all setting and no story*

Pteryx, they/them. This is my worldbuilding notes/writing/art/general creative stuff blog: my main blog is wandering-pteryx. (*may contain story fragments. Content is processed on the same machinery as story. If you have a story allergy, follow someone else.)

[pteryx-works]

Bird wings mark 2

Starting a new project, articulated bird wings mark 2! Original bird wings here (link)

I remember them as being pretty simple and also fun to make but my originals are very much a working prototype, so I'm going to try and refine the design and actually document the project this time.

I'll use the tag #pteryx-bird-wings to track the project and probably eventually link posts here as an index, idk I haven't done this kind of documentation before so we'll see how it goes.

First day of work!

[pteryx-works]

literal-last-minute attack for andy_teacupcultist of their character Egan on artfight!

[pteryx-works]

Finally figured out what colour I want for the wings!

I’ve been mostly fiddling with feather attachment for the last week or so, think I finally figured out how I want to put them on but then I needed supplies, and then I realized that I wanted to paint BEFORE I attached everything so then I needed paint

but now I have paint! And a plan!

Going for Eurasian Jay, they’ve got basically exactly the colour scheme I was thinking of (and sidenote, I love that if you’re trying to figure out a colour scheme, there IS going to be a bird and/or lizard that has it)

The wing shape is also pretty close to what I’ve got that I don’t need to change anything, they’ve got shorter wings and less fingering (I forget the term, the cut-ins on the primaries used for steering common in large soaring birds) than my feather blocks but I’m also MUCH bigger than they are lol, so they’re reasonable adaptations for a Eurasian Jay the size of a human.

[pteryx-works]

FEATHERS

Got the primaries and secondaries all laid out! I’m gonna cut the coverts from those smaller sheets after I’ve got everything attached, to make sure they’re the right length

Also finished the arm rig/harness! The chestband is a stand-in, the nice thing with this design is that you can hide all the attachment under your clothing and under the feathers, it’s got a couple options depending on costume.

Also Zix was HELPING

[pteryx-works]

And now for an actual progress update: ARM RIG

The blue strapping on the upper arm band is going to be the same idea as the wrist, it’ll connected to a similar quick-adjust thingy; the chest strap is somewhat temporary, the two wing bones will connect across the back with a removable strap that can be swapped out for something more aesthetic, strung inside/underneath a shirt, or each bone can be tied directly to the armpit area of something that’s already being worn for maximum stealth (I’ve tied my current ones to a sports bra before)

The idea is that, as a base, the wings can basically be shrugged into like a jacket and then the only thing that needs adjusting is the two straps which (because they’re already affixed) just need to be pulled tight. Even though this is objectively a large costume piece it should be pretty easy to move in: based on my original prototype, it should be possible to put on, take off, do up shoes, get through doorways, manipulate objects, and even (very carefully) get in and out of a vehicle without assistance.

[pteryx-works]

A friend is poking at maybe trying to make some wings for Halloween, so I put this together quickly! This is largely based on the original bird wings: I’m doing some revamping as I go to make the new ones a bit less haphazard (especially around the coverts), but the originals were an “Oh Fuck It’s October” Halloween Special so, like, they’re not *entirely* unreasonable to make quickly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Sorry, no IDs on this one for now, all the text is in tiny text blocks in my vector program and I don’t have the energy to copy it all out. I’ll try to come back and fill it in later.)

[pteryx-works]

concept: somewhat-rebuilt-post-post-apocalyptic Exorcist Priesthood

they have a censer at the end of a long pole that glows red and emits a piercing noise in the presence of ghosts. sometimes it makes invisible ghosts explode.

they practice and enforce a system of furniture and window arrangement based in esoteric geometries and if you’re doing any construction or renovation in and around kitchens and furnaces, it *MUST* be ritually examined and blessed by a priest at every step of the process

their holy sign is a knot of interconnected tubes crowned with fire

they’re a sect following the principles of Oh’Shaw, naturally

[pteryx-works]

Bird wings v2, first actual working day

So I started out cutting down the corruplast so it would stop eating my entire apartment.

The feathers all have to be oriented with the corrugations going lengthwise (mostly for strength), so I began by cutting the 8x4 foot sheet down into 5in strips

From there I started chopping the strips into feather-length chunks, but realized it’s hard to tell how long the feathers need to be before I’ve got the arm rig set up so I switched to that instead.

The arm rig is made of pvc pipe in three segments per wing, mimicking a bird skeleton: a 10in “humerus”, 15in “radius+ulna”, and an 8in “hand” which will double as the handle to control the wing. These are strung on a piece of nylon webbing to loosely connect them so they’ll follow human arm movements as smoothly as possible.

The webbing is looped through a notch in the “hand” bone and sewn in a largeish loop, which should give a good range of motion. The “radius+ulna” bone is just strung freely so it can move up and down; the end of the webbing is looped through a notch in the “humerus” bone and fixed in a loop with a pair of metal webbing slides. I’ll probably replace those with a webbing cam jam when I have a chance to buy some.

One thing I’m aiming for in this redesign is adjustability, so multiple people could fit to the same wing design. That’s one of the reasons I’m using webbing: it’s really strong and abrasion resistant, but it also has a lot of easily-purchasable buckles and tighteners.

The wrist strap is made of extra-wide webbing, which should be an improvement over the narrow fabric straps in the old design. It’s not quite done yet in these pics, but basically there’s a narrow webbing strap with a tightener that will fit into toggle loops over the outside of the wide webbing: the idea is that the wearer can pick which toggle loop fits best and slot the narrow webbing into that toggle loop BEFORE they put the wings on, then simply tighten the narrow webbing when they get their hand through the wrist strap. It should be pretty simple and easy to put on one-handed, if I can get the proportions right.

So yeah, pretty good first day I think! I should be able to finish the arm rig tomorrow, and hopefully start getting the primary feathers laid out.

[pteryx-works]

I have a PLAN and SUPPLIES and I really need to actually process said supplies soon because I keep having to move the corruplast sheet to get to my underwear shelf

I might slim the feathers down slightly to save supplies, I’ve got them all at around 6in across right now and my original wings were mostly 5in each, but I’ll see how that looks once I’ve got everything marked out at full scale.

[pteryx-works]

ALSO I'm gonna change the name of this blog to pteryx-works, I've had the url saved as a sideblog for a bit and I'm feeling a bit done with wandering-tangent as a thing

[3dspecbio]

Some physical art I made of @wandering-pteryx's T't'tik, in powder-coated steel!

I don't often get to make or design stuff like this, but this was a fun one-off thing made for a cool friend!

[pteryx-works]

Yeee thank! They turned out super well and look SO cool on my wall.

[pteryx-works]

“So how does this work, anyway?”

The engine room froze, people turning to glare at me with a look of, was that fear?

Jay, an enby with broad hips and shoulders so muscled they looked chiseled from stone, slung an arm around my shoulders with an air of false cheer. “That’s a good question, kid! Come a little ways away with me and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Their hand squeezed tight on my shoulder, manually walking me out and a little way down the corridor. When we’d gotten maybe fifty metres away, far enough that the buzz and thump of the engines was lost in the usual quiet drone of space, they spun me around to face them.

“Okay. First thing? NEVER ask that again where the engines can hear you. Understood? Any other question is fine. How to help, what needs to be done next, anything about any other part of the ship even. But never mention ANYTHING about how the engines actually function. Do you understand?”

I nodded slowly, very confused.

“Good kid.” They let go and straightened up, wiping their hand across their forehead. “Now for your answer, we don’t know.”

I blinked. “Wait, you don’t know how the engine works? But, you’re an engineer! You make it work!”

Jay shook their head, resigned. “Yes, and you’d think that would make a difference! I can tell you how virtually everything else on this ship functions. Water ballast, mychorizal radiation shielding, lights, electricity, doors...” they laughed frustratedly. “As far as we can tell, in all the documentation — and believe me I’ve tried to figure it out myself as well, subtly — the engines DON’T work, at least by any systems we understand. It works because the engines think it works, and we go along with it, do all the little apparently arbitrary things that it needs maintained, and everything functions. But the moment anyone starts really talking about how it works, where the engine can hear you? The entire engine just fizzles out and stops working, and can’t be fixed. We’ve lost a lot of good ships that way, and people have been stranded. So we don’t question it.”

I processed that for a second. “... Wait but how do you maintain it if you don’t know what it does!”

Jay shrugged, their hands flying into the air. “Oh maintaining it is easy! We have very good documentation, though different engine versions need different kinds of maintenance. You know those globes on poles that orbit around the central shaft? There’s a teddy bear in one, we brush it’s fur once a week. If you don’t, the engine gets sad, which mostly means it’s sluggish to respond to the controls. There’s a live mouse in another one. It takes shifts: we have a colony of mice and we swap them out every four hours. The engine can keep going without the mouse, but you can’t send it any new commands, so we make sure to keep it fresh. There’s a central compartment that has precisely 3.14159 grams of pure copper in it, that slowly degrades: we have to change it for a new one once it gets down to 1 gram or the engine starts shuddering like a car running on fumes. No idea how it degrades though, or where the copper goes. As far as we can tell it and a couple other elements in there are as close as the engine has to a fuel source, except 2 grams of copper every two weeks isn’t NEARLY as much power as an engine moving a ship this size at light speed should need. Like, it’s a laughably small amount. And yet....!

They threw up their arms and turned in a circle, apparently gesturing to the universe.

“We have fifteen full-time engineers in three shifts of five, all doing these tiny arbitrary things, and it all works. We can tell each thing is doing SOMEthing, because we see the results if they aren’t done perfectly. I’ve been on a ship where it was minnows instead of mice, seaweed instead of copper, or where three engineers had to act out a story with action figures, sing a song, or move a pile of empty cardboard boxes every three hours. I’ve been running ships for twenty years. It makes zero sense, but it uses next to no fuel and is the only thing that can break the speed of light so we use it. I GUESS.”

[warcrimesimulator]

Shoutout to autistic and adhd people whose special interests/hyperfixations aren't media-related. "autism is about writing fanfics about your blorbo scrunklies XDD" actually autism is about collecting miniature world war 1 airplane models

[warcrimesimulator]

[cassandracalin]

[panpteryx]

Yo the catch 22 of birds sounds like an incredibly interesting lecture please elaborate :0

.

YES

Okay so the thing is, feathers didn’t evolve for flight. They were insulation and display first, and they’ve been around since before the dinosaurs: some of the most recent research (1) suggests they go back to or before the common ancestors of pterosaurs and dinosaurs, aka the mid-Triassic or earlier.

In addition to THAT, basically all dinosaurs came from bipeds(2): the big guys like sauropods and stegosaurus were secondarily quadrupedal. As such, when birds started to evolve towards flight, they were already both covered in feathers and bipedal.

There’s a debate (3) on whether bird flight evolved “trees down”, where they evolved gliding first, jumping out of trees and using their long arm and leg feathers to slow the fall, or “ground up”, where they evolved FLAPPING first, using long feathers on their outstretched arms while running to help keep them balanced and help them jump higher while hunting or escaping predators.

Personally, I prefer the synthesis hypothesis which suggests a combination of strategies including using wings to slow their fall, run, and help gain height when getting into trees/cliffs, but that’s not relevant right now.

What’s important is the fact that by the time birds developed flight, they’d locked themselves into having hyperspecialized limbs: legs ONLY for running and jumping, arms ONLY for flying and flapping.

Since they were small, this wasn’t a problem! But it doesn’t scale super well, and to see why, let’s take a brief tangent into pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs are the biggest fliers that have ever existed, with some species having an estimated mass of up to 550lb. Despite this, even the largest individuals would have been able to take off without an assist, for one reason: they got off the ground with a “catapult” launch(4)(5).

Pterosaurs were quadrupeds, but that’s not their biggest asset. They used their wings for flying, as you’d expect; however, they also used them on the ground with a gait that functioned similarly to a gorilla or a vampire bat, “front wheel drive” as it were. With a catapult launch, they “jumped” off the ground primarily with their wings, resulting in the same primary muscles being used across all forms of locomotion.

This means that, if they needed to get bigger, pterosaurs could just keep pumping more energy into making the wings bigger as well, with no impact on their ability to fly or take off: it’s hypothesized that the largest pterosaurs were limited more by their hearts’ ability to pump blood to their extremities than they were by the ability to fly.

By comparison, in order to get bigger birds have to both add more leg AND add more wing. More weight needs bigger wings to lift it, but bigger wings need bigger legs to jump high enough for the wings to flap, but bigger legs need bigger wings to carry them during flight, and so on.

There comes a point where the legs can’t jump high enough to give the wings room to flap, and then they’re stuck. A lot of modern larger birds are partially reliant on gravity/wind assists or take off from the water because they can’t easily get high enough on their own, and these birds are all like, under 40lb. Even with environmental assists, balancing two sets of limbs to maintain the ability to both walk AND fly means that birds have a size limit: the largest flight-capable bird (6) that’s ever existed had a mass of up to 160lb, and probably wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground at all without a strong headwind or a cliff.

Essentially, in order to get bigger birds have to both add more leg AND add more wing but there’s a limit on how much they can add of each before they just can’t get off the ground, and that’s the catch-22 of birds!

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0728-7

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongonaphon

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_avian_flight

4. https://youtu.be/9TKgupAZVzE

5. https://youtu.be/ALziqtuLxBQ

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis

[pteryx-works]

Terraship setting communication and transportation

Communication:

NIAN (Near Instantaneous Ansible Network) works on quantum fluctuation, you connect to an “address” that entangles a pair of hydrogen ions — one where you are, one at the destination — wiggle them to get a binary signal with like, an electromagnetic field, and turn that into data

The actual nian computers are fairly big but they’re not complicated to make. They’re also subsidized so basically every ship, satellite, and town has one

High-powered radio is regulated and significantly restricted: radio is generally the first form of communication that makes it off-planet, so leaving it uncluttered and encouraging use of physical (fibre optic and copper wires), short-range, and NIAN communication allows the space-eu to more easily find new spacefaring civilizations.

This has been 100% successful and every independently-spacefaring civilization on record (including humans) has been found through radio! ….it is possible this is a self-selecting sample.

Also “every independently-spacefaring civilization” is like, 5 times in two thousand years, spacefaring civilizations are extremely rare and most sentient species never even bother to develop significant amounts of industry.

Drives: there are only two known working methods of faster-than-light travel, both of which have been independently invented several times by different species and civilizations.

The Alcubierre drive (“longhaul” ships or “longhaulers”)

Functionally “travels” at light speed

Usually takes 3-50 years, depending on the distance between stars

Due to intense radiation caused by the subspace, requires several tens of metres of high-density shielding around habited and cargo areas: as a result, habitable alcubierre ships have a functional minimum size of very large (several km long)

No time dilation since the ship itself does not actually move

Uses a pinched-off subspace, “moves space around the ship”

The subspace takes a lot of energy to create, but takes very little to maintain. It takes the same amount of energy no matter the mass of the ship.

Ships are usually made out of variants of mixed silicon-carbon substrate AKA rocks. This can take the form of everything from 3D printed basalt foam to hollowed out asteroids.

Due to the long-duration typical transit times, most ships are self-sustaining, operating more like very small planets than traditional ideas of spaceships. Most use centrifugal gravity, have extensive farming practices, and very tight-knit communities

Due to the minimum size limits, as well as the tendency for many ships to be repurposed colony ships (the human exodus was the last mass departure from a planet, and many of the ships are still around), many ship communities accept passengers for free, or for nominal fares, with the expectation that they’ll be added to the work rota on board ship. It’s fairly common for young people to board a ship, take the travel time to gain a degree and job experience (either onboard or through online NIANet classes), and disembark directly into a job on the other side. There are a few ship organizations that do this intentionally, acting as mobile universities in service of colonies that have a scarcity of skilled labour or other professions, to varying degrees of success.

It’s not uncommon for 60% of a ship’s population to completely change every time it reaches a port. It’s also not uncommon for people to decide they like life shipboard, and decide to stay. Many people end up retiring to live on ships as well, enjoying the slow “rural” pace and the relatively low workload of, say, climate-controlled aquaponic greenhouse maintenance.

The level of common-use technology on ships varies wildly. Nearly all ships are fully connected to NIANet, but agriculture can vary from nearly entirely manual labour to traditional tractors to robotic drones to eclectic schizotech mixes depending on what’s available

Due to the extremely durable materials most ships are made out of (rocks), it’s very common to find ships that have been flying for centuries, with parts replaced or retrofit when needed.

The tesseract drive/jumpdrive (ships are referred to as “hoppers”, “jumpers”, or local equivalent)

Jump itself is instantaneous (+engine warmup time)

Requires a navbeacon at the destination system

Significantly more expensive and resource-intensive than the alcubierre drive

Hard on engines: requires on average 9-24 hours to cool down after each jump, full manual systems check, and frequent replacement of vital parts

Emits radiation wake equivalent to minor solar activity during every jump: intensity of wake increases with the distance travelled and the mass of ship.

Because of the radiation wake, jumps are prohibited within several weeks’ travel of many habited planets/stations, with the exception of emergencies and emergency vehicles. Local laws apply, usually depending on the shielding of stations and the distance to the nearest navbeacon system.

All jumpdrive ships are also equipped with short-range engines, ie. solar sails, ion drives, mass propulsion, EM recoilless drives, and so forth, as they have to travel 3-6 weeks away from habited areas to be able to safely jump

Due to how the size/distance variable increases the radiation wake’s intensity, most jumpdrive ships are small short-range ships used for personnel transport and shipping of delicate or time-sensitive cargo. Many ships will take a series of smaller jumps between nearby star systems to reduce the distance they have to travel in the departure system, as the initial trip away from habited areas can take up to a month or more, depending on the transit authority’s estimation of the severity of the radiation wake. This also allows the ships to resupply more frequently. It’s a matter of weighing the time spent on engine cooldown versus time saved in physical travel.

Because the radiation wake takes place 90% behind the ship in the departure system, jumpdrive ships are able to safely jump significantly closer to the habited zones of the destination system. Local laws apply, and the ships still have to deal with the inertia from their initial departure.

There are several organizations that do “pony express” style travel/transport with the jumpdrive, with many small jumpdrive tugs and canisters that are moved between them. It’s very fast and also expensive, allowing people and goods to move across the entire galactic arm in less than one (very stressful) standard day (plus travel time out of the initial system, if applicable)

On navbeacons

The tesseract drive/jumpdrive requires navigation beacons to jump, since it runs by a form of subspace that requires entangled particles on either end. Navigation beacons, primarily, are a NIAN transmitter with a cache of hydrogen. For each jump, it entangles a hydrogen ion with a hydrogen ion on the scheduled ship, then ejects the ion off in a safe direction.

The ship’s tesseract drive creates a subspace bubble around the ship, rendering the ship’s in-universe mass to be functionally zero, then hijacks the quantum entanglement to fluctuate the subspace bubble to the precise location of the destination ion, appearing with the particle inside the ship.

The inertia and relative orientation of the ship is maintained: when the ship heads out of habited space on the departure system, it’s the navigator’s job to make sure that the orientation and speed match the targeted system as best as possible.

Since no-one’s made it out of the Milky Way’s Orion arm yet, systems share the same galactic inertia, so the navigator only has to orient with the relative inertia of the targeted system/planet/station itself.

[pteryx-works]

Made these a while back, just found this video in my camera roll! The wings are mostly made of corrugated plastic, fabric, and craft foam.