Sure, a fire’s temperature decreases quite fast with distance. Now, how can you have a fire in a body without this body being any closer than 1m? Does it levitate in the dragon’s belly?
It’d be easy to set up some sort of elevated platform if the lung is large enough and has a hard base, which would both be useful adaptations for a fire-making animal
Oh, you mean some artificial platform that is not part of the animal, set up by a different species? Right, but then you’re basically doing amphibians.
(And I don’t know if it’s 1) technically feasible anyways; 2) a plausible event that a species starts going into other bodies to build firecamps in them)
How is it like amphibians? The smelter-users would still be aquatic, and they could quite easily do all of their smelting without entering the gaseous part of the lungs
How? Explain Further.
Are you asking how they could stay outside of the lungs? If you are: The stand could be connected to ropes, so that it could be pulled down and out of the lung, and then pushed back in with rods and pulled up. The smelter’s tuyeres could be powered by a pump outside the lungs, with the pipes going between the edges of the lung-valves. The metal could be smelted in something like a loosely lidded ceramic cauldron, so that it could swing and stay upright as the smelter is felled and erected
How do they make a pump? How do they make pipes?
How do they use ceramic if they cant harden it?
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Pumps (or bellows at least) and pipes are easy to make, even for an underwater species. And for ceramic you could substitute any material that could stand up to smelter temperatures
Here’s an idea- whyyyyy? Why would you if you were a stone age agriculture civilization, spend a large chunk of your whole goddamed gdp on a tube to pump air that literally no one needs just to make a glowy fire to entertain the weird prince who saw a fire on an island and decided you need to bring devine death glowy down to your civ??? If was a farmer in that civ I’d just steal a manatee to Cary my stuff and set up a plot of sae to farm where the whale tribes could kill me and when they came for my food and children trade them out taking only the sick kids for the location of a fragile and expensive mess with tons of skilled slaves to steal.
Fire is (at least from a primitive perspective) is good at improving things
On land fire improves things since it can be taken everywhere and can be started everywhere making it easyli accesible, on water is not the same.
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Can i ask in what world would a creature evolve fire breathing instead of just normal poison, venom or electricity and it’s even underwater of all places. There are almost no species that is capable of fire breath even on land which is probably a sign that it is just impossible.
Also would someone look at such a creature and the first thing they think is “Yeah, i’m gonna jump into that. Hm, what’s gonna happens if i throw some wacky stones into it?”. This scenario is just impossible without outside intervention in my opinion
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Perhaps their poisons are highly flammable, and hence evolving fiery breathe would be a useful adaptation to make use of all the energy
And if they find out how the fire is made, they’ll realize that, counterintuitively, the lungs are often the safest place to hide from this creature
Super high oxygen content, also helps with with giant awesome critters of all kinds, plus a common flame retardant molecule that is common enough for the fire-breather to, you know, not die whenever it does that whole killing people thing, but scarce or weak enough that animals attacked by fire couldn’t just evolve to not die either. Of course the fact that the fire-breather has enough to fireproof a whole organ, that almost dictates that similar critters could do the same, so I imagine an awesome evolutionary arms race where prey animals have shields like organs and scavengers too. Ooh and a ton of luck.
I just thought of something, native copper can be cold worked into shape without heat, and this has been done historically (for example, the Keeweenaw people in northern Michigan), so small copper items are possible.
Additionally lodestones can be found as natural magnets (and have been used as compasses historically).
With the combination of a copper wire winding and a rotating magnet you can make a simple electric generator, although it would be near useless underwater, due to short circuiting, I also have no idea why they would bother to make this very specific item.
(Has anyone established electricity as possible yet, or am saying what’s already known)
Yeah Baghdad batteries were established last time somebody’s weird idea needed electricity, and it was mine! But yeah, cool another weird way to zap things.
I just found something.
Platinum can be found in native form, and has a melting point of ~1750 Celsius, iron has ~1550 Celsius melting point, there’s a ~200C gap.
Additionally, irons specific heat is 0.45 Joules per gram, humans can output ~100 watts with a generator, it would only take a few minutes for a human to melt a kilo of iron, under ideal conditions.
Accounting for inefficiencies, it would only take a few dozen laborers to melt iron using electricity.
You can exploit platinum to act as a heater that won’t melt while the iron does.
It may be possible to smeltle the meltle (Under extremely contrived conditions, and assuming you solved the short circuit problem, and this may fall apart if the loss of heat due to water is too great)!
That’s with 100% efficiency. A large chunk of the manpower would be lost, a large chunk of the electricity traveling to the zapper spot, and a horrendous amount of heat would be lost, especially underwater. It might work though (with better insulation and more people to throw at the problem), and that would be awesome.
But why would the civ do it? For reference, Mayas never invented the wheel because they didnt have any use for it, so, why would a primitive underwater civ go on its way to search for very rare materials, use a lot of their time and artisans to build something they basically dont have any obvious use for?
Hey, chopstick extensions for airpods exist, and they have no use.
Also the people could be under the influence of something while inventing and making it.