Vinegar, Gasoline and Rotten Meat

Seared kobold flesh and lingering brimstone.

Take a blowtorch to some grisltly game meat and at the same time burn a firecracker (or sparkler or whatever) and you’ll get the idea.

Sulphur is what comes to mind.

Without any real technical answer, dragons breath should be sharp, warm, and smokey, but not so much that you think there’s a fire in the building. Maybe the smell of slightly burnt, very seasoned meat?

That list sounds like the General MIDI of smells to me.

I’d heard that when they breathe fire it’s essentially like lighting a fart.

My guess is dragons breath is produced by a combination of two glands that produce chemicals that are hypergolic. This is seen in nature in bombardier beetles (which use hydroquinone + hydrogen peroxide).

The smell would certainly depend on the combination of chemicals, but a hot burnt and charred smells are probably common to all possibilities. The unburnt chemicals are likely to be irritants, being either strong oxidizers or reducers.

Overall, even after the main blaze has cooled, I would expect the area (and downwind) to be unsafe for humans and respiratory issues for those exposed to the remnants.

Would it really work if i coded a “Home 4DX” version of the Hobbit movies?

Are there ways to obtain and refill this pallete of smells and connect them to a home cinema? I guess it would work if you have the hardware and the juice for it.

I imagine dragon’s breath is not unlike a coal furnace, or a chain smoker.

Well, there are established fictional descriptions, or indications.

The one that I think would hold up the best would be the way Pern (Anne McCaffrey series) handled it. In that series, the dragons weren’t your typical fantasy dragons, they had been genetically engineered from a smaller creature called “fire lizards”. So there was an attempt to lean harder into sci-fi than fantasy from the beginning of the series, even though it didn’t seem like it.

That’s kinda tangential, but McCaffrey did put some thought into how they shot fire.

The dragons chewed up phosphorus bearing rocks, swallowed them into a special stomach, and the results of that breaking down allowed them to basically belch flames.

If you’re going to ignore “magic” as the source of the breath weapon, then that method makes sense. Since phosphorus sulfide could conceivably be made inside some kind of complicated organ like that, as could other phosphorus based compounds, the obvious choice is for dragon breath to smell like matches.

Now, that assumes you meant what the breath smells like because they breathe fire. There are other versions of dragons that shoot other things. But, more importantly, shooting fire isn’t actually the same thing as breath. It’s a separate process from breathing.

So if a dragon was in front of you, breathing in and out of its mouth, it wouldn’t be ONLY the smell of the fire starting agents. You’d smell the brew of saliva, any leftover bits of food left in the mouth, and likely some degree of “funk” from whatever extra compounds were in the saliva to help it protect the dragon from its own fire.

Imagine a snake’s breath, but spicy ;)

Well that’s very interesting. I’m guessing this is a proprietary scent that got added to the standard by whoever from the industry.

If I was designing it, it would definitely be fire-y. It would be a bad smell if I was being realistic, full of lizard bile sort of smells mixed in with partial combustion products, but nobody wants to be immersed in that. So, I guess the question is what sort of fire is dragon’s breath?

It’s supposed to be pretty hot, so maybe it’s a metal sort of fire, but then again you don’t really see that in the natural world. Acetylene and friends could do the same, although I’m not sure what that smells like exactly. Maybe I would split the difference between organic and metallic and go with a burning beeswax/hot metal combo, which shouldn’t be too gross.

If you get this working, please share the results! It’s an awesome idea.

ground dragonfruit

Impending death.

how much of Minecraft?

I just went looking for this document and found it for sale here; meanwhile over here there is a helpful PDF with a watermarked line drawing of the CD-ROM they’ll sell it to you on.

Fuck ISO so much.