Epona Reconnaissance Flight (Epona V)

The Epona Project was, or perhaps is, probably the first serious attempt to build an fictional biosphere from scratch. There is still a website, definitely worth watching. Admittedly, the project has stopped in the sense that no new life forms have been developed for a long time, nor is that likely to happen. But the website is being added to, and I return to it from time to time. The last blog entry on Epona is to be found here, while another one that shows the same scene as is shown in the film below is right here. This time, I used Vue Infinite (version 7.5) to produce a film of almost one minute duration.

How does this work? Well, first of all, there were the life forms to consider. Steven Hanly had modelled them in the past, and it proved possible to port some of his models into the Vue environment. The 'uther' you see flying in the scene is entirely Stephen's doing. The plants could not be used directly, as present-day computer imagery requires more detail than was available when he first designed the models. They were therefore designed anew, using XFrog for the large leaves of the pagoda trees and for all small plants. The stems of the large pagoda tress were done in Vue Infinite. The trees were assembled in Vue, and Vue's 'ecosystem' feature was used to create a terrain with a stream running through it. Then just imagine that a 5-second fragment of film may need some 34 hours to render.

After that, a bit of sound was added, a process I have hardly any experience with. I hope the result is not too jarring.

Anyway, there we are: perhaps the film is about a robot drone taking a look on an Eponan archipelago, covered by a pagoda forest. There is a larger version on YouTube. The original film on my computer is much better; I wish I knew more about optimising quality while compressing a video...

Mechanical and biological flight: heavier than air

While trying to find mechanical analogues for tetropters I stumbled upon some other technological innovations that might be transported to alien worlds as biological means of achieving flight. Some deal with heavier-than air flight, others with lighter than air. Let's start with the heavier than air designs, and leave the ballonts-like designs for another time.

On Earth, no animal has separate mechanisms for thrust and lift; instead, wings, and especially wing control, are subtle enough to combine thrust with lift. This holds for birds, bats, pterosaurs and insects, and of all these insect flight is in some aspects the most advanced, as insects can hover as well as fly forwards. Among vertebrates only hummingbirds are known to have evolved this ability. I suppose that this dual thrust-and-lift role is a typical example of biology performing much better than human creativity, and would not be surprised that advanced neural control is responsible for this superiority. But let us assume that separating thrust and lift can also work in the animal realm. In fact, I dreamed up such an animal once: the very first one I ever did on Furaha, in fact, Here it is: it has never before been shown on the site, and it is only a fragment of a larger painting.

Furahan Propulsor mechanicus

Its scientific name is 'Propulsor mechanicus', and I have forgotten its common name (a 'zummer'?). What you can see is that its front pair of wings does not flap, but the hind pair flaps very energetically, and provides thrust on the upstroke as well as the down stroke of the wings. As such, these wings are very much like an insects' wings in hovering flight, but rotated 90 degrees so the thrust is directed backwards instead of downwards.

Mechanical flying machines nearly always have a separation of thrust and lift, and most thrust mechanisms cannot be used as an inspiration for animal flight, as there are rotary parts involved. But people have been trying to design working 'ornithopters' for ages, and some of these are interesting.





For instance, the video above show a design wing a large lifting immobile wing, and two hind wings that provide thrust. The source is here. The two hind wings flap up and down rather like the fluked tail of a whale, but where a whale has only one tail, this design uses two such tails, one above the other. According to the text they flap in counter phase to provide balance. The design reminded me a bit of the Uther design for the Epona Project, if I understood correctly how Uthers were supposed to move: Steven Hanly once told me that the animation shown on the BBC documentary that you can find in an earlier post was not at all what he had in mind.

Eponan Uther by Steven Hanly

Uthers, one of which is shown here, have a large unpaired hind wing, and I think it provides the thrust while the paired front wings provide lift (Steven, please jump in if I got this wrong!).

If we leave the separation of thrust and lift behind, we can move on to more typical biological flight, in which each wings has both functions. But even then there are some interesting machines to be found. The typical body plan of a Furahan 'avian' involves a tetrapterate design with two paired wings. Some of you may have noticed that the first pair may overlap the second pair slightly, but in others, the two pairs are placed very far apart. he two images that follow illustrate the two variants.

Furahan Bulchouk

Furahan Seasoar

The idea behind the overlapping design was taken from sailing boats, in which sails that partially overlap work together to improve the boat's ability to make use of the wind. In aircraft 'canard' wings function similarly. I thought the same could be done with animal wings, hence the design. The other design also seemed fairly straightforward to me, in that the two pairs of wings allow great flexibility in how they are used: in unison or separately. I found ornithopter designs that I had never considered though, in which the two wings of one pair do not move up or down together, but instead one moves up while the other moves down. I do not think I like it, as this movement would cause asymmetrical stresses that seem impractical. Do not expect any Furahan animals to use this mode of flight. Still, people have built designs along such lines, and here is one:



This copy was taken from YouTube, but a much better quality can be seen on this page on the 'Entomopter' , which also shows a variant designed to fly on the planet Mars...

I will end with a design that I had not thought about and that I do find appealing. Take a tetrapterate avian like the bulchouk above, and move the first pair of wings even further aft so the two pairs are above one another. My first thought is that they would be in one another's ways, and they would. Still, if one pair moves up while the other moves down, you get a 'clap' effect, and those appear advantageous. In one of the previous posts on tetropters and micro air vehicles, two designs use exactly this type of wing plan: the Delfly and a Japanese design. Have a look again here; perhaps that is a design that one day will take to the skies as a fictional avian.

Epona II

I discussed the Epona project in this blog recently, and stated that it was at its time the biggest and best-developed world of fictional biology. Here is a surprise; it might very well still be the biggest such project! The problem is that most of it was only visible to the few people taking care of the project, among whom Greg Barr was one the people holding it all together. The website never showed more than the beginning of he project, and did not even discuss the major life forms and their physiology. The good news is that part of the old website has now been restored (it was damaged by a virus or a hacker). So take a look there, and let's hope that more of the wealth of Epona data will yet appear for all to see.

Meanwhile, I can discuss a few glimpses. There is a Kingdom Myoskeleta. These organisms do not have a sketelon, neither on the inside nor on the outside. What they have is a set of extensile muscles without joints. That is right, extensile muscles, not contractile ones. There were no bones, hence no joints. By expanding on a specific site in a thick muscle rod, the rod could bend, stretch or spiral in any shape desired. This was no mean feat; the limbs of any creature with such extensile muscles acted a bit like tentacles. I remember writing a critique on these muscles along the same lines as later reappeared in this blog: there were four blog entries called 'Why there is no walking with tentacles': one, two, three and four. If you read them, you will find that I made a case for the development of joints in any limb destined for serious weight bearing. I think that the arguments hold for tentacles of any type, with contractile or extensile muscles. By the way, I thought that extensile muscles could perhaps be made to work in a roundabout manner, but that is perhaps something for another day.

The myoskelata basically consist of a barrel with a set of limbs at either end. There are five of these limbs, and in principle they branch into three 'fingers'. Here is such a basic organism:

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The Myoskeleta are divided into two phyla: the Myophyta, plants for all practical purposes (the other phylum is the Pentapoda; they're animals). Take the basic shape, drop one end into the ground to act as roots, and span a membrane between the five limbs: that is a basic Pagoda Tree. If you add a similar layer ('tier') on top of it, you understand the tiered appearance of a pagoda forest. You will be able to recognise this fivefold symmetry for most of the plants shown on the cover of the recent book on how to grow Eponan plants (see the Hades Publishing page on the Furaha website).

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In principle these 'trees' can still move a bit, for instance to direct their leaves towards the sun. Intriguing, aren't they? I will add a few images of such Eponan forests. They are in development together with Steven Hanly.

Ah yes, I showed an image of a flying animal in the previous post. It was modeled by Steven, and is a pentapod, meaning its basic anatomy is similar to that of the trees it flies over. The species is a Uther, and it is intelligent. Life on Epona has developed intelligence, unlike Furaha (and the reason why there are no 'sophonts' on Furaha deserves mention on its own, one day).

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A stream in the forest.

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Somewhere else along the same stream.