The attention to detail in your designs is gorgeous. And including the aerofoil shapes just hits the spot for me! <3

Thanks. This particular creature (along with the xi and the nir, although to the exterior they don't look this exceptional) is a thought experiment, what if genetic engineering was possible? To such a degree like today's inorganic engineering? What if it was a natural trait, even?

This dragon mostly lives on stealing, that is, stealing genome and traits from the xi and the nir who are the builders of their civilization. They adapt it to their needs, incorporating traits into their body. One way of this stealing is transforming creatures into newborn dragons (rather imagine it as a parasite than the usual transformation portrayed here, although no actual parasite is involved, the external appearance is a slow transformation, but essentially this mostly destroys and dissolves the old creature), which way they receive mostly fragments of genome from the host into their population, but they also have means to more or less retain the structure of the brain to also steal fragments of knowledge.

In sci-fi ideas I use this trait to make them transforming humans. It fits their ways rather well, they are diverse, their intelligent members would realize that in a human the value is the contents of the brain, so they would eventually devise means to succeed in carrying fragments over into newborn dragons. Such as you may apparently even survive it. The catch is that the dragon genome also carries dragon instincts, and the process would be so that your brain would end up in the dragon's head. The shoulder and the hip would be totally dragon, crushing you, using you, unless you can accept them, accepting the dragon. If you can't settle with it, then the other dragons would eventually destroy you (they also "transform" dragons, shattering the minds). The end result is that the dragon society slowly soaks up human knowledge without becoming human.

Eh, just some details (I have actual story fragments written involving these).

Aerofoils... and why? (Any deeper interest in aviation? :) )

I won't pretend that I understood most of that... but it sounds like a stellar idea and I'm very intrigued; perhaps you might consider doing a picture or reference documenting this process?

And yeah I studied aerospace engineering and aircraft design at university; designing wings was one of my favourite things to do, as well as using various dragons in calculation examples; wing and body cross-sections and weight distribution. Eventually you always get the limits of realistic powered flight, but you can ignore them. :B It's fun and interesting to do nevertheless, plus you end up with creature designs that look so much more "real" despite the obvious diversion from reality.

^^p

Wow, neat! Could you show some examples of yours? I like this area, although I have no such background, just hobbyist interest, and I like very much reading about the history of avionics which is very much centered around figuring out the principles of soaring flight and how that flight could be controlled.

For the transformation process itself I even have fragments of an English language novel which uses this dragon specie in a different context (not the cheetaan universe). If interested, I could show you it through private note. I also have a large draft of a novel within the cheetaan setting (in Hungarian, if I ever finish it, I will eventually translate it, so for now, just that it exists along with lots of material on these races).