Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveS
If your Kudebeck is a gazelle or any other antelope, it has horns -- and horns do not shed; they're there for life. The type of stuff on their heads that sheds are antlers.
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Gazelle is a misnomer. In fact according to the Traveller Wiki they are hexapedal. Which goes only so far as it also says that they are only found on Victoria, which is contrary to my purposes, and just one reason to make them a different breed. They look a little like antelope though and also a little like bighorns in the sketch. If you look at Nobles, one of the main points of Kudebecks is that they shed for that allows ivory (actually horn or whatever you call it) to be harvested repeatedly without slaughtering it. If you wish to make a technical difference between horn and antlers that is fine. The original canon did not make such a difference. In any event the horns of a Kudy do not branch like antlers. In the sketch it looked like a bighorn.
One thing Traveller wiki did show was that females have horns that curl and these can only be used for fighting their own kind. So I will edit it to say that there are status fights among females too but those come at a different cycle. So we will say that there is a roughly three years as an adolescent (between the horn's first sprouting and the year as a full sized guardram) and one year after until the first breeding and every two after for males. For females status fights come every four years but at a different time then male status fights. They choose not only which are most desired as mates but who is the queen ewe and nearest accompaniment, who gets precedent for feeding and who gets to be closer to the center of the herd and thus safer from predation.