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[GLaDOSauR]

So I was going to make centaurs real in my world, when I realized I had no idea how to handle their body parts.  Is the horse part the lower body and the man part the upper body?  Does the horse part have both torso parts, and then man part is an upper-upper body?  Where do the organs go? Does it have two sets of lungs?  Two digestive tracts?   

[Eagleon]

Wouldn't that all be up to you? It's a fictional critter. There's precedent in biology for multiple stomachs if that helps - maybe the human part digests things and the horse part handles cellulose? It must still suck chewing grass with human teeth, so maybe they have bigger molars and stronger jaws? A horse needs big lungs to gallop, and they also have bigger heads and mouths to take in more air - maybe the human part has a giant gawping mouth to compensate for all of this? And what if, instead of a stomach, there's a horse brain inside the human torso, and they talk?

[GLaDOSauR]

Wouldn't that all be up to you? It's a fictional critter. There's precedent in biology for multiple stomachs if that helps - maybe the human part digests things and the horse part handles cellulose? It must still suck chewing grass with human teeth, so maybe they have bigger molars and stronger jaws? A horse needs big lungs to gallop, and they also have bigger heads and mouths to take in more air - maybe the human part has a giant gawping mouth to compensate for all of this? And what if, instead of a stomach, there's a horse brain inside the human torso, and they talk?

I'm just not sure how to handle it as far as hit-able zones in combat go.  I think maybe I'll just have the horse bit be lower body and the man part be upper body.

[Alpaq]

Or get carried away with this concept

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Hugo_The_Dwarf]

Well hardest part is the fact that all LOWERBODY parts would wear pants.

So if the horse upper and horse lower are LOWERBODY (assuming the human upper is the HEAD and UPPERBODY) the horse part can wear two pairs of pants.

not to forget for legs which are hooves, which are STANCE and STANCE can wear boots

so if Centaurs are supposed to be a wild creature this is fine. But if they form tribes, or an entity. Then they would be awkwardly wearing gear (that is baring the fact you didn't make custom gear that would make sense that is aka just used vanilla)

However I'm not sure how bisecting a bisection works (cutting a lowerbody off a lowerbody) would it kill the creature or since there is a lowerbody still connecting to a upperbody it's fine.

I'd imagine vital organs would be in the horse part. but major artieries will still run through the upperbody to supply the brain blood, nutrients, and oxygen.

But the suggestion of larger molars more flat teeth like herbivores would make sense. leaving their organs more equine

[Maximum Spin]

I don't think centaurs are traditionally browsing ruminants.

[jecowa]

I know of a few mods that add centaurs in case your interested:

• MMMMM (Mostly Mythical Monsters Modular Mod)
• Warcraft Mod
• Fortal Kombat

[se05239]

This thread is relevant to my interests.

[IndigoFenix]

Vanilla DF has molemarians, who are intended to be naked mole rat centaurs (their body plan is even labeled as centaur_hand_foot).  They use the four-legged part as the lower body and the humanoid part as the upper body.

[se05239]

Vanilla DF has molemarians, who are intended to be naked mole rat centaurs (their body plan is even labeled as centaur_hand_foot).  They use the four-legged part as the lower body and the humanoid part as the upper body.

I think what's sought after here is how people would do to make a proper centaur body plan.
Upper body and lower body isn't really it. You'd kinda need a humanoid torso (with guts maybe?), a middle section (that's the animal part's upper body) and an end section (which is the lower body). Three main parts.

[GLaDOSauR]

Well hardest part is the fact that all LOWERBODY parts would wear pants.

So if the horse upper and horse lower are LOWERBODY (assuming the human upper is the HEAD and UPPERBODY) the horse part can wear two pairs of pants.

not to forget for legs which are hooves, which are STANCE and STANCE can wear boots

so if Centaurs are supposed to be a wild creature this is fine. But if they form tribes, or an entity. Then they would be awkwardly wearing gear (that is baring the fact you didn't make custom gear that would make sense that is aka just used vanilla)

However I'm not sure how bisecting a bisection works (cutting a lowerbody off a lowerbody) would it kill the creature or since there is a lowerbody still connecting to a upperbody it's fine.

I'd imagine vital organs would be in the horse part. but major artieries will still run through the upperbody to supply the brain blood, nutrients, and oxygen.

But the suggestion of larger molars more flat teeth like herbivores would make sense. leaving their organs more equine

The thing with the pants might be a bit of a pain.  I want the centaurs to be a caste of a civilization.  So like, there will be minotaurs, beastmen, and centaurs, all different castes within the same race, with a 33% chance for each type to be born.  So getting all the different castes to behave differently regarding clothing might be an issue

[GoblinCookie]

I've got centaurs, but no specific civilisation for them since nothing fits site wise.

The main issue with centaurs realistically is that if you just add a human torso onto a horse body we get a problem in that the total weight of the front parts ends up exceeding that of the back parts so the creature either bowls over or spends it's entire time bowling backwards in order to correct the weight balance.

[AceSV]

I'm pretty sure there's a centaur body plan in the default raws. 

I had put some thought into this for GURPS at one point.  One thought is that the centaurs have redundant organs, 2 hearts, 4 lungs, etc, but supposedly in Dwarf Fortress they will still die if either of their hearts are damaged, which just makes them more vulnerable instead of less vulnerable as you would expect.  Another theory is that centaurs are related to or descended from Nagas and Merfolk, their lower body is just a modified tail, and serves no biological purpose other than to hold up its legs.  Finally, I think the DF centaur body plan treats the human torso as the UPPER_BODY, i.e. heart and lungs and the horse torso as the LOWER_BODY, i.e. the guts. 

I'm pretty sure civilized centaurs will feel the need to wear shoes, even if they have hooves, but there are some DFHack mods that disable the psychological need for clothing (I think MasterWork does this).  You could also give them some appropriate type of footwear like a horse shoe, but that would be civilization dependent, if a goblin bard joins the centaur civ, it'll wear horseshoes, and if a centaur joins a dwarven civ, it'll wear normal shoes.  There are such things as sneakers for horses though:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The main issue with centaurs realistically is that if you just add a human torso onto a horse body we get a problem in that the total weight of the front parts ends up exceeding that of the back parts so the creature either bowls over or spends it's entire time bowling backwards in order to correct the weight balance.

I don't get that.  Humans can stand upright on 2 legs, I don't see why adding a horse-behind would cause them to fall forward. 

[GoblinCookie]

I don't get that.  Humans can stand upright on 2 legs, I don't see why adding a horse-behind would cause them to fall forward.

Humans can stand upright on two legs because humans are balanced.  If you replace the head of a horse with a human torso along the lines of depictions of centaurs we end up falling forward because the weight *of* the front part is added onto that of the front parts of the horse (effectively) which are already balanced against that of the back parts.

Or think of both sets of legs as weights in a scales.  The legs themselves are already balanced against each-other because of bilateral symmetry (hence it's popularity in nature), but if we have four legs we have to balance the back legs against the front legs.  Add a centaur torso however and a whole load of extra weight is now added onto the front legs, tipping the scales so they are unbalanced in a forward heavy manner. 

This is why, despite all the advantages of having better vision, all the quadrapeds all have heads which angle forward (including horses).  They also have an downwards arch in their back, which allows their bottoms to balance out their heads near enough, preventing the problem I described.  Centaurs on the other hand have a serious balance problem because their bottoms are not large enough to balance out their human torso. 

[Hugo_The_Dwarf]

I imagine if you're born unbalanced, you learn how to balance it. Like at some point in the very early years of your life you crawled

so saying "There is just 60ish lbs more on the front it will fall over" makes zero sense. Maybe if it was a machine but even then the engineer can simply program "How about you lower the center of gravity at the back and place the front legs out a bit more"

Until trail and error it will balance (much like a child learning to walk and balance)

There are also people that do insane tricks with bikes, you just learn how to balance.