Como demolir a ponte para a cidade do lago Esgaroth ajuda contra o ataque de Smaug?

Você tem que ler a passagem inteira. Especificamente:

... his enemies were on an island in deep water too deep and dark and cool for his liking.

Smaug poderia voar e provavelmente atacaria inicialmente do ar em um ataque a um alvo como Lake Town. No entanto, ele não era uma máquina. Ele acabaria se cansando de voar ou precisaria pousar para ataques mais precisos contra alvos menores escondidos na cidade.

Ao afundar a ponte, o povo de Lake Town forçou Smaug a ficar no ar o que, estranhamente, lhes deu certas vantagens:

• Smaug pode eventualmente abandonar o ataque devido à fadiga
• Ele pode cair inadvertidamente em um padrão de ataque previsível
• Se eles soubessem, como Bard, que seu ponto fraco estava em seu ventre, eles precisavam se abaixar para atacá-lo. Isso seria mais fácil de fazer se ele estivesse no ar fazendo corridas de ataque do que se estivesse no chão alguns metros à frente deles arrotando fogo contra eles.

Estudioso de Tolkien Michael Martinez responde a esta pergunta em seu site :

So, let me preface my answer by saying that I believe J.R.R. Tolkien had a very specific image in mind about his dragons, in terms of how they would fly and how they would move across the land. And I think he must have felt that the act of flying would impair some of a dragon’s physical actions, such as breaking into buildings and grabbing people (either to eat or to kill with his powerful jaws). But we can also look at the behavior of dragons in Tolkien’s stories. For example, Glaurung (a non-flying dragon) loved to taunt his victims, and to cast spells upon them. Thus he wove his evil magic around Turin and his sister Niënor. Smaug, too, sat upon his mound of gold and searched for Bilbo even while engaging in a contest of wits with the (invisible) Hobbit. Finally, Dáin I and his son Frór were both slain at the door to the dwarf-king’s hall by a cold-drake.

So I think that Tolkien felt there was a very strong, perhaps necessary ground-based behavior for dragons. We don’t know if the cold-drake could fly or not. We’re not even sure what Tolkien meant by “cold-drake”, since his other dragons apparently all breathed fire. Whether Smaug could have crawled over the buildings of the town without sinking into the water is not clear to me. Tolkien’s full-color illustration of Lake-town seems to suggest that the piles supporting the buildings were of a similar strength to the piles supporting the main bridge.
Should the men of Lake-town have known how much weight the bridge could bear? In other words, in order to create a dragon-trap, how would they know what a dragon’s weight should be? It’s not like they could weigh and measure Smaug before he attacked. Furthermore, their carts and horses might — collectively — equal a dragon’s weight depending on the loads they were bearing, so they would run a risk of drowning themselves if the bridge collapsed under “a dragon’s weight”. I think, therefore, that Tolkien had the right idea in that throwing down the bridge would discourage the dragon from creeping up to the houses and clawing around inside for people; also, he would be unable to easily climb over the houses and scoop people from their boats.

Landing on the buildings might, in Tolkien’s view, have exposed the dragon to all sorts of attacks by the men from many directions. Hence, in order to keep his enemies/prey in front of him he would need to approach the town by the bridge. Also, if Smaug could stand on the bridge with ease he would be able to attack any boats that tried to come near by, flaming them.

Furthermore, I think Tolkien had an idea of what powered the dragon’s fire. So far as I know he never attempted to explain this in any of his published writings. But whatever it was, water would have quenched that internal furnace — perhaps even by mere contact with Smaug’s skin. It’s as if the dragon’s body was its own furnace, and he had to maintain his distance from water in order to generate the heat to breathe fire. This is pure speculation on my part.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s ideas about weaponry and tactics have sometimes been challenged by readers with knowledge and experience in such matters, but when it comes to dragons no one is really expert enough to know if Tolkien’s dragons were realistic in any way. Tolkien’s imagination was the final authority for how his stories worked and we can only judge his logic by what he left behind in print or his private notes. Unfortunately, there is nothing that explains why a dragon would be confounded, perhaps even disarmed or weakened, by water.

Eu acho que Smaug tinha um poder mágico anti-gravidade que ele podia controlar. Quando ele foi baleado ele perdeu o controle de sua gravidade anti e caiu em Laketown e quebrou a cidade inteira. Então, sim, Smaug era tão grande quanto Peter Jackson o fazia e, portanto, precisava de anti-gravidade para se levitar enquanto voava e batia as asas para propulsão e controle direcional.

Eu não acho que Smaug tenha confiado em sua habilidade de afinar sua anti-gravidade - e assim seu peso - rapidamente, e assim ele não queria pousar em Laketown ou na ponte. Ele planejou diminuir sua gravidade anti e pousar no chão pela ponte. Então ele colocava um pé na ponte, devagar e com cuidado, e se sentisse que a ponte estava afivelada, aumentaria rapidamente sua gravidade. Eventualmente, ele teria seu anti-gravidade ajustado corretamente e atravessaria a ponte para Laketown.

Algumas pessoas se perguntam como Smaug poderia ter andado entre os edifícios em Laketown. Smaug teria arrancado os edifícios do caminho com as patas enquanto caminhava em direção ao centro de Laketown. Havia um buraco circular na plataforma da cidade para o mercado da cidade. Smaug teria colocado as patas dianteiras de um lado do mercado e as patas traseiras do outro lado do mercado e baixara a cauda até o nível do convés. Então Smaug teria se virado em um círculo completo ao redor do mercado circular e sua cauda teria varrido e esmagado centenas de prédios e milhares de pessoas em um minuto.

" As pilhas podres de uma cidade maior ainda podiam ser vistas ao longo da costa quando as águas afundaram em uma seca. "

Talvez tenha sido o que aconteceu com o arruinado Laketown anterior e, em caso afirmativo, os homens de Laketown saberiam que precisavam derrubar a ponte rapidamente.