Step one is saying you have a problem.
So let's back up a bit. Back in the day Northy was going to be a chimaera of many different animals, with the main wing being derived from a pterosaur, relating back to her name. Less back in the day, this shifted a bit- now she canonically was just, for the most part, modifying her body with parts that looked like those animals, though the pterosaur wings were going to be grown tissue.
However, as most of you should know from all the blithering now (and all there is yet to come), Northy has shifted to being an actual demi-human pterosaur-person who just always had wings, and with this I sort of dropped a detail about the legs from the "natural" look- that being that they were crazy long. The "monstrous" form back then was 9 feet tall, most of that being legs- from the knees up, she had a normal human body that would be 6'1", matching my own height.
That'd put her crotch at face height.
Do with that information what you will.
So her legs were, in life, normal, and this "natural" form, if you haven't yet noticed, has sort of become the main form she occupies. Some of you, you know who you are, may also be very disappointed to hear that this is likely to be her only form, and this is because the wings are a bit symbolic. But what do wings have to do with legs? Well sit back my friends because I will now talk about pterosaurs.
Oh no she's gonna talk about pterosaurs
Every pterosaur has been hit with a time where it was either a scavenger or a piscivore and quite a few get both. In fact, when I declared my namesake- the massive Quetzalcoatlus Northropi- my favorite animal, I sort of did so under the presumption that it was a giant seabird-vulture-maybe-something. Evidence has since suggested it's more of a sort of "land and snatch up whatever's trying to scurry away from you" sort of deal going on, with anatomy providing both biomechanical and aerodynamic suggestions away from either lifestyle and more towards this absolute scourge we imagine them to be now. With this evidence, the model organisms have instead shifted towards the group of actual seabird- and carrion-analogues, the istiodactylids- soaring-optimized flesh-rippers, the ornithocheirids- long-winged fish-snatchers, and recently the nyctosaurids- who we'll get to.
Also, while I always liked to consider them a part of the even four pterosaur clades that were an element in her design, the Dsungaripterids, love them though I do, were never much of a prominent influence on the end result so we can consider the nyctos to have eeked them out, even initially just being there as an excuse to keep the blunt-tooth look that I eventually dropped. Even the azhdarchid influence has faded to just her name and a nod of it being one of two explanations for her denser bones, though if I do keep the scary 9' nightmare mode you might be able to see a bit of it creep back in in terms of personality and, more importantly, mobility.
See, wings with a higher aspect ratio- that is to say, a longer span relative to their chord- tend to be more efficient with lift-induced drag than those with a lower aspect ratio- a lower span relative to their chord. Chord, by the way, being the wing's length along the body, like nose-to-tail direction, as opposed to span being distance outwards. This allows two wings with the same area and thus nominally the same amount of lift to act a lot differently depending on how much of that is span and how much of that is chord. Low speeds generally favor high aspect ratios- high speeds tend to suffer from worse drag and higher dynamic loads from such designs and shift towards lower aspect ratios.
There's a lot I could get into like moment of inertia and stuff too, not to mention the implications for how far you need to actually hurl yourself off the ground before you have room for a downstroke, but when it comes to animals the general trend becomes that the soaring animal has more wing overall than the high-speed flitter, and the overland soarer will tend to have a lower aspect ratio than the oceanic one. The deep-chord low-span wing is a lot less awkward to go about your day with on the ground and has the bonus of being better at exploiting thermals, while the long-span narrow-chord wing tends to be a bit less graceful on the ground but maximizes gliding endurance, good if you can't, you know, land for a while. This relationship is visible among modern birds, but was even more significant among pterosaurs due to the fact that aspect ratio is pertinent to the lengths of the legs relative to each other.
Azhdarchids had low aspect ratios and would have been competent at walking. The ornithocheirids, however, not so much. Ornithocheirids had very long aspect ratios, and this meant that even folded their forelegs were much longer than their hindlegs on the ground, which made walking genuinely kind of awkward. Like a modern Swift or Albatross their game plan clearly didn't involve a lot of time walking on the ground. And when we get to a clade close to the Ornithocheirids, the Pteranodontids, we see some greater tradeoffs for this.
So Pterosaurs walk on their hands, and your hands have fingers and the metacarpals, those sort of finger-like bones that act as the bases of your fingers and form your palm, where they're all bound up and act fairly solid. Pteranodontids, however, decided they didn't need them so thoroughly bound up, and the only metacarpal that matters to them is the one leading to the big wing-supporting finger. The rest aren't directly connected. I'm not exactly sure what this looks like, admittedly, but clearly they wouldn't bear weight as well. But at least the wings still had feet, right?
Well not in the Nyctosaurids. Nested as Pteranodontids, the Nyctosaurids went a step further and outright deleted the phalanges, or fingerbones, of the wing that weren't involved in supporting the membrane. Saves weight and drag at the expense of doing anything much with them on land. Which is ironic when you see what they ended up doing with their heads, but, hey, only males had to deal with that. And it's this lack of something that makes me like Nyctosaurids so much now.
If you haven't picked up on it yet, Northy has always had Ornithocheirid wings which would get in the way on the ground, and now that I know about the toe thing, they're toeless and are even less helpful on the ground! Her enormous wings are something about her that she likes, but are cumbersome when doing relatively normal tasks! Huzzah! Symbolism!
Basically the character shift Northy has undergone that I feel leads to her being better represented by an intentionally awkward human-ish-height form than a slender-limbed rebar monster is that she's sort of become physically weak and emotionally needy. Which is like me. I'm like that. Yeah. Like, personally, I consider this character growth, because first off I'm acknowledging my flaws while also getting better at reaching out in real life, second, it fits with her motif of being a "real weapon" user better than being essentially a giant robot, making it more clear that she's not gonna just punch stuff to death. She's constantly falling apart and blowing fuses, and she sort of just waddles around unless you give her room to get airborne- it's honestly kinda great and I'm really proud of my new direction of being an absolute useless pissbaby who can't do anything (consider this a half-joke). I'll be mulling over whether or not monster mode could come back for a while to counteract all that, but for now, there... Well, I brought you all here for a reason.
This is an intervention.
See, it sort of became a mental rule with me that I shouldn't do anything that makes the wings smaller. The starting span- a relic from more truly azhdarchid-like models- was 36ft. This was with a 3ft chord so the hindlegs wouldn't trail behind her too far- 12:1 aspect ratio, a bit higher than most flying animals which tend to clock 10 at most, and getting to the realm of gliders. This did, however, make the math easy, as I could estimate her wing area, and thus lift, as half that of a giant 36ft span Azhdarchid, which mass at about 250kg, with 50kg flight muscle. I believe the numbers I've been going with are 85kg, of which 35 are flight muscle, which gives wiggle room for the actual mass of the wing itself, presumably heavier prosthetic parts, and anything she carries up with her.
Yes, she weighs 50kg when you don't include the flight muscle. She is not a naturally strong person. Zombie bullshit and bite pressures notwithstanding at least.
The problem started to really arise, I think, when I kept a 36ft span... without accounting for the forwards sweep. Pterosaurs often held their wings in a forwards sweep for balance, having a considerably anterior CoM. I sort of started to habitually treat this as more of an M-wing with a rear-swept finger but that probably isn't accurate. But in either case, the result was a considerably larger-than-realized actual length of the wing bones, as demonstrated here.
Even without a wing phalanx this is a lot, more than really intended. Notice there's a bit of lateral splay here even. Not even just the sweep either, there's also a bit of a gull profile going on and stuff, all of this adding to the length of the bones, and then in turn increased more by the fact that the 36ft span- 18 per wing- didn't account for the hips, and they don't "fit" onto the body very well, with the base portion having a lot of overhang when moved close, so the entire scale is off.
I really gotta figure a better size for these things out.
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