In fairness, circulating air in a castle whose geometry is best represented by an arbitrarily connected graph (not necessarily acyclic), is a non-trivial engineering challenge. After a few student asphyxiated, they may just have gone a little overboard.
I now declare this to be MoR!canon. (That large magical dwellings in general have large highly-connected, possibly magical air-ducts, by tradition, to prevent the occasional cases where somebody asphyxiated; and that Salazar used this as his excuse for why Hogwarts’s ventilation ducts had to be so large.)
Aguamenti creates water out of nothing, which you can drink. The Bubble-Head Charm could, in theory, work some way other than creating thin air out of thin air, but personally I doubt it does.
I never, in Canon, got quite such an impression of Eerie Alien Geometries from the castle as I do in MoR. Thankfully Event Horizon hadn’t come out in 1991, or I’d wager a lot of Muggleborns would be very uncomfortable in the upper floors.
Snakes can get through spaces much smaller than it looks like they should be able to. It doesn’t seem ruled out that a magic snake can do that to a greater extent. So this implies big ductwork but not enormous ductwork.
The ventilation ducts in large buildings are roughly 1m^2 in cross-sectional area, branching out to ducts that are roughly.1m^2 in cross-sectional area.
A python is 6 meters long and has a cross-sectional area of .015m^2.
Assuming the aspect ratio of the snake body stays roughly constant, a basilisk is 15 meters long, and would have a cross-sectional area of .094m^2. Barely enough to through ventilation ducts.
DO NOT SPEAK THE NAME
The Ree are from Nobody Dies, a Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfiction.
And Hogwarts has ventilation ducts large enough to fit a basilisk!
In fairness, circulating air in a castle whose geometry is best represented by an arbitrarily connected graph (not necessarily acyclic), is a non-trivial engineering challenge. After a few student asphyxiated, they may just have gone a little overboard.
I now declare this to be MoR!canon. (That large magical dwellings in general have large highly-connected, possibly magical air-ducts, by tradition, to prevent the occasional cases where somebody asphyxiated; and that Salazar used this as his excuse for why Hogwarts’s ventilation ducts had to be so large.)
Aguamenti creates water out of nothing, which you can drink. The Bubble-Head Charm could, in theory, work some way other than creating thin air out of thin air, but personally I doubt it does.
Ha!
I initially wrote ‘create breathable air out of thin air’ and then couldn’t resist.
I never, in Canon, got quite such an impression of Eerie Alien Geometries from the castle as I do in MoR. Thankfully Event Horizon hadn’t come out in 1991, or I’d wager a lot of Muggleborns would be very uncomfortable in the upper floors.
Snakes can get through spaces much smaller than it looks like they should be able to. It doesn’t seem ruled out that a magic snake can do that to a greater extent. So this implies big ductwork but not enormous ductwork.
The ventilation ducts in large buildings are roughly 1m^2 in cross-sectional area, branching out to ducts that are roughly.1m^2 in cross-sectional area.
A python is 6 meters long and has a cross-sectional area of .015m^2. Assuming the aspect ratio of the snake body stays roughly constant, a basilisk is 15 meters long, and would have a cross-sectional area of .094m^2. Barely enough to through ventilation ducts.
I think basiliks are a little thicker than pythons (from the second movie) and much longer than 15 m (from awesomeness).