So my existing rebel army is sort of grassland themed. I am definitely getting some tauntauns once they are available I will be painting the riders to match my existing troops but does anyone have any ideas for painting the critters? I am torn between painting them movie standard and just kinda saying that they were imported due to their usefulness or coming up with a new paint scheme and saying they are a local subspecies. I did find this picture which I guess is from the Old Republic MMO? What do you all think?

the proper term is Furry Dinosaurs, sir

22 minutes ago, devin.pike.1989 said:

So my existing rebel army is sort of grassland themed. I am definitely getting some tauntauns once they are available I will be painting the riders to match my existing troops but does anyone have any ideas for painting the critters? I am torn between painting them movie standard and just kinda saying that they were imported due to their usefulness or coming up with a new paint scheme and saying they are a local subspecies. I did find this picture which I guess is from the Old Republic MMO? What do you all think?

That person's leg looks so wrong

2 minutes ago, KommanderKeldoth said:

That person's leg looks so wrong

OMG. You can't just ask people why they are kaminoan!

Honestly I prefer the "local subspecies" option. Using a white creature in a woodland environment for military purposes seems like a really bad idea since the Tauntaun would be very visible.

That's the approach I'm planning on at least.

19 minutes ago, Caimheul1313 said:

Honestly I prefer the "local subspecies" option. Using a white creature in a woodland environment for military purposes seems like a really bad idea since the Tauntaun would be very visible.

That's the approach I'm planning on at least.

Also, who's to say that their coats are white year around? They could be like snowshoe hares or weasels that go from brown to white and back again seasonally

Just now, KommanderKeldoth said:

Also, who's to say that their coats are white year around? They could be like snowshoe hares or weasels that go from brown to white and back again seasonally

Except Hoth is always snow covered since planets in Star Wars only have a single biome/climate. Hoth is an "ice planet" so it is always covered in ice and snow. Changing their coat from white would make them easier prey.

3 minutes ago, Caimheul1313 said:

Except Hoth is always snow covered since planets in Star Wars only have a single biome/climate. Hoth is an "ice planet" so it is always covered in ice and snow. Changing their coat from white would make them easier prey.

We don't know Hoth's environmental history, maybe it wasn't always perma-winter there and some of the local fauna still have maladaptive traits to the new environment. There are plenty of examples of earth.

1 minute ago, KommanderKeldoth said:

We don't know Hoth's environmental history, maybe it wasn't always perma-winter there and some of the local fauna still have maladaptive traits to the new environment. There are plenty of examples of earth.

We do though. Star Wars basic premise for planets is each one is a biome, with no changes ever. Hoth is an ice planet, it is always covered in snow and ice, Tatooine is entirely desert, the Forest Moon of Endor is all forest, Yavin IV is entirely jungle. This is a fairly common shortcut used in the 60s and 70s pulpy "sci-fi." Just because something works a given way on Earth does not mean that it works that way in Star Wars, which is more "science fantasy" than "science fiction." Astrophysicists, climatologists, and biologists were not consulted, the writers just wrote what was convenient.

Changing their coat to a brown, lighter "summer coat" on an ice world would cause creatures to freeze to death, especially since we are shown that Tauntauns freeze to death if outside at night, despite being a native species.

14 minutes ago, Caimheul1313 said:

We do though. Star Wars basic premise for planets is each one is a biome, with no changes ever. Hoth is an ice planet, it is always covered in snow and ice, Tatooine is entirely desert, the Forest Moon of Endor is all forest, Yavin IV is entirely jungle. This is a fairly common shortcut used in the 60s and 70s pulpy "sci-fi." Just because something works a given way on Earth does not mean that it works that way in Star Wars, which is more "science fantasy" than "science fiction." Astrophysicists, climatologists, and biologists were not consulted, the writers just wrote what was convenient.

Changing their coat to a brown, lighter "summer coat" on an ice world would cause creatures to freeze to death, especially since we are shown that Tauntauns freeze to death if outside at night, despite being a native species.

Not so. Jakku was once a verdant world before becoming a desert. There is precedent in canon. With the erasure of the old Legends EU we don't really know anything about the history of Hoth beyond the very recent past.

Breathable oxygen is kind of a question without an O2 cycle, but from a planetology perspective an "ice planet" is actually a fairly sound status, compared to say "Tree planet". We have several icy planetoids in our own solar system.

According to old Legends data, Hoth is cold because it is distant from it's star on a highly elliptical orbit with heavy axial tilt, indicating very extended winter seasons, but solid detail that it is heated by tidal activity with it's three moons, which keep the oceans liquid in layers below surface ice and geological activity going for geothermal heating - also probably a bit of impact heating. This prevents total die-off of the biosphere. Based on this information, Hoth is basically a planet of a very extended Winter or even Ice Age effect, but it's possible it might have a short "spring" when it is at perihelion and in the equatorial regions (where Echo Base was located). But, that all said, given it's very harsh climate conditions and the nature of it's biomes which are basically glacier, mountains and various natural ice caves formed by seismic or cryovolcanic activity, even if there was a "warm period" concluding what that looks like is all pure speculation. In my old "Wildlife of Star Wars", ice lichens on Hoth are colored in green, so there's some basis for earthly color-schemes. But there's a lot of deep speculative stuff to get into there which basically go no where like "do creatures on hoth even have color vision?"

Canonically though there are apparently something like 15 species of Tauntaun. If you don't want to use Pantone 427U, 467U and 463U, you might be able to get away with some variation. Not knowing soil composition (if any), I'd aim for greys rather than browns, but since there are mountains and volcanic activity on Hoth, you could easily say there is a species or subspecies adapted to living in low albedo regions as opposed to high ones.

They're not white they're gray. Gray is decent camo anywhere. All that snow sticking to them makes them look white. But if you look closely they are gray in ESB and in all the merch I've ever seen of them.

In the WEG game there were plenty of planets with varied climates. You just weren't all that concerned with the climate outside the city you went to meet your contact, or whatever.

Tauntaun-like creatures show up in lots of colors in SW sources. There's brown psuedo-tauntauns in some old Ewoks cartoons. No I don't mean the things that pull the carts. I think you should paint them tiger striped. Or purple. Make them from a planet with purple foliage. Or just say "**** it, they're the flamingos of their world" and make them hot pink.

I remember them being even more tauntaun-like in the cartoon, here it is in a book.

And part of the reason "ice lichens" might be green is because (shock of shocks) the scenes of Hoth were filmed on Earth, specifically Hardangerjøkulen glacier near Finse, Norway. By making the Hoth lichens green, it accounts for any natural Earth lichens that may appear in scenes.

WEG did strive to make planets and species make more "sense," while film writers/directors/prop and makeup departments are more interested in what looks cool on film/in comics/on paper.

It's like the folks writing the WEG games knew that players will pick apart stuff that doesn't make sense and derail whole gaming sessions or something (says the recovering GM).

22 minutes ago, UnitOmega said:

Breathable oxygen is kind of a question without an O2 cycle, but from a planetology perspective an "ice planet" is actually a fairly sound status, compared to say "Tree planet". We have several icy planetoids in our own solar system.

According to old Legends data, Hoth is cold because it is distant from it's star on a highly elliptical orbit with heavy axial tilt, indicating very extended winter seasons, but solid detail that it is heated by tidal activity with it's three moons, which keep the oceans liquid in layers below surface ice and geological activity going for geothermal heating - also probably a bit of impact heating. This prevents total die-off of the biosphere. Based on this information, Hoth is basically a planet of a very extended Winter or even Ice Age effect, but it's possible it might have a short "spring" when it is at perihelion and in the equatorial regions (where Echo Base was located). But, that all said, given it's very harsh climate conditions and the nature of it's biomes which are basically glacier, mountains and various natural ice caves formed by seismic or cryovolcanic activity, even if there was a "warm period" concluding what that looks like is all pure speculation. In my old "Wildlife of Star Wars", ice lichens on Hoth are colored in green, so there's some basis for earthly color-schemes. But there's a lot of deep speculative stuff to get into there which basically go no where like "do creatures on hoth even have color vision?"

Canonically though there are apparently something like 15 species of Tauntaun. If you don't want to use Pantone 427U, 467U and 463U, you might be able to get away with some variation. Not knowing soil composition (if any), I'd aim for greys rather than browns, but since there are mountains and volcanic activity on Hoth, you could easily say there is a species or subspecies adapted to living in low albedo regions as opposed to high ones.

This is why I love these forums

21 minutes ago, TauntaunScout said:

But if you look closely they are gray in ESB and in all the merch I've ever seen of them.

Specifically this color gray

According to this old Lucasfilm memo, reposted to Instagram a few years ago: https://www.instagram.com/p/jMy4WoM_Rv/

1 minute ago, UnitOmega said:

According to this old Lucasfilm memo, reposted to Instagram a few years ago: https://www.instagram.com/p/jMy4WoM_Rv/

Quote

Just in case you need to know the proper Pantone colors for a Tauntaun.

So the Star Wars Instagram has known about the Tauntaun Legion models since January 2014....

3 hours ago, devin.pike.1989 said:

So my existing rebel army is sort of grassland themed. I am definitely getting some tauntauns once they are available I will be painting the riders to match my existing troops but does anyone have any ideas for painting the critters? I am torn between painting them movie standard and just kinda saying that they were imported due to their usefulness or coming up with a new paint scheme and saying they are a local subspecies. I did find this picture which I guess is from the Old Republic MMO? What do you all think?

Hah, I had that armor and Tauntaun in TOR. Sucks the long part of the coat clips through the Tauntaun.

I'm trying to ignore the absurdity that Tauntauns are a cold-blooded species on an ice world.

Regardless, as mentioned, grey works as camouflage in almost any environment, so they could easily be imported straight from Hoth to deployments anywhere. But if it bothers you, the scheme in any of the images above would work well for your chosen environment.

Personally, I've always found camouflage in Star Wars to be odd, and I thought so even as a kid when watching RoTJ for the first time. The setting doesn't seem to incorporate practicality into its military aesthetics, so camo's usefulness seemed out of place to me in the galaxy far, far away.

Shame they can't be chameleons like dewbacks.

9 minutes ago, DewbackScout said:

Shame they can't be chameleons like dewbacks.

I guess this brings the question: How do I paint my Hoth dewbacks?

1 minute ago, devin.pike.1989 said:

I guess this brings the question: How do I paint my Hoth dewbacks?

Just the rider floating in mid-air. They super good at camo.

1 hour ago, MasterShake2 said:

Just the rider floating in mid-air. They super good at camo.

Actually the stormtrooper's armor is also white so it would also be almost invincible on Hoth. I would just spray paint the base white and add a floating e11 blaster to the base, voila!

snow lizards have a furry subculture now, too?

2 hours ago, devin.pike.1989 said:

I guess this brings the question: How do I paint my Hoth dewbacks?

Like regular dewbacks but, you use some putty to add earmuffs and a scarf.

On 3/12/2019 at 3:38 PM, srMontresor said:

I'm trying to ignore the absurdity that Tauntauns are a cold-blooded species on an ice world.

Not all reptiles are cold blooded. Tegu are a Warm blooded species of reptile here on Earth. Most Dinosaurs were also likely warm blooded as well.