developed the blubber and muscle to traverse the deep sea which would make them ample prey for large dragons. Many whale species also float to the top when they die becoming a good food source. One thing I will say if the GOT world is anything like our own there should be safer whale species to hunt than extra-giant sperm whales. Smaller sharks, seals, and even schools of fish can be ample dragon prey as well. I know I’m probably way overthinking it but I can’t help it I have a love of both worldbuilding and speculative biology
They seem cheaper than a fighter jet with similar destructive power. The Seven Kingdoms are about the same area as the USA. The annual cost of maintaining 6 dragons is 48k gold dragons. Compare this to 80k gold dragons that Ned Stark's Hand of the King tourney was to cost and 6 million gold dragons that the Crown was in debt at the start of GOT.
Yea that is part of the very big inconsistency in the lore when it comes to economy, the values change alot
Dragons can’t really compare to a strategic nuke.
@@MultiKbarry in a medieval setting, they can
I just want to point out how the seasons effect the price of things. In "aGoT," it's been summer for 10 years, so the production of things was high, while "tHK" takes place in the spring.
I would suggest to use a logistic growth curve like from well researched carnivorous dinosaurs such as t-rex. exponential growth throught its entire lifespan is probably way over the top.
Also flying requires much more energy than "chillin" like a croc, so the amount of food required to grow should probably based on big birdies than crocs.
It's even worse than that because dragons do more energy intensive things such as flying, breathing fire and are just straight up implied to be hot/warm blooded meaning their caloric requirement far exceeds that of a model animal like cold blooded crocodile which makes their metabolism more akin to that of a large bird/bat.
they are not animals, they are magical creatures, that's why they can fly and breath fire, not because of their calorie intake
@@oguzkaganonder1331 This video was about estimating their caloric and financial needs based on real world model animals. Without this baseline you can just say everything is magic. They just feed them with magic and this video would then be moot lol.
Just discovered this channel and as soon as I heard this line in 7:26 i left a like
😚
Clicked and subbed immediately as soon as I saw the thumbnail in my video recommendations
Welcome home😂
I disagree on the reptile percentage base. Dragons in HotD are "fire made flesh". The run hot, grow fast, but have indeterminate growth, but cannibalism is not unknown to them (Vhagar swallowed part of Arrax). Bird metabolism at first, then they probably slowed down. Vermithor, Silverwing, Vhagar, Balerion were all quite sluggish as they got older. They could be riled up, yes, but sleeping so much probably wasn't natural (as Sheepstealer and Grey Ghost were so much more active and we're probably the same age). I would posit that the old house dragons were a overfed so they wouldn't wander.
I love this video! Cute art mixed with granular info is a niche I adore
Interestingly enough, in the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game, thoses costs are massively reduced
A Cow costs 9 Silver Stags, a Pig costs 2 Silver Stags while a Sheep costs as low as 48 Copper Pennies
Granted, they do say that those prices vary greatly in times of war and whatnot.
Using those prices, that would bring the yearly costs for Cows to a measly 23 Gold Dragons, for Pigs to 14 and Sheep to 21
Using the values of Wealth in the same book tells us that a single point of Wealth is worth 200 Gold Dragons and a House having between 1-10 Wealth is considered Impoverished
Thus the likes of House Corbray, House Osgrey or the infamous House Whocares would be able to maintain about 8 Dragons the size of Caraxes
... they probably miscalculated some stuff
Can never forget the raw power of Ser Whosit of Whocares
How did Dragon Stone, a small island used mostly for grazing livestock, manage to support that number of animals being eaten each year for so long I wonder? Even the untamed/wild dragons that lived there too.
I'd been wondering about this and then I found your video, so thank you! Also, my favorite is Caraxes as well.
Great video! Great narration, entertaining and informative!
I would like to offer some counterpoints on the math side just off the top of my head^^
The sizes you were ending up of something like 500 tonnes per dragon just don't make much biological sense (and I'm trying for a non entirely magic dependent answer here). Flying is an especially energy demanding type of locomotion, and most animals that engage in it consume anywhere from 20 to well over 100% of their body weight per day.
I think the breakdown is using a croc's 5%/week as the number base here. A flying fox is a relatively small flying mammal which can eat around 25% of their body weight/day. Let's go off the supposition from casual research that bigger creatures and dragons, being less mobile, need less and thus someone like Vermithor actually only eats about 2% of their body weight per day.
I'm going to agree with your food intake assessment in that Vermithor eats 2 bulls at 245kg x 2 per day.
With our new 2%/day figure that means Vermithor is actually closer to 24,500kg (54,000 pounds) or about 4 times a male adult african elephant's maximum of 6,300kg.
Dragonology has all these theories on how Dragons can be so large while being relatively lightweight enough that lift can be generated through other means. I won't go into that tangent but I will just say from watching the show that Vermithor certainly feels at least as heavy as 4 elephants, I would wager he might weigh a bit more even just visually but not by a giant margin.
I'll still follow your dragon size relations for Vhagar and Caraxes, and I'll throw in my own guesses with a healthy dose of watching Glidus on the side. So these would be my general dragon weights under these different assumptions
Vhagar: 36,7 tonnes
Vermithor: 24,5 tonnes
Dreamfyre: 22 tonnes
Meleys: 20 tonnes
Caraxes: 18,4 tonnes
Syrax: 16 tonnes
Seasmoke: 15 tonnes
Sunfyre: 13 tonnes
Vermax: 10 tonnes
Moondancer: 8 tonnes
Arrax: 5 tonnes
It's hard to get a sense of most of these because their size changes slightly throughout the show and trying to apply a square cube law to animals, especially fictional flying ones, means some of these feel more accurate at certain points of the show than others. I welcome earnest disagreements and alternate suggestions!
All this is just fun speculating drawn upon the excellent work in your video, so well done again! ^^
Wow, thanks for this great and well informed comment. Yea the math in this video was done so many times, your estimates would be more plausible in real life most likely, but dang the discrepancies in the lore an the countless fan theories all have different estimates, and also a side note, according to the vfx team of house of the dragon Vhagar is around 90 meters and 150 meters wingspan, which is just insane😂
As far as I know ancient Valyrians dabbled in genetics and creating different chimeras. I always wondered if they tried to create new creatures of “war”, but thanks to your video I now realize that they probably tried to come up with something that could be easily sustained, fatten up fast on anything, like waste, and fed to dragons later. Essentially all their experiments were to create big mutant piggies, that can survive on rocks or smsh🐷
This is the best theory ever😂 great stuff, must have created a big ass pig that destroyed the entire freehold😂
Not sure if a crocodile is a good example of the caloric intake for a dragon because crocodiles are much less active animals and as a result have a slower metabolism, dragons being flying animals will have far greater caloric needs compared to a same-sized crocodile. Birds would probably be a closer analog (at least among living animals, pterosaurs would be even closer but we have no living examples) but I assume dragons aren't endothermic like birds are since their internal body seems to be supernaturally hot, so they would have lower caloric needs than birds since they don't need to worry about burning calories to keep their body temperature up.
You make vids of my 3am thoughts
Considering the amount of animals they would need to feed dragons is likely many farmers would create new, bigger breeds that get fat quickly. Even after there went extinct this new breeds of farm animals would still be useful for feeding people, making them resist better during the long winters.
Westerosi selective breeding, that could be an episode title
Dragons seem to be much more active and have higher metabolic rate than crocodiles. making the whole situation much worse than calculated here.
But a medieval ox was probably gonna be heavier than 275Kg, of course it depend on the breed, but many of them were quite large and bulky used to plow field and as draft animals, it's only more recently in history that there has been a generall decrease in mass, then a increase caused by the new indutrialisation of farming and food production.
Of course this depended on times, breed and region, and could sometime get very low, like in 1000 in england, were those noumber used in the video as reference were taken from.
It's also fair to assume Westeros would have larger breed than that
And that's just what they eat... the crown even has dragon keepers, plural... salaries involved
Ey oh, lets not go there😂
True..but no dental plan, 401K, paid leave etc. 😅
Thank you for measuring in freedom units, I never would've known how tall those stacked coins were if it weren't measured in giraffes and shaq's
No problem bud, I got you👏
Imagine being the royal dragon food livestock farmer? Probably a pretty good gig as far as medieval farming goes
Great content I appreciate it. Even though dragons are expensive to upkeep one can argue that they can pay for themselves if riders are cruel enough. And also you don't need large army when you have dragons on your disposal. I would argue that keeping a dragon for a year is much cheaper then keeping and army of 10000 soldiers. Controlling armies are harder too. Loyalties were often fickle. But a dragon is always loyal to its rider as far as I know. So dragons are better for enviorement when you think about it. Because people can go work in production, education etc instead of enlisting in an army.
And more war more free food for dragons
FINALLY someone talks about this
A fun idea is part of why dragons domesticated is a more steady supply of food. I don’t believe they actually need to eat every day, half the time we just see them snoozing around a castle or hibernating in a cave. But they’re practically pampered pets, so ofc they’ll be fed every day.
The amount of energy necessary to generate all that fire must recquire insane amounts of food input.
Imagine if Westeros concentrated their wealth into the well-being of their people rather than feeding their already inflated military budgets
But if you are the only royal family that has medieval nuke, you want to keep those weapons for your kingdom.
@thutaaung2708 yes I feel so confident in the nukes around me that it almost makes me forget that we have no national Health Care in this country
I could not believe people actually make an in depth analysis over a fictional creature
Ah yea!! The boy is back!!
Great video!! My favourite dragon is Syrax. 🐉🔥
Good choice!
Before this channel blows up I was the 976th sub
Thanks you mega chad!
my favorite dragon is a tie between seasmoke and terression. not a shock since both dragons are the more heroic from the dance. this video also brought up the thought that why the dragons died out when they did. at the growth rate of dragons by the time of game thrones there would have been at least a hundred dragons living in westeroes. think about how many cows that would take feed. side note dragons also eat fish as noted by grey ghost who dined regualy on fish and was a menace to fishermen on dragonstone which also explains how the tarageryegns fed their dragons before ruling westeroes. also given the cost it does become a question about how the lannisters never got dragons as they have the money and even a gaint castle that built from soild rock that could easily been outfitted as a dragon pit. it was even mentioned in house of the dragon.
Thanks for letting me know your favourite dragons👌🏻 Imagine Robert complain about the eating habits of dragons. He probably would not need the breastplate stretcher then.
The Targaryens wanted to keep the dragon advantage to themselves because a dragon was a power advantage that trumped pretty much all answers and if the Lannisters had dragons they could easily challenge the Iron Throne, no payment was worth kingdom ending conflict generations down the line. If the Lannisters had managed to purchase dragons the Dance of the Dragons likely would’ve happened sooner if not twice.
The Lannisters lacked Valyrian blood, so they could not have dragon riders.
@@MrAlepedroza ((Potential HOTD SPOILER))
Nettles was a character in the books who was a dragon rider but I don't think she was a Dragon Seed bastard or a descendant of Valyria, like I think her character was to hint that it wasn't necessarily just Targaryen blood that could control dragons. I may be misremembering however so if I'm wrong discard this comment.
Either way, the point I'm trying to make is the Lannisters could eventually get dragons under their control given time and effort.
Great video man, hope to see more.
Thanks man, working on it!
I love your videos! Keep them coming
Thanks man, really appreciated🎉👌🏻
6:12 Fortunately Caraxes prefers to eat pigs according to Daemon.
This guy is crazy. You’re diving into the economics of Westeros? My man Grrm is infamous at how bad he is with numbers, either way fantastic video and I betcha your going to be at 10k subs before the year ends
Thanks alot, and yea figuring out the economics was a scramble😂
Would be cool to see you delve into more GOT
for practicality the Targaryens probably had a sort of tax in kind to keep their dragons fed, think of the way the modern military & industrial complex works
or perhaps the crownlands have a system where small folk pay their taxes in livestock - you want to hold onto your croft/farm? provide x amount of pigs or a cow per year - a bit like the cinque ports were taxed in England i.e. various towns and cities had to provide money to support the royal navy
or there might be a levee from the paramount lords, to provide a certain amount of cattle to support the Westeros equivalent of the War Department or nuclear weapons program!
We probably can't get a decent estimate on diet, crocodiles are fine but while they're both large predatory reptiles, crocodiles are far more sedentary. They're sit and wait predators, and spend a large portion of their time stationary conserving energy. Dragons are active hunters, and as such would require far more energy to maintain that lifestyle. (Obviously a dragon kept by a house isn't actively hunting all the time so that is worth noting, so it will consume less food. However during war they do mention that the dragons require more food due to the increase in activity). Because of this, it's likely that the 5% of body weight rule is significantly underestimating the intake of a dragon. A better example may be a large active hunting bird, like an eagle owl which generally require around 6-10% of their body weight in food every day, but can sometimes eat up to 20%.
Another thing to note, is that crocodiles are ectotherms (cold blooded) like most reptiles. However, when you get to the size that dragons get to, you have to be warm blooded to survive at such a size. Dinosaurs come to mind as an example. Despite being reptiles, the size of large dinosaurs like T-Rex, Spinosaurs and large sauropods meant that they would have been what we would call "warm blooded", as their size causes them to generate their own internal body heat regardless. Dragons, being even larger than dinosaurs, would also have to be warm blooded. An ectotherm simply cannot survive at such a large size as their body is just too big to be warmed by the environment. Even using a magical explanation, that their internal fire keeps them warm would still mean they are not cold blooded as they are able to generate their own body heat and regulate their temperature, which again would require more energy to maintain such a process. As such, dragons would have a metabolism likely more similar to warm blooded animals like birds and mammals.
Another thing to note, unless I'm remembering wrong and it is explicitly stated that dragons double in size every 25 years, then the growth would likely be the opposite way round. Crocodiles again, grow continuously throughout their lives, however that growth slows significantly the older they get. Dragons would likely be similar, only growing slower the older they get, rather than somehow growing faster as they age, which makes sense as you see dragons like Vermax grow significantly over the course of the story while Caraxes, over that same period of time, doesn't grow much at all.
All this to say very entertaining video still, and I don't have an issue with any of the analysis, this is just my 2cents on the matter as I've been studying reptiles for years.
I think the line about Caraxes preferring pork was more of a lightly-veiled threat to the portly man he was speaking to. I wanna say that human meat has been compared to pork in the books too.
During the Liberation of Malvinas, a former soldier told me "we stole 30 sheep from a local farmer each day" they were 'kind' enough to ask the farmer how many should they steal without this becoming his ruin in the short term. So, 29 pigs a week sounds pretty affordable.
And yes, war sucks )=
Wouldn't it be better to use birds of prey to estimate the amount of food they need, instead of reptiles?
Birds of prey have hollow bones and thus weigh a lot less for the size don't they? And less muscle mass than a reptile compared to GOT dragons which look kinda bulky and heavy most times.
@@mrct592Yeah but that probably means they have to eat even more. I would say that Caraxes weekly snack should be 3x that value maybe split between 2 or 3 meals per week.
Hilarious that I could pin you as a fellow South African just from your accent lol. Great video
😁
This is what I've been thinking about!!!
I hope I aided your thoughts
@@ProbablyTrueTales oh yeah I'm really satisfied with your video 10/10 ❤️🔥
Unironically, dragons would be amazing for agriculture. The sheer amount of money the crown would have to invest in buying animals would mean the peasantry would possibly become wealthier than merchants and craftsmen.
I imagine there exists a book in the world of Planetos similar to Hodja Nasreddin's "the Elephant gift", but with a dragon instead.
I love how you give this realistic and grounded aproach in a fantasy series. Nevertheless, the weights you obtain are so big because you use a crocodile for scale. Crocodiles need to eat much less than warm blooded animals and judgin by the level of activity of the dragons in the show they are more near warm blooded in the spectrum ( like some reptiles) . So the percetage of weight that vermintor is eating weekly is more than its 5 % body weight. Again as you have said this is fantasy there's no need to take this seriusly
Where are you getting these values from? Caraxes is approximately the same length as a blue whale and much thinner, if a blue whale weighs a maximum of 200 tonnes, there is not way that caraxes weighs 550 tonnes.
Thanks for the comment. Short answer “Its Magic”, the thing is how do you know that Caraxes is the size of a blue whale. And to add, according to the vfx department Vhagar is 90meters in length and a wingspan of 150meters, throws the calculations off from the blue whale theory. Since a blue whale is roughly 30meters in length that would make Vhagar 3x the size of a blue whale and Caraxes is half the size of Vhagar which would make him larger than a blue whale. And dragons most likely had large dense bones and you also have to take in account the scales and the massive wings
@@ProbablyTrueTalesTrue enough, but even with magic they still have to be at least somewhat believable in order to fly.
Maybe they had hollow bones, like birds, and hollow bones contrary to popular belief are actually much stronger than dense bones. So for all we know Caraxes could be far lighter than what you had suggested, which would considerably cut the cost of feeding him
@@ProbablyTrueTales Yes, but you still forget to mention that any aerial animal is comparatively lighter than its terrestrial and aquatic counterparts. A Blue Whale is huge in mass because its weight is supported by the buoyancy of water. The same whale would not survive on land as its internal organs would collapse due to its own weight. Similarly, lets take the largest aerial animal of all time, Quetzalcoatlus, which had a wingspan of 40 feet, but weighed less than a ton or perhaps a shade over a ton. I understand that the dragons in GRRM's world are ruled by magic, but there is no way that even a 300 foot dragon like Vhagar weighs a 1000 tons.The wings are basically hollow, the tail of the dragon tapers and is slender and the only meaty portion is the chest region. But again, Dragon bones could be a factor as they are said to be very heavy, so I give it to you.
@@ProbablyTrueTales Thx for the reply! It would make him longer maybe, but the volume is more relevant to weight than the length. I was going from estimates that caraxes is about 30- 40 meters long, much of that being tail which does not end up being very heavy. I guess you could assume higher bone density but even so 550 tonnes would necessitate a bone density that is virtually unachievable, even if we assume a total length of 45 metres. Scales would be included in a volumetric calculation of mass, unless their density greatly differs and the wings would definitely add a lot of weight but if you compare most winged creatures, even with wings they weighed less than their non-flying counterparts (e.g. Quetzelcoatlus weighing about 250kg at the height of a girraffe). I guess I was wondering if you had anything that the showrunners said regarding the weight or if these are your own estimates?
@@ProbablyTrueTales The main problem here is that you assume the animals would grow at the same speed during their lives. Or did you even say "exponentially" in the video? Which is not how any animal in our world works. Some grow continuously sure, but the rate of growth diminishes as they get older. I assume this to be the most likely scenario for SOIAF dragons.
So happy this has been to certain extent been incorporated in the AGOT CK3 mod game❤.
Also very nice video, liked it a lot and hopefully we get more.
Like how much treasury was needed to have on te baggage when moving armies from one place to another ?
Thanks for the suggestion, that would be an interesting topic
I mean If you have an Empire of the size of north America. This IS no Problem.
True true, and buddies across the isle to lend some money just in case😂
underrated
Woah. And now imagine the cost of a dragons vet visit.
this reminds me when I was little and read my dragon info book (you know the one) and it said something that a young dragon would have to eat a whole chicken per day and I realized how expensive it would be to keep 😭😂
a very intesting video! also my favourite dragon is vermithor
The Bronze Fury!
Great content
I looked at the weight estimates for the dragons, and thought 'Ouch!' Even if the dragons had some magical means to aid them in flight, that is still a great deal of weight to get off the ground. I can understand why crocodiles were used to estimate mass, but in doing so, one important factor was either ignored or neglected, and that is that any vertebrate that evolved powered flight (as opposed to gliding) would have also evolved weight saving adaptations... and the bigger the creature was/is, the more important this is.
I assume the content maker chose crocodiles as their model because they are cold-blooded, rather than birds or bats, which are warm blooded, and mostly require some form of insulation. The dragons, however, wouldn't have ( think of sauropod dinosaurs) with their size allowing them to retain body heat. Which brings up another point: the dragons may not have been truly 'cold-blooded', getting the heat they required from their environment. WE have learned in the last decade or so that there may be a spectrum of metabolism, from ectothermy to endothermy, with certain significant animals such as great white sharks and bluefin tuna being both mesothermic and employing facultative endothermy. On top of that, flight is an energetic activity that generates a lot of heat, so rather than being warm blooded so they can fly, dragons may well be hot blooded because they do fly.
It's true that endothermic creatures need vast amounts of calories compared to cold blooded creatures of similar size, but powered flight needs even more. This is another reason i suspect that the dragons were far less massive than estimated here: There would be a point where a dragon couldn't consume enough calories to get airborne above a certain mass. Not only that, but the amount of muscle needed would make it impossible to fly. No, I think an estimate of over a thousand tonnes for a dragon is far, far too high, given the biomechanical restraints and energy consumption.
This is why I think any fantasy story with dragons also needs fantasy livestock. The larger the predator the larger its prey. There are also some other ways to solve this problem. Keep the dragons at a more reasonable size- about the size of a small plane or quetzalcoatlus (largest flying animal ever). This is what I decided to do for most of the dragons in my fantasy story. Like a lot of people though, I think large kaiju dragons can be cool. So, I'm glad I can just use magic as the explanation for why some dragons are larger than others. Smaller dragons are far more common because it's easier for them to survive since they require less food. However, some species can become especially large. Of course, the larger a dragon is the more it must eat. To justify their size, I expand their diet. Not only can they eat livestock including a fantasy creature around the size of a hippo, but they'll also eat other monsters including smaller dragons, and also crops. A large flock of dragons could easily wipeout a cities entire food supply. Personally, I think dragons being omnivores that are also opportunistic eaters- being more than willing to eat any corpses they find- makes the most sense since they are less limited for food.
I do want to have species of dragons with specific attributes. This will likely include diet among other behaviors. These dragon species will probably not be as big as what we see in GoT, Harry Potter, or LotR. Yet, they are still dangerous.
That was a great read! Good luck on your novel. Remember to post it here so I can read it when available🎉
@@ProbablyTrueTales Thank you! I'll try and remember when I start publishing the comic. I'm still in the process of worldbuilding though.
I love this kind of video. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford a dragon.
Now an important question (and I'm serious): I have a horse, and I'm always amazed to see the amount of poo I have to clean every week. Now imagine what it must be like to clean the dragon's pit from the humongus amount of poop? However, I guess it would be a great fertilizer, and a great asset to agriculture. You could even sell it tp neighboring countries.
That would be a calculation and a half😂 I wonder of I would be able to find info on that
You literally forgot to mention the most important source of food for Targaryen dragons, that being fish in the Narrow Sea.
Dragonstone is the main home of the dragons even after the construction of the Dragon pit. This is for a reason as it is mentioned multiple times that the dragons fly off on their own from Dragonstone at their leisure pretty much. It is to be expected that most of this time away from Dragonstone is spent on hunting and fishing. You dont need to pay a single copper for that and before the conquest Dragonstone had no capability of feeding the dragons with any of the livestock mentioned in the video anyway, meaning there must have been another way for them to feed.
I don't think they actually need to eat. There's no way they could live 100+ years without hunting everything into extinction.
There are animals that eat Once in a few weeks.
For dragons it could be Once in a few months.
2:00 Crocodiles are cold blooded predators which means their caloric intake needs are not as intensive as a warm blooded predator… in order for dragons to be as agile, intelligent and active for an animal their size this means they must be a warm blooded animal, with higher caloric needs in order to keep their body in optimal temperature at all times.
All this means that not only they need to eat way more % of the stated body weight to stay healthy, but that they are way lighter than suggested
Do the cost of an Army next
Great Idea👏
I also think that you got the weight of Vermithor wrong. First of all I don’t think that dragons would be exothermic like crocodile and require little food in comparison to their body weight. Instead I would suggest that they like birds and dinosaurs are endothermic and would therefore have a way higher caloric intake like 5-10% every day. So your calculations in for of how many animals they would eat is still correct but the dragons would be way lighter. Syrax from the first episode is 14 years old and you can’t tell me that she weighs 70 tons. That would be equivalent to 7 very large T-Rex. I would guess 10% -20 %daily intake would give 14 year old Vermithor a weight of 2500kg -5000kg. And from that you can use the square cube law when increasing the size of the dragons.
Using the crocodiles might be a bad metric. Crocodiles are cold-blooded, while Dragons are probably warm-blooded. They move around a lot (unlike crocs and cold-blooded reptiles), and they produce fire. All of that probably requires a massive intake of calories. They probably also have hollow bones, like the Sauropod dinosaurs (to support their own weight because they were massive) and like the birds (in order to fly) so they are probably lighter than what we think. All of that to say that the weight estimation should be revised...
One good thing about the dragons dying out is that it probably lowered the cost of meat (due to increased supply).
I would not have thought that economics could shatter the "reality" of dragons more than them being flying fire-breathing lizards 😆
Hey there, I'm an economics grad in university who also found the currency conversions of westeros "interesting". You did a pretty decent job with your conversions, but in case you're curious I made an excel file that does a pretty decent job of converting westerosi currency into current-day values.
If you'd like I can send it to your channels business email along with a little info packet on the methods used in the calculations - might help you with future content.
Respond to this comment if you want me to send it.
That would be great thanks!🎉
I'm sure only the nobility would be able to afford feeding the dragons 🐉⚔️👑🔥
I feel like the crocodile comparison wouldn’t be that good since crocodiles only need to eat that little due to the fact that their cold blooded. Dragons though reptiles are not cold blooded and therefore would require much more food, a better animal to compare them to would be large birds of prey when it comes to thermodynamics.
I would like the purchase one of the Crocodils with wings please. They lool like the perfect pet❤
Thats fairly resonable. The Targarians took in a LOT of money, and feeding it to their dangerous rides would be a significant reinvestment of wealth into their economy.
The livestock industries would be booming!
7:25 just give me a big laugh and earned you a like
Well then I am very glad😂
No wonder Daemon claims Caraxes prefers pigs, lol. It's huge savings.