Skitarii (Fem)boi

No fic chapter this week 'cause I need more time with chapter 07 and want to work more on the next ones before I post it, but I did manage some comfy Seth sketches here and there. (ˊ͈ ꒳ ˋ͈)♥︎

@thedisablednaturalist @fagtabulous

@thedisablednaturalist @fagtabulous

Looks like a princess to me!

Historical-like cavalry in a futuristic setting with automatic weapons and tanks is stupid anyway, for the same reasons cavalry mostly went away in our real world. There are extremely niche modern military uses for horses but they don't make sense for most of the confrontations that happen in 40k.

the death riders to me seem like really wanting the 'role' of cavalry for style (that is pretty much nonexistent post-WW1) while absolutely hating horses. Their relative fragility, how they look, how after their military use is over they're often associated with women, stuff like that. The mount critters REEK of a fear of 'pretty pretty pony' and have removed all features that invoke 'pretty pretty pony' under the guise of cutting logistical inconveniences.

Except the resulting creature is worthless. I am sorry to tell you that a horse's coat of hair was pretty much the only thing making them semi-resistant to irritating gas weapons. The hooves are able to be shod and thus become resistant to being worn down by sharp terrain; giving them Claws won't help. And it fucks up their stride such that now they wouldn't be able to do what you want horses to do.

The lore about them being able to be freeze-dried is dumb too, because the only advantage of horses is that they're able to go fast without gasoline. Eliminating the logistical drawbacks of taking care of the horses (via axing all those Pretty Pretty Pony Features) also eliminates the entire tradeoff that explains why you might choose horses in the first place.

im also curious if you have any interesting takes on the cyborg dogs the adeptus mechanicus uses as horses

As others have pointed out in the "but there's <an exception>" genre of comment, normal horses also exist at the same time in the setting as the Kreig mounts. It's just that the most well-known riders of these horses are not white coded the Attilan Rough Riders, which are relatively unpopular. Or as far as I can tell given there are a million jokes about the suicidal gas mask shovel guys, and not as many about Space Mongolians.

This means the people in the universe should know that certain features of horses are not cruft, they're useful. It's only the IP holders that really don't think about it.

I PROMISE THIS IS IMPORTANT ABOUT THE ADMECH HORSEDOGS, @skitarii-boi. This is the reason: the Imperium has Regular Dogs. Regular dogs are NOT a lost species, they didn't re-engineer the dogs. The Regular Dogs are regular, until they are augmented into Cyber-Mastiffs or god knows what.

The reason regular dogs are not good for riding in real life is because of how their spines, shoulders move during their gaits. Here is a dog gallop photographed long before AI, so it should be a good example:

(Dog; galloping; white racing hound (Maggie), 1872-1885 Eadweard Muybridge (1830 - 1904), via: the RA)

You see how as different feet touch and leave the ground, the spine bends like that, the shoulders go up and down, it's a lunging motion? This is really different from how horses run. Here's another plate captured by the same dude, for control purposes:

(Plate Number 626. Gallop, thoroughbred bay mare, Annie G. 1887, Eadweard Muybridge, via National Gallery of Art)

You can see that the spine and shoulders barely move up and down at all, and this is a racehorse. It's not going slow.

Let's compare them in gif form:

It is even possible that these early references of dog gaits informed the poses of the Serberys mounted units. They're oldies, but goodies. But the point is that canine gaits include a lot of bounce. Canines as a wild animal are adapted to follow prey for long periods of time and then only speed up in a burst to chase it down when its weakest, bite its back end, and follow it as it bleeds to death. The most extreme form of the flexible spine sprinting physiology can be seen in cheetahs, which are known freaks:

(abdominal and thoracic cavities of cheetah during a sprint, showing phases of forced inhalation and exhalation, via wikimedia)

If you rode a dog (or a cat) the way you'd ride a horse in real life, you'd get bounced the fuck off. Boing-oing-oing. The reason why horseback riding was an incredible military technology was that it took the stability of something like a chariot's platform and deleted the heavy and unwieldy apparatus. The stirrup was an enormous innovation that meant you could shoot arrows or fix spears from floating steps on each side of a horse's body instead of a portable floor dragged behind it.

The reason the horse was the animal that enabled this (and not oxen, or some kind of Large Rideable Deer), was that it had three things:

Horses are able to learn complex cues

Horses have trainable gaits that could go variable levels of fast, and

Horses have this special, extra-stable shoulders and spine: a more 'endurance' approach to high speeds. They're very fast but not adapted for short-burst sprinting. The fastest racehorse in history was a mutant.

What does this mean about the Admech Puppies? Well, they're really cool, but we can see that their poses are sampled from coursing dogs like above, not lumbering chunkos who maybe MAYBE have a chance to be ridden:

(Eadweard Muybridge. Animal locomotion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements. 1872-1885. USC Digital Library, 2010. via Wikimedia)

So... it will be very hard for Serberys rider guys to aim a gun if they manage to stay on. And the admech working on this technology should have known, because they have access to regular ordinary dogs as a reference the same way that the Death Korps could possibly observe Normal Horses.

HOWEVER, I am willing to give the Admech a little bit more of a pass, because something is true about them that is not true about the Death Riders; the guys doing the riding are tricked out to all fuck.

The Admech despite its no-invention policies, over-engineers things a LOT. Which GW clarifies:

(Via: The British Money Draining Website)

So rather than compromising for a less silly mount physiology, Serberys riders clamp their butts to the damn things. They have installed special gyroscopically compensated saddles/hardware decks (?) for aiming their weapons, knowing bouncing dogs will shake them all over the place. Riders could rely on an overhead servo skull for terrain data instead of their own robot eyes which might not be able to see anything, unless those are stabilized too. It's good that GW got ahead of this one because they glued some dudes to mechanical bull rides that can shoot fire.

Historical-like cavalry in a futuristic setting with automatic weapons and tanks is stupid anyway, for the same reasons cavalry mostly went away in our real world. There are extremely niche modern military uses for horses but they don't make sense for most of the confrontations that happen in 40k.

the death riders to me seem like really wanting the 'role' of cavalry for style (that is pretty much nonexistent post-WW1) while absolutely hating horses. Their relative fragility, how they look, how after their military use is over they're often associated with women, stuff like that. The mount critters REEK of a fear of 'pretty pretty pony' and have removed all features that invoke 'pretty pretty pony' under the guise of cutting logistical inconveniences.

Except the resulting creature is worthless. I am sorry to tell you that a horse's coat of hair was pretty much the only thing making them semi-resistant to irritating gas weapons. The hooves are able to be shod and thus become resistant to being worn down by sharp terrain; giving them Claws won't help. And it fucks up their stride such that now they wouldn't be able to do what you want horses to do.

The lore about them being able to be freeze-dried is dumb too, because the only advantage of horses is that they're able to go fast without gasoline. Eliminating the logistical drawbacks of taking care of the horses (via axing all those Pretty Pretty Pony Features) also eliminates the entire tradeoff that explains why you might choose horses in the first place.

Also if it makes you feel any better, he, alas, CAVALRY CHARGED A GARGANT.

ON HORSEBACK.

FOR CONTEXT THIS IS BASICALLY CAVALRY CHARGING A TITAN WITH A HORSE.

Oh yeah he won.

(Also the horse is mechanical and can ride perfectly fine through falling debris btw. Never gets spooked either. Perfect 100% calm. THE PONY IS BRAVER THAN I!!!!)

Historical-like cavalry in a futuristic setting with automatic weapons and tanks is stupid anyway, for the same reasons cavalry mostly went away in our real world. There are extremely niche modern military uses for horses but they don't make sense for most of the confrontations that happen in 40k.

the death riders to me seem like really wanting the 'role' of cavalry for style (that is pretty much nonexistent post-WW1) while absolutely hating horses. Their relative fragility, how they look, how after their military use is over they're often associated with women, stuff like that. The mount critters REEK of a fear of 'pretty pretty pony' and have removed all features that invoke 'pretty pretty pony' under the guise of cutting logistical inconveniences.

Except the resulting creature is worthless. I am sorry to tell you that a horse's coat of hair was pretty much the only thing making them semi-resistant to irritating gas weapons. The hooves are able to be shod and thus become resistant to being worn down by sharp terrain; giving them Claws won't help. And it fucks up their stride such that now they wouldn't be able to do what you want horses to do.

The lore about them being able to be freeze-dried is dumb too, because the only advantage of horses is that they're able to go fast without gasoline. Eliminating the logistical drawbacks of taking care of the horses (via axing all those Pretty Pretty Pony Features) also eliminates the entire tradeoff that explains why you might choose horses in the first place.

Historical-like cavalry in a futuristic setting with automatic weapons and tanks is stupid anyway, for the same reasons cavalry mostly went away in our real world. There are extremely niche modern military uses for horses but they don't make sense for most of the confrontations that happen in 40k.

the death riders to me seem like really wanting the 'role' of cavalry for style (that is pretty much nonexistent post-WW1) while absolutely hating horses. Their relative fragility, how they look, how after their military use is over they're often associated with women, stuff like that. The mount critters REEK of a fear of 'pretty pretty pony' and have removed all features that invoke 'pretty pretty pony' under the guise of cutting logistical inconveniences.

Except the resulting creature is worthless. I am sorry to tell you that a horse's coat of hair was pretty much the only thing making them semi-resistant to irritating gas weapons. The hooves are able to be shod and thus become resistant to being worn down by sharp terrain; giving them Claws won't help. And it fucks up their stride such that now they wouldn't be able to do what you want horses to do.

The lore about them being able to be freeze-dried is dumb too, because the only advantage of horses is that they're able to go fast without gasoline. Eliminating the logistical drawbacks of taking care of the horses (via axing all those Pretty Pretty Pony Features) also eliminates the entire tradeoff that explains why you might choose horses in the first place.

im also curious if you have any interesting takes on the cyborg dogs the adeptus mechanicus uses as horses