So, I was in the middle of re-proofing chapter four when my mind began wandering.

Is it too soon for all this technology to start appearing?

The advances we have in the realm of technology have been around for the last 300 years or so (rough guess). In Recon's story, it takes place some 10-15 years after the events of Past Sins, and the ponies have already developed and built guns, explosives, underground bunkers, and magical technology etc.

Is this just me, or does 10 years seem far too quick for that kind thing to pop up AND get built?

Is it possible to fiddle with the timeline to give it more plausibility?

3731953

Well, here's the thing. There's an already established canon timeline in Fallout Equestria.

First, at an unspecified point after MLP2, a trade agreement was reached with the Zebra Nation which traded gems for coal. The coal brought a massive industrial revolution to the ponies, who built powerplants and crude computer technology very quickly.

This would have coincided with a population boom and time of prosperity. It got to the point where the ponies depended on the coal. We know that much.

At some point, tensions rose and sanctions were put in place. There was an incident with zebra pirates at sea who captured pony hostages. The zebras demanded the ponies stay out of it and that they would handle it. The Wonderbolts rescued the ponies, and sparked a military incident which was the beginning of open hostilities.

Deprived of coal, the ponies invaded and seized control of some outlying coal mines, furthering the conflict.

Nine years later, after a long and bloody conflict, the Littlehorn massacre occurred, which was the SHTF moment escalating the war into its next phase. However during the first 9 years of the war, both sides would have been working hard at advancing technology to keep up with each other militarily.

Nothing advances tech faster than war. Consider the fact that America had nuclear weapons (and used them offensively) only thirty years after the Model T automobile was introduced.

Now, look at the second half of the war. Luna rapidly restructures Equestria immediately after Celestia abandons the throne. The Ministries are formed. Within a year or so, the first Megaspell was configured with a healing spell and detonated over a bloody battlefield, healing everyone, ponies and zebras alike, who only resumed fighting. Not long after that was the incident where Big Mac was killed. This prompted advancements in armor technology where friggin exosuits were invented!! Exosuits with magical matrices that controlled them.

All of this is canon.

The war kept advancing, and only a few years after that the holocaust occurs.

So really, there's not a whole lot of years realistically, to develop the established tech that exists in the story proper. By the time of the holocaust, StableTec had already designed, built and implemented over a hundred underground stables! There were supercomputers! The Crusader maneframes had friggin artificial intelligence to the point where a pony's entire personality and intelligence could be transferred into it.

There was ridiculously advanced medical technology. There were the memory orbs (in use for many years if you look at the earliest flashbacks). The PipBuck had a crazy amount of individual, advanced technological modules built into a device that was so small that it could be worn on the lower foreleg. And it had a super high data storage capacity and an internal power supply that seems to be able to last indefinitely. It also had a module that could manipulate time itself!

These ponies were way ahead of where we are now in many areas. And they did it all in about 25 years.

So in my story, which takes place with only about 10 years of space between the present date and the holocaust, there's still a hell of a lot of new tech to come about. And tech doesn't just "appear" all finished and polished. No, these projects take a long time to develop. So that means there's multiple techs being worked on simultaneously, and quite early.

I've taken this into account with things like the rather crude version of E.F.S. and the generalized healing potion that does an ok job but nothing so spectacular as we see in Fo:E which lets Littlepip endure life threatening injuries repeatedly practically nonstop, for weeks. Also, the very idea of an underground living place that is self sufficient would have taken a very very long time to conceptualize and test and build. An early prototype would have been essential in the development phase. Hence the Underground Hideout.