Serious disproof of fictional entity detected!

Engaging humor! :U

1. Those are normal stairs? I'm fairly sure I'd pass out from the rate of climb on that thing.

2. I dunno but usually the upper body is about half a foot back from where you've placed it. Y'know, so that the spine isn't subjected to a constant 50 or so kilograms of shear force.

3. The arms play a large role in balance. Given that the center of mass is now *at least* somewhere behind the front contacts, any imbalance can still be further corrected.

Disengaging humor!

Seriously, those are normal stairs? You must have armored shins or something.


Perhaps i'm just used to the kind of stairs made when people say "This gentle slope is too boring".

True, the slope is a little steep, but fire escapes (for example) tend to be 40 - 45 degrees, as they're intended to be compact and functional. The torso would look normal if the taur was level. But if you put it on a 45 degree slope stairs, this is where the torso ends up - in the best possible scenario.

with humanoid torsos grafted to ... nonhumanoids (although I've thought about the caloric intake issues and lung capacity / windpipe constraints).

And what do they need with all that torso room ANYWAY? Assuming 1 set of standard organs, there's still ... a lot of space left over to fill

Cheers,
OT

Hmm...
What if they had a particularly heavy arse?

Technically a medium sized penis might help, as would a large set of balls, a pregnancy, or a very large tail. (Now someone draw that!) But the basic design is still fundimentally inferior to plantigrade anatomy when it comes to doing downhill.
Ohnoes! Humans might be better than furries at something! Posted the image mainly beccause enough furrries refuse to accept this.

Still, it's an intriguing problem. Perhaps if they had some way of shifting ballast around inside their body? From bust to balls, for example? Or maybe they could use special stair-stilts to lengthen their forelegs?

You do realize a taur would simply lean back enough to move its center of gravity back right? Also, most taurs are depicted with the humanoid torso directly over the front legs, not hanging forward like the head would.

The 'taur' is already leaning back in every way possible about as far as possible and it isn't helping. They might be able to counter baalance with their arms, but this would leave them no chance to catch themselves / protect their head if something went wrong.

The dotted blue line clearly shows that the torso would be exactly above the legs if the dog was on a level surface. It only appears to be in front of the legs because of the slope and bodily rotation.

The position the upper body "should" assume depends on the kind of joint that connects the upper spine to the ... forehips? The position of the red rectangle looks like it indicates an embedded connection, the way real spines connect to hips, so the spine has the bottom of the blue line and the back of the red rectangle as tangents.

That jointing causes more problems than just stair-descending: the taur can't bend forward at the hips the way a biped does, because the biped bends by rotating its hips, not by bending its spine. This appears to be an unpopular restriction on taurs' motion: most art I've seen depicting taurs other than "standing" looks like it assumes another joint coaxial with the forehips to allow the base of the upper spine to sweep through an angle of say 45 to 180 degrees with respect to the front of the lower spine. (Well, either that or the motional range of the vertibrae is much higher than for humans', which is also mechanically improbable.)

The resulting CoG is somewhat better than the embedded case. However this arrangement is, if anything, more problematic since the loading in that region is very high, and I doubt that an additional joint and associated musculature small enough to fit in the usual form factor would be sufficiently strong. It would also probably strain the spinal cord far too much.

I suppose the moral is that the further you go from the forms found in nature, the less likely it is that your idea is practical?

So, a 'taur would have to go down stairs backwards? That would be inconvenient.

When I think of taur physics I usually think of giraffes or large moose/antelopes, because they are the only RL animals whose bodies have evolved to support a huge and potentially unbalancing weight on the front.
The giraffe is the most interesting because it has the most unbalance. Its body solved the problem by moving forward the shoulders, so they are actually in front of the neck's attachment:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2051.....13472b6e11.jpg
This greatly improves the balance but I'm not sure it would look nice on a feline taur...

Have you ever considdered a domberman taur?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doberman_Pinscher
Their trangular torsos give them a close vissual match for giraffes. It might be very easy to make one appealing. I might even try it myself. :)

I also remember the 'reverse taur machine' picture you draw, with torso at the very rear. Very creative! I liked it! And that would solve a lot of problems, especially if the upper torso could lie flat along the bottom one. (And, erm, multi head. *cough* *blush*) Though picking heavy objects might pose muscle problems, if the upper torso had to lean to one side to do it. Other than that, great design.

I think a puma reverse-taur is flexible enough for that. The idea is actually leonardo's, it's based on a character from an old anime (Mazinger Z):
http://files.splinder.com/cb6ad8bde.....c89363691.jpeg

I agree about the dobermann shape, but like most dog breeds it wasn't bred with functionality in mind and it doesn't have a healthy/viable body, so I don't like the idea of using it as a model. I prefer to think of animals which have had their form tested by evolution. Thinking about it the hyena is quite similar:
http://myanimalblog.files.wordpress...../03/hyena1.jpg

Interesting concept/problem...never thought about it till now...not very much of a taur person...

But I did notice a few things...

The back legs of the giraffe and the doberman are a bit shorter than the 'norm'...

in video/movies horses have no trouble going up, the front legs look like us on an angled ladder...coming down (hills; I haven't seen any vids of downing stairs that I can remember...) they squat their back legs and lean back...would that be enough? *Shrug*

But keep in mind they're 'normal' folks and just like us, they'd have a 'building code'. Our standard steps are 9" tread and a 7 1/4"-8" rise, easily negotiated by the average human...they'd prob'ly have a 36" tread with a 12"-18" rise (Any horse folks out there that know the best gait for a horse types?)?

Now that'd mean that they'd have ALOT of room taken up by stair spaces...but then they're larger critters any way so they'd just take that into account when building...but I seem to recall that standard/historical 'Taurs are mostly out side critters...

the only hope for a tuar is to be on of those with large lowere bodiews such as horses... or oversized carnivoures

Depending on the scaling, that might work. Another alternative is to have a very heavy tail. However anything done to a conventional quadruped is going to alteter (usually negative) the system dynamics, cutting down on speed and manouverability.

Yes.. but also.... the houses should be designed according to the user's can-dos and can't-dos