I know they had apple orchards in at least two, but is that all that they ate? I feel like an apple-only diet wouldn't work, but can't recall what other types of crops (if any) were mentioned as being grown in the Stables?

7329826
They probably had lots of different crops, like carrots and beets. Maybe even some sort of dairy, like chickens, to lay some eggs, or cows to milk.

7329826
Depending on the stable they could have different crops such as carrots, grapes, oranges, etc. Of course, could use a recycling system like PH but think that actually would exist honestly, more likely they would have a food producer.

7329826
I doubt they would use only apples. Probably there are other crops. Or just grass (because ponies can eat hay). Maybe there is some weird alchemical food processor in some dark corner of Stable, synthesising horrible food paste for local ponies.

In blackjacks stable they had a recycler that they used to turn corpses into food so theres an extra source

7329828
In a closed environment like that would you not want to have any more creatures around than you have to since for each step your food take, from raw material, to veggies, to meat/eggs/milk do you loose 90% of the initial energy, which is also one of the main reason that all of our meat comes from "prey" animals and not "predetor" animals. Bear can taste ohh so good, but if you need to feed him 10kg of honey to get 1kg of meat does it simply not work out on a bigger basis.

7329826
One of the quickest growing foods are radishes and takes "only" 25 days from sowing until they can be harvested, so those would be one a prime candidate for pony food since you want something quickly so you need a smaller field to make it. Radishes could also easily be cultivated in hydroponics which is one of the most place/resurce friendly ways of growing greens that we know of, and are often referenced in Fallout Vauls, so would not be far fetched for ponies to have those as well.

Secondly would mushrooms be a prime candidate for food since they need little to no sunlight which means that they demand less energy than your normal veggies that want a lot of sunlight, heck there are even some that live off radiation. Look up "mushrooms in a bucket" and you will see how easily it is to farm some.

Now... down to the really really boring part, a lot of their food would most likely be "recycled", you can only pack up so many callories in a Stable after all, so better make every one count, and looking back at our "the body does only recive 10% of the energy in food" do you leave 90% of the callories behind in your poop. Another really boring answer is "magic", when you have spells that transmute stuff, like Twilight did with the frog that turned into an orange, would you most likely be able to zap some stones and turn them into potatoes or something else.

7329917 Very thorough response, I love it!

7329858 7329883
One thing to remember about the PH "food recycler" is that it is really really flawed since it can't do something as simple as kill all bacteria/vira in a pony before you eat it, so sounds more like a blender than a proper recycler. Prion disease (Too lazy didn't google: sickness based on proteins, most often found in brain matter) is a rare thing, but a well known fact, so that you don't put a safeguard in place to protect the ponies against any sicknesses when using such a sick machine is a wonder to me.

7329826
The story didn't really go heavy into the logistics of running a Stable. The apple orchard was the only source of food mentioned, but it didn't specifically preclude the existence of other sources of food. So there might have been more.

That said... the demonstration "Stable Zero" voice tour talked a fair bit about various aspects of the Stable, and when it came to producing food, the only source it mentioned was the "Stable-Tec Apple Orchard" (Capitalized because Stable-Tec just had to give it the name it already had). The orchard was described as providing all the food the Stable needed, which implies that it's the only source of food (Even if it doesn't explicitly eliminate the possibility of other sources). Additionally, when Stable Two was talking about relocating, they only mentioned the apple trees when it came to food. It may well be that this was the only source of food. Well, that and the grass, if you really want a change of pace. Maybe they did something to make an all-apple diet more nutritionally complete, or maybe ponies can just handle that (Some of them seem fine on pure sugar diets, after all).

Personally, I'd have a real hard time buying the whole "recycler" thing. It seems too ghoulish for Stable-Tec. Vault-Tec, sure, but not Stable-Tec. Sure, you probably have systems to reclaim drinkable water from urine, and excrement likely gets repurposed as fertilizer, but those are very different processes from processing biological material into food. It's also a lot of work for extremely small returns. Even if a pony's body could provide a full day's food for thirty people, and you relentlessly culled the population as soon as they fully matured (Say, 15-20 years old), that's providing less than half a percent of the Stable's food needs. That means for every roughly ten people you recycle each year (A bit more than the expected death rate per year for a population of one thousand people), you could get the same amount of food by planting a single additional apple tree. Maybe two, if the "Stable-Tec Apple Orchard" trees are low-output. It probably takes up less room and resources, too. Doomande is right about meat animals being very poor investments of time and resources, and Equestrian ponies would be among the worst.

It's an extremely narrow window between corpse recycling being pointless and corpse recycling being insufficient. With all of that, corpse recyclers, especially in the context of Stables, generally came across to me as more of the author trying to make things darker and nastier rather than trying to come up with viable survival solutions.

7329917
Ah, that's true.

7329883 Wow.

Soylent Green much?

7329930
The recycler killed most diseases, but prions are extremely nasty and far more difficult to destroy than most infectious agents. Additionally, the prion that infected 99 was specially genetically engineered, so the recycler wouldn't necessarily get rid of it even if it got rid of other prions.

7329826
The Stable community in my story had a multitude of fruits and vegetables; apples, cauliflower and broccoli are mentioned specifically. Broccoli became a running gag though, since there was this one kid in the Stable that reeeeally liked the stuff. Which was a direct reference to the fact there was a town named Broccoli in Pink Eyes, and the fact Puppysmiles had an immense dislike for the vegetable in question

7329990
Yes. Soylent Green exactly.

7330035 Yep.
Not sure that In want to even read "PH" now, knowing this.
Which bites, since I actually like Blackjack as a character.

7329826

7330063
well, speaking as one whose read it and doesn't like Blackjack, I do recommend it despite its irksome ways and love of the anime.

7330063
I still recommend reading Project Horizons. As I said in another post a while ago, if Fallout: Equestria were to be described as World War II, then PH could be described as Wolfenstein: The New Order.

It is darker and more dismal overall, even so far as being grimderp as opposed to grimdark, and it's certainly a wilder and more chaotic ride than FoE, but damn if it isn't a hell of a ride.

7330063 If I remember my PH right, he recycler wasn't actually meant to be used for ponies, they just sort of started doing it. A lot of how Stable 99 was supposed to run wound up not being how it was run, if that makes any sense...I wouldn't let the recycler turn you off from reading PH, I loved it.

7329826
It is stated in the Fallout games, at least in Fallout 3 during the tour of the Vault in the Museum of History, that the SimuSun lighting mimics real sunlight, and the Stables have something similar for their apple orchards, as I recall.

If a Stable were to acquire seeds for other crops, or if they had them from the outset, it's plausible that they could sustain and rotate crops throughout the orchard, and biological waste would supplement the fields.

Given that all of the Vaults ran on geothermal or nuclear power plants, supplying a small farm's worth of crops with sunlight equivalent would be limited only by the power plant's longevity, its fissile fuel, sustained output, and the reparability of the lighting elements themselves.

With a sufficient stockpile of spare parts, tools, and scrap material, such as steel stock, arc welders, lathes, and other machining tools limited to electric power, a subterranean farm could be maintained for many decades.

The duration of Stable 2 and Vault 101's operation implies that their inhabitants showed enough ingenuity and resourcefulness to extend a predicted stay of two or three decades to two centuries.

And LittlePip didn't even need to replace a water purifier.

7330158 Okay, thanks, I will.

7330160 Okay, thanks for the recommendation.
I'll give it a read soon.

7330163 Okay, thanks. I'll give it a chance soon.

7330163
7329936
7330063

That's at least partially correct. I'm fairly sure using the recycler on ponies was unintended (Glory did strongly warn them against putting corpses into it, but they didn't listen), and the most significant features of 99 were not intended by Stable-Tec. The corpse recycling wasn't just there to make things dark. The original experiment was about replacing most grown food with a huge amount of artificial food that would be recycled for re-use.

7330031
Come on there are a relative simple fix, take your people, turn tem into a slurry and feed them to shrooms that you then eat. Its strongly hinted that it is something like that 40K does, so if Grimdark 40k can figure it out would Grimderp PH be able to do it as well

7330513
And if they don't have any mushrooms?

Odds are most have Possessors like in PH(Just for waste not for bodies) Also probably some crops along with orchard such as rice and wheat. I don't think they have herd animals the eat the meat of seeing Rem's reaction to Pip and calamity eating meats. Other Crops might be sugar for backed goods. Eggs might have a chemical substitute for them.

7330513
Oh, mushrooms! I almost forgot that. Another underground community in my story survived on pretty much just mushrooms