I'd say a dragon has a lot of heat. Besides, who says they'd have to dogfight? use an extreme long range missile like the KS-172. Plenty of leeway there, especially if you fire more than one at the same time.

 

*shrug*

Youd be better off using the ground/sea to air based gatling gun machines that fire a stupid amount of projectiles per second, through dozens of barrels at once, then blow missles anyhow, but then you'd have to combat the hide.

Also, leather retards heat really, really well, so IF they kept fire inside them constantly, it wouldn't make it out I'd think, but more realistically, based off of what folks thing dragons in the real world could of done, was breath out gas and ignite it by swallowing pieces of flint, which wouldn't create fire or heat until they needed to.

 

My friend, Just think Godzilla that they made in 2000. The American version not the jap. That's how I imagine dragon skin to be.

 

We would need a disease that has a fairly long incubation/contagious period - at least two weeks. Two weeks out of London would allow it to spread to nearly every corner of the planet. Drop it in international tourist destinations - Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Disney World. Minimize symptoms as long as possible, so that carriers will go about their daily routines, infecting everyone they meet.
It'll have to be air borne, and fairly persistent - lives on a doorknob for a day or two. When it does go symptomatic, configure it for respiratory excretion - especially coughs and sneezes for maximum coverage.
Late spring would be good - magical children are in school, where they can be isolated, and muggle children are in school and would be a marvelously efficient vector. More people are outside wandering around in crowds, which bypasses the problem of indoor air-sterilizing systems.
The disease will have to combine a many-generations-long genetic stability with a built-in extinction trigger. This monster can't be allowed to last into the indefinite future, or mutate and keep going.

 

You know this is slightly disturbing talking about killing off an entire race.

 

We aren't (exactly) killing them off: we're actually weeding out the gene pool, and saturating with a desirable trait. One reason that the plague idea is good is because it reliably gets rid of the infirm, unhealthy, and those dependent on technology.

Infirm - old or unable to care for oneself
unhealthy - long-term abuse problems: obese, alcoholic, drug damaged
Dependent on tech - genetic problems like diabetes, congenital heart problems, paraplegic.

We could shield those people whom we feel are worth saving on a case-by-case basis. Non-magical people who have desirable traits (Hawking, every Nobel winner, recipient of the Westinghouse awards - those are obvious and easy calls. Other individuals - say, muggle parents of proven magical children would be automatic, as well) could get a specialized-for-muggles treatment to survive. A bit of Obliviate, an "experimental" batch of vaccine that seems to help; easy.

Muggles who don't live in cities would have a far lower exposure risk - we could encourage a more agrarian world-wide culture. Infiltrate the major religions to encourage tolerance and an emphasis on social harmony. Remember: we are planning for the Long Term, here.

 

Also the disease should to reduce the amount of children the survivors eventually have cause all people who come down with said disease to become impotent, takes care of all of the baby booms the survivors could possibly have.

 

Hmm... that's a good point. A major killoff pretty much guarantees a population bubble. Even if our superflu leaves the survivors with reduced fertility, that would only affect the one generation. Their kids would be Right There, breeding like rabbits (or locusts.) We would have to KEEP the population WAY down for At Least three or four generations.

Edited to add:
Ok. We have some fifteen years to make this work before the second-generation population explosion. There are multiple superbugs in storage: THAT's no fiction.

If a large proportion of the population moves back into cities and does the sheeple thing - getting careless about contamination risks and ignoring the lessons of the past, then causing a second outbreak would be a snap.

On the other hand, they could actually LEARN from the disaster - living in relatively small groups (towns of no more than a thousand population, for example,) making biocleanliness part of everyday life, doing much interaction through electronic means. Malls and bazaars would be a thing of the past: commerce would be nearly exclusively ebusiness. In that case, attempting recontamination would have real problems.

It would be MUCH more difficult to track a small, internet-dependant society; distribution probably would involve atmospheric dispersion. Again, reduce survivor fertility. We want the muggle population to remain relatively static, while the magical population should be exploding. Squib lines will need to be very carefully tracked and encouraged to cross with functional magic genes. Assuming that wizards and witches wouldn't want to marry squibs, we can go back to the sperm donors, probably with governmental financial help.

 

Several things to address here, but first a small point about dragons vs. AAM. Feel free to skip down to the “---“ if you are not interested. It is true that a dragon would be quite maneuverable, but let us not underestimate modern technology. The slowest US AAM is the AIM-9 Sidewinder, with airspeed of Mach 2.5, which is 850 meters per second. In contrast, the speed of the fastest bird in the world, the peregrine falcon, is 80 meters/second. Since dragons are magical and all let's give them 100 meters/second, which is just a bit short of the Boeing 747 airspeed below 10,000 feet.

At those two velocities, with the dragon trying to dodge full out, over the course of a second a missile will need to make a course adjustment of 6 degrees. For comparison, look at your analog watch or wall clock. On the face, 6 degrees is the angle formed between two consecutive seconds. A missile can make that course adjustment easily within a second. The only part where maneuverability would come in is at the last .1 or so seconds before detonation, where the missile would no longer be able to adjust course as minutely. At best this can give the dragon a 10 meter distance from the point of detonation. Considering the AIM-9 has ~10kg of high explosive material inside that is practically chump change.

Finally consider that the AIM-54 Phoenix has airspeed of Mach 5 (1.6km/second or 1 mile/second) with 60kg of explosives, and it was developed in 1974. I imagine modern day weapons would make mincemeat of anything in the air, long before they were aware that they were a target.


---

But I digress. Let us discuss the main topic. People have already mentioned problems with wizards getting their hands on such a disease and the like. For the sake of argument let us assume that is not a problem, and that the original plan has been put into effect. Now we have the following situation:

~5 billion sick people
Talk of Armageddon
Governments blaming everyone
Religious extremists being rather “active”

Under those circumstances I imagine there would be some very itchy fingers wanting to push some very shiny buttons that would launch a few thousand nukes into low-earth-orbit, and back, way too soon for anyone’s comfort. They would do this at the very least to wipe out whoever is supposed to be responsible. Now, assuming we are working with wizards of the Rowling world. Though out the books none have truly exhibited powers on a global scale, the most powerful spell we have truly heard of is the killing curse. Now we have a nearly barren planet with radiation levels far too high for anyone to live for the next, oh, 10,000 years or so. Could these wizards really have enough power to live in an environment that hostile?

Honestly, the only way I can see this sort of plan working is if every single muggle, or at least the vast, vast majority of them died within the space of about an hour. This way no megaton scale weapons have time to start flying.

PS: AAM info taken from Wikipedia and other freely available sources.

 

Yet JKR says in the books and in a interview that Wizards are immune to almost all muggle illnesses and diseases.

 

I can honestly see a conflict like that going either way. Muggles could easily wipe out the base of the wizarding populations if they learned where they were hiding, and all it would take would be one traitor: a dissatisfied squib or another ill-treated inhabitant of the magical world. However, at the same time, a massive poison or virus like you guys talk about is quite possible. It would most likely go to the wizards simply due to their advantage in being hidden, but at the same time it makes you wonder how powerful invisibility spells and such would have to be to fool thermal imaging and other pieces of modern technology.


Honestly, I don't really care as it doesn't affect me, though it would be an interesting thing to write. My major problem with the Muggle Vs. Magic conflict is the arguments for/against guns and magic. I have always felt that we should keep guns out of Fanfiction, but that in real life guns would win. The major method in Fanfiction to counter bullets is to summon a shield charm, but when you take into account the energy it would take to instantly stop a bullet (Infinite, unless you assume the shield would slow it down instead), it seems unlikely that it would be plausible to stop an entire clip from an assault rifle.

 

Not really. The genetics of Harry Potter wizards are contradictory - they make no sense and break all the rules of genetics. Therefore we have to assume that somehow they follow an alternative, magical, set of rules.

 

Shield charms, summoning objects, toughening skin, Imperio on the gunner, a "shield" of the form of a Klein bottle, or maybe even some made up spell that acts as a point defense system could all be sufficiently realistic ways of coping with gunfire. You are mistaken about the need for infinite energy to stop the bullet though. That would only be true under the assumption that both objects are ideal Newtonian bodies, and only interact with each other. More realistically a shield would need to exert a certain amount of force to deform the bullet, which is consequently less than the force originally supplied by the gun.

 

True, but on the pure physics side of it, the energy required to stop an object increases to infinity the faster it goes. That was more of an example, but to stop a bullet in any time that would save your life would take a great deal of energy.
I have no doubt that a wizard could easily kill a muggle who has a gun and no other equipment, but I don't feel personally that a shield charm blocking a bullet of any high caliber holds water. A more realistic theory would be to use a sort of spell that would ricochet the bullet, though then you run the risk of hitting a bystander or ally.
As well as the physics, I feel that any fight scene should be more interesting than filler, and the increasingly common "Harry's Protego spell blocked the 300 .30 caliber rounds that would each have torn his body into two pieces as he walked up to the Muggle and stabbed him with his Japanese sword. Magic was awesome!" is a sad, sad excuse for a fight.

 

VX and other vectors can be used that are not simply breathed in. Instead they are absorbed through the skin and persist in clothing, on hair, and some don't even become active till a certain time period has passed. Blister agents, blinding agents, etc. We've seen that magic's ability to heal is limited (look at Mad Eye) and chemical and biological agents are so FAR outside of the understanding of wizards that they might as well be magic to the wizards understanding.

Very true.
However Wizards don't understand electricity... so particle physics are likely lightyears beyond them. Thus, while they'd be fine against bullets in all likelyhood, they wouldn't even have the first fucking idea how to shield against things that use particle physics as their basis for delivering death. Use something like a directed radiation weapon. For example... link
The SAVATTI TIS-1 uses a gasdynamic laser system. Fires off an infrared beam (invisible to the human eye) and delivers 1.9 kW in .35 seconds. Enough to most definitely kill a human... and they'd never even see the beam or hear the shot fired.
We know the shields are not opaque, because they can SEE THROUGH THEM.

And from canon we know that shields don't cover the whole body.

Further, since we know that the shields are not opaque... therefore they don't block out light.. thus laser or other spectrum directed energy weapons would likely punch right through anything a wizard could put up. Why? Because they don't even have a clue what they need to block. For a bullet, it's a no brainer, you're blocking that piece of metal flying at you. But how do you (if you don't even know what infra red light is) block something you don't even know is coming or what it is?

Millitary hardware is no longer in the 1940's and 50's stages. Allow me to acquaint you with Fuel Air Explosive munitions. They are intended for decimating AREAS not targets. Let's say you task some snipers with hitting a wizard with a tracking beacon or have seen them congregating in an area. So while you can't pinpoint precisely where they are, you do get a generalized area. Drop 5 or 10 FAE weapons like the CBU -72 or the BLU 96 in the area, let them aerosolize the area... with a relatively harmless chemical which just happens to interact with Oxygen and Nitrogen in the air to form a highly explosive cloud of vapor... and KABOOM. The explosion and then implosion as air rushes back in pretty much kills as effectively as a nuke.

The difficulty that the wizards would have with this one is because the chemicals involved in the fuel air explosive are not themselves damaging, or even have a smell. They mix with the general air that the Wizards are themselves breathing... and they'd never even know it. About the only way they could possibly keep it out is by preventing ALL air in an area with mixing with outside air.

Ever looked through a a FLIR head set? Wizards can't see IR radiation, so you can't assume that invisibility cloaks or disillusioning spells account for IR emission. Further, even if they do, if you've ever put on a flir headset, you'd know you can tell where people walked because they leave warm footprints up for up to 5 minutes after they've walked through an area (you see these footshaped blobs of heat... as if the person dipped their feet in paint and walked across the floor) This would pretty much negate invisibility magics. I say this because the magics are purely to make you invisible... if they masked heat... you'd either parboil in the cloaks (due to the heat not being released into the environment, or freeze from all the heat (infrared radiation) being shunted around you, thus the air you'd be breathing in would have to be dropped to absolute zero. Either way... wizards would have likely never had a reason to include heat masking in their magics... because it's not something that could be technologically detected previously. Hell with their obvious disdain for technology, they likely aren't even aware that a human body could be tracked by FLIR equipment.

This is indeed their greatest advantage... apparition is hard to beat.

Again... seen is relative and would have to be experimented on to find the limits of this. Dragons however... If we have rapid fire howitzers that can punch through a foot of a half of case hardened steel like it's cheese, I doubt a dragon is going to fare well at all. Hell, it'd be a huge heat signature... a nice IR guided missile would make short work of it.

The idea that magic has limits is canon... because in HBP when the prime minister asked Fudge why the Wizards couldn't take care of the DE's... his response was... they have magic too... indicating that it has a finite limit to its application.

The greatest limitation that Wizards have is their lack of knowledge about what muggles are now capable of. Muggles can attack in ways that the wizards flt outright will not be able to understand with their limited understanding of science. Hell, even Mr. Weasley. who heads up a department that specializes in muggle items doesn't really understand HOW they work or what they are capable of.

 

My God in Heaven.
Well that just stated, no offense to the Wizards, but who ever said it is right DLP isn't leading the Wizards, stooges like Fudge and Umbridge are. Even with Modern Tech's limitations Muggles win.
The whole cenus thing to find muggleborns is good, hand the, and I know this is cruel, kids over to Mossad or Iranian intelligence, or the GRU and beat the information out of them, capture adult wizard, break hands, and shatter knee caps repeat process.

 

I think it was me that said that DLP wasn't leading the wizards.

Because we all know if we were in charge of the wizards, those pesky muggles wouldn't have a chance in hell. Except we aren't, instead they have people like Cornealius.

 

With people like Cornealius leading, its shocking they've lasted as long as they have.

I mean look at us... here in the US... we've got Bush, and in 8 years he's done so much damage to the US that it's nearly incalculable.

When he took office... we were well liked by most of the world... and when 9/11 happened we had 99% of the world backing us up. And in 8 years he's taken us from that to today...Imagine what someone like him would do to a nation of people in twice that time. And Fudge was in power for a long time if I remember my lexicon well.

 

There are also people like Dumbledore, who are not only quite aware of the mundane world, but are also incredibly powerful and intelligent. Consider just how vast the difference in power is between an average wizard and someone like Dumbledore, Voldemort, or Grindelwald. I wouldn't be surprised if the extent of their power is such that one of them alone could bring the Muggle world to its knees. Grindelwald certainly came close, and it could be argued that he was only stopped from doing so by Dumbledore - and that's without direct action on Grindelwald's part.

While I don't dispute that the fools that call themselves the Ministry are little more than Muggles with a smattering of magical power, the limitations on the power of the greater wizards aren't made very clear. What is clear is that they do have the means and intelligence to preform feats of magic that are sufficient to cripple or crush the Muggle world.

I direct you again to the notion that magic can replicate pretty much anything within reason from science fiction - wizards fighting muggles is essentially the same as an interstellar civilization invading us: we wouldn't stand a chance.

Narion