©Kooskia (art)
©  googynoober (commission)
© Naomi Novik (original world setting)

Second commissioned art for  googynoober about a Temeraire 's world setting for modern dragon.
This is the second art i did after this design for Soviet heavy-weight dragon in WWII: kooskia.deviantart.com/art/Sov…

Now, a little background for this art:
As all the other Aerial Corps of the world, even the famous British Aerial Corps found themselves in trouble after the end of the WWI.
The first world's conflict saw the definitive superiority of airplanes and anti-aircrafts weapons that could easily hunt and kills dragons and that seemed to be the end of an era.
However, the new World War saw a number of countries develop new strategies for dragons on battelfield.

With the huge German bombings on London and the whole country, the British Aerial Corps were called to do the best in support the defense against the raids of aircraft bombers.
The RAF had deployed an aircraft named Boulton Paul Defiant with an interesting concept: all the weapons were formed by a single turret with 4 guns while the aircrafts itself had no forward-firing machine guns.
This aircrafts proved to be too much vulnerable against the German escorts of Me-109 and Fw-190 fighters but the Aerial Corps managed to adapt the same concept for dragons:

Dragons needed to remove defensive armors and under-belly nets: even the crew for dragons as the Longwings showed in this pictures was reduced to just 2 people: Captain and Gunner.
No other weight could be carried because the dragon needed to fly quickly and still carry the heavy turret with the ammunitions on the back.

Dragons managed to be a true turning point for the Battle of London because the night raids of He-111 and Ju-88 faced a new foe: differently from aircrafts, dragons could fly under the bombers formations and retreat quickly hiding in pre-selected location on the ground, heavily defended by AAA if the German night fighters attempted to follow the dragons.

None night interceptor aircraft managed to reach the results achieved by the hunting teams of dragons of the British Aerial Corps, making the United Kingdom one of the few country of the WWII to successfully deploy dragons for direct engagements.


Comments and opinions are extremely welcome ^^