Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Horse

 

I think the only animal remotely competitive with a dog or cat for popular, intuitive understanding is the horse. Most people have been near one at at least one point in their life, and many have ridden them, or would like to. Riding, of course, is their key feature, as is work. We have eaten horses in the past, but most people see them as companions, something to be ridden, or helpers. They feature in our mythology and our history. Barbarian hordes ride on the back of horses, as do knights. So if we delve into the history of alien races, should we not expect to find alien knights or alien barbarian hordes riding upon alien horses? And if so, do they still ride on them today? What do human ranchers on alien worlds ride? 

 

Space Horses in GURPS Space

Horses are Walking Grazer from the Plains.

When it comes to Size, horses are typically SM +1, which GURPS Space pegs as “human scale” and assumes is 600 lbs (or ST 16-17). In practice, this is closer to a pony (which, to be fair, the original “onager” horses were pretty close to); real horses are bigger than this, but not quite SM +2.

When it comes to a Body Plan, horses are bilateral, have two limbs per side, have no features with their tail, and have no manipulators. They have an internal skeleton.

For Skin, we expect to see basic Fur. Interestingly, GURPS Space things they would average towards Thick Fur, which means horses are a bit light on protection for their niche (as far as Space is concerned). The equivalent for other body coverings would be Hide (DR 1) for skin, Scales (DR 1) for Scales, Feathers (+1 temperature tolerance) for Feathers, and Tough Exoskeleton for Exoskelton. Horses are warm-blooded, of course, and GUPS Space expects them to be (they breath air, they’re human-scale or larger, and they’re land-dwelling).

When it comes to Sex, horses have two sexes, are live-bearing and have a Strong-K strategy. The more I study animals, the clearer the benefits of live birth are to me: it lets you carry your eggs inside, which is especially useful for migrating, which great horse herds often did.

When it comes to Senses, we would expect alien horses to have some colorblindness or bad vision, to have extended hearing, to have human-level touch, and to have discriminatory or acute smell. We also expect peripheral vision. According to my actual research, horses have some level of colorblindness and may struggle with depth perception (though not to the point of No Depth Perception) and may have some limited nightvision. They do indeed have extended hearing, but also parabolic hearing. They have a good sense of smell, but not as good as a dog’s (so perhaps Acute rather than Discriminatory), and they’re very sensitive to touch, suggesting acute touch (or, when taken with everything else, improved perception).

When it comes to Alien Minds, we probably expect alien horses to be “Low Intelligence” which is to say, no smarter than most animals, and indeed, most GURPS stats put them at 3. The most plausible mating strategy, according to GURPS Space, is Harem, which seems accurate to how horses actually breed. For social organization, they seem to average towards “Small group” but I would think “Herd.”

This gives them a generic Psychological Profile of Chauvinism +0, Concentration -1 (Distractible), Curiosity +0, Egoism +1 to +2 (Selfish), Empathy +0, Gregariousness +0, Imagination +0 and Suspicion +1 (Careful).

Generic Alien Horse Stats

GURPS Basic has several horses. GURPS DF 5: Allies has the Stallion. Pizard has horses. Horses are probably the most statted critter in GURPS.

Variations

If the point of a horse is to ride it, we should think about mobility. Our alien beasty needs to be strong enough to carry a human (an ST 17 horse, a bit stronger than a pony, would see most humans as at least Medium encumbrance. An ST 22 horse (a more common ST) would see a human as about Light. I don’t think you could get much lower than ST 20 and have a horse mount most people on its back.

Speed will also matter. GURPS Space has a formula for determining a typical “speed” for an alien. If a human is 6 feet tall, and a horse 9 feet (based on it being SM +1, though this approach has some issues), that only gives it a move of 6, and most horses have Move 8 with Enhanced Speed. But this does emphasize that horses should be tall, both for the longer stride (and thus higher movement). And while I don’t really have good mechanisms for determining the speed of various modes of transportation, it’s noteworthy that horses already have questionable utility at TL 8 due to the presence of high performance off-road vehicles. In a UT environment, this may become even more pronounced.

Finally, note that horses are bred. Yes, there are great wild “mustang” herds, but they started as much smaller, much more wild creatures. If some of the variations seem evolutionarily implausible, it’s not that far fetched to cry “A scientist did it!” because horses wouldn’t be what they are today without human intervention.

The Chitin Horse

So why do horses have to have internal skeletons? Well, they have to be able to bear loads. A hydrostatic “Invertebrate” horse would be unable to do that. An exoskeleton might. Then we get into the next issue, which is that ideally, we’d want to keep our rider more-or-less level and not whip them around much (this is one of my issues with “slithering” horses, because the rider would undulate with the body, unless they could sit on the head). This tends to knock out most of your springing insects, which are going to struggle with weight anyway. If we want a fast, insectile riding animal, we need something closer to a centipede: they move quite quickly (they’re predators) and they do it while maintaining an even posture, and they have rounded bodies that can stand up to stresses. The only real problem is justifying a creature with an exoskeleton that’s sufficiently large: three meter-long insects are plausible, but such an insect isn’t “tall” enough to ride, so we’d need an implausibly large centipede. It may be that this centipede has an internal skeleton and also has armored plating for additional support, a combined system (which is plausible per Space). This critter might plausibly be about 5 yards long (SM +2), which isn’t crazy as horses are on the border between SM +1 and SM +2 due to their mass anyway. If we add a heavy exoskelton (to deal with the stress of the rider) and some nasty-looking strikers in the front, and we’ve got a full “riding centipede.” It might make sense to give it some venom too, but despite centipedes being carnivotes, we’d expect this critter to still be a grazer (justifying its large size, its herds, and its relative placidity, at least enough to be domesticated).

ST: 22	Basic Speed: 5	SM: 2
DX: 8	Basic Move: 8
IQ: 1	Perception: 10
HT: 12	Will: 10	DR: 3

Traits: Acute Smell 2; Acute Touch 2 (Feelers Only); Bad Sight (Low Resolution); Domesticated Animal; Enhanced Move 1 (Ground Speed 16); Extra Legs (18); Horizontal; Impaling Strikers (Forward Arc Only); Night Vision 2; No Fine Manipulators; Peripheral Vision;

 

The Feather Horse

“We rode the queerest steeds imaginable. Huge birds they were, more like enormous game-cocks than aught else I can compare them to; with longer, thicker spurs and bigger beaks. Ugly-tempered, too. Zarf said they’d fight viciously whenever it came to close quarters. And how those big birds could run!” ― Nictzin Dyalhis

You can ride an ostrich. You just really shouldn’t. My primary concern would be balance: you need to keep a creature’s center of balance firmly over their legs. Quadrupeds have an advantage as you can sit between the four legs, but with a quadruped, you’ll need to sit right above the legs. Ideally, the creature somewhat resembles a dinosaur, with a long body, tail and neck that can act to counter balance your weight, wherever you happen to be sitting. But you can ride an ostrich, so it is possible even without all those mechanisms.

The reason you shouldn’t ride one is that they’re not actually that large, and ostrich bones are fairly fragile. The extra mass of a human is literally crushing to an ostrich. So a true riding ostrich would likely have extremely tough, thick legs for the additional weight, would likely be a larger animal than an ostrich. In fact, if we just use horse values (why no?) we’ll find that they’ll tower at almost 9 feet, as a bipedal creature is probably going to reach the full height of their size modifier, rather than spread it out. We could justify a shorter tail if we feather it (which we’re doing, of course), as the feathers can amplify the balancing effect.

So what you get is almost exactly a chocobo. Hardly surprising.

Lens (Feather Horse): Replace Quadruped with No Fine Manipulators; Add Feathers and Sharp Beak.

 

The Winged Horse

Obviously, players somewhere will want a flying steed. Is that even plausible? Well, sort of. The largest GURPS Space will acknowledge for a winged flyer at as at most SM +1… which science actually agrees with! The largest winged flyer on earth was the Pteradon.  It had a wingspan of up to 25 meters which, if we’re going to get technical, is about SM +7, but the mass of the creature was up to about 600 lbs, or ST 16-17 (We can push it up to 18, I suppose) and typical for an SM+1 creature, per GURPS Space (though SM is actually about how easy it is to hit a critter, not how heavy it is).

So it’s possible to ride a flying mount. A winged horse given a generous ST of 18 would have a BL of ~65 lbs, which means a grown human would be Medium Encumbrance, and anything more than that would be Heavy. That would sharply limit the weight of people that it could carry (no “Heavy Cavalry” in the skies).

Here are some rather generous stats derived from the Giant Eagle of GURPS DF 5 and actual pterosaur values, where I could find them.

ST: 18	Basic Speed: 6.0	SM: 2
DX: 12	Move (Ground): 3	Move (Air): 10
IQ: 3	Perception: 12
HT: 12	Will: 10	DR: 0

Traits: Acute Vision 2; Claws (Sharp); Enhanced Move 2 (Air Speed 40); Extra Legs (4; Nuisance Effect, cannot fly while using them); Ham Fisted 2; Fatigues Quickly Under Load; Foot Manipulators; Flight (Winged); Teeth (Sharp).

 

The Balloon Horse

So you’re not satisfied with an ST 18 flying mount, and you want something that can support your flying knight’s weight? Well, the easiest answer is to just throw aerodynamics out the window and have super-strong flying mounts. It’s space opera and nobody blinks at space dragons, so why not? But if you want a physically plausible flying horse that has an ST of 22+, what would it look like?

Winged flyers are limited to SM +1. Bouyant flyers aren’t! So we could plausibly have a Bouyant Flier with SM +2 and thus clock in at 3000 lbs (ST 28). That’s more than enough to carry someone. We’d need it to be long and relatively slender, so the rider’s legs can fit around it, otherwise we’re talking more of a blimp than a steed. It might have a long digestive tract, but also have a long air track that uses musculature contractions to take air in the front and expel it out the back, creating something of a living “jet.” As a flier, it can afford to be a browser rather than a grazer: it can float along the tops of forests, plucking leaves from the tops of trees with a set of small tendrils that draw the leaves to its long digestive tract. This herbivorous diet will produce a lot of waste gas, such as methane, but rather than expel it, the creature could store it as its lighter-than-air gas, which would make up the bulk of its mass. This has the downside of making the creature flammable, however. It also means the bulk of the creature would have the feel of a leathery balloon, as that’s what it would be. Realistically, this would probably have a hydrostatic skeleton, and so need to be even bigger to support a human riding it, but this critter is weird enough.

So there you go, a floating, flammable, fart-balloon horse. Have fun!

ST: 25	Basic Speed: 5.0	SM: 2
DX: 8	Move (Ground): 0	Move (Air): 5
IQ: 1	Perception: 10
HT: 10	Will: 10	DR: 0

Traits: 360 Vision; Bad Smell; Bad Vision (Low Resolution); Extra Arms (18; short, weak); Enhanced Speed 1 (Air Speed 10); Flying (Lighter than Air); Fragile (Flammable); Weak Bite;

 

Ball Horse

Animals can’t have wheels. There’s even a discussion of it in GURPS Space! There are some workarounds, like Dawkin’s “concentric blood ducts” and we can even dispense with the notion that they wouldn’t naturally evolve by pointing out these creatures could be genetically engineered in some way. We’d also need to justify some roads, and there are problems with a creature that builds those too, but it’s possible that a local eusocial creature has more than enough budget to endure the “parasites” that use their roads without contributing anything, or we can envision a vast swathes of flat “salt flats” on the world. Those together should be enough to justify a “wheel horse.”

But do you want a wheel horse? It just looks like a biological car. It’s not really that exotic or alien. What about.. what about a horse on a ball?

I say “on a ball” because one of the problems with wheels is they need to disconnect from the creature to smoothly roll. But we have plenty of creatures that construct balls. We find them all over the world! We could imagine a creature that creatures a globular “shell” that rather than hiding in it, it rolls it around with itself perched on top. Or it could use some other material (a dung beetle writ large). We might imagine it something like a flat, starfish creature with lots and lots of small legs that can grip the ball and push it. It would need astonishing balance, and it would likely need to be small (its expending a lot of time and energy creating the ball), so I’m not sure how well it could be ridden, but it can afford to be rather flat, perched on its ball. I’m not sure precisely how one would ride it: you might sit on it (especially it was aysmmetrical, with one part longer than the rest, a sort of bridge you could sit on), or you might stand on it, like a surfboard. How does it eat? Uh… I guess long tendril arms? I don’t know.

Is this plausible? I don’t know. Probably no more plausible than a planet of salt-flats and wheelie-horses, but it’s something, at least.

ST: 18	Basic Speed: 5.0	SM: 0 (+1 with ball-shell)
DX: 10	Move (Ground): 3
IQ: 1	Perception: 11
HT: 11	Will: 10	DR: 3

Traits: 360 Vision; Acute Touch 3 (Legs only); Arms (Long, extra flexible) Asteroid Morphology, Bad Vision (Low Resolution); Extra Legs (18); Enhanced Speed 3 (Requires Flat Surface and constructed ball-shell; Ground Speed 24); Perfect Balance Weak Bite