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This is basically scratch work.
So. Kilometer long dragons that live in stars. I’ve made some slight tweaks.
1. Firstly, I’m assuming these dragons live in a very, very dense nebulae. I am aware that most nebulae are not dense in the least, but for these purposes we shall be assuming that there is a very dense gas cloud, dense enough for flight.
2. These dragons evolved on an Earth-like planet, but their planet was destroyed in a nova. As they had already developed an epidermis capable of deflecting solar wind, and a population was in a sheltered area (behind a gas giant planet) when the nova happened, enough survived that the population continued. There was, however, a nasty genetic bottleneck.
Now, organisms are known to be able to survive at temperatures above the boiling point of water (Pyrolobus fumarii, especially Strain 121); I won’t bother trying to figure out how to raise the available range of temperatures myself. Thankfully, I was not told at what point in the star aforementioned kilometer long dragons would be—so I went with the corona. We sent a probe in there, shouldn’t be impossible to live in there for a short period.
The main problem is heat transfer. If you can maintain a cool internal body temperature without starving, then it doesn’t matter how hot the external environment is. After a short time of searching, the most probable solution presented itself to me: an aerogel. Specifically, a silica-based aerogel, which can withstand temperatures of up to (well, I forget, but it's something in the range of a thousand) Celsius and have a thermal conductivity of, again, I forget, but it's really freaking low. Like 'keep crayons on it from melting when exposed to blowtorch' low. A metal-oxide aerogel would, frankly, be a more attractive option, due to the bright colors involved, but I don’t know the comparative heat conduction.
So. Kilometer long dragons that live in stars. I’ve made some slight tweaks.
1. Firstly, I’m assuming these dragons live in a very, very dense nebulae. I am aware that most nebulae are not dense in the least, but for these purposes we shall be assuming that there is a very dense gas cloud, dense enough for flight.
2. These dragons evolved on an Earth-like planet, but their planet was destroyed in a nova. As they had already developed an epidermis capable of deflecting solar wind, and a population was in a sheltered area (behind a gas giant planet) when the nova happened, enough survived that the population continued. There was, however, a nasty genetic bottleneck.
Now, organisms are known to be able to survive at temperatures above the boiling point of water (Pyrolobus fumarii, especially Strain 121); I won’t bother trying to figure out how to raise the available range of temperatures myself. Thankfully, I was not told at what point in the star aforementioned kilometer long dragons would be—so I went with the corona. We sent a probe in there, shouldn’t be impossible to live in there for a short period.
The main problem is heat transfer. If you can maintain a cool internal body temperature without starving, then it doesn’t matter how hot the external environment is. After a short time of searching, the most probable solution presented itself to me: an aerogel. Specifically, a silica-based aerogel, which can withstand temperatures of up to (well, I forget, but it's something in the range of a thousand) Celsius and have a thermal conductivity of, again, I forget, but it's really freaking low. Like 'keep crayons on it from melting when exposed to blowtorch' low. A metal-oxide aerogel would, frankly, be a more attractive option, due to the bright colors involved, but I don’t know the comparative heat conduction.
