From what you say about how the stuff gets exposed it sounds more like bad science than an
unreliable narrator.
As someone who's not an engineer and has no head for science whatever (and who didn't understand much of your workings but assumed it's all correct), if I read these books it would all just go over my head and whether or not it's 'bad science' wouldn't even occur to me.
Thinking about it more, those knowledgeable characters at the flying school would probably help to make the dragons seem MORE authentic, because I would, by then, trust those characters as (I guess) the main character does. Even if I knew, deep down, that the explanations are in fact BS - as I would if I now read these books - I expect could suspend my disbelief enough that it wouldn't bother me. I would have more trouble with other aspects, such as why history turned out the same as real life history if dragons were always a part of it, but that's not the issue here.
This really is a fascinating thread, and it made me remember something off the back of a book I bought but didn't actually read: it's called
Ringworld by Larry Niven (1970). I wonder if telekinetic or anyone else with a scientific mind could check the physics here (though I suppose to make much sense of it you have to know what material it's made of...):
Quote:
"I myself have dreamed up an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets. Build a ring ninety three million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - which would make it six hundred million miles long. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a million miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand meters. The Ringworld would thus be much sturdier than a Dyson Sphere.
There are other advantages. We can spit it for gravity. A rotation on its axis of seven hundred seventy miles per second would give the Ringworld one gravity outward. We wouldn't even have to have a roof over it. Put walls a thousand miles high at each rim, aim it at the sun, and very little air will leak over the edges.
The thing is roomy enough: three million times the area of the earth. It will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding."
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