Determining the Weight of Hydra Hide(-ra)

[Dragonsonthemap]

At session today, players killed a hydra, and then took the time to carefully skin it and clean the hide. They're hoping to take it with them, but we have no idea how much it weighs and are using the soft encumbrance rules. How would I go about figuring this out, or what is a reference for it out there?

[J-H]

According to elephantconservation.org, the skin on an elephant can weigh as much as 2,000 lbs.

I'd put an elephant and a Huge sized hydra in about the same weight class. The hydra might even have a higher skin/weight ration than an elephant due to all the long, snaky (high surface area/low volume) necks... so I will stand by 2,000 lbs as a nice, workable number.

It's potentially valuable given its magical properties.

[Alcore]

Upon googling "how much of our weight comes from skin"

As an organ, skin is made up of everything that covers one's body, including the nails and hair . In total, skin accounts for about 16 percent of a person's total body weight. Most adults' skin weighs in at 20 pounds or more.




So... while there is a gigantic difference between a hydra and a person 16% of total weight isn't a terribly inaccurate number.

[PhantomSoul]

When they cleaned the hide, did they dry it as well? It looks like dried hide is typically at about 35% of the weight of "green" hide, so that would be a good way to start cutting the weight down. (Plus potentially discarding sections that aren't useful except for fancy elbow patches that make you look highly educated and/or old.)

Lots of cleaning methods will increase the weight (before drying), e.g. (a) salt and/or acid solutions, while (b) trimming and de-fur-ring would reduce weight (even if they don't sufficiently "clean" it to prevent degradation), so you might have fun modulating based on how they did it.

[Hilary]

I found a site that claims...

Hides represent 6% of body weight in cattle and pigs but 9% for sheep

Sheep have wool that makes their hides heavier. Scaly creatures like dragons and presumably hydras would probably have a similarly heavy hide. Plus their body shape has a high surface area to mass ratio. Let's call it a solid 9%.

As to the weight of the beast... I saw some charts of scale using the official size categories, but there is a lot of room for variation within a given category.

A huge token is 3x3 squares

Huge is 2 tons–16 tons.

The average size of a hydra is between 20 and 40 feet long and 10 and 20 feet tall at the shoulder.

There are different ways to calculate the 'average' of a weight class. The simplest is to add both min and max and divide by 2. The other is to pick a value is proportionally between the two values x/y = y/z. The first method gives you 9 tons. The second method gives you about 5 & 2/3rds tons. So let's call it 7 tons.

9% of 7 tons is 1260 lbs.

This is my opinion. But I think the process I used is valid, even if some of the values are changed.

[Kane0]

Huh. Someone read ‘how to recycle a hydra’ recently?

I’d eyeball about 10% of it’s total weight which is what, around 2,000 lbs?

[da newt]

According to google, one sq foot of leather (like for a heavy motorcycle jacket) weighs ~1/4 lb. So you could use that as a rule of thumb along with a little math for the area of the hide.

Say a 40' long snake w/ 5' thick body would be around 630 ft2, so 160 lbs for example ...

Adjust from there as makes sense.




Of note, weight/volume are cubed, surface area is squared, so small things have much more surface area per weight/volume than big things (and shape matters too), so rules like 'skin is 10% of total weight' don't work for things that are very different in size.

[Temperjoke]

"Okay, so you guys managed to harvest 2000 lbs of hydra hide"

Why over complicate things? Just set an amount that you think is fair as the results of their efforts.

[Mellack]

I would go far easier and ask how many suits or medium hide armor do you think it can produce? One hide armor is 12 pounds. If they can make 4 armors from it, that would be 48 pounds. If 8 armors, then 96 pounds. If you want to figure waste, you might bump it up by 50%.

[JonBeowulf]

I'd have just grabbed a number and moved on to...

- a random bunch of guys showing up and asking, "WTH y'all doin' with that hydra?"
- a family of ogres stumbling in and asking, "You gun' eat dat?"
- an even BIGGER hydra who now knows why its mate/relative/friend was late
- something else I quickly invented to avoid RPing days worth of sitting around watching skin dry