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Dragons weren't primary sniper platforms anyway, I suspect they wouldn't be first in line for top technology rifles because the real damage dealer of a dragon isn't the gunner trying to desperately aim a musket from its bobbing back, it's the 30 tons of flying muscle bringing its claws (and/or...

They existed (In-service 1776) but Fergusons were so rare and expensive to make that there were literally only around 100 of them on the entire planet.

That was Laurence's plan in canon, it's just that he went about things in such an extraordinarily stupid honor-before-reason manner that all his ideas were basically tainted from the get-go and nobody would ever implement them.

I can buy an obsidian arrow going through a breastplate, once, for some bizarre circumstance like the hand-forged plate having a defect where it's only foil-thick around a huge wad of slag inside the plate, and the arrow just happened to hit that one weak spot. However any arrow would do the...

Why would this destroy it? Do you believe that the Romans just somehow forgot what horses, oxen, wagons, and boats were because they had dragons? And even a particularly small wild dragon is shown to be able to easily carry 20 soldiers in full kit. Even assuming they're puny humans we can...

The fact that packs of megafauna the size of elephants are still wandering around in areas where humans should have killed every other megafauna by then argues it didn't, for the part that matters in this specific discussion. We don't see any Aurochs or Cave Bears wandering around the world of...

Temeraire is noted to travel about 35mph in the books, and is unusually fast for a heavyweight, but the lightweights and courierweights are vastly faster than any heavyweight. Dragons are also noted to be able to fly for several days straight before having to land to rest and eat. Given that...

Of the named Ferals, Arkady has no breed given but feral and is described as grey with brown markings and a red patch on his face. Winge is his mate, no breed given, and is all grey. Gherni, no breed given, very small, colored blue and white, sometimes lets Tharkay ride her. Molnar, no breed and...

The wild dragons Laurence encountered seemed to be quite intelligent. Wild dragons also have their own language groups humans are unable to speak (Duzagh). Arkady was noted as a great storyteller and cunning leader. The problem with the wild dragons wasn't intelligence, it was that they...

Eh... French Dragons are unlikely to die anyway. Remember Roland basically chided Lawrence for being an idiot about it and told him she'd already put plans in motion to save the dragons, just without drawing enormous attention to herself and making it obvious she was crossing the British...

I'm reasonably sure Russian Serfs did not normally have barbed iron spikes driven into their ribcages in order to compel obedience. But my comments were less about the politics of it than the practicality. I can fully believe that somebody would be that cruel, less so that any human had the...

The original story's catch was "Horatio Hornblower with Dragons" so Lordsfire's tale is quite accurate to Naomi Novik's stories. Temeraire and Lawrence's internal thinking and discussions are by far the strongest part of the books, especially early on. There is some real enjoyment to be had in...

Not changing Europe's history too much didn't bother me, I think the reason the first book was decent was because the base idea was really interesting and the world wasn't developed anyway. But once Temeraire and friends started traveling, Naomi Novik wrote herself into a corner because she...

It's quite good even for all of that. Very original flavor for Temeraire. I'll be interested to see if he keeps up his interest. This one's a specific bugaboo of mine, but rapiers are really not lightweight weapons for the weak despite how they get portrayed in a lot of fiction. Due to the...

This is a delightful anachronism, the first wristwatch wasn't invented until 1904, approaching a century after this story takes place. What makes it so delightful is that the wristwatch was invented for the specific use of one Albert Santos-Dumont, who needed it because he was one of the...