Falcon chicks

[Plane]

B457 gives a Large Falcon ST 3 (less than the House Cat at ST 4)

B194 the Falconry skill discusses at the end the possibility of finding a wild nest in the spring with 1d-3 chicks. Looking for ideas on what stats they would have at that time, assuming you adopt and raise them from that age and in case they are engaged in combat before reaching adulthood.

B20 mentions human infants have 30% of adult ST, 30% of 3 is 0.9 so would that round up to ST 1 or would you treat it as ST 0?
*60% (human five year old equivalent) of ST 3 is 1.8 so a similarly not sure if that should be rounded down to ST 1 or up to ST 2.
*80% (human 10 year old equivalent) of ST 3 is 2.4 so I think you would round that down.

I'm also wondering how much time by default would take to train a falcon, especially if you found a nest of 3 and had to split time between them and might need to incur penalties for using below-standard time (or someone getting bonuses for spending above-standard time).

[mr beer]

I would just eyeball it. New chicks should be ST 0, 1 HP and then ST 1 soon after and then I guess ST 2 about the point that they are moving around freely. It shouldn't be too critical unless they are actual PCs.

According to Wikipedia, they (peregrine falcons) fledge in 42 to 46 days and are dependant on their parents for up to 2 months. So you can't hunt with them until at least 42 days and they are presumably effectively full grown around 60 days.

Some googling indicates you can train a hawk to start hunting in a couple of weeks but that training is fairly intense and takes up to a couple of hours a day so 3 falcons may be a full time job. Being a licensed falconer involves a 2 year apprenticeship in the US so presumably there's a lot to learn.

[Tinman]

Originally Posted by mr beer

Being a licensed falconer involves a 2 year apprenticeship in the US so presumably there's a lot to learn.

Or they had a good lobby & got a protection law passed. Like licenses for hair dressers.

[Plane]

How many falcon fledgelings do you think it would take to defeat that robot NPC in the basic set? If you score a critical hit against the head, one of the rare outcomes is that you can ignore DR. His DR is only Hardened 1 which would reduce ignores DR to armor divisor 100, which would still reduce his DR of 53 to 0 (or should 0.53 round up to DR 1?) and cutting attacks from sharp beak and sharp claws always do a minimum of 1 dmg (so ST 1-3 wouldn't really matter, they could even make Defensive Attacks to get +1 to dodge) before subtracting DR. Their low size modifier would make it pretty hard to hit them so he'd probably have to make easy-to-dodge telegraphic attacks to swat them down. Since he can't heal, it seems like they could eventually wear him down before he could find someone to effect repairs. It would be interesting if that could be run through computer simulators, adding 1 falcon each time until the simulation ended in his defeat instead of the entire Cast.

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by Tinman

Or they had a good lobby & got a protection law passed. Like licenses for hair dressers.

Possibly but these guys work with a variety of raptors up to and including eagles. My guess is not as easy or safe as training, say, a golden retriever puppy. Only a guess though, maybe it's not that difficult.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by mr beer

Possibly but these guys work with a variety of raptors up to and including eagles. My guess is not as easy or safe as training, say, a golden retriever puppy. Only a guess though, maybe it's not that difficult.

Liable to be somewhat harder than training, say, a dog, certainly. That said, it was also a standard part of the upbringing of most medieval gentry so it's probably not exactly rocket engineering either.