Stardate 20020714.1537

(On Screen): There's a shopping mall near me, which has an outdoor food court. Take this as an example of how things are different around the country; the idea of an open mall would be considered preposterous up in Minnesota where James Lileks lives, but by the same token, a closed mall would fail here in San Diego.

So I was sitting there drinking my coffee and noticed one of the posters up at the multiplex, for a movie called "Reign of Fire". The picture is quite graphic: London is in flames. You can tell it's London because Parliament is in the foreground and you can see Big Ben. It's visual shorthand so that you know where you are. If it had been Paris, it would have been the Eiffel Tower. For NYC, it would probably be the Statue of Liberty. You got the Space Needle for Seattle, the Arch for St. Louis, smog for Los Angeles. What about San Diego?

Nothing ever happens in San Diego, so the question doesn't arise.

Anyway, you have London in flames, and in the background a handful of attack helicopters coming in. It's not clear whose side the helicopters are on but since there aren't any dead-or dying dragons in the picture, presumably they're allied with the dragons.

I haven't seen the movie, but one has to be intrigued by the concept. James Berardinelli gave it a positive review, for some odd reason. Anyway, he provides the following summary of the plot:

The film begins with a short prologue in modern-day London, where a construction crew working underground awakens a huge fire-breathing dragon. Skip ahead to 2020, where most of civilization is a blackened cinder - reduced to ashes by a scourge of countless flying reptiles.

Excuse me? This film posits that a relatively small number of dragons appear and proceed to destroy technological civilization, but they sort of skip over that part.

Sez who?

In this corner, wearing the fire-red trunks, 10 dragons. And in the other corner, wearing red-white-and-blue, 10 A-10 Warthogs.

Who do you put your money on? It's unlikely that the dragons are going to be able to fly faster than 200 Kph, if they can even reach that speed. The Hogs are at least three times as fast.

The Hogs can also carry a non-trivial array of air-to-air missiles, if need be, but how they're really going to fight is with their cannon, the GAU-8. It fires a mix of armor piercing and explosive rounds, with extremely high accuracy, good range and very high muzzle velocity. Given that the gun is deliberately designed to destroy main battle tanks, there isn't any way that a dragon could have any kind of natural armor capable of stopping it.

The only weapon that the dragons have for air-to-air combat is fire-breath, and that's just not going to be long enough range. Long before the Hogs come within range of that, the dragon will already be laying on the ground in pieces (finished off by a Hellfire missile after it gets knocked down by gunfire).

Those helicopters which are shown on the poster can carry large pods of Zuni rockets on both sides, which are usually used for ground attack, and they're relatively simple in as much as they explode when they hit something. They're not using heat seekers or radar targeting or proximity fuses or anything like that; they just go in a straight line until they hit something solid and then go off. They're not ordinarily used for air-to-air combat because most air targets are too small and too nimble to be hit with something that unsophisticated. But they'd work just fine against huge, slow, ungainly dragons, and they carry a 22 Kg explosive warhead. One warhead that can be carried is a shaped charge designed to penetrate many inches of solid steel armor; seems to me that it would penetrate dragon flesh just as well if not better. Another version is high explosive fragmentation, which also ought to be impressively effective.

The fighter-bombers which the RAF has are armed with 20 mm cannons which, while not perhaps as effective as the GAU-8, are nothing to sneeze at. (They're similar to this one, which is carried by the F-16.)

I'm sorry, but if I had to make a bet, I'd bet the farm on the RAF. What I suspect that they'll discover is that dragon skin makes good shoes and belts, assuming they can find any pieces large enough to be used for that after all the shooting stops.