Speculation and Worldbuilding; Pegasus Combat and Weapons · 11:42pm Mar 21st, 2014
BEWARE; this post contains headcanon, speculation, rambling, and art drawn by me. You’ve been warned on all counts.
Some of my watchers may remember this blog post, wherein I did some directionless speculation about pony combat, particularly ways to properly differentiate and individualize their weapons. Others may remember this other blog post, where I outlined a potential form of earth pony vs. earth pony spear combat.
Today I thought I’d try the same thing for pegasi. As always, this is not supposed to be definitive or even accurate, but rather a public mental exercise about a topic I feel is often neglected in pony fic.
Equipage:
I envisioned two primary Pegasus weapons. The first is a blow gun. Unlike human blowguns, they have a large bite plate (picture a sports mouth guard) that enables them to be operated without using hands/hooves. All pegasi blowguns are preloaded with a dart and clipped to a bracelet on the foreleg. The other foreleg contains an identical bracelet, but without any blowguns clipped to it. “Reloading” involves placing a used blowgun on an empty slot and grabbing a fresh one from the opposite arm.
You could certainly carry multiple bracelets worth of preloaded blowguns, but this setup allows the most margin for error. Finding an empty slot on a 5/6ths full bracelet mid-combat would be a severe hassle, and keeping full/empty divided by leg instead of bracelet position allows for less micromanagement. Numbering them would have the same problems. Further, since clipping in a new one is a more complex action than getting a new one, putting the empty bracelet on the dominant side makes it easier.
The other weapon is what I call a “net grenade”. It is a net wrapped in a layer of clouds. Unclipping it from your belt while above an opponent would cause the clouds to dispel and the net to unravel.
The net could be made of a fairly thin/light material, since the goal is to tangle the enemy’s wings. After that, the fall would be enough to kill or injure them. The thinner the material, the bigger the net can be.
Pegasi do not wear armor, save for ceremonial purposes. The weight would restrict their ability to move too much.
Positioning/Combat Flow:
Dogfights are a tricky business; they involve outmaneuvering the enemy aircraft, but because the weapons are a part of your plane, how you move affects your ability to attack.
This is not the case with pegasi. Yes, speed and position are important, but pegasi are much more maneuverable than a regular airplane. Their weapons don’t need to be along the fuselage, which gives them greater angles of attack.
Since height gives you more tactical options, speed is important. The faster you are, the faster you can climb and the more leeway you have for making turns. (Note that this fits in with pegasi culture’s emphasis on sports and athleticism). As in the image, the pegasus farther up has more tactical options available to them
This means that single combat is very rapid; it involves climbing up to gain a height advantage, then using a net on your opponent. How they dodge the net makes predicting a dart easier. A potent enough tranquilizer would make only a single dart necessary to win combat—even if they land fast enough to avoid dropping out of the sky, the shooter now has a massive mobility advantage.
Obviously, there are many branches this combat pattern could take, but the lethality of both attacks means that whoever gets the first successful attack off will likely win. Forcing your opponent to move into a vulnerable turn (hitting a moving target is difficult, and a turning pegasus has a few moments where their profile stays in a single spot), or forcing them to dodge a net (thus creating a moment where their flightpath is predictable) would be the most reliable ways of getting an easy shot off.
Against Other Species:
As I covered in the previous post, I think that inter-tribe combat was fairly rare for political and practical reasons. Nowhere is this more obvious when evaluating pegasus combat abilities.
Against ground forces, bombing is the best way to fight. Earth ponies and unicorns, however, both have easily available defenses against aerial attacks (armor and magic, respectively). While pegasi nets could be used to drop rocks on enemy forces, it would take a very prolonged attack and multiple trips to be effective.
Pegasi also could grab enemies in nets and then simply drop them (either on their allies or on the ground). Unless the enemy is heavy or escapes quickly, a sufficient height would injure or even kill them. Even if their nets get damaged, net grenades are very compact (though one designed to fight non-pegasi would have to be made of heavier materials). The flaw of this is that the enemy has an easy shot at the pegasus while they are being carried.
Pegasi do have a distinct advantage in their ability to control the weather. Even without the resources to make lightning or rain, they can easily fly above the cloud line, making all their attacks and movements impossible to predict, and making them difficult to target with missile weapons.
Sieges would be trivial to perform—a prolonged blizzard or thunderstorm would be able to easily take out any species (See: Russia’s “General Winter”), and other pony tribes would be unable to retaliate easily since pegasi live in the sky (see: The Terrans in Starcraft, with their flying buildings). This military advantage may explain why pegasi are the most explicitly militaristic tribe in the show’s past.
So, there you have it, a brief directionless rant exploration of pegasus combat. I promised to keep it at a thousand words, and it is (just). Feel free to point out things I missed, things I got wrong, things that made no sense, things I misinterpreted, things I drew poorly, or things that were interesting in the comments!
Next time (if anyone is interested?); unicorn combat.
I always like seeing this kind of analysis, but biting down and blowing with enough force to launch a blowgun dart seem like mutually exclusive actions. Either the teeth get in the way or, even if one doesn't have to bite down completely, the lips can't pucker properly.
Still, very cool thoughts, and I'd love to see your take on unicorn combat methods.
I could see armored pegasi being used as a shock/cavalry type force. Perhaps after softening the enemy lines with weather bombing they send down a charge of armored pegasi to finish the job. This would be especially effective because the pegasi have the natural bird's eye view that can allow them to immediately gain the tactical advantage. When fighting pegasi, being outflanked is a risk 100% of the time for a ground force. However, as pointed out in your blog post, they wouldn't be very maneuverable so they would need a fighter escort in case the enemy has flyers as well. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the blowdart as an air-to-air weapon (I feel like the bite-down trigger would lead to too many accidental misfires), but I do feel like the weighted net can be quite effective. Perhaps some sort of leg-mounted blade would be effective as a close quarters weapon? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on unicorn combat. My viewpoint (although I think that I'm thinking more in general war terms and not how the battles are fought) is that they would mostly serve a supporting role in a multi-tribe military, with emphasis on barriers, artillery, medical support, shutting down enemy magic users, and, in situations where pegasus support is not available, surface-to-air offensive spells. I would also imagine that unicorns would make heavy use of special operations, using a variety of spells to wreak havoc on enemy supplies. Perhaps unicorn frontline troops would use offensive spells the same way we use guns?
Unicorns will be a weird blog post, since their abilities are far less uniform than the other two tribes (telekinesis excepted).
1944867 You're right that it is probably stretching physics, but at the time it seemed reasonable since horses have bigger mouths, bigger teeth, and bigger lips than humans. There's also the fact that atmosphere is thinner, which makes the ballistics of a blowgun more favorable (though you could certainly argue that this is an additional complication, not an advantage, especially when it comes to the stamina of the shooter).
Every other projectile weapon that could be operated simply seemed too heavy, and I didn't find clinching a believable tactic for such mobile combatants. You're right that this may not be any more realistic. Maybe they use wind magic to fire the blowguns? MAGIC
1944955 While the show has pegasi using speed and ramming as weapons(the Wonderbolts with their wings, Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash with lances), to me it seems painfully counter-intuitive. I mean, if you could fly and your opponent could not, why would you give up your main advantage by closing to melee? If I could fly and my opponent couldn't, I'd rather just toss a bunch of caltrops at them or shoot them than going down to ground level to punch them
1945481
Blowgun bracelet + magic + handwaving = wrist-mounted minigun.
Makes sense to me.
This is actually my only real problem with this headcanon. Doesn't make sense to me. Humans have a concept of ceremonial armour because we used armour and it became important, and certain kinds of armour still held that feel of importance even after they became impractical or obsolete as technology improved (such as how a Roman legionary's armour would be ineffective against modern projectile weapons, but still looks impressive to us and is representative of the great power and influence that the old Roman Empire had at its height).
For pegasi though, if armour has always slowed them down too much to ever be effective, then there's no reason for their culture to develop any kind of respect for or attatchment to it. I can buy that the oversized helmet that Commander Hurricane wore in the show was ceremonial, but to have ceremonial armour, pegasi would need to have had practical armour at some point. No doubt something light and aerodynamic.
1949379 That one's easy; cultural posturing. Even if pegasi never used armor themselves, diplomats using it as a show of force and wealth would be perfectly sensible (especially in the dung ages shown in "Hearth's Warming Eve", where most of the population is living in poverty).
After all, political posturing is more effective when put into familiar terms. Modern ambassadors/diplomats are trained to be familiar with the mores and culture of their assignments for just that reason.
I also wouldn't say pegasi never used armor. Something like a gambeson/padded jacket would be able to stop a blowdart without being too restrictive. But in the sort of rocket tag combat I have described here, dodging is more important than defense. Armor wouldn't be able to stop a net from tangling wings, so it makes sense that it would have been phased out when such a weapon appeared.
1949597
I guess I can kind of see it, but the idea of a warrior culture that only wears armour because the neighbours do and it wants to impress them is really weird to me.
1949940 Point taken. As I said in the post, this is more of a mental exercise than an attempt to be perfectly accurate and plausible. As 1944867 pointed out, the blowgun operation I chose also stretches plausibility.