Ghost on Worldbuilding 2—The Teleology of Technology -or- Revolvers in Equestria, Yay or Neigh? · 4:47pm Jul 13th, 2015
Hello my readers... uh. Um. Damn. Plum ran out of adjectives.
Mm...ah!
Hello my readers augusti et augustae!
Well. It'll have to do. For now.
(Warning: Long post is loooooong. If you just want the Equestria bit without me ranting about... oooh, all manner of thing, just read sections I, V, and VI.)
I—Colt Revolvers?
So. Let's say I write a scene in which, threatened, Dotted Line pulls out a revolver from his saddlebags. How many would be thrown clear out of the story by the technological/tonal incongruity? Previous experience shows that it would be quite a number of you. Not a few found issue with the word 'sniper' used in my last story even though said snipers were armed with more appropriate (?) crossbows.
In retrospect I missed a perfect opportunity to use the phrase 'marksmare.' Ah well. L'esprit d'escalier, and all that.
But are crossbowmares more appropriate than snipers? Why aren't there guns in Equestria?
The first question to answer is, of course, what technology level Equestria is at in the show, and therein lies a problem. What, exactly, is a 'technology level' and what assumptions does the use of that term hide when we use it to describe a fictional world, especially one we are building?
It's easy to catalog a sample of the technological advances Equestria has: steam engines, regular rail service, airships, refractive telescopes, typewriters[1], lasers[2], hydroelectrical power generation[3], X-ray machines, moving pictures, &c &c &c.
If we look at when our own civilization produced some of those things (1712, 1830, 1852, 1608, 1873, 1960, 1881, 1896, and 1895) and allow for some time for some of them to enter standard use[4] we can guesstimate the technology level of Equestria to be, roughly, that of 1960 in our own world[5]. 1960! Forget revolves, that should mean that we ought to accept the fine folks of the Equestrian Armed Forces fielding 20mm rotary cannons. My Little Pony: Friendship is Miniguns.
Right?
And now we reach the hidden assumption in the talk of 'tech levels.' The hidden assumption is that the advance of technology follows a fixed, predetermined path which can, then, be divided into levels that are consistent between societies. That there is, in short, a teleology in how technology develops: an end goal. Is there, though?
Well, as so often the answer is probably both yes and no. As in, yes there are regularities in how technology develops, and no the sequence and exact nature of developments are heavily context-sensitive. This complicated state of affairs is best described, as so many things, by referring to monophyletic cladistic taxonomy.
II—The Evolution of Technology
No! Wait! Don't run away! It's actually simple. When considering traits that arise during the evolution of living beings one runs into two types of traits: parochials and universals. Parochials are traits that arise once and once only, and are often adaptations to unique circumstances or the result of a certain amount of chance. The formal cladistic term is, I believe, autapomorphy[6] and while this trait my propagate through the descendants of the species in which it arose, it has only arisen once and won't do so again.
The alternative is 'homoplasy' which is a new and fancy term for a concept commonly referred to as 'convergent evolution.' Fancy terminology aside, the idea is brutally simple: physics demands that the solutions to certain problems be similar and so, say, the shape of 'underwater fast hunt-y thing' is pretty consistent in quite divergent groups. There's generally a streamlined torpedo-like thing in groups such as bony fish, cartilaginous fish, and mammals that swims fast and hunts things.
My favorite example of homoplasy is the eye which has evolved something like over twenty times entirely separately. The eye of a cuttlefish is astonishingly like the eye of a human despite our last common ancestor probably being a largely blind worm-thing. Even more amusing is the case of a spookfish with the sciency name of Bathylychnops exilis which appears to have evolved eyes twice. The reason for this is that light-sensitive chemicals are all over the place[7] and being able to see is pretty much always useful.
If you look you can find all sorts of other homoplasties. Like the long-boney-finger-to-hunt-grubs-with modification which happened to the Aye-aye and the Striped Possum despite the two being different orders which is forced by (1) neither of the animals living in a habitat where there's woodpeckers which normally exploit the resource of grubs in wood (2) the ratio and size of fingers in tetrapods apparently being easy to evolve considering how many creatures have specialized their fingers/hands[8].
III—Technology Rules
Certain things, then, you would expect to see everywhere and certain others are product of some unique context and we won't see again except where inherited. Technological evolution ought to be similar enough. The key thing is to identify universals/parochials ahead of time and act accordingly when plotting the technological history of your fictional world. But how can you tell an universal is an universal? Especially for an alien civilization?
Well, in absence of real alien civilizations I'm going to offer some very very approximate rules-of-hoof[9] in order to identify universals[10]: They have to have a plausible origin, satisfy an existing need, and be on a smooth gradient. A plausible origin simply means that there must be a mechanism by which your technological advance could be found. That means that either nature does it, and you are copying from it, you have the scientific principles to explain it and can, therefore, derive it, or it can be assembled from things you already have if you fiddle with them enough.
The first scenario is simple enough: penicillin is a natural byproduct and once found, effort was made to understand and synthesize it. The second scenario is the atomic bomb. Certain scientific advances were made (explanation of the mass defect, &c) and were then deliberately employed in order to create a piece of technology from scratch[11]. This is the popular image of technological progress but it is a relatively recent invention. The 'assemble from things you already have' origin is shockingly common and basically refers to those inventions who came about because of the assembly of components that already existed and did separate things all on their own. This is quite common, actually, and the most triumphant example is the bicycle. Nothing like it exists in nature, not only was it not developed from first principles, we still don't really know what makes bicycles work[12], and it was assembled pretty much by someone playing with wheels and wooden frames for a lark.
But an origin isn't (usually) enough. Certainly, sometimes someone makes something just to see if it can be done and you get one of those 'solutions in search of a problem' deals like the laser (it's rather amusing that we now use them for everything imaginable), but most of the time you design something to satisfy a certain need. Take the steam engine. The technology needed to start work on one was present, possibly, even in antiquity but it only really developed when there was a commercial need for it, i.e. when you needed so much physical labor in very specific locations that the early ornery steam engines were worth it.
Now, you might think that the steam engine is exceptionally useful in so many areas that it was inevitable, and you are sort of right. A modern high-pressure post-Watt design—yeah, that can (and did!) find use in every branch of industry and change the world. But to get to that stage you need people putting up with the annoying early designs which were inferior to already mature water power which was (alongside the cam) already powering industry since the high middle ages. And that's the point of the 'smooth gradient' requirement. Throughout history technologies were generally only developed when the need was pressing enough that the teething problems and the expense of an entirely new technology could be justified. And this use allowed the quality of the technological solution to slowly ratchet up becoming applied more and more frequently as quality rose and prices dropped.
There are exceptions, especially when people try to prototype a technology they hope will be economic in the future, as is the case with, say, the ITER project to harness fusion, but that's mostly an artifact of the modern age[13]. That said, I can remember a relatively old example of a secret project: In the early renaissance Portugal investigated navigation techniques for its navy with exceptional thoroughness and with what appears to the modern eye to be a very modern attitude to R&D and secrecy.
IV—Why Do I Care About This, Again?
Now the reason you might care about this sort of thing is if you want to worldbuild and want to give your world an interesting technological makeup. Most of the time, synthetic worlds are either futuristic (which is a can of worms for another time), or simply fall under some Earthly era, most commonly a sort of theme-park version of the middle ages or, lately, steampunk.
And, sure, this works, but it does mute the palette with which you work. Technology colors everything we do even if your story is not a tech-fest: just writing down a letter is a entirely different experience depending on the century you are in, let alone posting it. And if you are a dedicated world-builder you can't ignore the massive effects technology has on the development of your fictive societies.
I contend that considering what your society might use and how they use it leads to a richer-feeling world and can produce wonders you might not have thought of if you just go "Oh, it's just like us except with circuits/gears/runes stuck on top." Of course, you needn't replicate the technological development of an entire species in your head. Do what all the greats do: steal. Specifically, steal technologies that never were in our world but could have developed if the socioeconomic situation was different.
An example? Certainly!
Consider the late, great, lamented Sir Terry Pratchett and the 'Clacks' system of the Discworld. Pratchett used it to play with Internet-y jokes and to write commentary on the effect of communications on the world, and to do so while maintaining the fantasy-ish feel of the world he invented a sort of clockpunk telegraph system of semaphore towers criss-crossing the land.
Except, of course, he didn't.
The semaphore system—pretty much like it was described in the Discworld books—was used in France in the 18th and early 19th century. It was designed by the Chappe brothers and it covered the length and breadth of the land, conveying messages from one end of France to the other within an hour or so. It wasn't just used in France, either. Britain had a (more modest, admittedly) system which even used the 'six shuttered boxes' design. The last line using what was known as 'optical telegraphy closed in 1880.
We only had the electrical telegraph dominate because we also got the railways that made the countries effectively smaller allowing for more centralized control which, in turn, allowed for stringing expensive fragile copper cables all over the landscape without fearing someone just cutting them down and carting them away. And the railway made for logical and easily-serviceable routes for the telegraph lines to follow and they provided the early demand for telegraphy because of line signaling issues. In a world without a railway or without a government effective enough to protect vulnerable infrastructure, however, Clacks may indeed be the answer.
V—Yeah, But Do Ponies Have Guns?
Well, to answer this, first we need to ask ourselves: are guns parochials or universals?
Gunpowder appears to be pretty universal. It's the result of mixing some fairly common chemical all of which have plenty of other uses. Besides, ponies have fireworks. They have gunpowder. In fact, given their general level of materials technology (they have movie stock for a start) they almost certainly have nitrocellulose, too. In doing chemistry (which ponies certainly do, if the laboratories we've seen are any way to judge) you are pretty much guaranteed to run into explosives whether you want to, or not. Frequently, in fact, exactly when you desperately don't want to run into any explosives at all.
The idea of making an open piston in order to launch something, well, that requires only the most basic of mechanical engineering. And since ponies appear to possess steam engines and turbines and so on, well, they have this level of mechanical engineering. All that's required is to imagine what would happen if your steam engine's main piston wasn't held down and then asking yourself "But how do I make steam on demand?"
So they have guns?
Well. Sort of. I mean, they must have cannons. Pinkie has a party cannon and while Pinkie is... y'know. Pinkie, when she calls it a 'cannon' nobody asks "What on earth do you mean by that word?" or "Why did you name it after a bit of your leg?" or "Why did you name it after ecclesiastical law?" But they may not have the revolvers this story started with. Why? Well, the things above are universals, certainly, but guns as we understand them aren't just 'tubes that launch projectile using stored chemical energy with deadly intent.' They also imply some other things such as being the standard military weapon and being portable and intended for the use of one person and so on and so forth. These are probably at least a little bit parochial.
Why? Well today's guns are marvelous things. Precise. Efficient. Light. Deadly. But they do represent about five hundred years of psychotic devotion to the improvement of this one technology during which we've run field trials of this technology that have taken well north of a hundred million lives. Original guns were terrible.
They didn't shoot anything like straight—you aimed the front bit at the massed foe and hoped for the best. They were dangerous for the user—they often exploded in the user's hands. The had a spectacularly limited rate of fire and would foul up and require arduous cleaning after a remarkably small number of shots. They were short-ranged and weak—true, their caliber was by modern standards preposterously huge, but the irregular balls they fired slowed down right quick once they left the muzzle. Early hand-gonnes didn't actually have enough whoomph to go through armor at all rendering them essentially pointless. It wasn't until the matchlock (which took some two hundred years of development) that you had a weapon that would reliably kill your foe. Provided you hit them. Which you won't.
And during this entire time, there was this thing called a longbow which would trivially outrange a smoothbore musket by a factor of two and would go through armor well enough to give the world, say, Agincourt or Crécy. And it could sustain a rate of fire of six rounds a minute, which wouldn't be exceeded until the advent of magazine loaded rifles. Eventually rifled weapons would beat it easily, yes, but when the gun was invented, the longbow (and to an extent the crossbow[14]) were just better. So why even use the gun?
Because in order to have archers, especially those which could fire with deadly accuracy and strength you needed to start them training early. Very early. The ideal time was to start with their grandfather, actually. Now this wouldn't be much of a problem but, first, the world's most enthusiastic longbow users (that'd be the English) had a bit of a personnel crisis due to the Black Death which led to the greater emancipation of the peasant class which, therefore, wouldn't practice archery as they were legally mandated to do. Second, no nobleman likes the notion of turning their peasants into a lean mean killing machine and then leaving them their weapons because they had to practice. And most importantly, Europe was just then going into about five hundred years of pretty much uninterrupted warfare and they needed many more troops. And training someone to point a gun in a vague direction and pull a trigger is much faster.
And so guns were used and refined and used and refined until we got the modern version which is superior to any bow you'd care to name. But only because the kings of early modern Europe needed a lot of cheap cannon fodder very quickly.
So they don't have guns?
Well... sorta. You see the problem is that if they made some now they have the existing pieces and the scientific savvy(there's your origin) to make them much, much better than the early models I mocked above. Probably not as good as ours, since we had so much time to practice, but probably pretty damn good. That rather solves the problem of a smooth gradient, doesn't it? Okay, fine. But do they have a need for them?
Well, let me answer this way. To you, the day a huge monster stomps into your town and eats a few buildings would be the most horrifying day of your life. To your average pony, it's Tuesday. So... yeah. I'd say they have a pressing need for some five rounds, rapid.
VI—Stop Stalling and Answer the Bloody Question!
Okay, okay. Look. The point is that the question of how well armed ponies are is interesting to consider because it has no clear immediate answer and because it allows us to think about alternative technological routes which is interesting. Well, to me it is, at any rate. Presumably it is interesting to you too, if you've lasted this long[15]. But there's still a need for the answer: Would Dotted Line pull out a revolver? Well, first, no he wouldn't because he's planned this whole thing and a bunch of guards are waiting on the other side of that door. Obviously. Second, do we want him to?
I mean, it is fiction after all. Nobody says we have to take the most probable outcome of our considerations. So, do we want ponies to have guns? Well the impression I get[16] is that by and large people just feel that guns in Equestria are wrong. They don't fit the tone. A cinema, or a telegraph, or something like that is fine, but shotguns, say, just aren't. So how do we justify this in a way that makes sense?
Well, I'm going to take my own advice for once and steal. Specifically I'm going to steal Frank Herbert's idea. See, let's say that magic exists which can trivially shield someone from bullets. Something moving that fast, well, that's easy for magic to deflect because it is so obvious. The subtle blade of the kindjal[17], on the other hand, slips right through and so armament evolution of Equestria went another way. They still use cannons, certainly, explaining why Pinkie could make one fire parties and presumably even might have tanks[18], but combat between individual soldiers is all about cold steel and hot spells. Which just so happens to fit what we all want to be the case. The only chemical explosives used by your average soldier anywhere on Epona are grenades which are harder to deflect and may be used in an anti-materiel context or to deny cover.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :)
[1] Bad Horse, whose brilliant essays on every subject this blog post is trying to imitate—ineffectively, I'm sure—wrote a characteristically elegant and detailed disquisition on the subject of Equestrian typewriters.
[2] The MMMystery episode. Out of the mouth of Twilight Sparkle no less.
[3] It's About Time. It appears to use wireless power transmission, no less. Tesla would be proud.
[4] The local hospital in Ponyville has an x-ray machine and a lightbox for displaying x-rays as standard. So it can be assumed that this has been invented some time ago.
[5] This, incidentally, is my own pet theory which is why whenever Dotted Line talks about rocket propellants he talks about the concerns that a rocket propellant chemist would have had in the 1950s-1960s. He mentions, for instance, the use of lithium borohydride as a freezing point depressant for hydrazine even though modern storable hydrazine is typically achieved with UDMH and MMH. And, yes, I worked this out solely in order to please the shade of John D. Clark.
[6] WARNING: Ghost is not a biologist. Ghost is a computer scientist with delusions of competency. Do not write down anything he says onto, like, a Biology AP exam or use information gleaned from a blog post discussing whether fictional pastel ponies have firearms or not to design containment procedures for biohazard level 4 pathogens, because if you do we shall all be killed.
[7] The chemical reactivity of atoms is focused on the outer parts of their electron shells and that's exactly what a passing photon can hit and make interesting. In fact, if a passing photon has enough punch everything in your body, say, can be considered light-sensitive. We just happen to call that sort of light 'ionizing radiation' and we are rightly terrified of it.
[8] Our beloved ponies walk on their fingers, after all. And three separate groups of tetrapods, quite unrelated, have evolved to fly by futzing with how their hands/fingers work (pterosaurs, dinosaurs/aves, and bats, of course).
[9] Like rules of thumb, but even less precise.
[10] WARNING: Ghost is not a historian of science either and his delusions of competence are still as delusional as ever. Only apply his harebrained ideas to safely fictional universes, and even then take care.
[11] A less famous but more amusing example is when Einstein first beheld a refrigerator he was annoyed at how ineffective it was so he made a better one from first principles leading to the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator design which requires no moving parts whatsoever.
[12] Look at this video for instance.
[13] Which is the age where we've tried to control the flow of technology by systematizing research and development imposing, thus, a sort of teleology on its evolution, much in the same way we are imposing a teleology on every aspect of change we can.
[14] I've shot a crossbow. The thing might as well be shooting lasers. It goes where you point it, it has virtually no recoil, and the one I used which was essentially a toy went through a wooden door. Scary stuff.
[15] I commend your patience!
[16] Do tell me otherwise in the comments if you disagree. I'd be interested to hear why.
[17] Dune reference. The true nerds among you will understand, I'm sure. :)
[18] Which is why Tank was named, uh. Tank.
The likelihood they would actually call a tank "a tank" is... kind of low, actually. Tank was the codename used during the development of armoured self-propelled vehicles, forming part of the admittedly flimy cover story that they were some sort of water transport. Or possibly a giant whisky barrel for Sir Winston. They were originally going to be termed "Landships".
Of course it could be a translation convention. After all, they can't be speaking English. They're aliens.
That point on wireless power transmission is interesting. A world where Tesla's ideas became the primary means of power generation and transmission would seem very nearly magical compared to our own. Of course, beings used to the concept of spooky action at a distance probably would develop electricity transmission in a similar manner to the natural phenomena they were used to.
Two arguments for guns in Equestria.
1. Griffons. Those claws are just as dextrous, and their eyes are eagle sharp. Long range rifles would be their specialty.
2. Minotaurs. Again, it comes down to hands. While I can see them wanting to gore opponents, longer range weaponry could evolve, starting with bows, to crossbows, to guns. We already know gunpowder exists, because Trixie uses fireworks, so we have all the ingredients we need for invention.
Having made the weapons, we now ask would ponies have them? Earth Ponies and Pegasi, likely not. But unicorns... possibly. It comes down to being able to aim and fire properly.
I have thoughts on this subject!
Alas, I am at work and cannot fully reply until later.
You weren't kidding when you said it was long were you Ghosty!!!!
Will need to take the day off, open up the old lap top and put my spectacles on to read this properly!
(On my phone at the minute)
Hello, our host arch & affable!
I've always thought of bows as unicorn weapons; you levitate the whole thing, manipulate the string and arrow with your field, and probably get a rather frightening rate of fire for a competent unicorn archer. Crossbows seem much more like an Earth pony thing, especially big nasty arbalests used by teams of two ponies; one carries the bow on their back, the other aims, loads and shoots. Not sure which of them would crank it.
And yes, crossbows are damn scary weapons. There's a reason why at least one Pope tried to ban their use against fellow Christians (but those nasty Saracens and Turks were fair game!)... and the same reason is why nobody gave a fig about the ban. They were way too effective to ignore.
And while we're on missile weapons, I can see pegasi pelting their enemies with darts and javelins from above. Slings, too, seem like something ponies might well use, and unlike what multiple editions of D&D has taught us, slings are also damn nasty and very, very effective.
On the overall tech level of Equestria, I'm imagining something like early 20th century, but with more emphasis on high-quality handicrafts over mass production, magitech taking the role of most electronics, and some odd advances and omissions on account of ponies being, well, small pastel magic horses in a surprisingly nice niche (thanks to the local physical goddesses) of a pretty dangerous fantasy world.
Having thought about it a little more, the thing about guns, the reason they and any other form of projectile weapon were invented, is to enhance our ability to throw rocks. That's all they are in the end. Extremely advanced, artificial rock-chucking arms.
Why would ponies develop such things in the first place? Ignoring Pinkie's party canon for a moment, consider the pony shape. It isn't optimised for flinging things at large distances, at least not in the way we'd do so. We have these arms that can swing through a huge range of motion and that are pretty damn good at flinging things long distances at high speed. Basically we're a walking catapult. Add a sling and we're a trebuchet.
Ponies aren't built to throw. They're built to kick and bite and generally be bastards to you, but they aren't built to throw. A unicorn might consider telekinetic propulsion of a projectile, but they might equally consider simply blasting things in the face with raw magic. With that in mind I'd imagine that any sort of weapon development - amongst unicorns at least - would be toward the means of enhancing and refining that ability. They'd either develop means of focusing telekinesis as a means of propelling a projectile, or they'd develop some means of refining and increasing the power of a pure magical attack - essentially, creating a laser powered by a unicorn brain.
The limitation of the unicorn's own initial power may be a consideration, but with refinement and research they may eventually find a way to eliminate the need for a unicorn's own power in the first place. Imagine, then, a squad of unicorns toting these little weird devices over their horns that shoot a narrow, searing beam of focused "fuck you" at anything they're looking at. Ponies with frikken laser beams on their heads.
Meanwhile Earth Ponies have invented the cannon because they understand the use of percussive force to propel objects over large distances, but they don't shrink it down because they can't see the point.
The Pegasi would develop something from clouds and lightning. Why do you need a gun when you can just electrocute everything?
So few people ever considered the way magic effects these things...
With regard to the lasers, since they were only seen in a Pinkie Pie fantasy sequence, it's possible that they're only theoretical in Equestria. Einstein established the theoretical foundation in 1917, and beams of coherent light are interesting enough that they could've become commonplace in equine science fiction. Even if that weren't the case, Pinkie Pie, avid engineer that she is, certainly could've heard of them.
Or they're magical lasers. That's the thing; when the world has an extra fundamental force, there's a whole new dimension for technological development to consider (and a much wider variety of nature to crib designs from.) Take the Apples' refrigerator in "Somepony to Watch Over Me." Electrical, magical, or magically electrical? Clarke's Third Law and Heterodyne's Corollary can work hand in hand.
As for the question of guns in Equestria? Well, I'm not going for the slow knife passing through the shield, but the thing about firearms is that recoil and hooves don't mix well. The minotaurs? Maybe. Ponies? Probably not. The ergonomics aren't insurmountable, especially not if there are hoof-compatible crossbows, but what they have works.
Ponies don't have guns because a third of their population is Cyclops. See the following example; assume Batman = Earth Ponies and Superman = Unicorns.
seanbaby.com/superfriends/images/batman5.jpg
The Friendship Magic Rainbow Kingdom Castle (reorder those words at will using 1d5) is really a giant focusing apparatus for Twilight's Beam Cannon. Which would incidentally be a great name for Season 5 Episodes 25 and 26.
3234587
I don't have the episodes handy at work. Have we ever seen ponies possess or use actual DOT Class C fireworks? Or did Trixie conjure illusions of fireworks, complete with auditory (and possibly olfactory) components?
Is it weird that while reading a giant wall of text on the technological advancements of a fictional world that i still ended up laughing to the point of tears at some points in it? And on a more serious note I cant remember how you portrayed the griffon's in your story's but if you look at the shows cannon the only other nations we are are aware of are the crystal empire(which at the moment is run by the niece of celestia so the chances of conflict there are few), griffonstone(which appears to be a third world country and before that the population was to busy fighting themselves for anything else.) and yakyakistan(which might actually be a threat depending on how serious the prince yak was on the declaration of war.) no word on whether or not the zebras and minotours have there own country and the dragons appear to just be these huge solitary creatures which sleep in whatever cave they find for a century or two. If the europeans advanced in gun technology due to the large amount of warfare and conflict during the time the lack of it in equestria(at least that which was not solved by the princesses or elements of harmony at one point.) there would not be a overwhelming need for town defense past what the local mage could provide.
Because of the length, I'm going to try reacting to your post as I read along, which will account for the fractured nature of my comments below. (It will also excuse anything stupid I happen to type... hopefully.)
There's nothing wrong with going back and editing in your little bit of staircase wit! Fics aren't set in stone!
Yeah, those do look like Tesla towers on the generator house of the dam, don't they? I don't think that's a coincidence.
At last count, the eye has evolved separately some 43 times, including one in a bacterium that is composed of molecules, rather than cells.
The crossbow is indeed a scary weapon. It's main advantage was that it took most of the skill out of marksmanship. Aiming a bow well is an indirect art, and takes years of practice achieve competency. Aiming a crossbow simply means looking down the shaft of the quarrel and lining it up with one's target. Guns were even more untrained-user friendly.
...aaand you covered that in the next section. Never mind.
Your impression aligns with my feelings about the matter, and your reasoning seems sound. I do have a couple of supporting ideas to add, however.
1) If confronted with the possibility of an enemy employing gunpowder weapons such as cannons and grenades, a smart strategist would work diligently at an area-effect spell that would ignite gunpowder from a distance, turning the intended weapons into serious disadvantages. Guns would then only be useful in civil situations. Would there then be enough pressure for them to be developed? A large catapult or two ought to be a simpler solution to the Tuesday Monster problem.
2) This post is framed in the context of technological evolution, without giving time to the competing theory: Intelligent Design... or, rather, Intelligent Interference. Maybe Princess Celestia doesn't like guns. Maybe she has already developed the spell I mentioned above, and many more that would actively prevent the development of gunpowder weapons. By the evidence, she is a dearly beloved monarch, but keeping small, easily concealable weapons out of the hooves of the populace might be a wise precaution, nevertheless.
Thanks for the fun and thoughtful post!
First, a tangential:
Oh, eyes, eyes, eyes. Aren't they just fantastic? From what I recall, we have three and a half counts of effective camera eyes evolving independently: Vertebrates, molluscs, and arthropods. (Portia spiders, in particular, have a visual acuity that can compete with that of cats. I feel like they tend to get short shrift compared to other cool animals like octopuses and stomatopods.) The half a point goes to box jellyfish for having eyes that, while pretty simple, are still impressive for a jellyfish.
Anyway, as for the main topic, and speaking as someone who isn't in the slightest a dedicated worldbuilder and glad of the fact:
I wonder if the ponies would have bothered with gunpowder, or explosives, at all. If you have an enchantment that can dump kinetic energy and momentum into something (Tank's propeller), without the risk of explosions, missing eyes and the like ... well, the decision seems obvious.
Or maybe you just power your guns with springs. Pony materials tech, at least, puts all of ours to shame.
3234804 In Magic Duel, those are illusion, best I can figure. But in Boast Busters, she has a setup on her stage with bottle rockets that make a wheel spin (Huh, irony that she comes to distrust them later) Some of what she does is just illusion, but clearly Equestria has at least rudimentary gunpowder.
I'd go on to say, any firearms they possessed would be rare, and a pony possessing them would be rarer still.
"Bullets are expensive and hard to come by."
Ponies and guns dont seem feasible to me for a couple reasons. And ive seen this done in other fics. Where the guns are identical to earth guns. How do ponies pull the trigger? Unicorns yes magic, but still who would make a weapon they cant even use? I could see a lever on the side thats pulled but still.
Magic and shields would render firearms useless. It also renders combat tactics to be very different from earth based combat. If you enemy has some decently powered or better unicorns, there going to be blasting you to pieces from a distance, and or chucking things at you. You better have somepony capable of catching/deflecting that. Pegasus make things even more challenging. They can just freeze/wash you away. Large scale combat never has to actually be face to face. If it is, it would seem lances, razor sharp armor/hoofboots/shoes, horned helmets would be the main weapons. Melee combat, ponies kicking the crap out of each other. Swords seem silly, the damage to their teeth/mouth/head/neck would be extensive. If they could even hold onto it after the first blow is landed. I could see some ind of blades strapped to pegasus wings, if it could be done without interfering with flight. Not to mention focused bursts of their magic when they kick you would send you flying if not destroy you. They do destroy clouds with kicks and that doesnt seem to take to much effort.
Last thing, video games have screwed folks perceptions of how technology progress's. You have a tech tree and having to learn tech a to unlock tech b and so on. Makes some folks believe that technological advancement is rather linear. and dependent on certain preceding tech advances.
Etymology of Tank's name aside, didn't Cheese Sandwich bring an actual tank into Ponyville?
img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140203121057/mlp/images/thumb/7/7b/Cheese_on_top_of_cannon_S4E12.png/800px-Cheese_on_top_of_cannon_S4E12.png
Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my accordion.
I mean, yeah, Cheese Sandwich. So I suppose the same arguments that applied to Pinkie Pie apply to him as well.
This is tangential to your post about the scientific grounding for the plausibility of guns, but: the reason that modern guns (revolvers, et.al.) simply don't work for me in canon Equestria[1] is that they straight-up invalidate the premise of the show.
Thematically, this is not a show about violence. It's right there in the title: Friendship is Magic. As a practical matter, violence is sometimes necessary — because you will encounter beings of different principles, some of which are going to be in violent conflict with yours (up to and including "eat you") — but the core pony ethos is reconciliation and reformation. Technology gets developed when it fills a need, and violent conquest of Equestrian enemies is not a need that needs filling.
Okay, but what about self-defense?
Practically, we can see the show's premise at work in how those monsters-of-the-week are handled. When something comes in and stomps the town flat, what do they do? They don't dig trenches and pull out the rifles. They send a squadron of six idealistic teenagers out to hoof it in the face for a while. If guns were a better solution than the friendship squadron, we would see them in use.
"Well, yes, Ponyville sends out the girls, but what about the rest of the country?" you ask. Frankly I don't see any evidence that the rest of the country has a monster-of-the-week problem. Keep in mind that Ponyville is uniquely on the edge of the Everfree.
Speaking of the rest of the nation, note that we have seen Canterlot's actual response to external threats:
img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120425132220/mlp/images/thumb/7/7d/Who_Goes_There_S2E25.png/640px-Who_Goes_There_S2E25.png
An active Guard force using melee weapons is a strong signal that there is no need which gunpowder missile-flingers fill.
--
[1] I'm happy to entertain the idea in AUs, but then those AUs need to reflect the changed social circumstances which would make guns make thematic sense. Pony gunland is pony dystopia.
Earth civilizations would be a much better metric for this. Alas, the Eurasian civilizations mixed together pretty early, with ideas percolating back and forth across the continent, meaning that we really mostly have the Eurasian civilizations and the American civilizations, which were much more technologically primitive. And then there were the various much smaller island civilizations, which were stone-aged. We still have some interesting examples between China and Europe, but unfortunately, we can never be quite certain whether or not the technology was independently invented or "researched" (or even just inspired by seeing it somewhere else, as we suspect Rongorongo was).
Writing is a kind of weird piece of technology, actually; the sub-Saharan Africans lacked it for ages and ages, and most of the Native Americans never took up writing, but in both cases nearby civilizations had it and there is no way that they were never exposed. And then the Easter Islanders see it once and are like "Yes, this is a good idea" and immediately made their own. It is strange how people who build huge stone monuments seem to be eager to adopt writing; maybe they simply get the idea that they can finally make future generations listen to them.
Heck, a steam engine existed in antiquity; people just never put it to much practical use as far as we can tell. Of course, they also built a freaking analog computer.
I think one thing worth considering is how much of our technology happened because of our freaky ape bodies. The idea of making ranged attacks may seem obvious to humans, but the number of species on the planet which can make accurate ranged attacks on Earth can be counted on one finger. Humans are freaky things who developed shoulders and the ability to throw objects very accurately at range, an ability we promptly used to kill and eat everything in range. Slings, javelins, bows and arrows, and guns all work on different principles, but all rely on the core idea of "propelling some small object quickly and accurately at a target by a single person". This may seem horribly obvious to us, but we skip stones for fun and even an untrained human being can hit stuff pretty accurately with flung stones. In fact, we do it for fun as children; it is a natural part of play, like predators playing with each other and pretending to "stalk" each other.
It is so cute how we practice murder.
But to creatures other than humans, this may not be at all obvious. It seems obvious to us, but we have the experience of it being possible. If you were a species that didn't develop throwing as a means of hunting, and which were not physiologically adapted to do so, you might see it as a very alien idea - of course you can't do something like that! There is no way you could be accurate. Sure, you can knock stuff around, but how could you hope to actually HIT something on your own?
Of course, there's an interesting theory that the reason we are so good at math is because of the calculations necessary to THROW an object accurately at distance, so maybe this is a universal thing in intelligent species, but I digress.
Unfortunately, all of this wonderful speculation is ruined by the ice archery in the Equestria Games and Applejack destroying those Timber Wolves in Spike At Your Service. Plus unicorns firing magical horn beams at people. On the other hand, these might be highly specialized skills that few ponies possess.
Somewhere out there, there may be an advanced civilization for whom the idea of personal ranged weapons may seem strange because they evolved along different lines. Heck, their brains may not even be wired to do so - aiming quickly and accurately may be a human superpower, along with our freaky endurance.
As far as ponies go... I think one of the biggest practical barriers to the development of personal firearms is the inconvenience of using them. We see in the Equestria Games that their archery consists of them setting up their bows on fixed mounts, more like how we set up machine guns on mounts. This resolves the issue of "How do they aim and fire" - on a fixed mount, this becomes much easier - but such a weapon is not tremendously useful for a normal pony. A pistol would likely require them to strap it to one of their hooves somehow unless they were a unicorn, which reduces one's ability to suddenly draw and fire it (and indeed, a pony hoofgun would likely look wildly different from our pistols, which are designed for human hands). And unicorns can fire magical horn lasers, though we have no idea how common that is - I don't think we've seen even ten unicorns do it, so it may be one of those "only real magic users can do it".
Ponies are quadrapedal, which means that stowing and pulling out their weapons is kind of a necessity for earth ponies anyway - they can stumble along on two hooves, but it isn't their primary mode of locomotion, and is awkward for them. A unicorn would have to maintain constant TK on their gun, which would be bad for night-fighting, and possibly energetically draining. Pegasi and griffons would have the easiest time of using guns - once they're in the air, they have their limbs free for carrying and firing.
So when you're thinking about stuff like this, it may be that their warfare would be more heavily focused on crew-serviced weapons - things like bows or machine guns on chariots, with some ponies pulling and others firing. Indeed, that might be what their "tanks" are - heavily armored things which roll around the battlefield, with someone shooting out from inside the armor while it is pulled around by a crew of ponies which are protected by a large steel shell. Because the idea of personal weapons are out, instead their warfare is more along the lines of such "turtles" or "tanks", which have the added advantage of being harder for pegasi and griffons to attack with lightning, as the outer metallic shell of the object would form a natural Faraday cage. Indeed, they may have developed such as a mode of warfare centuries before we did because of the general inconvenience of setting up their ballistae and bows and other weapons. Someone got the bright idea of carrying them around on chariots, then someone decided to start adding armor (either to protect from enemy projectiles, or to protect from attack from above by pegasi), and a few centuries later you end up with iron tanks with ballistas being drawn around by crews protected by the iron shells.
Meanwhile, the pegasi and griffons can fly around, making them more natural skirmishers, and their ability to summon lightning from ordinary clouds may sharply reduce the value of firearms for them - why develop unreliable, stinky weapons that might explode when you can just carry around clouds, which can also serve as camouflage AND as resting places high above non-flying foes? You could even develop a mobile cloud fortress of sorts, propelled by pegasi, possibly even allowing you to carry around vast amounts of supplies. You could even drop cannonballs from the clouds, which would achieve terminal velocity by the time they hit the ground and certainly cause a fair bit of damage.
Indeed, that might be the origin of cannons in their world - the pegasi and griffons had originally dropped rocks, then large lead balls, and some enterprising earth pony or unicorn realized that you could propel them laterally as well. They don't have to be nearly as accurate, because you're firing at fortifications or those big tanks, and you can stick them on your OWN tanks...
And what sort of crazy pony (other than an archmage who can shield themselves with magic) woudl be foolish enough to venture out onto a battlefield in the first place without a big cover of iron or steel around them?
3234578
Granted on the 'tank' front, but the point is that Rainbow Dash looked at an armored creature and the first thought that came to her head is 'tank!' That rather indicates the armored kind, doesn't it?
3234587
Oh, this isn't an argument against guns in Equestria, necessarily. It's a discussion on what would go into such an argument plus a suggestion on how there might not be guns, since I was under the impression people don't like it.
3234594
Feel free to once you have time. I'm intrigued.
3234620
Sounds very reasonable on all points. And yes, I suspect the Pegasi might actually be greatest fans of gunpowder as adding a warhead is a great way to add oomph to your javelin which, yup, sounds like something they'd like, especially given the Greco-Roman theme they have going on.
3234603
Oh, I never kid about my status as a verbose bastard. Serious Business, that is. Dead serious.
3234728
I generally assume that magic, where not otherwise stated, is merely all-purpose tech-spackle that makes things work. Not an ideal choice, admittedly, but I can't apply Sanderson's law to someone else's world, now can I?
As for using triggers, well, I always assume ponies are as dexterous as we are, but using different methods and adaptations. They can make and use intricate machinery even if they are Earth Ponies: typewriters, cameras, &c.
And finally, why use a bow if you can propel something with telekinesis? Well, actually, I have an idea about that: What a bow really is is a way to store energy. We turn muscle exertion into compression of the bow's wood and then let it go all at once. In fact, all muscle-powered weapons are basically kinetic batteries we charge with our own labor. Even the humble sling is really a way to store motile force by way of orbital momentum (it's really just a stone-age flywheel if you think about it). Well, unicorns might want that too. Twilight notwithstanding, ordinary unicorns can exert about as much force with their TK as they can with their hooves. Some way to store up a greater wallop of energy might be useful, hence a bow or (for them) even better a crossbow. After all they can affect the mechanism directly, and store much more power.
Why not simply use zappotronic horn-things? Well.. do they have any in the show? Only Twilight's been shown to toss around power blasts while a unicorn, hasn't she? Presumably, since most unicorns have one signature spell, and standard-issue TK learning extra spells is hard and so there's probably not that many battlemages so you end up with the same training issues as you had with bows in our world.
That said: magic is important, certainly, but I'm loathe to rely on it overmuch because the show hasn't and won't explain it.
3234739
It's from Pinkie's vision, but Twilight calls them 'lasers.'
And as for magic as I said above, yes, I'm sure it exists, but I always assume it is a general purpose spackle that makes existing devices and machines work better. Why? Well, we've only ever seen Twilight pull off serious pyrotechnics with her magic and she basically doesn't count. Rarity's never zapped anyone. She's more into fashion, sure, but Things have tried to kill her about a thousand times since Twilight came to Ponyville and she's also been enslaved at least once. Wouldn't she learn the requisite zappotronic spells just in case? Also, of course, the show won't ever explain what the limits of magic are so it's a bit pointless to use that to explain something since you are still stuck with something you can't explain.
In my own head the Heterodyne Clause holds with a vengeance. Yes, they have magic, but they've analyzed it to the level of science and for them it is science. If you took apart any pony device you'd likely find magic in a dozen places same way you'd find 'magnetism' in something humans made.
Also, recoil is not a problem. Back-carried pony-portable canons on the back of a ridiculously strong Earth Pony with a second pony there to aim and fire the thing. You'd end up with highly portable field artillery. That's why I made up the shield nonsense. Not that I mean to make any fuss about it. I just like to have things orderly in my brain, is all.
3234804
Well, Twilight is Cyclops. But Twilight is a terrifyingly powerful magical prodigy hyper-dedicated genius. I am going to go and assume they don't have an infinite supply of those. Have we seen any other normal unicorn shoot horn-lasers? Teleport? Rarity can lift things, find gems, and do light illusion work, if memory serves. No death-blasts. And she could have used some over the years.
I'd be more interested in weaponized weather from the Pegasi, honestly. I forgot to take that into consideration.
3234817
My griffins are a vast empire to the east. Zebrica is its own country, and so's Dromedaria, Saddle Arabia, and a whole bunch of other places I've not fleshed out completely. In my head Griffonstone is what I've been calling Northern Griffonstan.
That said, Princess Celestia engineering matters might work. Might. It's a lot of work, especially when you consider foreign inventors. I do like the idea of setting the rounds off remotely with spells. That could work very well to render them an ineffective battlefield weapon.
3234856
Interesting you should say that. I have been considering what to use as a menacing weapon[1] in case I write [adventure] or mystery fics and one option was essentially 'hoof crossbow that re-cocks itself using a magical spring.'
[1] I.e. something the bad guy can wave at the protagonist while they have a tense conversation.
3234924
I know. That's what the whole blog post was about. :) How there's no teleology in technology. The guns were merely a interestingly contentious topic.
3234943
True. And they clearly have the wherewithal to make tracked vehicles with a canon on them because Cheese Sandwich or not, we are looking at one in that picture.
3235092
I'm not asking for them on the show. But I do need to talk about international intrigue and occasionally characters need to be menaced. Spears are crap weapons to be menaced by because the range is limited, and bows can't be kept drawn for a long time, whatever else the movies say.
I mean, I guess by your terms I'm already rocking an AU since there's all this skulduggery around, aren't I?
3235175
What I forgot to put in my blogpost was that I, too, thought their warfare was built around crew-serviced emplacements.
But what I didn't consider is the argument for tanks/mobile forts as primary means of combat. That's sheer brilliance that is. Ingenious! And it makes absolutely perfect sense.
Hey... you know how I was talking about stealing in glowing terms just now?
Well...
*yoink*
3235092
The real point of confusion is a translation convention; in pony, "friendship" means both "friendship" and "magical horn beams".
This, of course, explains why the "Princess of Friendship" spends her time building up interpersonal relations with people and blasting monsters with magic. It is the same word, so why would that even seem weird?
3235199
I think you mean "research".
3235213
True fact: I once spent an afternoon trying to ponify that song in a fever-fueled[1] drive to write a story about that noted-if-reclusive Equestrian mathematician 'P.D. Pie'
[1] Some writers take drugs or experiment with altered states of consciousness. I get a nasty chest infection. Then again, considering the quality maybe I do need the drugs after all. All the drugs.
3235178
Weaponized weather kicked off this story:
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/217612/diplomacy-for-the-strong
Also, Shining Armor can laser too. Princesses as well.
My only concern would be: how could they pull the trigger with hooves?
Then again I grew up with this guy, so...
2.bp.blogspot.com/_hfirdv34n7A/TVFLcOwmsGI/AAAAAAAAHzQ/22w348dV9SQ/s1600/ELEPHANT%2BBOY%2B5.png
...it's not a very fundamental concern.
If you do I hope it's like the John Cleese scene from Silverado.
I can't find a clip of it but it's an entirely straight scene in which a saloon brawl is broken up by the local Sherriff who strides in through the swinging doors, repeating rifle in hand, and demands "What's all this then?"
3235178
Verbose yes but a bastard?? really? and yes deadly serious indeed Ghosty.
Do you like my new avatar? It's my OC and it is me
or do you think the Fluttershy one was better?
I need an opinion from a verbose bastard on this one
For some reason, I really like the idea that somepony in Equestria got as far as the arquebus. Aside from the above reasons, they are noisy and tend to spook the regulars, so Equestria as a whole never really invested in firearms, but there is a dedicated portion of the armed forces, made of up a bunch of nutters who actually like the silly things, and they keep tinkering with them. The fact you can attach a spear to them helps. (That's another thing about early firearms you forgot to mention. The bayonet meant they were basically polearms that could mess up a cavalry charge before they got to you, and then once you were too close to try and reload, you could begin to stabby stab.)
Crossbows are probably the ranged weapon of choice though. Much easier for a hooved creature to use than a bow. Granted, bows have been shown to be used, but boy does it look awkward.
I can see other cultures working with them though. And that could result in certain individuals in Equestria importing some, possibly as a curiosity.
3235245
I imagine that a rolling pegasi stormfort preceded by gales and sparking off lightning, deafening your troops with thunder, and spinning off tornadoes as munitions would be a profoundly unwelcome sight. I suspect that the use of weather on this scale is treated with the same ginger respect as we give to thermonuclear warheads today.
I keep meaning to read that. So many stories! So little time!
3235266
Dotted wouldn't draw a weapon because in his mind, once you've actually resorted to violence[1] you've at some level already lost. However, if he drew a weapon because the situation has deteriorated to the point that he has to use violence it would be rather more like that scene from Firefly. You know the one.
Sir Pterry had a quote about it, I think:
[1] As opposed to diplomacy, negotiation, argument, threats, lies, deception, deceit, chicanery, film-flam, untruths, half-truths, semi-truths, partial truths, pseudotruths, metatruths, questioning the existence and meaning of the term 'truth,' questioning the meaning of 'to be,' questioning the meaning of 'meaning,' and more lies.
3235291
Verbose bastard, laconic answer: Good.
Okay, I'll be slightly more verbose: A unique avatar helps you stand out and be instantly recognized.
3235318
"Ah, yes, Slow Match is our Chemical Explosive Ordinance Expert. You'll find her in the back."
"I've never actually met her so if you could—"
"Yellow coat. Flame cutie mark. No eyebrows. Faint smell of sulfur. You can't miss her."
3235357
Okay Ghosty...verbose bastard it is
And that was a very diplomatic answer
Sorry, slightly on the Loopy side tonight, lack of sleep, too much caffeine, emotionally wrecked, so I apologise for lowering the tone of the serious debate/discussion
I'll get my coat...
These are all good reasons... But I'm still proud of my universe's Whinnychester (and by extension, the Gryphon's bastardization: The Wingbuster.)
Because maybe to you, guns don't fit ponies. But puns certainly do.
Dear sir, I agree with your opinions and wish to subscribe to your newspaper[1].
I am a unrepentant world-building DM, and one of my personal bugbears is the way time is always horribly distorted in most settings (fantasy or sci-fi, it often makes little difference). Where there are period where nothing changes for thousands of years and the technology level remains the same (medieval in fantasy, usually). Virtually every fantasy author seems to fall to this to some degree, from Tolkien to Pony. (The late, great Sir Pratchett neing one of the few exceptions, to his many credits[2].)
On my own campaign world, I spent a great deal of time creating a "when stuff was invented list" in concert with my regular timeline, and made sure I cut down the needless " a thousand years", especially when a mere "hundred, two max" would have the same effect. (Just push it out of living memory and you're fine, usually.) It is, perforce, approximate, and some things I decided would be invented earlier (like artifical steel (as opposed to naturally occuring iron-with-contaiminents, e.g. Damascus steel), because Dwarves of whatever) and other later (gunpowder, because fireballs and magic). Because you're always going to get a bit of plus-and-minus.
(One of the more interesting aspects about my current major fantasy world is that it is basically not-Roman-Empire-in-circa AD1100 or 1300[3] verses Evil-not-Roman-Empire, where both sides are not quite mirrors of each other, but also shamelessly nick each other's best ideas, be they military architectural or otherwise...)
My own estimations of pony technology are relatively consistent with yours. I place them modal level as being more 1920-40s as opposed to 1960s; but that was also my own upper boundary (my assumption being that more advanced stuff probably hs resulted from magic.) But it is worth noting that, here in the UK, that it wasn't that long ago when the milkman still came round on his horse and cart, and my Dad's grandmother was one of the first people on the city to have a colour TV. Outside my lifetime (I'm 35), yes, but not outside my parents.) And +/- 20 years is not an unreasonable variance for universals in any case.
As to guns in particular, I think a point not often raises would be they would be unlikely be in reality the uncomfortable "drawn like human things so kids understand what they are but are a bit awkward for ponies" technolgy we so often see.
I did, shamelessly inspired by pony create the Jalyrkieons (yes, even that is a portmando potpourri of pony names); a race of telekinetic tetracorns as one of the alien races for my sci-fi starships and ground forces (what I use in both RPG and wargame and CAD model for 3D printing for). They are not so much ponies (though they are the size of a Welsh Mountain Pony) as they are somewhere between ponies and mesonyxids (i.e. hoofed carnivores). At some length, I am my local ponythread discussed what would their guns look like. They obviously wouldn't look like human guns, because they're designed to be operated only by telekinesis.
What we arrived at in the end was a sort of internal handle, which they would hold in the TK. (They don't hold an entire object in their field. They could do, but you don't need to do that all the time- you can hold a pencil in both hands; great if you don't want to drop it,but it doesn't help you use it.)
Here is the (rather basic) scribble-sketch I made at the time to illustrative what I mean more concisely than I can explain with words. (I'm linking, not imbedding since my images tend to be rather large for a comment post.) (The gentlepony in question has three weapons because the four horns of the Jalyrkeions essentially give them (for brevity) four "hands" with which to hold stuff.) Here is the 3D model of one of the actual ones I printed, in full powered armour and with two what are effectively assault rifles. (Which are on a black flight stand because I obviously can't actually print levitating guns...! ) Also, if it looks a bit crude, here's how big the final models are in comparison to a convenient Rarity and a regular d20[4].
Anyway, blowing my own horn (horns?) aside, my main point is that if ponies had guns, they would probably not look all that much like human guns. You would have the barrel and stuff the same, of course, but how you held them and where the mag was would probably be a lot different.
(I am not familiar with it, but I'm told by my local ponythread - in a discussion that linked to this blog post, as it happened) that in Fallout: Equestria they have mouth guns, which I would personally suspect would probaly not be the way to do it!)
I could, though, see larger guns - light cannons, in fact, perhaps being mounted on a saddle-like structure, with perhaps something almost like a stirrup or something on a cord as a sort of trigger maybe? I would presume breech-loading weapon might have been adopted ar sooner (in the days of musket-level fireamrs before decent magazines). Or perhaps it might be operated by the tail, since those are pretty prehensile. (Unicorns - if the felt their horn-lazars were not sufficient, would probably have something similar to what my Jalyrkeions have.) Whatever, it probably would not have looked very gun-shaped.
Well, if anyone is still reading, I hope at least something intelligible came out of that morass!
[1]And, on typing that, I remember there is that feature that I always forget exists that allows to me to EXACTLY THAT. *skulldesk*
[2] Pathfinder's Golorion campaign world comes very close It does it right sometimes (where events happens at a rapid pace for few years) then has fantasy-typical periods where nothing much happens. It galls me a little whe it does that, since it often com SO CLOSE to being perfect. (It is, I think, probably one of the best pieces of worldbuilding I've had encountered and decisively is the best to come out of a fantasy RPG.)
[3] Depending which time period the particular game is set in, because there's two,
[4]Yes, I do regularly take pictures of ponies with my wargaming figures. Especially at conventions.
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3235199
img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120108045357/mlp/images/c/c6/Happy_Cheerilee.png
"...but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the 'right answer.' "
3234587 That's a great point. Non-ponies with less magic would certainly have cause to develop guns, and once they have, it wouldn't be that hard for ponies to adopt the technology for their own forms, once they see the advantages.
A large question Ghost asked was: should Equestria have handguns, from a thematic story point of view? I actually think they should. Appleloosa, Dodge Junction, there is a huge "western" portion of Equestria, and that fits a lot with guns, I can't imagine Sheriff Silverstar not having a gun. I've read some well written western-adventure pieces on this site with guns made to be operated with hooves. That said, I think there should be some limitations: I doubt Equestria invests as heavily in armaments technology as it does in other areas, so I would expect guns to be in the area of early 1800s technology, much more primitive than other aspects of Equestrian life. I would also expect to see them pretty much only in the western setting areas. Areas far from the capital, mostly earth pony, it makes more sense to have guns. I can definitely see Celestia feeling they are not necessary for the armed forces to have, at least pre-Changling invasion.
The whole "magic shields stop bullets but not arrows" seems like hookum to me, especially since it looks like only the most powerful of mages can even create shields (Twilight, Shining Armor, alicorns). Since we know sufficient physical force can shred a magic shield, I can a barrage actually used to wear down a powerful unicorn, it's certainly a lot harder to catch a bullet than an arrow in telekinesis.
One thing early 1800s guns would not do a lot of good against is a 20 foot tall monster, against something with that mass barbed arrows and bolts or spears seem like they would do more damage than a single small lead slug, in terms of blood loss. So it makes sense that Appleloosa would have guns, since they fear bandits and Buffalo, while Ponyville wouldn't have them, since they fear Hydras and Ursas that would be merely annoyed by guns.
3235199
"Alternate Universe" might have been too strong a wording on my part, and I'll reiterate that I have read and thoroughly enjoyed stories with both ponies and guns in; it's a matter of squaring the technology and setting. The tl;dr is, the additions of guns is stepping away from the show's default, and I want to see the story thoughtfully reflect how that changes the world your story's in.
Put another way, I don't think you (the general you) can just technologically justify guns and slap them in without also sociologically justifying them, and I think the sociological and technological justifications heavily dovetail, because the sociological justification is what provides the impetus for ponies to create the technology in the first place.
I do implicitly trust you (the GhostOfHeraclitus you) to do that, because you're the sort of hoopy frood who writes seven-part essays on worldbuilding. Just trying to stake out some principles, is all.
3235210
This is brilliant.
It also explains why Equestria was so eager to "make friends with" the yaks. Clearly they visited Canterlot first, and 10 minutes into negotiations, Celestia said, "Why don't we introduce you to Princess Sparkle …"
A thing on tech trees: People used to try to justify "racial superiority" by classifying tech levels. They quickly found cultures that had supposed gaps. I believe Hawaiians never got around to a bow and arrow. Anthropology Intro Class.
Regarding why ponies would want guns: Maybe they really need some sort of really easily trained gunners, and powerful mages and lightning throwers required a lot of specialized training?
Regarding anti-gunpowder spells: Could still be beat by surprise snipers. Probably. Doubt shields can reliably stop bullets unless you angle them, in which case they can still block arrows anyways. So grenade launchers? And angling can easily be beat with a Pegasus with a heavy rifle.... and now Strike Witches come to mind. That is a weird show.
Regarding tanks: I like tanks. I like that idea. Moar tanks. Scribble scribble.
3234856
I always figured something could be done with some sort of magic powered railgun. Some sort of gem stores kinetic energy, and pulling the trigger dumps kinetic energy into the projectile.
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Then again, little girl's cartoon show. Doubt guns would be ever portrayed. Even Looney Tunes rarely ever had guns that actually killed someone.
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Actually, regarding math, we're so-so at it. The reason why computers are far better at math (which some people find hard), but terrible at not faceplanting/walking/balance/identifying objects, is because our brains are wired for balance. Not hard calculations. In fact, we tend to generalize numbers past the number 5.
Interestingly enough, our motor cortex, on the other hand, is bloody amazing at math. That chunk of grey matter is responsible for our accuracy at throwing things, and subconsciously calculating the amount of force and the angle required to hit a target. The main problem is that its unconscious, and the vast percentage of the population is unable to tap into it. Unless you are some of the rare people who are basically organic calculators. IIRC, an episode of "Stan Lee's Real Life Superhumans" did a bit of research on one such human calculator, and it was found that for whatever reason, his brain used the motor cortex to help with mathematics.
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Regarding fantasy world and annoying unchanging tech: I have a story idea sitting around of a Lich king who merely survives long enough to see a modern-like society form up, and just goes around goofing off at all the fancy stuff he gets to play with. Not sure whether or not magic has become forgotten, Ex: Merlin existed, but humanity forgot how to wield magic, etc. Also not sure whether or not he secretly becomes the only guy who fights of demons and monsters or whatever, though considering I'm writing a pony version as practice, its slightly more than likely to be vaguely parodying MLP. I also seriously dislike all the humanoids everywhere, now that I've been exposed to ponies and 6+ different sapient species of various shapes.
Also, Mouthguns: Stupid. As bad as mouth swords. Terrible aim, recoil, off center from eyes, unhygienic, etc.
And if we look at Pinkie, she seems to have prenhensile hair. Which is weird
Another thing regarding multi-pony team warfare.
I used to have a half baked idea that was originally a cross of sorts with Soul Eater. Basically, I operated off the assumption that Earth Ponies have large amounts of power (extrapolated from endurance), but few ways of expressing it. On the other hand, Unicorns have a wide variety of spells they can learn, but often times not enough mana to fuel it for very long. (Pegasi are in between)
Therefore, combat mages often start off by learning a spell that turns them into a "Weapon," and team up with an Earth they feel comfortable with. The line up had came up with for the Six was:
Applejack + Twilight (Magic blasting double-sided sword.) (On a side note, the "Weapons" tend to have some sort of ribbon that wraps around their wielders'' [body part] (Mane colored) and partially prehensile.)
Pinkie + Rarity (Rapier, precision strikes, helped with Pinkie's raw mobility)
Rainbow/Fluttershy tag team: RD is a lightning sword (rainbow colored, of course) and Fluttershy is a crossbow
I never got really far with this.
There is one more factor in the tech development that you overlooked. Weapon vs armor. If all your armor consists of cloth or leather, then a slashing weapon (like a curved sword) is good. If you reach chain mail, you upgrade to stabbing weapons to pop the rivets (standard 'knightly' sword with pointed tips). If you are up to full plate armor, ditch swords entirely and switch to maces, war hammers, and other bludgeoning weapons to crush the armor (and the flesh and bones underneath) like a tin can.
Ponies have at least partial plate armor, with possibility for full plate. This indicates fairly medieval weapon tech. Though, given that ponies can hit hard in a charge, spears would make a charge terrifying. They also likely have clawed and cleat-covered hoof-boots to make rear-leg kicks and boxing (rearing up and striking out with the fore-hooves) more deadly.
Like Ticktacker said, an AoE spell to set off a grenade in the enemy lines would make a lot of sense. In fact, the only gunpowder based weapons I can see them using are rockets, fired from far in the back. This is because there are probably many ways to introduce fire into an area to set off gunpowder. This would turn ammunition storage areas into potential bombs that could kill an entire encampment. Additionally, there are probably more than just dragons and unicorns on the 'magically created fire' front. Gunpowder becomes an explosive liability that will get an entire squad killed when faced with literal fire-power.
They have crude early cannons, but the whole issue of explosives vs fire magic make them useless in most wars.
On Tank and tanks: I believe that this is a case of translation convention. The 'tanks' they have are likely some sort of armored carriage. There are four pullers under an armored canopy/shield. There is a driver behind and above them to watch for hazards and steer. The top has a siege ballista with adjustable aim attached to make it a mobile artillery platform. There may be front and side crossbow ports for troops within. . Like in real life, many armored vehicles of war are mistaken for tanks. There are smaller versions pulled by two ponies. Some have a team of unicorns on top projecting a shield over a company. Some models forgo the crossbow ports to make them into troop transports with an exit port on back. The big tanks take eight-ten pullers and have room for two ballista on top along with room for many troops or cross bow ports.
Side note: what if horse drawn carriages are actually pulled and driven by members of the military in a reserve force, and the carriage pulling is their way of keeping up their conditioning and training in case they are called to the front lines while providing a civic service and getting money?
On unicorns in war: Very few unicorns take the effort to learn new spells beyond personal talent spells and the basic utilitarian spells all unicorns know. The few that do learn new spells probably are not learning combat magic (Twilight and, recently, Rarity are exceptions. Twilight would know combat magic as a side effect of curiosity and growing up with a soldier for a brother, considering her power-copying; Rarity may have come to the conclusion that the number of adventures they have been on means that knowing a few spells for fighting would be useful). Even the unicorns in the military probably know little more than basic force blasts. The few unicorns that go deep into combat magic become unholy nightmares on the battle field, capable of warping the laws of physics, making friend and foe indistinguishable, stone-tough skin, intangibility, mind control, summoning monsters from other planes of reality (Starswirl was a conjurer), and otherwise unleashing terror on armies. Very few unicorns have the power and inclination to master those magics. Sombra, for example, took the entire Empire at its peak because he was untouchable and unstoppable. The unicorns are a bit like the Asari in Mass Effect: they are mostly gentle, but the few that start fighting are the most dangerous enemies you can face, and if all of them mobilized, they could conquer anything. Which is why it is considered a good thing, by every species, that nothing has ever roused the entire unicorn race to go to war. At most, <1% are in the military at any time and 1% of those soldiers are versed in anything beyond the basics.
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Alright, I'm going to start by annotating the blog post here and there, but for all the tl:dr folks, my theory puts pony tech at about 1860-1870 US levels, with outliers because of magic or lack of need.
I'd call foul on the tonal incongruity, but in terms of what we've seen in canon, there's no reason to believe ponies--or some other sapient species which might find it more useful--haven't invented revolvers.
If the movie Hero is somewhat historically accurate, crossbows that could be fired without hands are plausible. Even if it's not, I can think of several ways to make a crossbow that a pony could use. It's also worth considering this pony:
img.neoseeker.com/mgv/60953/953/121/silverspeed.png
Silverspeed, from Hurricane Fluttershy
Or, 1606 ( Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont), 600 B.C. (the Diolkos), 1783 (Montgolfier Brothers), 1608, 1575 (Francesco Rampazzetto [maybe]) or 1714 (Henry Mill), 1960, 1881 since you qualified with 'electrical', 1896, and 1878 (Sallie Gardner at a Gallop).
Admittedly, I'm using some of the earliest dates of the technology, but the Diolkos was used for centuries, and Sallie Gardner at a Gallop won a bet (that counts as mature technology, right?).
I see a lot of people make that argument. And, as you observe, it's often wrong.
I don't buy all of your argument comparing natural evolution to technological revolution, although I will contend that there are many places where the two processes are similar. And this might delve into philosophy, anyway. While it's plain to see how innovations like fire and clothes benefitted us as a species, there are of course many technologies we didn't need. Ipods. Eyeliner. Cigarettes. Granted, all of those things can fill a psychological need.
The biggest catch with the plausible origin is seeing it from their perspective. To go back to your earlier example of a Colt revolver, it's a ludicrous thing for a pony to invent. The design is not at all hoof-friendly--or does a pony hold the handgrip in her mouth? You could strap it to a leg, and use a shutter-release type of bulb, held in the mouth, to fire it. Reloading would require a unicorn or good mouth dexterity (which even IRL horses have, so that might be plausible). Besides, a unicorn doesn't need a gun; she can just turn her opponent into a potted plant. A pegasus would do just as well with a lightning strike, and an earth pony . . . well, I guess it sucks to be an earth pony.
Now, what if a minotaur invented it? All of a sudden, the drawbacks are gone. Sure, it still sucks for a pony to use, but there are ways to make it do-able. That gives plausible origin.
So let's jump to lasers. I don't know how a laser works, except that it takes energy source, and a beam of light comes out the end.
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/e/eb/Twilight_y_Cadance_utilizando_su_magia_para_atacar_a_la_Tatzelwurm_.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20140309201626&path-prefix=es
Oh wait, those are alicorns.
It would be plausible for a pony to invent a device which somehow mechanically utilized whatever-it-is a unicorn does with her horn for a laser-like effect. Technically, it's obviously not really a laser, but then real lasers can't be directly fueled by apple-themed foods, either, which gives the pony a bit of an advantage, maybe. And it's canon that Flim and Flam have mastered a technology the US military is working on for refuelling drones in-flight (with lasers), so in that sense, they're more advanced than our society.
Which segues nicely into
derpicdn.net/img/2013/1/16/214329/full.png
For me, this is one of the greatest joys of writing. I research a particular technology, how it was (and wasn't used), and then think from a pony point of view how they might solve a similar problem. For example, i invented a telegraph system which is somewhat like our system combined with the Pennsylvania Railroad's Trainphone system, and even consulted with an electrical engineer to see if it would actually work, assuming some of the givens in Equestria. Every bit of major technology, I try to think of why the ponies might have invented it--or why they wouldn't. What principles of their world and society drive technology . . . and even more important, what they import. Would a pony camera look like the ones we've seen in the show? Doubtful. It's just as impractical as a Colt revolver. But they could import them. Maybe the minotaurs have a lock on the film industry; maybe there are international trade laws which keep it that way.
Heck, on Earth you've pretty much got to invent fire before you can get too far with metals; in Equestria, you just need to know a dragon--and it's a reasonable bet that ponies learned metallurgy from dragons. Or else that's another trade deal. Rock farmers grow gems which are exported to the dragon nation, in exchange for refined metals and not being eaten.
For that matter, semaphore signals are still used on some US railroads (although over the course of the last century, they've been sloooooowly phased out), and of course light signals are still used (Aldis lamps and all that). One could argue that they're even more common than they once were, since . . . well, what runs through a fiber-optic cable? But I digress.
Or do they?
We have not seen, in canon, a single pony die because of a monster attack. They're annoying, yes, but generally all they do is mess up a bunch of property, and then one or more ponies sends them back into the Everfree or Tartarus or Celestia's statue garden, and that's it. They clean up the mess and move on. Much like humans do after weather events--we clean up the debris and re-build the town on the same floodplain.
Suppose that ponies do die in monster attacks? It was a possibility when Twilight got blindsided by a cockatrice, for example. What if they hadn't found her? Or what if it was somepony else? How many ponies have to die each year before Something Is Done?
While it's hard to know for sure what the ponies consider 'too many,' we can say with certainty in the US that we have not yet hit the number of fatalities per year to inspire meaningful gun control legislation. By comparison, the first year seat belts were required in all seating positions in all cars, 52,725 people died. I assume there was some lead time to the legislation; maybe it was when it hit the 40.000 mark in 1963 that lawmakers finally got motivated?
But the point is, this is more of a philosophical debate. A question of morals, maybe. We would be horrified by random monster attacks; they'd be appalled by a technology that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year (guns or cars, take your pick). Maybe they just shrug when Applejack's parents get eaten by timberwolves, and then sing a few verses of "The Circle of Life" at the grave and go on with their lives.
Which I think leads us back to the technology question. Not only to they have to have the ability to invent it (by luck, improvement of existing technology, or whatever), they also have to have the desire.
Sheesh, I already said my theory puts pony tech at about 1860-1870 US levels.
I think it fits nicely with many of the societal beliefs we see on the show, and the levels of the most pervasive technology. They might have limited their use of steam because pegasi hate the smoke, or because wind- and hydro-power are so much more reliable when you control the weather (and solar, when you control the sun). Heck, a couple of unicorns that are good at the come-to-life spell can reliably power a Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000, and presumably also a stamping press.
Interestingly, one of the things that many of the pony technologies seem to have in common is that they are an effective way for ponies to get together. Hot air balloon? Takes mudponies to cloud cities. Cinema? Get together with your friends and learn about somepony else's friendship. Telegraph? Faster than letters for communicating with family or Princesses in distant cities, and safer than equipping everypony with a juvenile dragon. Train? Ditto. Self-powered parade floats? Ditto ditto.
Or, consider the Mythbusters' experiments with shooting guns into water. Slow, heavy rounds are the answer; something fast just won't get through. Now imagine how guns were invented in our world--which you cited earlier. Maybe the early guns could get through the shield (if the gun actually fired, didn't explode in your hoof, and the shot went where you aimed it), but a faster, modern bullet couldn't, and that made the gun no better than an arrow (worse, actually, because it's slower and louder), which simply caused the ponies to reject it as a stupid idea early in its development.
img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120124071614/mlp/images/9/93/Speeding_train_approaching_S2E14.png
Since it has no tender, the locomotive is a tank engine.
img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121014222156/mlp/images/archive/b/b6/20121017005944!Wonderbolts_flying_into_Spike's_water_tower_S2E10.png
And the water tower tank can stop the Wonderbolts. And an Ursa Minor. Probably both things were specced in the original construction documents. The Ponyville bureaucracy must be fascinating. Building a house to earthquake or hurricane specs is one thing; how about love-poisoned Earth pony spec? What degree of monster damage do they have to be able to withstand?
Truth is, the whole thing is kind of subjective anyway. We see what they have on the show--what the animators show us. We, the writers, can decide what it means. Let's take the cameras we've seen.
orig04.deviantart.net/dc77/f/2014/106/a/5/cameras_in_mlp__canon__by_orchetect-d7ent09.jpg
The ones that probably come to people's minds are the SLRs that the ponies (usually pegasi) wear on neck-braces to use. As I mentioned before, my headcanon is that that type of camera was imported from the minotaurs (or griffons would also be plausible). We could also ignore it entirely, and chalk it up to 'translation convenience.' After all, it is a show for kids, and they probably wouldn't know what a box camera is. Or we can fit it into the canon some other way--maybe their technology is closer to the 1960s, but with a lot of holes--things they didn't want to invent, or didn't need to invent (how many airplanes hit pegasi in flight before you give up on that technology?).
And that's just the outside appearance. How it works on the inside--well, when you're talking a world where a unicorn can easily move things with her horn from a distance, who knows what makes that box work. Their guts might be as foreign to us as a digital camera would be to Nicéphore Niépce (and the basic principle of the camera goes back to Ibn al-Haytham [1021]).
It's also always important to consider that Ponyville is a small town, and probably doesn't boast the latest technology. Heck, where I grew up, they hadn't gotten around to putting stop signs at all the intersections, but I'm sure it was on their to-do list. The local grocery store doesn't have UPC scanners.
I've always found it's best to take things on a case-by-case basis, avoid tonal incongruities (unless it's a comedy), and try to explain things as mostly mechanical, but leave allowances for magic to fill in the gaps.
Finally, you're wrong about the dam. It's not a hydroelectric dam. That's a pumphouse on the bottom, and the electrodes are so that unicorns can power it to pump water up into the reservoir to make up for deficiencies in the lake level. The purpose of the dam is twofold: it pressurizes the Ponyville water system, and it's also the source of water that sometimes is taken up to Cloudsdale.
The other factors to consider... you have complex interplays between multiple technologies and equally complex interplay between technology and society/politics/military doctrine/etc.
On the interplay of technology front... people were able to build repeating rifles as early as the 1600s, but the materials, tooling and precision manufacturing techniques needed to mass produce such weapons meant they only became militarily useful in the 1860s to 1880s.
Looking at an example of the latter, well, there's a generally assumption that firearms development goes useless handgonne to slight less useless match lock to flintlock with a one to one correlation between advancement and key combat properties, like, oh. accuracy. Instead the real story is somewhat more complex: the arquebuses wielded but the Spanish Tericos of c.1600 were accurate out to 200m while the Brown Bess muskets of the British c.1800 couldn't hit the broadside of a barn at 100m... not because the British couldn't make good long ranged weapons (look at the Baker Rifle), but that military doctrine had shifted to place emphasis rate of fire (improved field artillery having taken the longer ranged role); and the changes needed to increase rate of fire (notably increase windage between the musket ball the the barrel) count against accuracy.
It'd be easy to see both factors confounding the development of small-arms by Equestria.
There's also another angle which could be considered. I *suspect* the combination of magic and cutiemark derived skills could have some interesting effects, short circuiting a lot of the infrastructure requirements for high-tec but at the same time locking production into an artisanal rather than industrial model. What do I mean? You have an Earth Pony with a rock farming mark, they can grow a flawless silicon wafer; you have a unicorn with a cutiemark referring to finescale work... they can etch the silicon wafer and make you a bloody computer chip without needing any of the fancy clean rooms and fab plants we need in the real world. But at the same time, lack of such infrastructure means production cannot be scaled up beyond the relatively small number of ponies with skills in that area. Hmm... could be interesting... explains a lot of the schitzo-tech (fancy electronics are perfectly possible but there's only a few dozen unicorns with skills to make 'em... so we don't see much of 'em) and adds interesting areas to explore (conflict between the Electronics Guild and a move towards real-world like mass production?).
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Well, people used just about everything to try and justify racial superiority.
Fortunately, nowadays we know better. Alicorns are the best.
As far as tech levels go, the original purpose for them was an attempt to match up technological progression across various areas of the world. The whole stone age/bronze age/iron age thing, for instance, was useful for understanding the technological progress of Eurasia. Of course, it is a simplification of how technological progression occurs; metals were hardly the only area of advancement, after all. It is useful for broad strokes knowledge, but if you want specifics, you have to, well, go into specifics.
Humans are incredible at math; we're the best creatures on the planet at it by far. Indeed, we're the only things that even know what math IS. It isn't even clear if anything else is even really capable of math as we understand it.
And yes, I was talking about throwing in my post, and the hypothesis that our ability to throw things accurately (which requires us to calculate drop distance, movement speeds, ect. on the fly) may be why we can do math so well.
Ability at math isn't rare, though; it falls on the same general curve as all other forms of intelligence do. In fact, it was the realization that all forms of intelligence are linked which lead scientists to discover the so-called general intelligence or g factor, which affects your ability at all sorts of intellectual tasks. Your math score on the SAT, for instance, predicts about 50% of the variation in your verbal score on the same test.
Incidentally, that five thing is known as subitization; basically, humans can know the number of objects if that number is small simply by looking, without counting. Saying that we abstract numbers beyond that point isn't really right; whoever told you that didn't quite get it. Humans can't just immediately know numbers of stuff larger than that (well, usually, though it depends on the circumstances; there are actually tricks to quickly estimating larger quantities of objects, and knowing things like squares intuitively can mean that you can quickly work out that something which is, say, 4x4 contains 16 objects, or know that something shaped like an egg carton contains 12, even though those are outside of our ordinary range of subitization) - we have to actually count stuff at that point. However, the idea that this is somehow more abstract is kind of questionable; there are many numbers I am very comfortable with and can easily envision the number of without really going into abstraction. There's no clear line of demarcation; I'm not quite sure at what point it actually becomes purely abstract.
As far as we can tell, mental calculators - that is to say, the people who are extremely good at multiplying large numbers - are people who have trained themselves to do so. If you train yourself at math, you can quickly and intuitively grok many mathematical operations without spending any real thought on it. That's why we use multiplication tables, for instance; it is a lot of memorization which eventually incorporates itself into the way our brains work, so that when we see 8 x 8, we know that it is 64 without having to do something like "Okay, so 8x10 is 80; half of that is 40. 40 + 8 = 48, 48 + 8 = 56, 56 + 8 = 64" or something similar. Not everyone has the same capacity for learning such things - and, moreover, not everyone has the same commitment to doing so - but I've never seen any evidence that it is anything beyond what others can do with lots of training, if they are sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently inclined to do so.
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Spears....really aren't. They may actually be one of the most effective weapon archetype - melee, anyway - ever conceived. Compared to a sword, you have significantly more reach, allowing you to stab or slash with less danger to your person. Compared to axes they are faster and better balanced. And of course, the person who combined the effective smashing slash of the axe with the reach and versatility of the polearm basically created what is considered the most dangerous personal weapon ever, the polaxe. (Spellcheck insists it is not spelled that way, but I am pretty sure it is pol without an 'e') The heavy wood haft of a polearm is very effective at deflecting away blows, and makes for a good bashing implement as well. And of course some spears are adapted for throwing. Can't match a bow of course, or even a sling -which by the way a properly used sling could fling a lead bullet with lethal force further than the vaunted longbow- but it's an option.
It's just there is a pyschological effect associated with swords, and to a lesser extent, axes. Swords are elegant, and require skill to master. Someone with a sword feels more dangerous. Axes are brutal and messy, so an axe feels dangerous. Spears and polearms are perceived as simple, thus a spearman looks like a useless putz.
Unless you are a horse, of course. Nothing scared a cavalry charge more than a wall of pikes, after all.
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I think he was talking about throwing spears, rather than polearms. Threatening someone with a javelin just doesn't have the same aura of menace around it as having a bow or gun pointed at you.
"Find a Pet". Rainbow needs something real fast, like a bullet, to keep up with (her).
I have this private silly idea for a story that Equestria really is a hardcore meat-eating gun-toting republic but they're always putting it away right before Twilight enters the room because Celestia wants Spike and Twilight alone to remain idealistic and innocent because that works better for the national defense.
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And those same semaphore signals gave the name "highball" to the popular cocktail consisting of spirit and a carbonated mixer.
3236033
That would be a really weird mugging indeed.
3235903
Or... I could just be terrible at explaining myself.
I agree there are probably people who trained themselves to mentally calculate very fast, but there are others who's brains are simply wired differently.
And on the math part, while I agree that humans are so far the only species to understand math species-wide, it was more of a learned ability rather than a natural one, like walking is. It wasn't exactly something our brains were designed to do, but it was powerful enough to learn it. Which is why math is easy for computers, while coordinating a set of limbs in a 3D environment is difficult for them.
3236074 Bullet is the term for stones, spikes, and anything else you can throw from a sling. Though the idea of a benevolent, Celestia-ordered conspiracy sounds funny.
Do you need a wall to bounce ideas off of for that little comedy? I have preformed that duty for several other authors around this site.
3236091
Well, technically it was the signal that predated semaphore: the ball signal.
edsanders.com/railroad/may59037.jpg
3236096
Alternately, it could just be the vague air of fiat that surrounds song lyrics in general. If MLPFiM isn't your only children's show crush, you'll see it in "Fraggle Rock" as well; it's like "HOW DO THESE LITTLE SECLUDED UNDERGROUND RODENTS KNOW WHAT A (word probably inserted just for the sake of making a rhyme) IS?!?"
3235781 May I offer a suggestion on the Soul Eater Weapon form idea?
If you are having Pegasai turn into Weapon forms, why not Earth ponies as well? It would be a case where the earth ponies could go weapon mode, but are usually more effective as Meisters doing the whole soul resonance thing.
Rarity being a rapier works for the elegance angle.
Pinkie could be a scythe or other oddball weapon. Party cannon?
Applejack would make for a good war hammer.
Given that one of Twilight's things is versatility and power, why not make her like Tsubaki, many forms? Perhaps upgraded to Death Scythe (Alicorn Blade?) status as well? If Twilight was a Death Scythe, and Celestia was a stand-in for Lord Death, maybe Twi was upgraded to DS at a very young age and Celestia is merely loaning her to Applejack? What if alicorn Ascension is coupled with reaching Death Scythe level and requires a lot more than 99+1?
Fluttershy would probably be a ranged weapon. Just what kind? Crossbows do work for her.
Rainbow, given her direct and aggressive combat style, could be a halberd or heavy lance with lightning attribute. This would also play into the Weapon-Meister dynamic. A polearm like a halberd is good at blocking blows as well as striking back, which would help Fluttershy, who tries to avoid confrontation and only strikes back when necessary.
Edit: If you want to discuss what their Soul Resonance skills could be, PM me.
Very interesting.
I'm reminded of a blogpost I once read claiming that the idea of Scootaloo being disabled was ridiculous (For the record, I have no opinion on the matter, as either way can make for a good story). Ignoring that the post was a touch... ranticular, the main thrust of the argument was a refusal to believe that, with the incredible magical wonders we've seen in Equestria, that there wouldn't be some method of "fixing" her.
Except that we've got some pretty wonderous things and there are plenty of things we can't "fix". As you say, technological and/or mystical development (even assuming they can be separated, as Clarke's thrid law kind of works both ways) doesn't happen in set stages, nor does it necessarily stay level in all areas. Some things aren't needed, some things wouldn't be practical and some things are just literally impossible, even if the surrounding developments "should" allow them to be done. And the different world, history and biology we're dealing with would alter these in unpredictable ways, even without the addition of magic into the mix.
I do have a couple of points I'd like to make. Or try to, at any rate.
First, the idea that "magic blasts would outdo and eliminate the need for firearms" argument I've seen in multiple comments... it's possible, certainly, but works on the assumption that any unicorn could do so. Or at least, do so effectively. And they may do, certainly, but how many and how powerful spells any unicorn can learn is something that's never made clear. Certainly, Twilight can learn most, but using her as a baseline might be... a touch problematic.
I don't know where exactly, but I believe it was stated that most unicorms only have telekinesis and a few spells related to their cutie mark. But again, I'm pretty sure that's never stated in the show, so you may choose to disregard that, or argue how difficult that means non-CM-related spells would be. or how many unicorns have the appropriate power or CM, it all depends. The point is, unicorn magic eclipsing firearms is possible, but not definite, even ignoring what the other two-thirds-at-least of the populace might have to say on the matter.
Also, I think Longbows might be a bit more viable than they were in our world. In particular, I'm reminded of this cute li'l filly:
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And, in particular, this li'l beauty:
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When you think about it, a cutie mark is an amazing piece of magic, giving an automatic skill with a certain task that's, at the very least, the equivalent of years of practice. And that's ignoring the general magic ponies possess - Strength, Agility, Precision, etc... Might make widespread archery a bit more practical.
Or not. Because there is one part of this post I'd question. And a fairly innocuous one at that:
Is there? Do we need a "definitely yes/no, this would/would not happen"? In terms of individual interpretation, probably. Having a good idea of the world you're writing is... a little bit useful, and I honestly do not believe that putting thought into things, no matter how trivial they are or may seem, is never a bad thing.
But the key word there is interpretation. We don't know a lot of things about Equestria... and that's okay. Not every question, mystery or bit of idle curiosity needs a definite and universal answer. We don't know for certain whether Equestria has guns, or if Scootaloo can fly, or if all the urine the pegasi of Cloudsdale produce is rained onto the land below. And you can argue till you're blue in the face (generic you, not you specifically, Ghost... though you probably could if you wanted to) about what's more likely or what "would" be the case, but in the end, it's all down to interpretation. And I'd say that fanfiction, and indeed fiction in general, is the better for it.
...okay, I'm not entirely sure how relevant most of what I said is or how much sense it makes, so feel free to ignore it. Just wanted to get some of it off my chest.
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You know, I can relate to your enthusiasm perfectly. I get it, really. Still...
All of these things being the case, I wonder why they still bothered making all those swords and axes, then. Spending all that time, all those resources to make weapons that are slower, clumsier, with poorer reach, and using so much more metal to do so! Strange, that.
Do you suppose it is possible that they are different weapons, designed to do different things under different circumstances?
...considered by whom, exactly? And exactly what qualifies it as "most dangerous"? Most dangerous to whom, under what conditions? With a poleaxe, your range ends more or less at the end of the pole - it strikes me as a less than elegant throwing weapon. So to, say, your average not-particularly-well-armored person standing at some distance, a simple throwing knife would be more dangerous. Especially if they have some clever stratagem to defend themselves with.
It is spelled poleaxe, or polaxe, or pole-axe, or pollaxe, or polax. Take your pick. Wiktionary favors poleaxe as the principle spelling, while Wikipedia seems to prefer pollaxe.
Really, any of these weapons require skill to master. A sword, just like a spear, can be operated by the simple "stick-them-with-the-pointy-end" methodology, which requires basically zero skill. But of course, this is not really "mastery".
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The thing about the polearm in general, is they posses a significant degree of versatility, in nearly any situation. And the pollaxe - thank you for providing those spellings, btw, I forgot that second L - and its very close cousin the halberd, as well as the likes of the glaive, and the naginata, strongly emphasized that. They were dangerous to pretty much anyone within spitting distance, capable of dismounting riders, cutting down horses, being set against a charge, and smashing through armour. Granted, you won't be throwing them, making them pretty useless against anyone with a ranged weapon, but I had specified that polearms were excellent melee weapons. And the crowner, is that it required both a fraction of the cost to manufacture, and a fraction of the time to train people to use them in mass battles. Of course, most axes were fairly cheap too. Most axes used in warfare were adapted tools. Not to say there were not axes made and balanced for warfare, we as a race are very good at making something that is normally a tool into a weapon of war, but the degree to which that holds true tends to vary by culture and time period. Swords and spears are close to timeless.
I don't mean to imply that swords are poor weapons either. Swords did not gain the mystique the have by being useless and impracticable. The Roman army made it's mark on the world with the shortsword, after all. They actually defied a lot of conventional battlefield tactics during their rise and dominance of the world. They eschewed cavalry as well, save for light cavalry for scouting and harrying. But the Romans use of the spear pretty much began and ended with the pilum, and a legionnaire or auxiliary's primary weapon was a gladius.
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This is true.
Evolution? Naa, God just likes to re-use his patents. Somebody's going to be awfully peaved when they unravel the bottom strand of DNA somewhere and find a teeny tiny disclaimer "All right reserved, Yahweh, Year 0, do not duplicate under penalty of law."
Guns in a High Fantasy setting: One thing. Gunpowder is an explosive (ok, techncially it deflagrates instead of detonates, but you get the point) All it takes to set off the bang is a tiny change in the environment, like a spark. In GURPS, Ignite Fire has no prerequisites, and if your gamemaster doesn't keep on top of the players, it can wreck anybody with firearms. In fact, I ran a game session once where a weak varient of Ignite Fire had been discovered that used long-range modifiers and area of effect instead of short range modifers and point sources. The Powers That Be were willing to murder every single mage they even *thought* had gotten a glimpse of the spell formula because it would allow a single mage to detonate the magazines of a ship of the line at about a mile. Needless to say, the game got really frisky with the knives there for a few sessions, and one of the mages in the group wound up with a nifty spell that they could not use, teach, or talk about for fear of starting the murder frenzy up again, starting with him.
Anyway, to make a long story short (too late!), higher tech guns are complicated with lots of moving parts and little containers of bang powder. Any magic spell that can fiddle with their workings even a little bit will give the attacker either a smoking stick, or just a stick. (I plan on having a scene with a couple Royal Guard and a couple of US Army Reservists in the upcoming EIH fic Farmer Bruner Had Some Ponies that will claim, in short, magic can easily stop guns from working, BUT big guns can shoot big bullets from farther away than you can gimmick.