So, I’ve been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress lately (which goes a long way to explain the lack of new posts). If you don’t know, Dwarf Fortress is a bizarre and ridiculously detailed fantasy game where you send a squad of dwarves into the wilderness to dig for gems and ore and try to stay alive as long as possible. That’s harder than you might think, since all dwarves are born alcoholics who must have booze to function properly, they’re surrounded by horrible creatures that want them dead, the environment is harsh, and they’re…well, they’re a little dim.

I love Dwarf Fortress. I love it because the creators have put such an insane level of love and detail into it. For example, how many other fantasy games do you know where they actually use the specific heat of copper when calculating whether or not your armor is melting?

But one detail in particular caught my eye: Dwarf Fortress’s temperature system. Temperatures in Dwarf Fortress are, to quote the Wiki, “stored as sixteen-bit unsigned integers,” which means temperatures between 0 and 65,535. The cool thing is that Dwarf Fortress doesn’t use some wimpy unspecified temperature scale. There is a direct correspondence between Dwarf Fortress temperatures (measured in degrees Urist. Don’t ask.) and real temperatures. To convert from Dwarf Fortress temperatures to Kelvins, for instance, just do a little simple math: [Temperature in Kelvins] = ([Temperature in degrees Urist] – 9508.33) * (5/9) . As it turns out, the Urist scale is just the Fahrenheit scale shifted downward by 9968 degrees (which, incidentally, means you can go several thousand degrees below aboslute zero, but that’s an issue for another time).

Better yet, Dwarf Fortress has DRAGONS! I love dragons, far more than any twenty-six-year-old adult male probably should. I turn into a hyperactive eight-year-old boy when I think about dragons. And Dwarf Fortress combines two of my great loves: dragons, and being unnecessarily specific about things. Here’s a typical encounter between a human swordsman in bronze armor (the @ symbol; the graphics take some getting used to) and an angry dragon (the D symbol).

Round 1. FIGHT!

The dragon breathes fire. The human’s chainmail pants are now filled with poo.

The human is engulfed in dragonfire and begins burning almost immediately.

To nobody’s surprise, the dragon wins. I’d also like to note that this dragon is a real jerk: while his poor prey was burning to death, it swooped in and knocked the human’s teeth out…

Dragon fights in Dwarf Fortress end very quickly. That’s because, as the wiki tells us, dragonfire has a temperature of 50,000 degrees Urist. Which translates to a horrifying 22,495.372 Kelvins (22,222.222 ºC, 40,032 ºF). That’s higher than the boiling point of lead. It’s higher than the boiling point of iron. It’s higher than the boiling point of tungsten, for crying out loud. In fact, it’s sixteen thousand degrees hotter than tungsten’s boiling point. Dwarf Fortress dragons don’t breathe fire like those wimpy Hollywood dragons. They breathe jets of freakin’ plasma. Plasma hotter than the surface of the sun. Plasma almost as hot as a lightning bolt.

With this in mind, we can take a scientific (and somewhat gruesome) look at what happened to our unfortunate human swordsman just now.

From the images above, let’s say the dragon’s plasma jet reached a maximum length of 10 meters before the dragon stopped spitting. Just before it struck our adventurer, it was spread out in a rough cone 10 meters long and 5 meters wide at the base. It was broiling away at a temperature of 22,500 Kelvin. When you’re working with absurd temperatures like this, the radiated heat and light do as much or more damage than the plasma itself. This kind of thing (unfortunately) also happens in more mundane circumstances: when high-voltage, high-current equipment shorts out, it can produce an arc flash, an electric discharge that produces a dangerous explosion, a deadly flash, a flare of plasma, and a shower of molten metal.

Arc flashes are horrifying. They’re a serious source of danger to electrical engineers. They’re also not terribly funny. But they give us an idea of the effects of dragonfire.

At a temperature of 22,500 Kelvin, the front surface of the fireball would radiate about 0.285 terawatts of energy. The formula for a blackbody spectrum tells us that the fireball will be brightest at a wavelength of 128.79 nanometers, which is in the far ultraviolet. That’s more energetic than the ultraviolet light from germicidal lamps, which is already more than enough to cause burns and damage the eyes. So our unlucky swordsman would be looking at instant UV flash-burns.

Lucky for him, he probably won’t have long to worry about those burns. The fireball is radiating at 1.453e10 watts per square meter. If we assume the swordsman knew he was about to fight a dragon and therefore put on some sort of bizarre medieval bronze spacesuit and polished it to a mirror finish. He’s still dead meat: copper, one of the main components of bronze (the other is most often tin) is a terrible reflector at the wavelengths in question here, bottoming out at around 30%. That means our foolish knight is still going to be absorbing 70% of the radiant heat, which will (given a long enough exposure) raise its temperature to around 20,500 Kelvin, more than hot enough to flash-vaporize the outer layers.

But if we’re nice and pretend the knight was smart enough to have his bronze armor coated with something decently reflective at all wavelengths (like ye olde dwarven electropolished electroplated aluminum), he would only absorb about 5% of the incident radiation. Well, bad news, sir knight: your armor’s still heating up to 7,600 Kelvin, which is much hotter than the surface of the sun.

Of course, producing a plume of 22,000-degree plasma takes a lot of energy (I’ll resist the urge to nitpick the biology of that), and even if we put that aside, according to the game’s own internal logic, dragonfire doesn’t hang around very long. Each in-game tick (in adventure mode or arena mode) lasts one second, and our bronze swordsman was only exposed to these ridiculous temperatures and irradiances for around 10 ticks, or 10 seconds. If we consider the fact that the plume of dragonfire is going to lose a lot of energy to radiation and thermal expansion, our knight probably wouldn’t evaporate right away. But he will probably wish to his randomly-generated deity that he did.

Metals are good conductors of heat, and copper is one of the most conductive metals, heat-wise. Therefore, although our knight only got exposed to that horrifying draconic welding arc for a few seconds, his armor’s going to soak up a lethal amount of heat from that exposure. Arc flashes, lightning, and nuclear explosions can cause second- and third-degree burns from just a few seconds’ exposure, so our night is going to be blind and scorched, and then he’s going to poach like an egg inside his armor.

Don’t worry, though–he probably won’t feel it. Unless he has superhuman willpower (and is therefore able to hold his breath while the rest of his body is bursting into flames), he’s going to take a panicked gasp, and that’ll put an end to his battle very, very quickly.

The inhalation of superheated gas kills very rapidly. The inhalation of gas at thousands of degrees (meaning: the dragon’s plume and every cubic centimeter of air in contact with it) kills instantly. So our knight would probably lose consciousness either instantly, or within 15 seconds, which is how long it takes you to pass out when your heart and/or lungs quit working. And what would be left? A knight cooked Pittsburgh rare, wrapped in a blanket of broken bronze welding slag.

So, if you think you’ve outgrown being scared of dragons, imagine this: a scaly reptilian horror older than a sequoia, fixing you with its piercing gaze and then spewing a jet of gas as hot and bright as a welding arc. That’s good–I didn’t need to sleep tonight, anyway…