Can a dragon's fire breath be liquid based?
Dragons commonly breathe fire. They can do so over considerable distances, often many times their body length. But this needs to be powered somehow, by a substance that the dragon can generate on its own. Flamethrowers in real life can be powered by either a gas or a liquid.
However, gas based flamethrowers are pretty lame compared to their superior liquid brothers (insert MGS joke here) because they generate what is nothing more than a long flame. This is what flamethrowers look like in the movies, mainly out of safety concerns. Liquid based flamethrowers are a lot more dangerous, firing streams of burning gasoline at targets.
Given that I want my dragon's flamethrower be spelled with an F instead of without, I want to go with a liquid-based flamethrower. However, this means that a dragon will have to generate the stuff somehow. A methane powered one would be relatively simple given that a dragon's digestive system would produce this on its own, but to me creating the equivalent of dragon napalm seems a lot more complex. And needs to be able to combust somehow, preferably not inside of the dragon. They wouldn't want to end like draco vulgaris, after all.
So how would the biology of a creature like a dragon create a flammable liquid? Would it require a special diet, or dedicated organs? Or perhaps something else entirely? I am looking to make it a continuous stream akin to a real-life flamethrower rather than a short spray created by the equivalent of a bombardier beetle.
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1 answer
A liquid based approach could be done.
There are a number of biologically produced substances that are flammable.
The dragon would just need to produce a quantity of it and store it in a gland of some kind, similar to how a snake produces venom and stores in a venom gland until it's ready to use. How big the gland will be, and where in the dragon it's located will depend a bit on how you want them laid out and how much fire breathing you want them to be able to do before recharging.
So what about lighting it? Well we can look at nature for this too.
There is a bug called a bombardier beetle, which produces two different chemicals in glands in it's thorax.
When it is threatened it sprays the chemicals, which mix and cause an explosion to scare off attackers.
So the dragon could create a catalyst that is sprayed out in smaller quantities that reacts with the fuel to cause combustion shortly after leaving the dragons mouth, reducing the risk of burns.
Another idea would be something like potassium, which in it's pure form reacts violently with water, generating a large amount of heat and hydrogen gas, and can cause an explosion.
One neat thing is that potassium was first isolated in potash (the ashes of plants, from which its name is derived), and so a dragon burning plants and eating the ashes would be able to collect potassium, and then could process it into an oil fuel mixture which would be exposed to to water/saliva when sprayed out generating enough heat and hydrogen to ignite the oil part of the mixture.
The oil would also keep the chemical reaction from happening inside of the dragon.
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