Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Elephant

 

 

Elephants are inevitable. Space Opera is all about fighting giant space monsters, so naturally we’re fascinated by the largest land animal currently alive: The elephant. Of course, by space opera standards, the elephant is chump change. If we’re talking giant space monsters, they’ll tower over buildings, not merely knock over mud hut with an angry charge. Even so, I can’t help but notice space elephants everywhere, not as space monsters, but as large mounts. Two examples that leap to mind are the bantha of Star Wars or the Yeddim of Exalted before getting into more obscure examples. I think we’re enamored of the idea of the largest beast of burden which act like living tanks or living semi-trucks. The image of an alien queen on the back of a giant tortoise, or a caravan packed onto the sides of a mammoth, ready to deploy as an impromptu marketplace are the sorts of images that tell us we’re in space opera!

So the key features, to my mind, for a space elephant is its massive size, is herbivorous nature and general placidity paired with its potential for extreme danger, thanks in the very least to its large size.

 

Space Elephant in GURPS Space

A Space Elephant, like a real elephant, is going to be a Plains Grazer. Only on the plains are you going to find the nourishment necessary to reach such a large size paired with the space necessary to reach said size. It also makes said size important, as it lets you look out over the grasses, and lets you fend off equally large predators. They’ll Walk, of course.

Ah, Size, the whole reason we’re here! Elephants don’t get much taller than 12 feet (about 4 yards) and they’re somewhat boxy, so they’re not going to get much longer than that either, which suggests SM +2, but they weigh up to 6 tons, which clocks them at SM +3, which seems a more reasonable number, as elephants are really topping out on the SM +2 scale. Their official stats put them at SM +3 as well. I would like to note this is on the low end for sizes in GURPS Space.

For Body Plan, we get a bilateral creature with 4 limbs, a featureless ail, a prehensile trunk manipulator, and a combination skeleton (yeah, Elephants are one of the weirder animals). I want to take a moment to say that my work on this has really taught me how clever biology really is. Again and again, as I learn about animals and how they exploit their niche, the more impressed I am by their designs. The trunk, for example, is such an odd thing, but once you understand how grazer work, it makes sense. The elephant’s huge size allows it to survey the world, and allows it to fend off predators, but it still needs to eat, and that means lowering its head to the ground or raising its head up to the leaves. This requires a long and often delicate neck, which is impossible if you want to have a giant tank-head with great tusks in it, and a smaller head is more vulnerable. So, it goes with a trunk that brings the food up or down to its mouth. This has lots of knock on benefits, like it can drink from a watering hole without bring its vulnerable neck into striking range for a crocodile. This is one of those designs I’d struggle to improve on.

For Skin, an Elephant has Thick Hide, clearly. Their official stats even gives them DR 4. Of the other skin types, we know fur is possible (the Mammoth), and scales seems quite likely too (many elephant-sized dinosaurs had heavy armored plates). Feathers seems unlikely. The more we look into dinosaurs, the more probable it seems that the larger the theropod, the less likely it was to have a lot of fur cover, for the similar reasons to the elephant lacking a fur coat. Exoskeletons are also probably out. It seems the maximum possible size of a creature with an exoskeleton is SM +1, and it’s more likely to be a long centipede than a bulky, bear-sized thing, never mind SM+3. We can lie, of course and just make giant, elephant-sized things with an exoskeleton, but we’d need extremely tough material, a non-insectoid way of breathing (as surface area-to-mass seems to be a limiting factor to size), and possibly a combination skeleton, in which case it’s less of a true exoskeleton and more extensive armor plating, though it’s possible for a true combination skeleton for both the external and internal skeleton to provide their own degree of support.

It should be noted that GURPS Space puts the average Temperature Regulation roll at War-Blooded with Metabolism Control. I don’t know of any hibernating elephants, though it wouldn’t surprise me if Mammoths did something like that.

When it comes to Elephantine Romance, elephants are clearly sexual, live-bearing, and have a Strong-K strategy. I think in practice egg-laying is quite doable for them as a strategy, as there isn’t so much seasonal change that they need to move quickly, but grazer herds of giant animals risk denuding an area pretty quickly, so there’s some advantage to carrying your eggs inside you until they hatch. But Strong-K is just a function of how big they are!

Next comes Senses. Elephant eyes seem to be weak. I can’t find anything on colorblindness or visual acuity, but it might be plausible that they lack depth perception (they certainly have Peripheral Vision), and a lack of visual acuity doesn’t seem to hurt them much (Elephant matriarchs retain their position even if completely blind). Hearing seems impressive and they’re capable of Subsonic Hearing. Their trunks might have Acute Touch, like a special feeler. And given that their trunk is also a nose, it’s not that surprising that they have excellent smell, though it might be Acute rather than Discriminatory: they’re very good at picking up faint scents, but I don’t see much suggesting that they distinguish more scents than most animals. Taken together, this suggests rather impressive Perception, though I see this isn’t reflected in their stats.

When it comes to Alien Minds, Elephants have their long life spans, and their Strong-K strategy working for them, and their grazing herbivore nature working against them; they average out at “Low Intelligence” but I feel comfortable giving them a mammalian IQ 4 and GURPS officially gives them a generous IQ 5. It’s quite plausible though that giant grazers would be dumb. For organization, Elephants seem to have Harem breeding patterns (mating patterns never tightly fit into GURPS space definitions). Males enter something like heat, and then will claim and protect one or more female for breeding. However, they don’t seem to have a permanent status as a member of the social organization, which seems to be matriarchal and seems to fall into the “2d troop” size.

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

Generic Space Elephant Stats

GURPS has Elephants on B460, though based on research I would say I find some of the design choices simplistic and/or questionable, but it’s a good place to start. Pizard comes to our rescue with even better stats. Shockingly, there are no Elephants in DF 5: Allies; I guess this is Kromm’s way of putting his foot down about pet mastadons.

Variations

Lizard Elephant

What about a reptilian elephant? In a sense, this the most pedestrian “variant” possible, because “that’s a dinosaur.” Specifically, a triceratops engages in similar herding behavior, has a strong, “front facing” set of weapons and is the right mass and size.

But we can imagine a more generic “reptilian elephant.” First, we might replace the trunk and tusks with a tail. That tail becomes its primary form of defense. We’ll lose the ability to “reach” for food, though, which means this will need to have a “low to the ground” posture, likely something that moves in a crocodilian way, which is slower and less efficient. For scales, we’d go with “Heavy scales” but that actually reduces DR to 3, surprisingly. We might add “Armor Shell” to some places, like perhaps its back and its skull. It will likely be egg-laying, which means you have to have fewer in number (perhaps mere pairbonds), lest they depopulate an area while waiting for the eggs to hatch. They can retain their weak, peripheral vision, but they’ll probably lose their excellent hearing (a fin could replace their ears for removing heat), touch and smell. And in keeping with stereotypical reptiles, we might lower their intelligence

Lens (Triceratops): See GURPS: Land out of Time Page 25.

Lens (Lizard Elephant): DX -2; IQ -2; HT -1;

ST: 45	Basic Speed: 5.0	SM: +3
DX: 10	Ground Move: 5
IQ: 3	Perception: 9
HT: 11	Will: 11	DR: 5 (Skull and tail)/3

Traits: Crushing Striker (Tail; Rear hexes only); Domestic (or Wild) Animal; Loner (12); Peripheral Vision; Quadruped; Weak Bite.

Bite (10): 3d cr; Reach C

Tail (10): 5d+5 cr; Reach 1-3;

Land Whale

If the point is “How big can an elephant get?” well, we know the actual answer to that, because we have the gigapods. They get up to 100 tons and thirty yards long, which puts them either at SM +6 and at the top of the GURPS Space scale, or just beyond the largest possible size! By comparison, blue whales reach up to 200 tons, so these are half the mass of the largest creature ever recorded. Not too shabby!

It’s a little hard to grasp just how big that is. It’s about ST 120, or a thrust of 13d; that averages 45 damage. That means even an TL 11 character in a monocrys tacsuit would still be dead if one of these kicked him, and the average person would be knocked about 7 yards. It would take up an area of about 15 by 10 hexes on a map. It tramples for Large Area Injury (no surprise there) and can simply step over people. If it bites a human scale target, it can just lift the target and hold them helpless in their teeth. It’s huge.

This might imply some additional features. First, such massive creatures would require a massive amount of food. Either the environment is especially rich in food, or they are fewer in number. This later doesn’t have to be the case, but consider it, in any case. A different physical layout is also quite probable. For example, it’s likely either higher up off the ground, or lower down, in both cases to protect it vulnerable underbelly from attack. If it’s taller, its tusks serve no purpose, and what you get is a classic brachiosaurus build with a long neck and a small head. On the other hand, if it’s low to the ground, it likely doesn’t have a trunk either, as the grass is right there in front of its mouth. Even so, I’ll leave the lens as is; just be aware that there may be additional differences for your land whale.

Lens (Brachiosaurus): See GURPS: Land out of Time Page 24.

Lens (Land Whale): ST +80; SM +3; Move +4;

Genius Elephant

I’m not entirely sold on the idea of IQ 5 elephants. They’re clearly clever, but they have a manipulator with which to do clever things and they live a long time, and I wonder how much those two things contribute to our perception of their intelligence. Even so, we could exaggerate this further. The biggest factor holding the elephant back is that it grazes. It does this for good reason: it needs a lot of food. But what if it got its food from calorie rich sources? What if it was a Gathering Herbivore? It’s big enough to exert its strength and be the first to get to them. It has a long, sensitive trunk that can pick up the scent of a specific food that it wants. And it has the scale to travel long distances if necessary. This assumes that such a food exists, is capable of feeding our giant animals, or that our animal is slightly smaller.

If we assume a slightly smaller elephant (say we trim it to 3 tons) and more of a calorie rich environment, we might get even smarter elephants capable of proper language and tool use. Their psychological profile becomes much more important, but I won’t get into that here. They might also have a more complex social organization, longer lifespans and greater degrees of wisdom.

Lens (Genius Elephant): ST -10; IQ +1; SM -1; Replace Restricted Diet (Herbivore) with Restricted Diet (Alien Nuts and Fruits or Something).

Swamp Elephant

Are there any options for giant elephants other than plains? Arctic terrain benefits from a large size, but Mammoths are fairly obvious so I won’t bother to write up a lens for them. What about jungle elephants? Jungles could support the biomass of an elephant? Well, the African Forest Elephant fits the bill, but it’s much smaller and tends to favor eating fruits and nuts… hey, just like the Genius Elephant! They’re even the same size! How interesting! But the smaller size is a bit of a deal breaker if we’re thinking about “giant freaking herbivores” and jungles tend to result in smaller creatures. Swamps, however, have more of the open terrain, and the water helps support larger mass, so we might imagine an amphibious elephant. We used to imagine dinosaurs like this; it turned out not to be true, but that doesn’t prevent us from imagining swamp elephants, does it?

The problem with a swamp is how to cross the surface well. You have to move a fairly extreme mass over very soft ground. We could spread it out with large, flat feet, or multiple flat feet, but perhaps if we just set the body down into the water or mud and let it “slither” along with legs propelling it either in the water or on the land. The trunk could lift up to reach for leaves in high branches, or scoop up moss and bring it to the mouth, but again we find a long and slender neck might do the job better. Given the snorkel of the trunk, we might not need special breathing tools and we’re not going into especially deep water. Egg laying is also more of an option, because large migration patterns are unlikely unless swamp extends over vast swathes of a planet. This also suggests you have only a few pockets of these rare behemoths scattered over your planet.

Lens (Swamp Elephant): -1 Move; Amphibious.

Giant Worm

How is a worm an elephant? Well, people will doubtless notice that the worms of Dune are giant, and so are elephants are both are effectively herbivores (Shai-halud are more filter feeders, as I understand it, but that’s not necessarily a problem for our analogy). More importantly, this poses the question: can you have a giant, multi-ton slithering creature? Do elephants need to walk? Well, GURPS Space allows it: Slithering is -1 to your size roll, so it’s possible, just improbable. The problem is that legs are vastly more efficient than slithering, which caps the size of most slithering animals. An elephant-sized strains the imagination, at least when it comes to efficient biomechanics.

But there are additional considerations here. First, such a creature would have a very long body, which means a very long digestive tract, which means it can extract every last possible calorie from what it eats, and likely be far less picky about what it processes. That could push it towards an omnivore, but I think calling it an herbivore with universal digestion is probably closer to the mark. Second, by reducing the cross-section of the creature, it becomes more able to navigate tight spaces like caves, forests or jungles. Caves lack the biomass to really support such a behemoth, but a jungle worm is hardly the worst idea. Slithering also works quite well with water, which means our swamp elephant could easily be a swamp work.

So, the drawbacks are a greatly reduced move, but you’re likely gaining superior digestion and more environments in which to be casually mobile.

ST: 45	Basic Speed: 5.0	SM: +3
DX: 9	Ground Move: 2
IQ: 1	Perception: 9
HT: 12	Will: 10	DR: 4

Traits: Bad Vision (Near-Sighted); Born Biter +1; Helminth; Loner (12); No Legs (Slithers); Peripheral Vision; Universal Digestion; Wild Animal;

Bite (6): 5d cr; Reach C

Death Ball

So, a giant worm isn’t enough for you? You really want a spherical elephant? Well, as noted many, many times, a spherical land dweller is hard to justify. A radial elephant might be possible, though. If we imagine something like a giant starfish with an upward facing mouth, and lots of long, sensitive “tentacles” that reach up or out, grab plant matter and bring it in to the central mouth, we have something that functions like an elephant. We could give it a hard carapace and the multiple “arms” to allow it to move the way a starfish does: painfully slow, but it shouldn’t matter if it’s just feeding.

So where do we get the spherical part. Well, one of the key features of the elephant is its ferocious charge. That’s what we used war elephants for. What if this “spherical elephant” had the ability to retract its tendrils, close its mouths, close its eyes, roll up into a ball and roll? A multi-ton creature crashing down a mountain side at someone is a horrifying vision, and would definitely make low tech armies flee in terror.

Is it plausible? If we’re being honest, none of the radial land animals are especially likely, but maybe it’s plausible? I dunno.

ST: 45	Basic Speed: 4.75	SM: +3
DX: 9	Ground Move: 1	Rolling Move: 8 or 12
IQ: 1	Perception: 9
HT: 12	Will: 10	DR: 5 (not on feelers)

Traits: 360 Vision; Acute Touch +4 (Feelers Only); Asteroid; Bad Vision (Low Resolution); Extra Arms (4; Extra Flexible; Weak, ST 11; No Attack; Switchable); Enhanced Move (Rolling; Requires Ready Action; Ground speed 8); Enhanced Move (Rolling; Requires Ready Action and flat ground or downhill only; Ground speed 12); Numb (Not on Feelers); Weak Bite; Wild Animal;

Bite (6): 3d cr; Reach C