SajuukKhar said:
j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Firstly, dragons fly using magic, not areodynamics, and they can speed up, and slow down, via magic. Also, Horses aren't that slow, horses normally walking speed is equal to your running speed, and their running speed is equal to twice you running speed.
Again, that could be solved by making them fly slower, via magic.
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You fallen into a bit of a logical fallacy there Sajuu. While dragons are considered to be magical creatures, they don't just exude spells like bad BO. They have to focus their magic into Shouts, so if it was true that they used magic to fly then they would need to constantly Shout to remain airborne. Ergo, airborne magical combat would either be impossible or incur a massive risk of crashing into the ground every time the dragon swapped the Flying Shout for a combat Shout.
And even if the flight was done by some inherent magical auras or some such, then it raises a big question: Why do they have wings at all? Sure they look impressive, but wings large and rather unwieldy, even when being used in flight (think of it as the equivalent to fighting with one of those ridiculously long and flowing capes on your back. It'd just get in the way the point of even interrupting everyday actions). So if the wings don't actually need to fill the role that they usually do, then why don't the Dovah look like Chinese dragons?
Because the standard 4-leg system would be smaller, efficient, and far more practical, to say nothing of the advantages it would offer in combat (see any member of the cat family for examples to that end).
But the Skyrim dragons have wings, so it would stand to reason that they do need them for sustained flight, else why would they put themselves in such an awkward position on the land (where they need to eat, rest and the like) with a body based around aerodynamic flight?
And while we're on the subject of flight, do you remember the final parts of the mission Unbound (the intro mission of Skyrim) where Alduin flies on overhead? It takes him about 10 seconds to crest over Bleak Falls Barrow from being directly over your position. That's ludicrously fast for the Elder Scrolls universe. Comparably, the fastest horse in Skyrim would roughly take several minutes to do the same, and that's in a straight line managing to ignore most of the obstacles that would be in the way. So flying around on a dragon would melt the processors of any electronic device shy of a hell-forged supercomputer from space via sheer weight of data being fed as you transition through one cell every few seconds.
And yes, while you can slow down the dragon's speed to cover for the cell-loading, you suddenly run into the problem of dragon riding becoming a massive time sink for not much reward. Yeah you do get to fight on a dragon, but if you really need the dragon to win the fight then you can hardly wait for the whole summoning process (most likely a la Odahviing flying to you or the whole Durnehviir literally being built next to you) to finish while the supposedly dangerous enemy you're fighting carves you like a Christmas goose. And if you do manage to fend off the enemy for that long, you've likely already killed them yourself, so the whole summoning malarky is rather pointless.
Even in terms of travel, it's going to be overshadowed by the more mundane aspects of the game. Dragon riding would not be an early game feature to have, so unless you played to get the dragon-riding skill alone, then by the time you've unlocked it you'd already have explored a good chunk of the map, so fast travel would simply be the more efficient solution to get where you need to go, and even if you did fly you'd most likely miss out on a lot of the game's secondary content. And if the dragon's speed was slowed to account for cell loading, then I could just Summon Arvak the horse and be well on my way by the time you've just finished summoning your dragon.
It really is a case of [a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AwesomeButImpractical"]Awesome but Impractical[/a]. Yes it's cool, but would you really ever use it more than once or twice?
