Is a 500 kg flying creature possible?

I usually like to leave some wiggle room for myself when fleshing a concept out.

Dragons make that sort of impossible, same's true for nanomachines but ripped senators are a question for another day.

I was trying to expand my wiggle room by asking these questions:

Would stronger tendons and bones allow for stronger muscles for the same weight?
Would linear increase of a muscle's dimension increase the power as well?

The basic idea was that I had some wiggle room for material strength, thanks to graphene.

The core idea was to reinforce the bones and the attachment sites to be able to handle more muscles. The range of motion depends on the length of the muscle, while its strength on the area.

Staying aloft shouldn't be a problem for large fliers, thanks to thermals. Taking off, however, is a b...

Obviously, there would still be little room for the other stuff, like the third pair of limbs, but more managable than ~200 kg for this:
Would it be possible for, say, a ~500 kg dragon to take off?

posted over 4 years ago

Mephistopheles‭

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