Dragon Biology

## Classes

Dragons are defined by their Size Class, Speed Class, and Spacetime Class. They all have a unique substance called Dragon Dust, which fills their Suspended Animation Chamber to render anything in it unconscious.

## General Biology

Blood is forced out of the appendages during high-Gz-Scenarios (HG'S) by a combination on one way valves along the spine and muscles contracting and pushing the blood out of the appendages.

The Suspended-Animation-Chamber (SAC) is a second stomach located after the dragon's ribcage. During interplanetary flight, it fills with dragon dust, which is a liquid very like perfluorocarbons, with a trademark scent. Dragon dust sends anyone who inhales it into a state of suspended animation. The original use of the SAC was to transport treasures (both biological and not) to the dragon's home. The dragon dust has a very high specific heat, meaning it heats and cools very slowly. This allows the dragon to encounter vast changes in temperature without fearing harm to its passengers.

Dragons have a layer of alpha fats just below their skin, made of a material similar to aerogel. It is incredibly light, explosion resistant, and an excellent insulator. Again, this keeps the dragon's interior organs safe from outside temperature changes.

Below this, and around some of the organs, is a layer of beta fats. These are heavier than alpha fats, more akin to polarbear-like blubber. They store energy and provide decent insulation.

Dragons are warmblooded; they maintain an interior homeostasis of between 60°F and 120°F, depending on environmental factors.

The dragon's exterior scales have an extrordinarily high melting temperature, and also act as a heat sink, directing all heat towards their tail. The dragon's tail, sort of like other reptiles, constantly regenerates and has no nerve endings. The transfer of all heat to the tail causes the skin there to burn off rapidly, meaning that the number of interplanetary jumps a dragon has made in the last month can be determined by the degree of burns on their tails. This skin regenerates regardless of whether the dragon is jumping; if they do not remove the excess cells regularly, they can build up and cause infections.

Cells that are irradiated in space are transferred to the tail, where they are burned off next time the organism enters an atmosphere.

Dragons have an additional sweat-like liquid used to control the transfer of heat around the body. It has NO gasses dissolved in it. If the dragon needs to vent heat, they can run the liquid along capillaries located above their alpha fats. Their scales can also be raised, like goosebumps on a human, to further aid the diffusion of heat by allowing more air to blow along the skin.

Dragons' mouths are not generally filled with saliva. The flesh inside is leathery and tough, and the tongue (like a snake) sits in a pocket below the mouth until needed. Saliva is only produced during eating.

Speech is created by a speaker-like organ that rests against the breastbone and the lungs. Sound vibrates along the scales at a subsonic level (inaudible to humans). This means that dragons can communicate with each other, even in a vacuum, by pressing against each other. Dragons have special cortex's in their brain to translate these waves into intelligible communication. When not in a vacuum, dragons only need to open their mouths to allow the sound to be heard. The sound travels along air expelled from the lungs (much like humans), but does not require any type of movement of the jaw to articulate. Because of this, dragons have no need to mimic "talking" by varying the amount their jaw is open; they do this because most of them learned to talk from humans. A dragon raised several generations away from humans will not do this.

Their cells also all produce telomerase; an enzyme that repairs telomeres. This allows them to live for many, many years, as well as repair DNA damaged by radiation. It does, however, cause a higher incidence of cancerous cells. Most of these cells are found by the body and moved to the tail to be burned off.

Notes

Don't go FTL.  If you go faster than the speed of light, your mass may increase to the point of causing a smaller black hole, creating hundreds of higgs-boson particles which will add to mass all the while creating a cherenkov radiation.

The change in acceleration is called jerk. Jerk = change in acceleration over the change in time.

In space, really anything does work because It's constantly in a state of free fall.

If there was a device that could somehow expand space-time rather than compress it like matter does, there could exist a faster than light travel where you don't feel any acceleration. It doesn't rip space time. by creating a expansion of space time in the back and a equivalent gravitational contraction in the front, it will naturally glide the spacecraft across space

Fuel in the thrusters are typically Argon gas because (noble gas) it's easy to ionize and turn to plasma and it's a rather heavy atom