 December 22, 2013 - 4:29pm | So I was reading a cracked.com list of useless human body parts. Things like your appendix and those glands behind your eyeballs which do nothing. I got my wondering, "Do the other core four races have useless body parts too?" Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
 December 22, 2013 - 6:19pm | They are relying on very old information. Cracked.com is wrong about the Appendix. The Appendix has many functions that were not understood in the old days. Doctors did not know what the organ did, so they assumed that it was some sort of evolutionary throwback to cavemen. It does have a useful function in the human body. The Appendix is not the useless organ that people used to think it was in the old days. Check this article out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-function-of-t The bombing starts in five minutes. |
December 22, 2013 - 6:26pm | Some might say my pinky finger is useless but having broken mine in the past I can tell you that it adds to your grip strength more than you usually notice. But I have to say yeah .... why do Vrusks have both an endo and an exo skeleton? The bombing starts in five minutes. |
 December 22, 2013 - 9:32pm | I imagine that a vrusk has an exoskeleton because the environment it developed in required it. The internal skeleton supports the internal organs. The exoskeleton provides necessary extra portection. The vrusk home world must have creatures, weather, or location where they lived that caused an exoskeleton to be a benifit. Likely this was also a benifit to many of the creatures on the vrusk home world. I most often gravitate to thinking of the vrusk needing a tough skin to protect them from cuts and corrosives in their environment. This is because I imagine their primitive ancestors building massive stone and earth structures where abrasions and crushing were common. -iggy |
 December 22, 2013 - 9:58pm | Sort of like an armidillo. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 December 23, 2013 - 2:00am | When I made up a background for Vrusk, I made them native to a world with a single supercontinent. There's a great interior desert where an area will go for a decade with no rain and then have a few days of torrential rain. The waxy exoskeleton helped vrusk to retain moisture on the treks between oasis. I also had the endoskeleton be part of the same structure as the exoskeleton. Instead of a spine or limb bone, the exoskeleton has a few thickened ridges. Where as most of the exoskeleton is a couple millimeters thick, the ridges might be two or three centimeters thick. Areas that need extra support have ridges on both sides connected by a buttress. People hear of vrusk cracking a buttress and assume that they're a type of bone. I know this flatly contradicts the picture in the rule book but thought it was a bit more plausible, at least to my mind. |
 December 23, 2013 - 2:03am | The Vrusk can colonize a wider variety of planets because of their internal & external skeletons. They have less of a problem with heavier gravity than Yazirians, Dralasites & Humans. |
December 23, 2013 - 4:09am | Very interesting takes on the Vrusk. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
 December 23, 2013 - 8:54am | I think it may depend more on the stress levels that their joints can withstand, rather than their carapace/exoskeleton/etc. |
December 23, 2013 - 4:15pm | OK so I finally got a chance to look up the scientific america article on the appendix. Interesting. Then I typed in "is the appendix necessary" into Bing and found ten different answers. Everything from yes to no to we don't know what it is used for. So like global warming our scientific community still appears to be divided. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
