I love to see more chapters of this though I have one nitpick: How is there a plumber much less multiple plumbing companies to choose from before sewers are a thing? I mean, yeah, they existed to do aqueducts and such but I imagine they'd be a lot harder to find than, say, a blacksmith. Mentally, I'm just chalking this up to deus ex machina.

8540193 That pretty well sums up the problem I had with this chapter. This story seems to presume that Equestria is functioning at roughly the equivalent of Europe's (late) medieval period; if that's the case, plumbing should barely exist at all except perhaps as grooves in the street for wastewater to collect (covering those formed primitive sewers). References to plumbing as a profession, with pipes and hard hats of all things, shouldn't really exist yet.

Aqueducts, as you mentioned, might very well exist (along with other advancements), but that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that the minotaurs or other nations would have that Equestria doesn't (notwithstanding rare instances of undertaking a commission, a foreign ruler's gift, etc.).

At the risk of going too far off-topic, there are some great primers out there regarding what life was like in Western Europe during the late medieval period that seem almost essential for establishing the baseline that this story is working from.

Was Equestria behind some of its neighbors?

I would have to do something about that.

TIME FOR ORBITAL COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES :D

This story is very interesting. A story solely based upon Equestria's tech advancement and not it just being an afterthought like in a lot of popular HiE. Keep it up you have something special here!

8540193
Your probably right.

I'm gonna wait for him to go and try and figure out why the fuck their are minotaurs. I'm mean their mostly just bipedal bulls with fucked up proportions but they still have hands.

8540522
This statement confuses me. Why are there minotaurs? You'd have to ask show staff.

8540319

8540193
Hard hats? Did I mention hard hats?

It was already stated that this plumber pony did ornamental work, at least so far as his daughter was thinking. A town fountain is not outside the realm of medieval. Here: https://www.pinterest.com/ladydraza/medieval-fountains/?autologin=true

Moving water for making a decorative well is not the same as a sewer system, at all.

Big difference between lead pipes a few inches accross for supplying water under pressure to houses, and brick tunnels the size of 6 heavy cargo carts in cross section for handling the vast volume of low velocity waste flow. The faster the flow of particulate containing waste fluidics, the rapid increase in erosion of the pipes. Theoretically, top grade engineering brick lining can handle high speed high wear flows. Then again, theoretically top grade engineering bricks can handle volcanic lava flows. so maybe selling, licensing, installing that technology to the Dragons would be worthwhile.

If Easys mother worked on both water supply and waste disposal, would she get the nick name, Ma I/O ? And her husband, Lug I/O ?

OK, so far I could see that Equestria has base technology and knowledge, but not advanced applications. Let's see how it would turn out from here.

8540550
Ending of chapter 4 they talk about minotaurs. Minotaurs are half human not sure if that applies to MLP but minotaurs are supposed to be half human. And I'm waiting for him to ask "so why teh fock are der minotaurs wit out Dem hu-mans?"

8541327
Sure they are half human, on earth. In Equestria it is much more likely they are a type of bovine, similar to but clearly different than the sapient cows we have witnessed beside the minotaurs. Much how we have Opal, a feline, and suddenly a bipedal cat, so says the movie.

8540554 I somehow seemed to have misread her cutie mark as being a hard hat when it was actually a top hat. My mistake, there.

That said, while you're not wrong that there were fountains and other water-based architecture during Europe's medieval period, the way that it's talked about in this chapter is confusing for two reasons:

1) The word "plumber," while dating back to Roman times, was used in medieval Europe to refer specifically to people who worked with lead, having lost its etymological connection to pipes that was used in Rome (where they used lead pipes for various water-transfer projects); as such, hearing it used in the contemporary manner here is confusing, as it doesn't evoke the medieval period that this story is attempting to convey.

2) it's hard to believe - in the context of this story - that "plumbing" (in terms of creating ornamental fountains) would be, unto itself, a trade that could provide for lifelong stability, let alone a family discipline, which is how Easy described it. Those types of projects tended, insofar as I'm aware, to be folded into larger disciplines regarding construction, architecture, and sculpting. The method by which pre-Industrial fountains worked was little more than taking advantage of gravity, making water flow downward from either natural or artificial sources (e.g. lakes or cisterns) via channels, pipes, or other pathways so that it would spurt when it reached its destination. Making them wouldn't be a specialized profession the way it's described here, but rather a particular application of a much wider, more loosely-defined field of study.

To put it another way, this story has a resident of a medieval-era society talking about "plumbing" in contemporary terms, and it's throwing off the chapter's tone.

8541987
I think you're forgetting that this is the words not of the 'plumber' but the disinterested daughter who specifically avoided the family trade. This is pretty good measure of an unreliable narrator. She wanted to be a magician! What does she know of construction and other such things? Clearly not much.

8541335
The world may never know unless they decide to royally fuck up the show by adding a human in the Canon show

8542224
Come to think of it, there's also winona, a dog, and the diamond dogs. None of them are 'half human', at least so far as the show has presented.

8542260
Im not sure the diamond dogs show up anywhere in real life except the show. And what is Winona? Some non sapient diamond dog outcast?

8542265
Applejack's dog. Just another example of biped and quadruped versions of the same animal existing.

8542267
Still weird tho

Hey, don't forget part of the employment deal: Easy Breeze said if she hired the human he would give her ear scratches. Since the human hired Easy Breeze, does that mean she has to scratch his ears, or just let him scratch hers? A worthy debate to have.

Okay, I like how this is turning out.

8540709
A huge part of london still relies upon the victorian brick sewer system.

8543942

Very popular your mega brick waste disposal tunnels, very hygenic.

One I really liked was some years back when they were putting metro tram tracks in Dublin, Ireland, and right outside the main door to the bus station, with the road alighned with it, they found a still operational Roman sewer only a few feet down. I only saw the open trench and the opened end, not if they decided to totally rip it out to get the foundation depth for the tramline. Or totally redesign that section of line to bridge the archeology and leave it in place.

Many have mentions this but i also have to point it out plumbing in what we assumes is medieval Equestria who doesn't even have aqueducts that we know of at least.
Even if a plumbers exist there with a different meaning how does Ian intends to build a sewer system that involves pipes? without constitution machinery, we didn't have pipe system until the early industrial era until there it was just bricks and stones, canals mostly.

Worth point out also the is the fact that Ian thinks he can do better job then centuries of humanity engineering with few wiki pages downloaded on his smartphone that will day in few days with no means to recharge it.
Ian himself has no knowledge or experience in the field that we know.
Sorry to say but there is complete lack of thought that Ian put in his plan, the only thing he could do is give ponies the basic ideas and not much else.

8545580
I would think those kinds of issues will just be resolved with magic. Though it feels like a cheap way to resolve it, it would at the end of the day be the most appropriate.

8545772
And this what i got in my email box

Considering they have running fountains and artificial waterfalls of all things, I'm pretty sure they have pipes. Heck, Breeze even says that her father knows pipes, so they definitely have them.

And yes the most simplest answer would be magic, as for ponies having pipies but not having the basic concepts of sewers is just plain stupid, but then again they have telebims and trians pulled by earth ponies.

8545782
Indeed, I had misread your comment at first, which is my fault, I should have read it a little more carefully from the beginning since I know my vision is bad and I mix words up sometimes. That's why what showed up in your inbox is different from the comment currently on there. And as you said, it is dumb to have pipes and the knowledge of their implementation but not have even the idea of a sewer system, however they do in fact have trains pulled by earth ponies, so maybe they are just a little dumb. Well that's a bit harsh, it's more that they are complacent rather than dumb, more of a "this works, so let's not give it any more thought," kind of mentality as opposed to a lack of intelligence.

8545795
The problem with that is if that was thier thought process they would never evolve past tribal Era.
They do not poses the will to improve themselves nor do the mingle with other civilizations to copy ideas from them as we know Equestria is very isolated.
But then again their whole world is backwards from what we've seen from the griffins to the yeaks

8545805
I would say it's not that they lack the desire to improve, it's that they lack the desire to improve further if that makes any sense. Think of cell phones, they've come a long way, they came to be from the desire to improve some aspect of our lives, but are where they are today from the desire to further improve. It's like, they only take the first step, they just dip their toe in the pool, but they never jump in. I hope you get my meaning because I can't think of any other ways to explain. xD

8545838
I do get your point but it is silly and doesn't make sense, cause when do you decide to stop improving?
If we were trace back humanity improvements we probably could go all the way to the invention of the wheel, why didn't we stop there we had a very good wheel.
And there's the fact that there are people on earth who got stuck in being tribal due to isolation from the rest of the world and other reasons, to them we'd be aliens.

8545857
Indeed, to them we'd be aliens, and the MC of this story has only had to chat with Celestia for a few minutes before she began to question what exactly he is. It is silly from a human perspective, but remember that they aren't humans. You shouldn't hold them to our standards, nor judge them for not sharing our mindset. Which was a silly sentence to type out about fictional characters but you get my meaning. The one thing I am somewhat flummoxed about is the MC saying how he's gonna do things better than his kind did. It's one of those "you wot mate?" kind of statements. I mean he's pretty much just some jack-off with a DIY guide, not sure how exactly he plans to go about doing better. I guess if he means that he's going to speed run technological progress than that is probably doable, considering he has the most difficult part, the inventions themselves, already figured out.

8545901
I also pointed this out Ian us just a kid with some wiki pages on his phone and he thinks he can outdo centuries of enegenering and countless humans labor? Yeah good luck kid i say.
As for standard we do have to apply some standards otherwise the author may as well use cartoon logic in his fic complete with Deus Ex Machina solutions rather then simple logical solutions.
I hear this excuse often, they're ponies they don't think like humans etc, the thing is they're beings capable of logical thoughts proces and emotional responses same as us, so we do share some standards on a on a basic level at least.

8545922

8545901
You two realize that we, humans, in the real world, have had fountains in places without sewers or even the idea of sewers, right?

8546088
And what has that do do with anything?
Fountains before pumps were invented were just small pools of water that were regularly cleaned via buckets.
There were no self cleaning fountain before then.

8546103
Who said a thing about self cleaning? I was pretty sure I read doubt that ponies could have 'pipes' without 'sewers' as if the two were married concepts.

8546105
Because for someone with half a logical mind they would get married very fast as they would be a vast improvement from aqueducts, but as I mentioned before ponies are far from logical beings having steam trains pulled by earth ponies or telebims in Manehattan but not have something like. pens

8546105
Not married, more like they've been dating for a while and she's just waiting for him to pop the question but he can never seem to work up the nerve.

8546110

8546111
While it would be 'logical', they didn't. They just didn't, in the real world. We had working spraying fountains long before someone decided sewers were a great thing to have. We're not talking about what should be or could be, but what already happened. This is not opinion, it's fact. Progress is not always 'logical'.

8546115
I would say if you were going to really go into the whole why they have X but not Y, a factor you have to consider is time. How long have they had X? Like you said we had mechanical fountains long before we had sewers, and the gap is centuries wide, and for a species with access to magic, I would say they probably had fountains before we did. Progress takes time, but that's why the MC is here, to speed run it.

8546115
I dunno what we're arguing here about, yes progres isn't always a straight line, in case of Equestria it's far more screwy then ours, similar how in fallout universe the only difference is that they never invented micro procesor and invested more research into nuclear energy.

As for sewers before they existed as they are now we had other systems like aqueducts, the concept of sewers existed long before pipes were invented, it just had a different name.

The issue that i think here is that you have pipies plumbers but no sewers or apparently any other system dealing with waste, Roman's had this stuff figured out, bloody Roman's.

8546130
Darn those Romans, but after they fall apart, the idea of sewers were entirely forgotten, but fountains came back faster. There were dark age fountains, powered by gravity mostly. Sewers took much longer to return.

8546142
Not really, aqueducts still existed in one way or another or people had other ways dealing with waste but obviously those weren't implemented everywhere, only the biggest and the richest cities would afford such systems, most common folk like farmers had to used the good old buckets, but even they were taught the importance of boiling the water before hand, for the most part anyway.

8546142
What Celestia found baffling about boiling water is actually what people did and still do in case of contamination.

8546142
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sanitation
Roman's were the most popular with thier aqueducts but there were other systems as well.

8546177
That page entirely skips over the medeival era, which is what we're dealing with, the dark era when sanitation was not used, and many related illnesses ravaged the population.

8546185
I think it skips cause nothing changed until the beginning of the industrial Era, and as I mentioned before only the richest and wealthiest cities could afford such systems ergo maybe 1%. So 99% were filthy
The medivial era or dark ages is very centered time event as it mostly happened in England a good part of the world wasn't affected by it or by the black plauge and there also other factors that affected health, corpse piles on the streets rats etc.

8546220
As described so far, the urban centers of Equestria are built like London before the sewers. People piled trash and shoved it out of the way and that was just how you did it. The rural people of Equestria are healthier by far, away from the concentrated filth. This is what was said in the story.

8546225
And again I'm not sure what we're debating here.

so from what i understand, this dudes about to start the industrial revolution? nice!