Not Really Instructions But Discussion - Tumblr Posts

Hello! I've been wanting to give dragon scalemaille a shot (mainly want to make my Dragonborn's tail) but I keep getting stumped on two things.

One: I was wondering if you may have any resources for inner tail support? The way you have yours set up is fantastic but I'm not exactly sure how you did itplus I dont want to copy you exactly ^^' I've seen the videos on how to weave them together but not any on the inside.

Two: For making it thinner near the tip of the tail, do you shrink the scale size at all or just use less scales and pull it closer together?

Thank you so much in advance!! -Kodiak

So the inner support on my tails is kind of complicated, but it grew reasonably straightforwardly from first principles and experiment. When I made my first tail, it was just a tapering hollow tube, and I realized immediately that it wanted nothing more than to fold flat. Which sucked.

The first edit of it was to just add a few straight chains bridging between opposite sides of the tube. I'd noticed that when worn, the tail flattened itself top-to-bottom, flat against the butt. I figured that having the sides of the tail held together would reduce how badly that happened. I added like 4 chains spread along the body of the tail, bridging from left side to right side, and I just adjusted their lengths to match the appropriate diameter at those points. (I think I actually did this with string first, then switched to using simple chains of rings because it would hold to consistent incremental lengths better.)

That worked OK at reducing the vertical squash factor, but it opened the door to the tail folding the other direction, flattening into a vertical eel tail shape. So I opened it up again and added in perpendicular chains, so that looking down into the tail you saw a line of + shaped braces.

Again, an improvement, but not enough to reliably keep the tail round. It still folded, but now at weird angles, and in the spaces between the cross braces. I needed (1) more directions of folding being resisted at each brace point, and (2) way more braces total.

More total braces is easy, you just got to add in more of them.

For maximizing the number of directions of radial bracing, this was approximately my thought process: Start with just joining each pair of opposite scales all along the circumference. That'll leave you with a whole lot of chains overlapping at the center point. So instead of a whole bunch of separate diameter chains, just have one center ring with a bunch of radii chains linked to it. That gives you a wheel-spoke arrangement, which is fine. But what if you joined all of those spokes to their neighbors, to make more of a disc? Then it could resist squashing forces that were not purely diametrical. OK now how do I make that disc structure more efficiently?

The particular structure I came up with is basically a Japanese weave structure constructed concentrically. I know that phrase probably conveys no meaning to anyone other than myself. The specifics of that structure are also so tedious to enumerate that I basically just decided to call them a trade secret. But I think by going through through the basic goals and thought process, anyone else with some patience and determination could figure out an equivalent workable solution.

For the thin tip, I just reduce the number of scales. The tip of my tails is a few rows with just 2 scales in them. These really want to fold flat, and adding in cross-braces to fix that in that tiny constrained space is a bitch even for me, so I'd probably recommend just starting with 3 scales in a row. It would be cool to try blending it to smaller scales at the tip, but splicing together weaves of different sizes is really hard to do gracefully.