Steam Deck.

Hmm, humans swing their arms while running to counteract angular movement. Presumably, the horse undercarriage wouldn’t have this problem, because there’s more legs in an offset motion and just some distance between the pairs of legs to hold the body straight.

But horses nod their heads during gallop, so maybe the centaurs would do a little chug-chug motion with their arms instead.

This is just another reminder how weird a centaur is as a concept. Vertebrates don’t have more than 4 limbs. Land vertebrates mostly have 4 legs, but the structure of their forelegs is very similar to human arms and wrists. Bats have wings, but their wings are basically arms with a membrane of skin between the bones. Even a Naga (human / snake hybrid) makes more sense than a centaur.

Also, think how unbalanced a centaur would be. Instead of a trunk that merely has to support a neck and a head, a centaur has to support a full half-human right at the front of its body. That would shift the centre of mass way forward, so most of the weight would be on the middle limbs. That would affect its ability to gallop, because in a gallop most of the running power of a horse comes from the back legs. If the back legs are almost completely unloaded because all the weight is at the front, the back legs wouldn’t be able to push with much force.

A more realistic centaur would have the trunk weight shifted backwards, so instead of having a human torso replacing its neck and head, it would be like a rider on a horse but without the rider’s legs or the horse’s head.

They swing them in sync with the opposing leg.

Centaurs have four.

There’s no acceptable use for something that can only exist by violating the copyright terms for millions of artists.

Fun fact, horse heads/necks weigh about as much as human torsos do. Depending on the horse, and the human.

Modern horses are fuckin huge. It’s not unreasonable to think that a horse body could support a human upper body without much additional musculature.

The more you think about them, the more they just don’t work.

Wait till you get into the math of <insert any mythological creature with wings>.

A Pegasus, if it were to fly in the same way as a bird, would require extremely large wings relative to its body size, likely much larger than commonly depicted. Calculations suggest a wingspan of at least 30 meters (about 100 feet) for a horse-sized creature. This is due to the constraints of the square-cube law and the need for sufficient lift to support the horse’s weight.

A study of dragons from movies and video games suggests they would need to fly much faster or have wings 45 times larger to stay aloft.

Don’t even get me started on Sphinxes and Manticores.

Several fantasies just give em required secondary powers. Griffins use wind magic. Dragons use some form of antigravity or flight magic.

Iirc in Stormlight, the … gigafauna?(Googles and finds it has been cooked for how I want to use it…huh) have gems in them that allows em to sorta reduce gravity in order for them to be able to survive at such a size (the planet also has lower gravity than earth,at 0.7G)

Horses legs are mostly fingers.

This is just another reminder how weird a centaur is as a concept. Vertebrates don’t have more than 4 limbs. Land vertebrates mostly have 4 legs, but the structure of their forelegs is very similar to human arms and wrists. Bats have wings, but their wings are basically arms with a membrane of skin between the bones. Even a Naga (human / snake hybrid) makes more sense than a centaur.

Also, think how unbalanced a centaur would be. Instead of a trunk that merely has to support a neck and a head, a centaur has to support a full half-human right at the front of its body. That would shift the centre of mass way forward, so most of the weight would be on the middle limbs. That would affect its ability to gallop, because in a gallop most of the running power of a horse comes from the back legs. If the back legs are almost completely unloaded because all the weight is at the front, the back legs wouldn’t be able to push with much force.

A more realistic centaur would have the trunk weight shifted backwards, so instead of having a human torso replacing its neck and head, it would be like a rider on a horse but without the rider’s legs or the horse’s head.