Natural Pregnancy Rates In Mixed-Gender Pseudo-Religious Pony Military Orders

So, I made some trouble for myself in a recent chapter by mentioning, in the course of a discussion of the dubious characteristics of thestral genetics, that the natural reproduction of ponies within the Company caused the recessive-gene thestrals to disappear from the rosters by the operation of bizarro Mendelian genetics. This means that there *is* natural reproduction within the Company, which presents me the problem that these are mixed-sex ponies of peak physical condition and a culture which strongly discourages retiring to go have a family. I mean, it might be possible in very long-term contracts for breeding couples to take "long leave" and play house in near-by micro-colonies near the Company garrison quarters.

I didn't mention this in the first chapter as the Company extracted itself from its last semi-long-term contract. I can hand-wave this as Sawbones settling into his unfamiliar new duties as Annalist, and suggest that Asparagus and some of the other members of the carters' corps had actually been settled outside of the compound in Openwater Bay as a colony-in-formation, but there is a notable lack of foals from this hypothetical, so I don't think I can pull that one off. I think I can make a case for paranoia about the faceless Hidden Council suppressing family-formation, and perhaps leave room for a tradition of fostering "daughters of the Company" which means that there are a bunch of Company-spawn still with their foster families back in Openwater Bay. But that gets into dodgy terrain right there, and while the Company is horrible on their own merits, I want to maintain their standards in other areas. Hrm.

Anyways, I'm trying to nail down in my head just how often the mares of the Company are likely to carry to term in a given year and season. I *want* to stay away from this whole bogus estrus business, I don't like where it leads in terms of fanon. But it would simplify my medical-logistic concerns, because now that my Company is in winter quarters, the subject of non-trauma medical care, and in extremis, foaling is bound to come up.

So, I'm doing my numbers, to see just how big the Company is, *exactly*, because I've lost track and I need to double-check (and I found that I'd given that logging/iron-smelting town doubling with Thunder Bay two different names in the text, I'll need to figure out which one I need to correct, damn it.). But in general, the current Company is between 1250 and 1300 ponies strong, somewhere close to 1:1 male/female, although probably favoring male *slightly*. Canon seems to demonstrate a slight sexual dimorphism, but it isn't as pronounced as in humans, so I figure there might be a bit of a bias towards stallions having a "long-tail" bell curve - with more than the occasional outlier like Big Mac or Trouble-shoes, but similar bulky mares like Braeburn's pegasus teammate in 'Buckball Season' being a true oddity - but mares and stallions having a fairly close set of means. Long story short, the Company is definitely sexually integrated, and the subject never even enters Sawbones' mind.

(BTW, my count is 1282 ponies currently in the Company. I wonder if they maintain spreadsheets? I blithely described the Company as having more "officers" than support-ponies in the first chapter, damn me. That's a preposterous tail-to-teeth ratio, and I've gotten around it by making the Company a ferocious practitioner of aggressive detailing of "lances" to temporary support roles. And the "officers" include whom... let's see, the three from the command-section, Sawbones, Mad Jack, the three cohort commanders, the members of the warlocks' section, maybe the cohort second-in-command sergeant-majors as well? Eh, I reserve the right to be vague.)

So, again, what's the pregnancy rate of an integrated active-duty or national guard battalion? You know, I've got a former roommate who's a Civil Affairs/Military Intelligence officer, I could ask him what his experience in the Guard has been...