how fast are harpy's?

ok does anyone actually know how fast a harpy flys as the wiki isnt very clear on this subject?

sonik0578 wrote:

ok does anyone actually know how fast a harpy flys as the wiki isnt very clear on this subject?

Faster then birds would.

I don't think theres any set speed really they'd just be fast.

I've seen responses from "Not very fast" to "Supersonic is not unheard of". Basically: It depends entirely upon the writer.

They fly at the speed of plot.

lol speed of plot i was expecting someone to answer that lol but thanks people for the assistance ^^

Well, using animals as a base of measurement, I would say roughly one-hundred times faster than a large eagle.


Using similarly sized, yet fictional animals as a base, I would say slightly slower than Rodan, so maybe Mach 1.


Using my own guidelines, I would say as fast as it takes to look cool.

sonik0578 wrote:

ok does anyone actually know how fast a harpy flys as the wiki isnt very clear on this subject?

I'd like to see that broken down into straight level flying speed, dive bombing speed, climbing into the air, etc.

https://felarya.forumotion.com/dryads-and-fairies-f12/max-flying-running-speed-t1123.htm

This topic has been discussed a fair bit in this other thread. The rough estimate was that an average 80ft tall giant/giantess/elf/fairy/human-like....thing, could run at a top speed somewhere around 200mph. Considering that Harpies are extremely fast, even by predator standards, you're probably looking at something flying at at least 400-500mph in level flight, and definately super-sonic in even shallow dives, I imagine. Its impossible to get an accurate measurement, since Felaryan physics aren't exactly the same as ours. All we can do is estimate, speculate and agree on speeds that would "look right" in motion. These are massive, agile creatures. They are fast.

Don't even want to imagine how fast centaurs are. They are probably pushing somewhere around that range themselves.

Keep in mind, in the jungle, most preds would never get close to their full speeds, given the terrain.

I don't think Harpies could achieve super sonic speeds except in long dives. There'd be too much drag. Harpies aren't streamlined enough and their wings wouldn't be able to generate enough lift & forward momentum to reach Mach 1.
Besides, the sonic boom would be a dead give-away to nearby prey.

Non-aerodynamic shape+extra unneeded wieght (honkers)+several hundred tons+an even VAGUELY humanoid shape=most akward creature to ever get off the ground.

FalconJudge wrote:

Non-aerodynamic shape+extra unneeded wieght (honkers)+several hundred tons+an even VAGUELY humanoid shape=most akward creature to ever get off the ground.

My point exactly! Their wing muscles would have to be extremely strong. Their bones would have to be incredibly strong while still remaining light...

To be honest I think it'd be better if harpies were somewhat awkward fliers, at least compared to actual birds. A harpie zooming at a million miles an hour does sound very cool, but it'd be impossible to steer at that speed. Whenever one tried to catch prey with her mouth, she'd do the biggest faceplant ever. Even real predatory birds usually have pretty awkward landings when grabbing mice and rabbits, seems silly that a huge, bulky thing like a harpy could do better than them.

Anime-Junkie wrote:

I don't think Harpies could achieve super sonic speeds except in long dives. There'd be too much drag. Harpies aren't streamlined enough and their wings wouldn't be able to generate enough lift & forward momentum to reach Mach 1.
Besides, the sonic boom would be a dead give-away to nearby prey.

In the real world, yes. But this is Felarya. Giant predators are not effected by the negative things their size would do to them in the real world. Fairies shouldn't be able to support themselves at all if we were going by real physics.

Sonic booms trail behind something. If a harpy is travelling super-sonic, you literally could not hear them coming (they are travelling FASTER than the sound can reach your ears). You wouldn't hear a sonic boom until after they pass by. Keep in mind that Harpies would be flying at incredibly high altitudes. You have trees that are massive compared to 70ft tall predators...which would be 1000s of feet tall themsevles, and harpies can fly high above those.

Don't try to apply real world physics to Felaryan preds. Harpies, and faries, fly pretty well. They shouldn't be able to, but they do.

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To be honest I think it'd be better if harpies were somewhat awkward fliers, at least compared to actual birds. A harpie zooming at a million miles an hour does sound very cool, but it'd be impossible to steer at that speed. Whenever one tried to catch prey with her mouth, she'd do the biggest faceplant ever. Even real predatory birds usually have pretty awkward landings when grabbing mice and rabbits, seems silly that a huge, bulky thing like a harpy could do better than them.

Felaryan physics are strange, to say the least. Its about scale. To us, its incredibly fast, but to a harpy, its just cruising around at normal speed. They could steer just fine, just like any bird steers in flight.

As for grabbing things in their mouths, yes, thats just stupid. The boobs would get in the way. I always imagined a harpy would just pluck someone up and then bend to put them in their mouth (they're pretty flexible and dextrous with their legs and talons). Its like how centaurs are supposed to just lean over and eat on the run. It wouldn't work that way. lol.

400-500mph is noticeable, but one must remember that it's still 240mph slower than Mach 1. Much speed gained during a dive is from the benefit of being in "free fall" (where every one second of acceleration is something like 22mph gained). And usually, there's a limit to how fast something can be when falling due to air resistance and the likes (hence why a penny dropped from the top of a building won't kill someone on contact). Regardless, going by the 500mph "high end" it'd still take 11 seconds of unobstructed diving to surpass Mach 1, so a "short dive" would not really work. Long swoops, perhaps (provided the Harpy has the distance to fall for 11 seconds at 500+ miles per hour), but just a quick "dive swipe fly" wouldn't be supersonic.

It should be noted that I am not the best when it comes to working on these things, and have no formulas to back me up besides the standard gravity one. Only reason I could get away with the running calcs of over 100mph is because I did a literal scale, but scaling doesn't work for free-fall (9.8m/s is 9.8m/s for a penny as well as a brick) so I could have some glaringly obvious flaw in this set-up.

Basically though: Harpies are not "normally" going to be passing over the Jungle at velocities reaching into the supersonic. Even if they had the capability to fly this way without the aid of a dive, they'd lack the proper reaction time to make use of this ability (Dense jungle canopy = extremely small fraction of a second they'd be able to spot prey, and last I checked Harpies are not putting out words like a machine gun bullets / watching their land-based friends as though they were in slo-mo video). Whether they can or cannot move supersonic is up for debate, but for an average fly your Harpy should be moving 'slowly'.

Keep in mind, guys, to a harpy, mach 1 isn't all that fast. A harpy flying at 100 MPH is going to be slowly lurching forward, given its size.

It's already established that all Felaryan giants behave as though they were human-sized in regards to the laws of physics. Thusly their huge size is going to be a non-factor in terms of lift. What we have more or less amounts to a human-sized being in a world where human perception shrinks to maybe four inches.

So, we have a creature that behaves as though it's man-sized, even though it's eighty feet tall. That extra 240 mph between normal flying speed and mach one means precisely jack shit.

Assuming that a Harpy is, instead of giant, and 75' would be considered normal, no offence, but... Mach 1, seriously? Closest thing we ever got to that in a jungle setting was the Haast's eagle, which could go around 45 MPH, and let's say that a tiny (or "human", here) would go at a quarter the speed of a mouse's scurrying- or about 2 MPH, lets carry this out. That means that a large eagle could go around 22.5 times as fast as a smaller critter.

22.5 X max human speed of 45 MPH is 1012.5 MPH...

Okay, that IS over mach 1, my bad...

GREGOLE wrote:

Keep in mind, guys, to a harpy, mach 1 isn't all that fast.

Human average running speed: 15mph low-end. Size compared to a Harpy: 1/17 (give or take). If you scaled up straight, 17*15 is 255mph. If you double it, you're still over 100mph short. If you triple this number, you're getting barely past the Mach 1. The problem with this? It gives Harpies 1/3 the reaction time of other predators. Assuming a straight-up scaling from human to predator (that a beast 10 times human's size would react ten times as fast, for instance), then a Harpy would have a POINT four millisecond reaction time when their adrenaline is pumping. We have seen nothing to suggest they comprehend things anywhere near this fast.

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A harpy flying at 100 MPH is going to be slowly lurching forward, given its size.

Given its size of 2.5 the height of a human and who knows how many times heavier, an Elephant is at a crawl considering it's got a max recorded speed barely 2 miles above the fastest human recorded.

FalconJudge wrote:

Assuming that a Harpy is, instead of giant, and 75' would be considered normal, no offence, but... Mach 1, seriously? Closest thing we ever got to that in a jungle setting was the Haast's eagle, which could go around 45 MPH, and let's say that a tiny (or "human", here) would go at a quarter the speed of a mouse's scurrying- or about 2 MPH, lets carry this out. That means that a large eagle could go around 22.5 times as fast as a smaller critter.

22.5 X max human speed of 45 MPH is 1012.5 MPH...

Okay, that IS over mach 1, my bad...

A search online finds mice running around 8mph, or four times as much as you give. Which turns it from 22.5 times to a little over 8.5 (so round it up to nine). Which gives us... around 200mph, or similar to the land-based Predators.

I know, but a human can't run as quick perportionately to a mouse.

FalconJudge wrote:

I know, but a human can't run as quick perportionately to a mouse.

Then why, may I ask, can they fly proportionately as fast as an Eagle?

Because that's a damn slow eagle.

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Human average running speed: 15mph low-end. Size compared to a Harpy: 1/17 (give or take). If you scaled up straight, 17*15 is 255mph. If you double it, you're still over 100mph short. If you triple this number, you're getting barely past the Mach 1. The problem with this? It gives Harpies 1/3 the reaction time of other predators. Assuming a straight-up scaling from human to predator (that a beast 10 times human's size would react ten times as fast, for instance), then a Harpy would have a POINT four millisecond reaction time when their adrenaline is pumping. We have seen nothing to suggest they comprehend things anywhere near this fast.

Sound logic. Except you're comparing human running speed to harpy flying speed. It's a universally known fact that flight is MUCH faster than ground movement. The idea that a harpy's airspeed is less than triple the landspeed of a similarly sized human is laughable.

And I don't know where you're getting this idea that it gives them one third of a human's reaction time.

GREGOLE wrote:

And I don't know where you're getting this idea that it gives them one third of a human's reaction time.

Not 1/3 the human's reaction time, 1/3 the Predator's reaction time after already being influenced by scale (the 1/3 because they're three times as fast now as other Predators, and in reaction times the smaller the fraction the better, not higher).

I'd say they fly as fast as a person makes them. They could probably fly anywhere from 15 mph to 30 mph. That's my guess.

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I'd say they fly as fast as a person makes them. They could probably fly anywhere from 15 mph to 30 mph. That's my guess.

You've never driven a car, have you? A harpy moving at 30 MPH would be standing still.

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Not 1/3 the human's reaction time, 1/3 the Predator's reaction time after already being influenced by scale (the 1/3 because they're three times as fast now as other Predators, and in reaction times the smaller the fraction the better, not higher).

That doesn't make a lick of sense. They fly fast. That's all the math proves. I have no idea where you're getting reaction times from.

SuperPieGuy9 wrote:

I'd say they fly as fast as a person makes them. They could probably fly anywhere from 15 mph to 30 mph. That's my guess.

At their size giant harpys wouldn't stay airborn at that speed. Some normal sized birds canfly that fast.

Read above, some others have already done a fairly decent job of figuring out the rough flying speed.