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This question is simple, sort of.

Mithril is a fantasy staple, and my version is ridiculously hard and strong. On the Metal-Crystal Toughness Scale, I've ranked Iron as 1 and Steel as 2, but Mithril has a ranking of 14, making it 12x stronger, harder, and tougher than the best steel available in medieval times. "Whoa, that's amazing! Where does this stuff come from?" Giant moths.

You see, moths and butterflies have scales, modified hairs that cover the wings, and they "range in size from 30-80 µm x 30-500 µm."(mccrone.com). Silver Moths, the aforementioned giant moths we get mithril from, have two substantial differences from regular moths (aside, of course, from their size, which this question is about):

1. Magic-science technobabble-Due to magic, the silvery chitin (mithril) a Silver Moth's exoskeleton is made of has strength that scales up linearly with size. It also has adaptations to compensate for its large size, like actual lungs and an internal skeleton that acts as a support for its exoskeleton (also made of mithril), but the problems we should see with circulation, thermal exchange, and so forth for a scaled-up moth are mostly negated by whatever mysterious magic is within Silver Moths.

2. Scales-Silver Moth scales are silver-white with a bluish sheen, like moonlight frozen solid, and unusually large......like as large as the plates of this guy's armor large.

Lamellar Armour

Now, my question is, How Large Would A Silver Moth Have to Be To Get Scales This Large?

Or, rather, how big are Silver Moths going to have to be?

Alendyias
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    What are you looking for in an answer? If all issues can be dismissed as "it's magic" then the scales can be whatever size you want on a creature that is whatever size you want - I'm mentioning this because "ability to fly" isn't explicitly mentioned as a handwave but is implied. If you're serious about the "biology" tag then less fluff and more information required - scales have various purposes including insulation, thermoregulation, discarding to escape spiderwebs, reducing lift to drag ratio when gliding - the size will depend on their purpose for these creatures. – KerrAvon2055 Apr 21 '21 at 04:09
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    Is it mothril because it's moth mithril or just because of a finger slip? – L.Dutch Apr 21 '21 at 05:23
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    I'd like to leave this open, but the answer can be almost anything. I quickly Google'd "largest animal scales" and found the giant pangolin which suggests your moths needn't be more than 50 inches long. But that's the problem, without anything more that reference only represents a minimum. Next I searched for "largest bird" and found the Common Ostrich (by mass) and the Wandering Albatross (by wingspan). Those seem to be your maximum. Anything else is just an opinion, right? – JBH Apr 21 '21 at 06:27
  • Steeljaw mothril be like: TOBE WO GUNDAMU – Writer-of-stories Jun 01 '21 at 18:21

1 Answers1

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About 20m long

... and you'll be making weapons, too.

You've allowed us to scale up (pun intended) linearly. Those plates in the image look like about 8cm (80mm) wide and of unknown length. 80mm = 1000x 80µm, and a moth is about 2cm (20mm) long, so about 1000x 20mm = 20m long.

If you have the full distribution of scale-proportions, from 1:1 squarish to 3:50, then 3:50 scales could be bound together into spears. Or 8:50 could be mounted as sword-blades directly, for shortswords.

Making some conservative assumptions about the surface-area of your moth (cylinder, 1m radius, no overlapping scale-layers), that'll give you about 60m^2 of scale. Adult humans are under 2m^2 each, so a team of 20 can get a suit of armour and some weapons for each moth they harvest, before touching the skeleton. And have some considerable profit to boot - for the first moth, even assuming that they all survive.

At some point, tougher armour stops helping, since the impact is what kills you rather than the armour failing. Drop a protagonist in indestructible armour from orbit, and you can wash the resulting goo out from the perfectly-shaped armour.

Anon
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