RTAC #15: Schizotech · 4:40pm Nov 9th, 2017
I said that I want to do a collation post on the state of pony technology observed in canon. The Points of Canon series is still a ways off from being complete, but I think I have enough data, so why not do it now.
It’s not just about the technology, of course, this overview touches on more things, but technology forms the core, as it dictates just how each of the other things is accomplished. I’m going to have to write a separate post – probably, titled “Schizolaw” – describing things we know and can infer regarding pony legal practices and application and use of knowledge, as well.
Before we begin: Tech Level
Forget the notion of tech level immediately.
There is no single path up the technology ladder. Which is a statement that might surprise some. Strategy games, certainly, condition us to think that there is at most a technology tree, which, eventually, deep into the game, everyone explores fully – but it’s a highly trivialized model for how research and development actually happens, and it suffers for it.
To put it very briefly and avoid turning this post into an essay on the general problem, it tends to take a technology at least a decade to turn from an idea to practical applications that actually result in wide-reaching changes in daily life or an industry. At any given point, many specific technologies will be in their infancy, and often, there are many competing ways to fill a given need and solve a specific problem.
Competing in the literal sense, because they will compete for funding and customers. Whichever provides the results first, usually wins, but not always, and occasionally, an upstart technology which is initially weaker but has less long-term limitations will win. Some can be skipped entirely, which will produce unexpected consequences later on.
An example I love to quote is the genre of classic cyberpunk, which is devoted primarily to describing a conflict between a technologically empowered individual and a faceless organization that has more power than a government. To work, this genre requires fairly specific technologies, namely, cybernetic augmentation, without which such a conflict would end too quickly.
Ironically, classic cyberpunk is in the past for our world, rather than any potential future: While we might, and probably will, acquire cybernetic technologies over time, they will not be seen as a vehicle for augmentation. Only the military-industrial complex could fund them to become that, when seeking to create a superior soldier, and they found that drones get the same results before this research could get up to speed, while ethical concerns hindered cybernetic augmentation research. As a result, our world picked computational power over material science, and at some point, drones became preferable, and the window to make that turn closed – it started closing sometime after the Apollo program was shut down and finished by the time effective machine vision became a thing. Were the Apollo program to continue, it could have turned out differently.
This is called a race condition: A system with multiple processes running in parallel can produce radically different results, if more than one of them affects the same thing and it’s possible for one to complete faster than the other due to some random factor.
Ponies appear to have tripped a lot of them, producing a picture substantially different from what we know.
Field by field
I will try to approach this systematically, selecting a specific field of technology or daily life and describing what I saw – as well as things that are conspicuously missing, occasionally offering theories as to why they might be.
It’s a bit haphazard despite all my attempts.
Electricity
We can see no end of appliances that require some sort of power source, as well as products that do so indirectly – for example, smoothies, which ponies mention all the way back in Boast Busters, require a powered blender to produce. I could cite examples all day.
Most of these examples do not have wires shown on screen, but some do:
- In Suited for Success, Rarity operates a clothes iron, which is emitting steam and has an obvious wire.
- In Rainbow Falls, the Wonderbolt pit crew operates fans and powered polishers which have wires trailing after them.
Whether this means that pony use of electricity primarily relies on some form of broadcast power, or that wires are typically present, but are hidden by cartoon resolution most of the time as unimportant, is mostly up to you.
One notable example suggesting that it might in fact be broadcast power is the hydro power station in The Mysterious Mare Do Well: While it also has no visible power lines leaving it, it has what looks like Tesla coil towers, which would be consistent with a broadcast power system. Broadcast power, likewise, slows the development of broadcast radio, for simple physical reasons: Preventing an antenna from frying your receiver with stray broadcast power it picks up becomes an engineering challenge.
Of course, there’s an option to presume some completely un-electrical equivalent of electric power, like an entirely magical work-alike. However, there are good arguments against that, see below in the section on Electronics. If it works like a duck and looks like a duck, what would be the point of not calling it a duck?
It is particularly notable that the Crystal Empire appears to have had some manner of powered technology a whopping thousand years ago, when the rest of Equestria clearly did not – see specifically my comments for Games Ponies Play – and the rest of the world only caught up relatively recently.
Electronics
There are two fundamentally different electronic technologies that need to be covered: Solid-state and vacuum. That is, transistors and tubes.
Ponies show examples of both, however, vacuum devices appear to be a much rarer thing, as if they did invent them, but at some point, solid state devices became more practical for a lot of applications, and the development of vacuum devices stopped entirely, before they could reach their full potential. They are now retained only in specific niches that solid-state devices could not fill.
There are two kinds vacuum devices seen on screen, essentially one kind:
- Heart monitors in Read it and Weep, Rainbow Falls, and a few other cases.
- Oscilloscope screen on the measurement device Twilight uses in Feeling Pinkie Keen
Both look like and perform the function of a primitive cathode ray tube. However, “primitive” is the key qualifier here: in Read it and Weep, the heart monitor appears on the cutie mark of Dr. Horse, a mature stallion, who clearly got it at least a decade ago, if not more. It’s obvious the device would have to be a mature technology already by then, to become a symbol of medicine. There are no examples of more advanced cathode ray tubes on screen anywhere, which suggests that this is exactly how far they got: for whatever reason, the technology for raster scanning did not materialize, and the beam does not sweep the screen.
One other vacuum device on screen is the incandescent light bulb, which is actually a pretty common thing in Equestria. However, while it is the same basic technology that permits the subsequent development of a triode, it is not by itself an electronic device.
Solid state electronics, that is, transistors, are more difficult. While you can infer that something is a solid state electronic device, because it uses electricity and works like one, you can’t unambiguously demonstrate that it is one just from visual evidence. If you can’t see if it uses electricity, you have even bigger problems doing so. Transistors are by nature microscopic, and can be packaged in a wide variety of ways. However, there is one scene that allows us to infer that all examples of such in pony world that fit actually are:
During To Where and Back Again, while inside the magic-nullifying field, Discord uses a megaphone – shaped like a condenser microphone from 1920s – and produces sound that is heard as amplified. It follows that non-magical amplification of sound is possible in a rather small package, and that implies both electricity and solid state electronics developed to a certain level. You can interpret this in some other way if you really want to, but I don’t see any reason why you would. You have to explain numerous cases of speakers and other audio equipment on screen anyway, whenever Vinyl Scratch appears, not to mention Sapphire Shores.
It is important to note that ponies seem to have not – presumably, yet – progressed into digital electronics: None of the technologies displayed require digital devices of any kind, not even Vinyl Scratch’s equipment. The device Twilight uses in Feeling Pinkie Keen, often imagined to be a computer, is, likewise, not one. I keep repeating that, and people keep bringing it up. It displays no behavior more complex than a multichannel electroencephalograph. It is, obviously, a derivative of a moving paper oscillograph with an oscilloscope screen, presumably set up to measure electrical impulses resulting from magic-driven events in crystals – sort of like a magical piezocrystal, I expect.
Not even a whiff of computing technology otherwise, the only other device for computation I caught so far is an abacus in Hurricane Fluttershy.
Post-publication addendum: Occasionally, devices that are, in essence, a species of mechanical calculator, turn up – notably, the cash registers in Fake It Til You Make It and The Maud Couple. While technically, these are digital devices, they do not have to be electronic, and in particular, the one Rarity has in Fake It Til You Make It isn’t even electromechanical – it’s crank operated. Since the crank isn’t turned every time it needs to ring up a purchase, it also has to be spring driven. These things are only a few steps above an abacus, in any case.
Another Post-publication addendum: Somehow, nobody seems to point out multiple instances of arcade machines, first appearing in Hearts and Hooves Day and repeating multiple times since, notably, in Slice of Life and Viva Las Pegasus. I had to remember these myself. Using digital technology in games when it isn’t used anywhere else at all would be quite absurd, though, and I must remind you that electromechanical arcade games were an actual thing – in fact, I spent much of my childhood playing a knockoff of “Periscope”. The most advanced piece of technology inside was a vacuum tube. The obviously mechanical take on a Dance Dance Revolution machine in Viva Las Pegasus suggests that all instances of arcade games are also such, possibly with an extra touch of magic to enhance the experience. Sorry, Button Mash, no SNES for you.
There is one little thing I should also mention: While we don’t know if pony reality has any lasers, MMMystery on the Friendship Express makes it clear they are at least a subject of pony fiction, and we can probably presume they are at least theoretically known. Probably, ponies have jumped straight into semiconductor lasers, and have not developed gas lasers and other earlier ideas.
Radio and mass media
There is no whiff of broadcast or long distance radio in Equestria. However, short range communication devices do appear, usually on security ponies of various kinds, for example, in For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils. Wonderbolt pit stop crew in Rainbow Falls likewise uses them. We could assume they are actually decorative, but in My Little Pony Movie, we hear them actually being used.
For a theory as to why these devices exist, but broadcast radio doesn’t, see RTAC #5. It is possible and practical to communicate over short distances using low-frequency – audio-frequency, in fact – devices, but you can’t reach across kilometers unless you modulate a higher frequency, and if that is what ponies have problems with, broadcasts are still a long way away.
Absence of broadcast radio would likewise prevent the appearance of television: The bandwidth required for a television signal is substantial, and the development of the primary components required for early television, the cathode ray tubes, seems to have stalled. At this rate, ponies may not produce any equivalent until their solid state electronics permits them to make equivalents of an iconoscope and a CRT – that is, a CCD and, say, an LCD. Both are possibilities, but won’t become practical until they can substantially reduce the size of the elements.
One interesting technology that may provide ponies with an alternative is a Nipkow disc, or some other mechanical television pipeline – yes, these were a thing – because they might have magical means to overcome the shortcomings of such a system: the fact that increasing the resolution to practically useful requires a ridiculously sensitive photo cell. In our world, the fact that vacuum tube based television permitted this result earlier is what lead to its eventual adoption, but for ponies, it’s still a toss-up which comes in first.
In any case, it would require shielded cables until higher frequencies are available.
The only observed kind of mass media in Equestria is newsprint, and of course, book publishing. Journalists and newsstands appear on screen in Fame and Misfortune, local scale mass media is the plot of Ponyville Confidential, and they also pop up in quite a few other cases. The printing technologies involved are somewhat murky:
- In Fame and Misfortune, Twilight at least behaves as if she has personally magicked into being and then distributed the entire print run of the Friendship Journal. We cannot reliably conclude if this is the way it happened or not, but even if she did, this is probably not indicative of the entire publishing industry: Twilight is by far not the only author of a book in Equestria. See my comments on that episode.
- In Ponyville Confidential, the Foal Free Press uses a muscle-powered printing machine, which looks and seems to work most like a mimeograph. However, it also manages to print color photographs, which is very difficult to achieve with a mimeograph, and would involve several colors of ink, where we can only see one. Were it some manner of a magical process, the machine probably wouldn’t also be muscle-powered, so I have no clue how it works.
Post-publication addendum: I have since figured out how, through the use of magic, a simple mimeograph-style printing machine can print in color, without requiring a magic-user to operate it: Alchemically-produced ink which changes color depending on the size of the individual droplet can, through a simple enough photographic process, be used to produce full-color images. There is, of course, no evidence that this is what ponies are actually using, but at least it makes sense.
Numerous books which have to be a thousand or more years old turn up in The Crystal Empire and in Castle Mane-ia, but whether these are manually written or printed, we don’t know. The number of titles, however, is immense, and some manner of duplication process had to have been available even back then for this to happen – but we know nothing specific about it.
One other notable artifact is a typewriter. Two different kinds of typewriters have been observed, only one of them in primary canon:
- The three-key typewriter has been seen in Ponyville Confidential, Daring Don’t, From The Shadows (Friendship is Magic #51-53) and a few other places.
- The full-keyboard typewriter has been seen in Mini-series #1.
While people have joked in the past regarding the three-key typewriter, it can work, in one of several possible ways:
- Chording: Different combinations of presses and tilts of buttons would produce different letters to be typed, like in a chorded keyboard.
- Iambic keying: In the manner of a dual-paddle telegraph key.
Both options would require the typewriter to be very mechanically complex and rather expensive, and would need it to be electrically powered, but both are feasible.
When not using a typewriter, however, ponies write with either a quill or a pencil. While I can imagine numerous reasons why a fountain pen would be inconvenient for them, they do not appear to have anything resembling a ballpoint pen, or even a felt tip pen, and I can’t imagine why.
Post-publication addendum: A highlighter, which is technically a felt tip pen, appears in Testing, Testing, 1-2-3. Several other instances of pens which have to be felt tip based pop up after an exhaustive search. The leading theory on why they are not more popular is that accidentally biting through one could be hazardous. In Rarity Investigates, a device that can only be a fountain pen can be seen in Spitfire’s room, so they are not unknown either, and are probably not more popular for the same reason: At least two thirds of the population prefers writing with their mouth. Notably, even unicorn children seem to learn writing with their mouth first, before progressing to using their magic: Twilight-as-human uses her mouth to sign in Equestria Girls
Movies are observed as a form of popular entertainment, in One Bad Apple, and as a form of educational material in Hurricane Fluttershy. Secondary canon agrees, depicting the Ponyville movie theater multiple times and referring to movies in From The Shadows (Friendship is Magic #51-53) and on other occasions. Despite that, it’s Discord who most commonly pops up with a movie camera. While mechanically, these are simpler than three-key typewriters would have to be to type a whole alphabet, producing a film, especially a color film as seen in One Bad Apple, requires substantial knowledge of photochemistry and specifically, plastics, to produce the film base onto which emulsion is to be applied – it needs to be transparent.
Pony photography is also rather advanced. Cameras are cheap enough to end up in the hooves of foals (for example, in Twilight Time) and can print color photographs instantly, which requires some clever self-developing film trickery. In fact, we see printed photographs very often, but almost never see actual photo film. The occasions where such cameras are used are far too numerous to list.
At the same time, photos dated to over 40 years ago typically appear in black and white, suggesting that color photography is a relatively recent development, or at least, only recently became sufficiently cheap for amateur photographers.
Chemistry and physics
Pony chemistry is freakishly advanced. That is, there are no less than twenty episodes in my list that have ponies present examples of things that should be beyond the technology of the early XX century they typically stick closer to.
The list includes synthetic glues, strong transparent plastics, chemical cleaning agents, insecticides and disinfectants, PTFE, LDPE, and while we never see just how these things are made, the total weight of evidence that they are is overwhelming. They could conceivably be imported, if you can only imagine where they would be imported from. It is pretty safe to assume that if ponies want something only made possible by the chemical industry of 1970s in our world, like, say, Kapton, they have it already. Some of it might in fact be magically produced.
Of course, not everything in the pony world is made of plastics, but there are multiple reasons to pick different materials when you can, from cultural to economic.
It can be inferred, that since ponies have so much plastic stuff around, they have to have some effective means of keeping production clean, being otherwise so eco-conscious. But they are not unprepared for cleaning up potential spills: In Bats!, we see Rarity wear a personal protection suit with a biohazard symbol on it, which both requires plastics to be effective and would be effective against potential mishaps. But that brings us neatly into physics:
In The Cutie Pox, a similar personal protection suit with a radiation hazard trefoil can be seen.
This could be dismissed as a random joke, however, once Crystal Empire turns up, we can observe a very interesting stallion, who has the placeholder name of Neighls Bohr, and a cutie mark depicting an atom of lithium – a very common symbol for physics. He appears most notably in Equestria Games, but is otherwise seen rather often. Which would imply the structure of an atom was known as early as a thousand years ago, if not longer, at least in the Crystal Empire, which is otherwise ridiculously advanced compared to other observed pony polities of the era. Similarly, in The Hooffelds and McColts, Twilight mentions that quantum physics is a fascinating area of study, which it would have to be if solid state electronics were a thing, as described above.
There is very little we can infer from that, but it offers some really interesting story possibilities.
Communications
Ponies habitually use mail for communications, however, no less than four competing companies performing this service even for simple letters appear to exist, and maybe even more: Just about every time a mailpony appears on screen, they are wearing a completely different uniform from any prior appearances of a mailpony. This gets really ridiculous: Putting Your Hoof Down actually has two mailponies in mismatched uniforms in the same episode. Just how does this work, I don’t really know.
Otherwise, telephones with a dialing disc, which implies an automated telephone network, have been observed in Manehattan during Rarity Takes Manehattan. Another telephone, pre-automatic-dialing, can be seen in the Ponyville antique shop in Uncommon Bond, but no evidence of a telephone network existing anywhere other than Manehattan surfaced so far, unless you count Friendship is Magic #41, which I wouldn’t.
Post-publication addendum: In A Matter of Principals, a rotary telephone can be observed in the School of Friendship. While we cannot be certain it wasn’t Discord who put it there in this case, it may be evidence that Ponyville started building a telephone network at least by the time of Season 8. In any case, in the same episode, Trixie unambiguously identifies Discord’s skit with a banana as a phone call, and later on, automatically answers a ringing banana, implying that she is well aware of what telephones are and how to use them, making it certain that Equestria has phone networks at least in some cities. At the same time, Trixie is not aware of what a “long distance plan” is, implying that cross-country telephone network connecting the individual city-wide networks does not yet exist.
There is one case of a telegram on screen: Scootaloo fakes a telegram to distract Granny Smith during Family Appreciation Day. Secondary canon, notably, Friendship is Magic #45, likewise agrees that Ponyville has a telegraph station, but at the same time, neither telegraph nor phone network reaches as far as Saddle Arabia: During Magic Duel, Twilight laments that she can’t contact Celestia in Saddle Arabia without Spike.
Only Celestia and Twilight appear to use dragonfire mail, which is a subject for a post of its own. In The Crystalling, Cadance invites Twilight with a magically delivered letter that is not delivered by dragonfire, implying that suitably magically powerful individuals may employ other means of sending messages – but we never see examples beyond these, except Chrysalis communicating to her changelings in To Where and Back Again.
Transportation
The most commonly used method of transportation in Equestria, beside simply walking and running, is rail, observed in episodes too numerous to list. As it is, it does not appear to be particularly advanced, with cars being built with no regard for air resistance, and fueled by coal to run what looks and behaves like a steam engine. There is an option for ponies to use more advanced chemically processed fuels that look like coal, but aren’t. But in this case, according to MMMystery on the Friendship Express, the fuel is still called “coal” in conversation.
Family Appreciation Day implies, if Granny Smith’s statements and flashback are to be believed, that the railroad station in Ponyville dates back at least 50 years, if not more, so in general, pony railroads are an old, mature technology. For the longest time, I suspected they might actually be ancient, since The Crystal Empire has the Mane 6 arrive to the location by train, which would otherwise have a station in the middle of nowhere for no obvious reason. However, later official map, released sometime during Season 4, places the Crystal Empire on the middle of the stretch of track that leads towards Rainbow Falls, so the stretch that reaches the Empire itself could serve a variety of practical purposes. The Crystal Empire, ever the one to buck the trend, manages to produce a much more advanced-looking train, which, apparently, also burns a more advanced fuel, less than a year after re-emergence, in Three’s a Crowd, but we only see the thing once.
See also the discussion on Over a Barrel for why exactly were ponies pulling the train, but they were only doing it that one time, and never again.
Air transportation is considerably more varied. We see examples of:
- Pegasus-driven chariots, that is, ostensibly normal land vehicles which, when a pegasus or an alicorn drives them, become capable of flight. Examples are rather numerous, but some specific ones – the cart Fluttershy uses in Feeling Pinkie Keen in particular – convince me that the carts are actually otherwise normal, and do not have to be manufactured specially for such use.
- Muscle-powered helicopters, which apparently require an earth pony to fly, and are never seen flown by anyone else, in Griffon the Brush Off and in Testing, Testing, 1-2-3.
- The infamous Pink-Purple Balloon, as well as multiple airships, in use primarily by Equestrian civilians – in Sweet and Elite, Apple Family Reunion, and of course, in Once Upon a Zeppelin. Not to mention the My Little Pony Movie, where numerous airships appear as part of the Storm King’s army. In all cases seen, the size of the actual lighter-than-air envelope appears to be too small to keep the vehicle aloft, even if it were full of vacuum rather than hydrogen, which suggest some manner of anti-gravity gas, or a similar physics-bypassing scheme. Most examples seem to move by flapping wings, rather than spinning propellers, likewise implying magical technology.
There’s a notable lack of paved roads anywhere outside a large city, and while numerous rubber tires occur on screen for various reasons – like in Fluttershy Leans In – we never see ponies use them on actual pony-driven vehicles. This is an oddity that was and remains unexplained. Lack of paved roads probably explains the dearth of self-powered land vehicles. While in One Bad Apple, the carnival floats appear to be self-propelled, the mechanism by which they are moving is never explained. Cheese Sandwich’s tank seen in Pinkie Pride likewise appears to be self-propelled, but we have no idea how.
Post-publication addendum: Eventually, I did find exactly one example of a vehicle with rubber tires in primary canon: The mover van in Feeling Pinkie Keen. Notably, it’s not using these tires at the time it is shown, since it’s being driven by pegasi. A few more scattered examples, always pulled by ponies, appear very rarely throughout the comics. Why the most common, mass-produced kind of carriage – the Manehattan taxi – does not use them is still a mystery.
As a side note, streetlights only appear occasionally, and only on some streets. In general, ponies never appear to stumble in the dark, and the Moon is very, very rarely seen not to be full.
The state of pony shipping (no, not that shipping) conveniently escapes being shown on screen for most of the series, and we have only scant evidence that ponies are a seafaring species at all, but yes they are:
- In Rarity Takes Manehattan, the Mane 6 engage in a trip to the Statue of
LibertyFriendshipWhatever, using a very modern-looking ship that looks like it would use at least a screw for propulsion, and at least a steam engine of some kind. - Pony Point Of View revolves around a recreational trip on a sailing ship.
- Secondary canon has a whole story devoted to Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, in Friendship is Magic #13-14.
The extent of such practice is unknown, but Equestria does have some international trade: In Made in Manehattan, a stallion refers to his hay and oats import/export business, and in Slice of Life, Lyra confesses to eating Bon-Bon’s imported oats.
Weapons
Now, we should account for the fact that even when the weapons would normally be shown, the restrictions of TV-Y would get them eaten by the cartoon resolution – remember what happened to One Piece? But some weapons, or at least, weapon technologies, do turn up in visible canon.
Most weapons actually seen on screen would be classified as pre-modern combat weapons in our world. Of these, the most easily noticeable are the spears of the Royal Guard, but since the Royal Guard itself seems to serve ceremonial purposes and I am pretty sure they are not a proper modern army, and were not supposed to be – see RTAC #4.
Some characters, notably, Spike, in his imagination sequence in A Dog and Pony Show, employ lances – in rather unorthodox manner, this time.
Occasionally, swords can be observed – in A Canterlot Wedding on the walls of Shining Armor’s dwelling, and in Luna Eclipsed, Pipsqueak turns up in a pirate costume with a sword held in his teeth. Cutie Pox depicts the use of rapiers for sport, and otherwise, ponies clearly are no strangers to bladed and piercing weapons. In The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows, Pinkie uses a crossbow for utility value, to get a rope into Rarity’s window.
Firearms are a bit more complicated. There is no doubt that ponies have gunpowder, because fireworks are far from uncommon in Equestria, and Pinkie’s infamous party cannon, that appears from Season 2 onwards, is too conspicuous not to suppose that at least smoothbore firearms are well-known. Secondary canon agrees: From The Shadows (Friendship is Magic #51-53) depicts a “colonial period” – don’t ask what that means, I don’t know – cannon with actual cannonballs.
It’s an interesting unanswered question whether ponies can currently produce a rifled barrel or not. The amount of technological challenges involved is substantial, but not that high, compared to other things they are known to have – in our world, rifling was invented in 1498. The actual limiting factor in using rifled firearms is not the rifling itself, but the requirement for using smokeless gunpowder, otherwise the grooves foul up, which severely detracts from the usability. Which didn’t prevent widespread adoption in our world anyway. Seeing the extent of advances in chemistry displayed by ponies, there is little doubt they can make smokeless powder trivially, given the incentive, even if they do not currently have such a technology.
In any case, ponies appear to have boxes marked “TNT” and refer to them as “dynamite,” according to Friendship is Magic #47, which would indicate they already have multiple generations of high explosives – because TNT is not actually dynamite. Pegasi certainly go together well with bombing.
Mass production
We never see mass production happen on screen, except in The Cutie Re-Mark, where it appears to be a wartime technology more than anything else. Some techniques of mass production, like a muscle-powered conveyor belt, can occasionally be observed – for example, in The Last Roundup – but the only actual factory seen on screen is the Weather Factory, in Sonic Rainboom and Tanks for the Memories, and that is not so much about mass production as it is about bulk production, and looks more like a chemical factory than any other kind.
However, certain mass-produced devices do appear in peacetime, notably, all typewriters seen in primary canon, as well as all taxi cabs appear identical, and the armor of the Royal Guard follows only a few specific, well-defined patterns.
In general, however, ponies are big on personalization and customization: Many a saddlebag and personal accessory is customized with the owner’s cutie mark. Pinkie is particularly notable for having a large amount of such gear.
Pony-unique technologies
There are some technologies unique to ponies, which do not have an equivalent anywhere in our world:
Firefly lamps
I have no idea how these work, how the fireflies are fed, and how do they manage to produce so much light. In one instance during Read it and Weep, Rainbow Dash extinguishes a firefly lamp by letting the fireflies out, which implies it’s easy to entice them back in, but we never see that happen.
Still, this strange example of bioengineering pops up often, though not quite as often as kerosene lamp, candle lanterns, and battery-powered flashlights.
Rock farming
Or mining. Or not. Canon is of multiple minds on the subject: Pinkie refers to the activity as farming, and while it does involve going after the rocks with a pickaxe, as seen in Magic Duel, the rocks themselves are above ground when this is done, suggesting that most of this activity happens above ground as well. At the same time, there’s a relatively modern style rail-mine abandoned somewhere under Canterlot in A Canterlot Wedding, and there’s a similar mine that can be seen in Hearthbreakers.
Pinkie Pie and the Rockin’ Ponypalooza Party insists that the primary product of a rock farm is pavement stone, however, that entire book is so incompatible with primary canon, that I wouldn’t take it into account at all.
So far, my best hypothesis is still that a rock farm grows minerals using natural magic, in theme with the general idea that ponies make the world go. If they control the weather, why wouldn’t sustainable mining be a concern for them?
Allow me also to plug my pet hypothesis on the origins of rock music in Equestria:
While rock farms grow minerals, this does not work with petroleum, which is a liquid that would otherwise eventually run out and is not common in Equestria in the first place. To combat the problem and feed the growing plastics industry, earth ponies eventually evolved the magic of rock festival, wherein a large pit is dug in the ground, filled with plastic scrap – preferably, shredded beforehoof for optimal results – and covered with soil once it is full.
Once this is done, earth ponies from neighboring towns and villages assemble on top and have a multi-day festival of singing and dancing, which magically recycles the plastic scrap into usable oil again – once they’re done, the mound is drilled and oil is pumped out of the resulting reservoir.
The music that is played during this entire activity has to follow a particular rhythmic structure to be effective, and as such, is called “rock music,” because oil itself is called “rock oil.”
Cloud construction
Through some process, the mechanics of which remain entirely unknown, pegasi can not only stand on clouds, but also, solidify them into some manner of construction material, which remains aloft even if non-pegasi stand on it. This can be observed, most notably, in Newbie Dash, when not only ponies, but also numerous objects, which can’t all be enchanted with cloud walking spells, hang out in Rainbow’s cloud home. Compare to what happens to Twilight encased in crystal during The Cutie Re-Mark. While fanon often thinks that cloud homes remain permeable to non-pegasi, this is most certainly not the case.
Also, in Parental Glideance, we can observe Bow Hot Hoof use a machine – not unlike a lawnmower – to flatten the clouds around his home, suggesting both that they fluff out when unattended, and that possibly, this is exactly the process required to make them non-permeable.
Weather generation
Our only two on-screen visits to the Weather Factory have occurred during the Sonic Rainboom and Tanks for the Memories. The actual technology for producing clouds involves consuming water brought up from the ground as described in Hurricane Fluttershy, and other unrevealed ingredients. The question of why do pegasi need to clear the clouds when they are manufactured, and wouldn’t it be more expedient just not to produce the clouds when they are not needed remains unanswered in canon.
My only guess so far is the delivery mechanism seen in Sonic Rainboom: at one point, a pegasus dumps a bucket of blue liquid into a funnel, producing a torrent of wind. The same blue liquid subsequently reappears in Top Bolt. Should the delivery of clouds be accomplished by blowing them up into stratosphere and letting them descend down naturally, precise targeting would be impossible, and pegasi would be continually occupied managing and moving them around.
We have no earthly idea just what this blue liquid is, by the way.
Conclusion
Whew.
There is the Sweet Apple Industrial Zone in the Sombra timeline of "The Cutie Re-Mark."
Most impressive and comprehensive rundown. And I really like that rock music hypothesis.
In Hurricane Fluttershy they use a film projector with a newsreel style promotional film, and in One Bad Apple we see that Ponyville has a movie theater. I have no idea where movie cameras and projectors fall in terms of technology, but it is a form of mass media they have in some capacity.
In the episode where Rarity goes to Canterlot and slacks off at making Twilight's dress, i think she was sketching it out with a felt tip pen or marker.
Also, i think the reason they use quills is because with the pegasi, they have a nearly unlimited supply of them, for free.
It could be the blue stripe from liquefied rainbow. Maybe the different rainbow colors have different properties.
4721378
Damn, knew I forgot to write something down. BRB.
I love your work, thanks for going through all the trouble. You answer a lot of questions that tend to pop up in the back of my head but I haven't the education to answer.
Even when I don't directly use any of it in my writing, it makes me somehow feel more confident having read your posts.
The acquisition of smokeless powder in particular has been a concern of mine, one of my characters wants it but is totally ignorant about its composition, and I have always been unsure what to say about the state of pony science in that particular field.
And just yesterday I wrote a sequence in an upcoming story involving a cannon with a rifled barrel and the question of what could foul it up, so I appreciate the reminder that basic black powder would.
Even in large cities, the roads are often drawn more like gravel than asphalt or concrete. The road immediately outside Canterlot, which serves as the main entrance to the Grand Galloping Gala: definitely gravel. Streets of Manehattan: either the lumpiest pavement ever, or more gravel. And the Manehattan sidewalks appear to be paving stones rather concrete. Interestingly, the streets inside Canterlot proper seem to be entirely paving stones.
It’s odd. There were cinderblocks at the construction site in “The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well”, so we know ponies have concrete, but they don’t seem to ever use concrete for roads or sidewalks.
My own theory that this railroad built by Equestria. Becuase otherwise it's mighty strange why it ended in the middle of snowfield instead of going under Crystal Empire weather shield.
Most likely Celestia expected that sooner or later Crystal Empire returns and stationed some scouts near it. When ponies learn to build railroads Celestia ordered to build tracks toward Crystal Empire for faster scout rotation and troops transportation if needed. But at this point, she can't precisely remember when exactly Crystal Empire used to be so rail station ended in the middle of nowhere.
Pony chemistry being 50 years ahead of all their other tech kinda makes sense to me. First it appears that all three tribes have a strong alchemy tradition which can produce real magical effects. Second matter manipulation spells are a thing. It may take a Twilight Sparkle to turn an apple into an orange but tweaking a natural chemical reaction for greater speed or efficiency probably takes a lot less power.
Whew, indeed. Thanks for compiling all this. Individually, most of these were things I was aware of, but taken together, they paint an interesting picture of Equestria as a whole. The observations on the chemical industry was of particular interest. It implies a lot of off-screen happenings that aren't immediately obvious from what we can actually see.
The solution to this: bring your own uniform. The mail service doesn't specify a single uniform, but employees are expected to look mailponyish, each in their own way.
Oh, and they live in a town with Rarity. So of course there are going to be elaborate experiments.
The end products are personalised, but I'd note that the quantity of material available to Rarity and the rate at which she uses it is very suggestive of mass production of fabrics. Rarity Takes Manehatten seems to agree: unique materials are considered a specialism against a backdrop of mass-produced types.
Extrapolating out, I'd agree that ponies value uniqueness, but benefit from having the mass produced materials to do so.
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The architectural differences suggest that Canterlot earns a good amount of its wealth from tourism, and maintains a certain image that promotes that. Paving stones may be part of that image.
The main reason to phase stones out in favour of concrete or tarmac is when you have a lot of wheeled vehicles moving quickly. Manehattan seems to have this, but Canterlot doesn't.
I have long been convinced that the filling is simply clouds, since they can be made to support objects.
One wrinkle in that would be that airship technology seems to be even more common/advanced outside Equestria. Incidentally, when would you be getting around to ding the movie?
My assumption is that a) rainclouds remain clouds after they've run out of usable rain and b) it's simply more expedient to destroy clouds and make new ones than to recycle them.
4721588
That makes a lot of sense. We know clouds can be made to seem solid despite being physically light.
My main gripe with solid state electronics is that it requires an industrial base we never saw. The whole supply chain for transistors pretty much requires industrialization, something we can suppose ponies know but avoid or minimize if we take what seen in the Sombra Timeline as a consequence of their desperation and the extraordinary measures taken.
As for the rest, I suppose that when you have magic and alchemy you can take a lot of shortcuts regarding chemistry and probably produce various polymers in useful amounts without going into the requirements we humans have to fulfill.
4721402
It's probably uncomfortable for hooves.
4721560
This is entirely plausable. I worked for the USPS as a carrier for a very breif time, and rural route carriers (which includes small towns where a lot of the residences are rural) are not issued uniforms, but many try to dress in "mail" themed clothes for the heck of it. (T-shirts and sweat shirts with mailboxes or letters are popular.) In Equestria where there's no casual clothing, they might just go for some personal approximation of a city carrier's uniform.
This is quite comprehensive, thank you.
I'd question the idea that chemical batteries are more prevalent than magic crystal batteries, because the very existence of the Crystal Empire and its advanced technology seems to depend heavily on crystal magic for everything. Between that, the rock farm, and every last McGuffin we've ever seen, magical energy seems like it can be stored incredibly densely in crystal. Now just because it's "magic" doesn't mean it can't spit electicicty out the side to power devices, the question is really how the energy gets into the battery rather than out of it. If earth ponies are effectively pumping their own magical energy into crystals over time, a magic crystal would literally run on horsepower.
Also, I love your idea for how plastic is recycled. You're right that the amount of plastic used in industrial and chemical products, but without hint of serious oil extraction, means they must be recycling plastic over and over again in some method.
4721604
That was my thinking as well, until I noticed the apparent use of big, flat stones for paving in Manehattan and Canterlot. Are stones any more comfortable for hooves than concrete or asphalt?
I've long held the theory that rock farming is a case of artificially accelerated mineral construction, using earth pony magic to turn what would conventionally be centuries of work into a year-long process. I once wrote a scene where Marble Pie creates a series of fissures across the farmland to swallow up the snow for Winter Wrap Up so she can use the water runoff for erosion on some of their currently subterranean product.
This process does kind of require that earth ponies have a sort of magical radar that reads the earth, but this ain't about the mounting evidence that earth ponies are the best race.
4721789
Maybe, it probably depends on the stone. While we are in wild speculation territory, here are a couple of other factors which could or could not influence this decision:
+ Asphalt smells awful
+ Tradition. Depending on the age of the city, using stone instead of concrete may be a historical decision. In Europe many of the cities that weren't bombed during WW2 keep their historical centers. Here, for example, is Siena:
footage.framepool.com/shotimg/121897060-siena-invecchiare-vita-cittadina-vecchio.jpg
Those are stone slabs used for paving the streets.
This is often less than optimal, but in many places there will be also a strong resistance to change that even if there isn't much tourism. I think we can infer that various cities in Equestria are just as old and that their inhabitants like to keep things as they were.
+ Available materials. Depending on local Earth Pony traditions, slabs of stone may be dirt cheap.
+ Technomagical babble about conducting mana (See the Movie and the city-wide runes in Canterlot).
+ Earth ponies like to keep their hooves on stone if by necessity they can't keep them on dirt. And modern sanitation requires paved roads for larger settlements.
+ Depending on how roads get worn down (no trucks apparently, traffic composed mainly of light vehicles and pedestrians) stone slabs could be easier to maintain. This is mostly dependant on one of the other things being also true.
+ If worn down by hooves, concrete produces dust, I think. This may be an issue. Also, we never have seen how Equestrian metallurgy fares. Without cheap steel grids, concrete may be less viable. Also, we require an industrial base that may or may not be there (looking at the wooden ships in the Sombra timeline, I think it's not there in the required size) and cheating out with magic seems less viable here, as there are certain production volume requirements that don't mesh well with smaller workshops. The various advanced materials we see ponies using, on the other hand, are always used for smaller objects, and never for infrastructural works.
I don't think we will ever have an answer in canon, but I'm pretty sure none of the points above are contradicted either and are, I think fairly reasonable. I'm glad to be proven wrong, though.
4721604
Actually, less than plastics, at least by total volume of space it would need to occupy, and the same considerations as for plastics – using magic as part of the technology chain – also apply.
4721588
This is a very clever idea, which I like a lot. Unfortunately there’s a wrinkle in it:
While airships may stay aloft by hanging under a captive cloud and change altitude using their normal means of propulsion, balloons also have the same problem, but do not have any means of propulsion.
We see a balloon rise up with no provocation or propulsion whatsoever, for example, in Spike at Your Service.
Any ideas for a piece of cloud physics that would explain this while being consistent with everything else we know about pony clouds?
4721604
My problem with idea that pony doesn't have industrialization are railroads, manehattan bridge, manehattan skyscrapers and hydroelectric dam near Ponyville. All these things require lots of quality steel and cement. And I doubt that you can smelt tens of thousands tons of steel for a bridge in town smithery.
4722010
Well, if magic can supply each step of the pretty long chain that is required for such a technology and keep it still at a reasonable cost, then yes. But I kinda feel that this is an inelegant solution. I am aware that those abound in our messy, complicated reality, but in this specific case, it seems to amount to an awful lot of very specific materials, tools, and processes used for a thing with, as far as we have seen, limited distribution. Possible, no doubt there, but less than optimal.
4722013
My point is more that the industrialization is limited. We see a couple of very large projects that require a lot of steel but don't see a wide distribution of the infrastructure that we suppose comes from such an industrial base. If you have one blast furnace supplying all the steel nationwide, then you can build expensive railroads and a couple of large projects requiring it. I once made a back of the envelope calculation regarding the Pony of Liberty statue in Manehattan. Even with the copper at 100x its price in our reality, it would still be a viable vanity project, but creating a giant telephone network would be prohibitive. It is possible to have smaller regions (or cities) with enough bleeding edge tech if you invest enough money in it.
The kind of industrialization we talk about, the pervasive, modern type that allows our civilization to work, shapes the environment in a visible way, even if we are used to it and don't see it anymore. Factories require supplies, which require other factories, which require large-scale mining operations, which require the educational infrastructure to form enough engineers to plan it. And all that requires an outlet for the produced goods and a communication system.
4722020
Well, we don't see all that much of Equestria period. We see Canterlot, Manehattan (small part of it), Las Pegasus and a couple of small towns. That all. So even if the distribution of the infrastructure exists we never have a chance to see it because of the show itself not about pony factories, industry or infrastructure. It's about six mares that live in small town.
4722025
Which means we can basically go either way, depending on our preferences.
I think that, taking the show at face value, the clues point to a limited to almost inexistent industrialization with the rare, occasional glimpse of larger structures being the exceptional project done for science or to solve specific issues, rather than the rule. That's my whole point, really.
4722030
Yeah. I see all sorts of fics. From one where all advanced stuff you see in a show ponies buy from their more advanced neighbours to a one where they launched their first rocket in space.
4722012
A network of some sort of wind or pegasus-magic streams set up to make balloons go places? You need something like that anyway to justify how commonly balloons are used to simply travel long distances from A to B. In Not Asking For Trouble Pinkie travels in Twilight's balloon from Ponyville to Yakyakistan, rising and landing without any apparent means to influence its movement.
The sword in S6e19 that parents are prepared to give their child seems notable in that they are thus-prepared and at least semi-willing for the Cutie Mark Fulfillment.
which suggests that it's more like snowshoveling sidewalks than lawnmowing in that it is a Civic Good, possibly mandated. (Had I been on art direction, that would have been a tamping machine instead).
4721789
Fashion requires horseshoes.
4721914
Changelings are best race, because they have a global superset of capability (must, in order to carry out any long-term infiltrations) and are a reproducing race, unlike
alicornswingèd unicorns one-offs.4722543
Prove they have a global superset of capability, and maybe.
We've had two episodes demonstrating changelings as being really bad at impersonation (both changeling finales), and being hungry enough can just break their cover on muscle memory (Thorax's first appearance). You can just about prove they might have evolved shapeshifting abilities in order to protect the loved ones that they most reasonably evolved to be symbiotic with. Prove their abilities are actually genetically suited to impersonation in any but the most superficial ways? I'll need citations.
4722570
Can't *prove*, unfortunately; it's all circumstantial on "nobody knows what a changeling is in modern times" ("Canterlot Wedding") which means they never got caught in living memory…and changelings are at least the millennium of vanished villains old, if you believe Starswirl accidentally loosed them from the tree as FIENDship comics show. They feed on love (at least to some degree), which means they have to have been infiltrating all along; nutritional shortages lasting a millennium would result in extinction*. That means no mistakes that get out in living memory, which is a ludicrously high success rate. Even a modest success rate would require talent emulation, considering pony society is built so tightly around cutie-mark talents…
Obvious counterarguments: It's possible they had access to the luvcats or similar for most of their history and Chrysalis is a new dum-dum (incompatible with tree-origin, she's visible there…perhaps she just went around the twist recently, though); they've been sealed away (volcano?) and just forgotten, eating only non-love doesn't kill them, only makes them sociopathic(or holey)…
or the obvious option "Starswirl was timetraveling forward when he released changelings" (does that comic say a date to prevent this?)
ed: missed more obvious possible counterscenario: they're foreign (see "Bridle Gossip", "Griffin the Brush-off" for pony ignorance of foreigners)
4722604
I mean, other counterarguments if we're willing to entertain movie as canon is that there's a whole lot of southerly space that doesn't trust equines, and generally looks like trash. There is kind of like most of a planet that we haven't seen.
4722641
oh, right, I hadn't updated the argument to account for the last few seasons' confirmation of "can turn into nonponies, inanimate objects, size-unrestricted", which damages the argument a fair bit…except that nonponies also seem not to love anywhere near as much.
4722772
One could make the case that nonpony species reasoned the best way to fight changelings was to starve them, and so a conscious shift in attitude gradually fostered more anti-social national identities, whereas Equestria is only a recent changeling battleground (which may in part be because the anti-social behavior of other races slowed down the changelings so much).
This is an incredibly interesting post and I loved reading it.
However, you missed something really important:
Nope! Sorry for throwing a massive wrench into your post, but you've forgotten about Vinyl Scratch's MP3 player in Slice of Life. Or, more specifically, her headphones, which are either wireless or have an integrated music player.
This is one of those times where you kind of just have to yell "Magic!" because I have no idea how this fits with the rest of Equestria's technology level.
4730884
Magnetic recording is a pre-war technology for us here. Wire recorders, in fact, have been remarkably compact as early as 1940s. If you can make them with analog integrated circuits, yes, you can fit them into earphones sized for pony ears. You could squeeze a straight up Walkman in there…
No magic and no digital required. :) That said, I can imagine a few ways magic could be used to record audio on crystals and play them back, which would be even more compact. These would be mostly optical. Ever heard of LaserDisc? Analog technology, too.
4730911 Fair enough, I suppose, but you'd have to really squeeze it in there. I can't imagine fitting my old Walkman in those headphones, taking into account that a lot of that space has to be used for, y'know, the headphones.
Your idea of recording audio on crystals seems much more likely to me than trying to make it work with human technology.
As always, a facinating blog post
Cannons also appear in the show proper and they seem widespread enough for a bunch of rednecks to have a couple:
derpicdn.net/img/2015/11/14/1022721/large.jpeg
Interestingly, Hooffields in the same episode only used catapults.
Uh... It looks like some IDW don't see the show or don't care. In Friendship Is Magic number sixty-six ponies suddenly have 'magic lantern show" instead of normal movies.
4866052
That’s why they’re “secondary canon”.
How about a section on architecture?
Most houses in Ponyville are constructed of wattle and daub with thatched roofs and jetties (that is, the upper floors extend several feet beyond the ground floors). IRL, these styles and building materials date back to the Middle Ages; the Doylist reason for these houses was almost certainly to give Ponyville more of a fantasy feeling. The Watsonian reason? Well, nowhere else in Equestria uses this style (IIRC)—and Canterlot uses more modern architecture, even though it’s canonically older than Ponyville. And the flashbacks from “Family Appreciation Day” show that the original Sweet Apple Acres farmhouse was an all-timber building with no jetties, and the first wave of city expansion didn’t match up with the current style either. So all Ponyville’s superficially old houses are actually more recent construction. I’m almost certain the city planners chose this intentionally quaint architecture for the sake of drawing in more tourists.
But the reason I bring this up is because of the drawbacks associated with jettying, and the implications for worldbuilding. IRL, in cities where the streets were already crowded, widened upper floors could reduce space between buildings to almost nothing. The city of Rouen banned jetties in 1520 for cutting off air circulation (this was back when the medical authorities thought “bad air” caused the Black Death). London banned jetties in 1667 (the year after the Great Fire) for posing a serious fire hazard. So, the prevalence of jetties in Ponyville: are they just another example of ponies lacking structural safety codes? Or perhaps evidence that ponykind never lost a major city to fire or suffered a pandemic that could be attributed to “bad air”, so they never needed to ban this architecture?
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By this time, I think it should be a separate post, as that goes beyond little additions… Also, I’m nowhere as well versed in architecture as I am in the history of XIX-XX century technology, someone else would have to do it – there are things I just don’t notice.
I’m not above linking to posts by others in a see-also section at all, though, hint-hint.
Fizzlepop’s home village in the movie and comics, in particular, uses a similarly quaint but different style. So does Stratusburg in Top Bolt… Nowhere else uses jetties that I remember.
As I keep telling people.
We know little to nothing about safety codes or lack thereof in Equestria. However, it is reasonable to believe they never needed to ban jetties:
4931644
I can’t name specific instances, but I recall your recaps have wondered about lack of guardrails, lack of barriers around construction sites, and the number of disasters and close calls that a functional equivalent of OSHA should have been able to prevent.
4931866
I think you’re misremembering, it’d be out of character for me to worry much about this.
However, the important part is that even observations like these don’t tell us whether ponies have regulations preventing this behavior or not: They could just as well have such regulations, but routinely ignore them for cultural reasons, and we would not be able to tell between those two alternatives.
Where's the "Like" button for blog posts?
I remember watching Connections back in the 90s
Cloud Chambers were originally developed for weather research
They had problems with it & asked a physicist for help fixing it
This led to the deduction that subatomic particles existed.
For Pegasi, Cloud Chambers are probably a grade school science lab tool
This plausibly means that ponies have AT LEAST a 1930s level understanding of atomic physics
& possibly a 1960s level (sub subatomic particles (quarks)).
I THINK that you need computers to do enough math for String Theory
5143506
Certainly a possibility.
First, you need general relativity and quantum mechanics, for the string theory to try to bridge the two as a theory of quantum gravity. Now, quantum mechanics is mentioned explicitly, but there’s no clear sign of relativity theory, it may be known or it may not be.
What is even more important is that it’s clear that the size of the Pony Earth is anomalous for its apparent surface gravity, so pony understanding of gravity might well be skewed in unusual ways, being either much more advanced or much less advanced than ours.
And that not considering that string theory is kind of a crude overcomplicated hack for what it’s supposed to do, and isn’t the only theory competing for the spot right now. Ponies might have something entirely different, possibly even involving theory of magic.