Suppose dragons have factions that wage war. If for some reason they needed to take an enemy dragon back to their home territory with them, how might they go about it? Dragons travel primarily by flight. How would they ensure the prisoner(s) they're escorting wouldn't just fly away? If they were bound so they couldn't fly, someone would have to carry them somehow. Could one dragon carry another dragon roughly his same size, for example, suspended by cables underneath him, or would he be too weighed down to fly? How would they carry a dragon bigger than they are? If each prisoner required multiple dragons carriers per prisoner to transport, wouldn't that be inefficient for a sizable number of prisoners? Let us assume the dragons have technology that can be powered by coal. An airship would probably be too resource-heavy and vulnerable. A train might prove useful, but what if a) they don't happen to be near any tracks, or b) tracks would lead right to their prison, which would be less than ideal if they wanted to keep their home base a secret? And what about traveling over water? There's going to be a lot of ocean travel with a prisoner in my book. I need to know how the prisoner would be transported and restrained.
I think the simplest method would be for the captive dragon to be carried by several dragons at once, rather than just the one dragon.
Do the prisoners need to be bound so they can't fly? I can imagine a pair of dragon guards/escorts for each prisoner - one the prisoner is chained to in such a way where both guard and prisoner can fly, while the other unencumbered guard shadows his or her partner in case they are needed to assist with prisoner shenanigans. Of course this system only works if all dragons are healthy enough to fly.
Hm, yes. I was thinking, though, that the prisoner might be able to thrash around and drag their escort off-balance. But if they have an interest in self-preservation, they probably wouldn't risk that, because it would mean falling to their death. So this does seem like a fairly logical system.
magical bonds? sort of a pokeball, or a genie in a lamp./// chained to a magic rock that follows the party, floating above ground/// chained to a rock that orbits the planet until the prisoner is needed... non magical: dragon needs to be fed, I'm sure he'll have a lot of ablutions and so on... chain him to a flat bed of iron that can be ratcheted onto various modes of transports, be it train, airship or steamship. one can even have the dragon be pulled by pack animals, and have goblinoid creatures or peasant feed the thing and wash away ist waste. *** and an airship is pretty cool as an idea, basically a zeppelin that carries a bound dragon about.
To be honest, prisons don't sound like dragon-ish things. They live to protect treasure, and the only way to stop a threat permanently is to kill it. However, dragons are pretty thoughtful, and as predators, they are constantly in a state of judging whether or not they can beat an opponent. To me the most plausible thing sounds like multiple dragons surrounding one, and the one goes peacefully because he knows he'd never make it out of a fight alive. Oh, wait, tech. Um, they'd probably just use it to hold the prisoner, not to capture him in the first place.
In human terms prisoners of war are routinely marched colums accompanied by guards - a dragon could be made to fly like wise accompanied by guards... of course he could try to fly away, just as a human prisoner being marched could try to run... but fear of consequences should prevent that
Yeah, the concept of this world is basically, "What if dragons decided to form societies and evolve?" It's been done before with the Wings of Fire series, so it's not completely out there. (One of these days I need to get around to reading that series.)
