Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

[Ketchup]

@ketchup: The purpose of a train is to move large quantities of supplies or personnel between two secured points quickly. What you are suggesting would work, and is probably the best solution for moving supplies or personnel to a non secured or tracked location. But trains move truly enormous amounts of supplies, and the number of trucks or carriages needed to move an equivalent amount of supplies would be impractical to organize or defend. A train fits a specific niche, a niche wich cannot be filled with trucks and tanks.

You are correct. Trains cannot be replaced with a few trucks, but why would you need to move such a huge volume that you would need to use trains for? New construction, maybe, but it surely is easier to convert pre-war buildings to suit any need. Unless you want to make a town in the middle of nowhere, in which case, there wouldn't be any tracks or any resources that would make it worth settling.

[Somber]

Either way I don't see this design being used. If the train was 'recovered' tech then I could see gun nests and the like being built for small arms defense and portable missiles. Why? Cause it's easier. There's a lot less resources, time, and design problems. Nothing interferes with the trains primary function of providing horse (zebra?) power.

If the train were built from scratch, I still couldn't see it as having integrated weapons. It's the reason why we never put steam powered gatling guns on trains in the wild west. Cool as it might be, that's a complex machine to be trained, maintained, and is only used how often? so sorry. It still doesn't pass my plausibility meter. If the route is so dangerous that the train is guarenteed to be attacked, why have it in the first place? It's a lot of resource and I don't see what for.

[Snipehamster]

Much as I hate to butt in on the genetics discussion, I think it's worth pointing out that there's no reason to believe that we're working with anything resembling real life here. These are sentient, magical, multicoloured cartoon horses after all. For all we know, they might have biomagical pattern latticing (or similar psychobabble) instead of anything we might recognise as DNA.

Well, we know from Faust that different pony types can interbreed without problems, and that ponies reproduce like normal mammals. We know from the Baby Cakes episode that earth pony parents can give birth to both pegasi and unicorns. Yes, we could assume that they have rainbows in their nuclei instead of strands of DNA, or even that they're literally made of sentient marshmallow but there is no evidence whatsoever that they don't work like normal animals in that respect. Either they use a system similar enough to DNA to work the same in everything we've seen, and it's a matter of semantics, or it's all completely magical and arbitrary and there's no point in talking or even thinking about it. I like thinking.

Then by all means, pay my rambling pedantry no mind. (I didn't realise that Word of Faust confirmed interbreeding. That's neat.)

[Sindri]

It's the reason why we never put steam powered gatling guns on trains in the wild west. Cool as it might be, that's a complex machine to be trained, maintained, and is only used how often? so sorry. It still doesn't pass my plausibility meter.

I agree that in our world it would never happen; things actually attacking an established train route are very rare and can be dealt with by dedicated vehicles on a case by case basis. But the zebra wilderlands is a massive area filled with monsters, dotted by a few concentrated areas of civilization. Travelers between these areas will be attacked, the routes cannot be made safe for any practical expenditure of time and resources... either every shipment sent can defend itself, or there will be no communications or trade between settlements. Would it be more practical to send along another escort vehicle or more likely several, burning their own fuel, not carrying enough armor because they don't have the advantage of the tracks (if they were close enough to do any good in combat they'd be a hazard if they were riding the tracks themselves), and requiring their own maintenance and replacement after every shipment, or to spend some of the considerable capacity of the train to allow it to defend itself? External gun nest welded on would be a possible solution in the short term, but you would lose a lot of expensive mercenaries over the years and it just isn't an efficient use of space of mass; once you were building your own trains you would want them to have integrated weapon systems.

I do agree that the clearing of the rails should be done by a separate, specialized vehicle, probably riding a few miles ahead of the main train and carrying its own defensive armament. Clearing every obstruction with missile fire would be very expensive and a big enough boom to remove all debris would also damage the tracks themselves.

[Somber]

If the passage were that hazardous, I would build a rest stop, fortify and supplied, spaced out as far as the train could travel from dawn to dusk, minus an hour travelling time. The train would only travel at day light. At night and while the train is travelling, I'd have teams of four to six travelling in steam cars, scouting out problems and warning the train of potential ambushes. That's just me tho. I still don't see integrated weapon systems ever being a practical solution. For one thing, if I know "Missiles are X" all I have to do it hit that spot and hope for secondary explosions to cripple the engine.

[Cptadder]

Damn the last time I read this thread was page 22, lots of posts to catch up on.

Quick reply as I get reading this afternoon

If the passage were that hazardous, I would build a rest stop, fortify and supplied, spaced out as far as the train could travel from dawn to dusk, minus an hour travelling time. The train would only travel at day light. At night and while the train is travelling, I'd have teams of four to six travelling in steam cars, scouting out problems and warning the train of potential ambushes. That's just me tho. I still don't see integrated weapon systems ever being a practical solution. For one thing, if I know "Missiles are X" all I have to do it hit that spot and hope for secondary explosions to cripple the engine.

Look up train warfare of the civil war if you want an example of Pre WW1 armored warfare and exactly how good both Union and Confederate engineers were at repairing train tracks. To the point at which during the Vicksburg campaign some rail tracks were repaired faster than the carvery regiments had destroyed them. Look at the armored warfare of WWII when the Germans and Soviet partisans were cutting each others rail lines and the air forces of both sides were bombing junctions and how quickly both sides had railroads back in service. And all of the repairs guided from some truly massively armored rolling citadels that started life as a train car engine and boxcars.

As long as you build your bridges tough enough there are some truly crazy armed and armored train designs from 1861 to 1957.

My point is even if your country has the equivalent of land Godzilla running around tearing up tracks and attack trains I can guarantee you that a sufficiently well armed and armored train can be produced to reduce land Godzilla attacks to a manageable level so your losing maybe one train a year because of bridge loss or simple attack luck like getting the garrison car first or poor maintenance wreaking the only two Anti-zilla guns on the train.

[222222]

@Somber: I don't think we have to worry about anybody being intelligent enough to attack the missiles. It's mostly raiders and giant monsters that are the concern. I'm not entirely sure why traveling only in daylight would help, daytime monsters are just as dangerous as nocturnal monsters. Clearing the way ahead of time would work probably, but if the clearers ran into too much trouble then they would only be blocking the means of escape for the train, and if you make the clearers so powerful that that isn't an issue, then you are just building a battle train that is separate from the transport train. And if you just send scouts ahead, what good would their information be without a means to act on it. They would just end up saying wait a few more hours, and since you want to travel by daylight and space bases out one day from each other, you would lose an entire day.

[Sindri]

If the passage were that hazardous, I would build a rest stop, fortify and supplied, spaced out as far as the train could travel from dawn to dusk, minus an hour travelling time. The train would only travel at day light. At night and while the train is travelling, I'd have teams of four to six travelling in steam cars, scouting out problems and warning the train of potential ambushes. That's just me tho. I still don't see integrated weapon systems ever being a practical solution. For one thing, if I know "Missiles are X" all I have to do it hit that spot and hope for secondary explosions to cripple the engine.

Yeah missiles on the train are probably a bad idea. Unless the threats are big enough to justify a dedicated missile car, at which point you should just roll a squad of Ultra-Sentienls down the tracks and call it a day.


But there are almost certainly a large number of monsters that strike during the day, and keeping the whole route properly patrolled would be extraordinarily expensive (and lethal to many of the scouting parties). I think that for safety and expense, arming the train itself would probably be more practical than keeping fortified emplacements all across the wildelands and trying to either keep a large enough force stretched along the tracks to keep it safe or fight off monsters with the skeleton crews you end up with. In any job that dangerous you need to be paying each and every fighter enough that they're willing to risk death, and making them safe enough that they think they'll last to spend it. In order to fight off a serious monster incursion, you need heavy fortifications or a large force of damned good fighters. Over the scale and frequency you'd be dealing with, at some point it becomes cheaper to roll a small fortress down the tracks than to try to make the whole journey safe enough for a soft train. Especially with civilization building, and most people being able to survive in a job that doesn't try to eat them, so mercs would get expensive fast.

[Cptadder]

Rather than edit I'll throw up the links here. First Wiki's piece on armored trains

But more importantly here is a well written piece from the Business insider of all places detailing some armored train history and exactly how easy it is to build these kinds of rolling fortresses.

Being one of those War nerds growing up anything armored interest me but unlike ships, missiles, tanks and small arms I don't have sixteen books on the subject squirreled away.

[Somber]

Thank you for that, Cpt adder. Hmmmm... in light of that Wikipedia article, I guess I could see the zebras making something like that during the war and some zebra fixing it up years later. I doubt it would move very fast, but something like that really doesn't need to. I think derailment would be a huge issue tho. Derail once and you're never getting it back on the tracks without a heap of hard work.

Edit: Yes, Somber can be taught. :D

[Cptadder]

Thank you for that, Cpt adder. Hmmmm... in light of that Wikipedia article, I guess I could see the zebras making something like that during the war and some zebra fixing it up years later. I doubt it would move very fast, but something like that really doesn't need to. I think derailment would be a huge issue tho. Derail once and you're never getting it back on the tracks without a heap of hard work.

Edit: Yes, Somber can be taught. :D

Somber just needs to have more friends with eccentric tastes for example did you know how ships were built and launched back in the day? (Pre industrial revolution)

Give you a hint, it involved lots and lots of people(pony) power. Even train derailment back in the day unless it was down a valley or into a gorge involved lots of people and lots of ropes and a lot of pulling. But yes, de-railing in combat would be a huge issue which is why armored trains were designed with quick release and multiple engines so if the train started getting attacked the armored train could be split up and back up quickly. As long as the wheels are not wrecked or it's a head on colluision you can quickly get trains back into service.

Remember the moving parts of the train, the wheels and the chassis are made from steel

The steel connects to the steel, which is connected via steel to other steel. Which is why during derailments you will have shredded cars, hundreds dead but the cars themselves only need a new topside as the undercarriage is still perfectly fine. Only in a hard sharp impact accident do you generally get damage that can't be buffed out and even then the further back up the train the easier it is to just get some ropes and level it back up onto the tracks.

There is still in use in Britain active traincars and active railroad from 1877 in the old coal fields. The engines might have changed and upgraded but there are still coal trains using the same cars for over a hundred and fifty years even if most are not hauling as hard or as much as they did the first hundred years they were in service.

[Ketchup]

Here's my two bits on the whole armed trains discussion:

The armed train would be mostly practical in situations where an army is fighting invaders, during which they can swiftly move these behemoths to areas just behind the battle lines and pummel the enemy with artillery as they advance and machine guns and light cannons as they get closer.
Air power is the enemy of everything with heavy armor, though.

As time went on, they were replaced by tracked and wheeled AFVs, I'd assume.

Welcome back from whatever you were doing, Adder. I enjoy reading your posts on the wide variety of subjects you talk about. All I've said is probably already in your articles.

[Sindri]

Yes, Somber can be taught. :D

You heard it here first folks: even somebody as magnificent as Somber can still learn more. Proof that human potential is infinite.

[Aonee]

Yes, Somber can be taught. :D

You heard it here first folks: even somebody as magnificent as Somber can still learn more. Proof that human potential is infinite.

Waitwaitwaitwaitwait.

Wait.

Somber's human?!?

Nonono, a human taught her something.

[Ketchup]

Not this again...

[Kippershy]

Yes, Somber can be taught. :D

You heard it here first folks: even somebody as magnificent as Somber can still learn more. Proof that human potential is infinite.

Waitwaitwaitwaitwait.

Wait.

Somber's human?!?

Of course not! Don't believe the heretic!
Somber is a demi god on the verge of achieving full godhood, no human can ascend!

[MrMagma]

heretic!

Methinks I should lay off 40k for a while:

[Caoimhe]

My brain is now broken between work and then punnett squares and traintalk. Time for an old fashioned, a cigar and a bath.

I'm just waiting for a prime opportunity to interject with my vast knowledge of obscure music no one listens to so I can feel smart again.

[Ketchup]

I'm just waiting for a prime opportunity to interject with my vast knowledge of obscure music no one listens to so I can feel smart again.

Maybe try this thread?

[Caoimhe]

Oh boy, don't get me started on that. :) Ironically my favorite Australian dark country/bluegrass/blues/postrock folk artist popped up as I was typing a response and here's a song of his that references the Indian Pacific Railroad and train travel as a theme (also begging forgiveness for cheating, etc)!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWC7z859Psc

[Caoimhe]

Ack, I can't click the right buttons.

[Rafafidi]

My random question of the day: how an human/pony brain in a computer could be better than an AI normal computer and a programmer/technician?

[RoboRed]

Magic.

[O. Hinds]

Well, firstly, while I suppose that you could use these guns as ballistic weapons, that's really not what they're intended for.

As for beam weapons, yes, they'd be good, but they require gems to manufacture and a rather rarer specialized skillset to make and maintain. At the time this locomotive was designed, the EA's best source of gems was trade with hellhounds, and there were only so many they could buy that way (to say nothing of quality concerns). Combine that with the available engineers and maintenance personnel being predominately more comfortable with gemless kinetics, and it didn't seem to make sense to arm the locomotives with energy weapons. Now, they could be retrofitted in the modern era, given the growing trade with the NCR and the influx of ex-Enclave personnel, but it still makes more sense, I think, to use the energy weapons in places where they're more needed.

They still use ballistics no matter where or how you fire the gun. Kinetic would have been a better term to use, though.
Your explanation on why they wouldn't be using beam weapons is plausible.

Ah, thank you; it appears that we were just using different definitions.

@Somber: Just for context, this train is being used to travel through the zebra wastelands after the Gardens fixed stuff and the NCR was established. It's being built by a rebuilding society with access to fairly advanced technology. I'm not disputing what you said and I mostly agree with you, but you seem slightly confused as to why this train is being built. It's defense is for irradiated wildlife and raiders. Please correct me of I'm wrong Hinds but I'm pretty sure this is the case.

That's more or less right. The locomotive was originally designed and used for the recolonization of the Zebra lands prior to the Day of Sunshine and Rainbows (though it was still being used for that after TDSR). The design is now also a part of the Elusive Alliance's expansion into the regrowing but still-dangerous Equestria; in time, as things there become safer and more stable, it'll probably be replaced on the Equestrian routes by cheaper unarmored and unarmed locomotives, though it's lifespan in the Zebra lands will likely be much longer due to the wildlife, robots, etc.

As a side note, it's actually TDSR that's important for the expansion, not Gardens, as that's when it started (though it took a while to become noticeable to the inhabitants of the Wasteland in what would be the NCR, as the expansion did take time and was not free from further delays). The dominant reason this didn't happen fifty years or more ago was the presence of the Grand Pegasus Enclave.

@ketchup: The purpose of a train is to move large quantities of supplies or personnel between two secured points quickly. What you are suggesting would work, and is probably the best solution for moving supplies or personnel to a non secured or tracked location. But trains move truly enormous amounts of supplies, and the number of trucks or carriages needed to move an equivalent amount of supplies would be impractical to organize or defend. A train fits a specific niche, a niche wich cannot be filled with trucks and tanks.

You are correct. Trains cannot be replaced with a few trucks, but why would you need to move such a huge volume that you would need to use trains for? New construction, maybe, but it surely is easier to convert pre-war buildings to suit any need. Unless you want to make a town in the middle of nowhere, in which case, there wouldn't be any tracks or any resources that would make it worth settling.

Raw materials. Fuels. Construction materials (preapocalypse buildings, where they exist, would often be suboptimal, and in most of the Zebra lands there simply isn't anything left due to the ferocity of the Equestrian megaspell barrage). Finished industrial goods. Finished consumer goods. People. Materiel (lots of this). Parcel mail. Food.


@Somber in general on the locomotive matter:
Just to clarify:
This is a machine designed, built, and used after the apocalypse, and it was built from raw or recycled materials rather than a refurbished preapocalypse machine. As for who the builders are, I don't blame you for being confused, as that's pretty much entirely my headcanon. Suffice it to say for the moment that they're a mulirace and multispecies organization using both Zebra and Equestrian technological influences.

My random question of the day: how an human/pony brain in a computer could be better than an AI normal computer and a programmer/technician?

It's not necessarily better, but it's a useful shortcut. To build and program something even as good as, let along better than, a pony brain would be a tricky task, even given the tech that they have to work with. On the other hoof, while the computer could be made better, using a brain quickly and without much fuss gives you a machine equivalent to a pony, though with expanded IO capability if you've done your job properly.

[Sindri]

My random question of the day: how an human/pony brain in a computer could be better than an AI normal computer and a programmer/technician?

In terms of programming and other preparations? It basically is a person using a computer, but the interface would be improved. Instead of reading off a screen, parsing the text, typing commands in, and compiling them, it just flows straight from machine to mind and back.

In terms of combat efficiency? You get all the creativity and adaptability of a live pilot but without the reaction delay required by the instrument readouts and control levels and such. Not to mention that you only have to allocate a brains worth of space in the machine instead of a full cockpit.

A computer would be a hell of a lot faster than a conscious mind performing tasks and calculations that they're programmed for, but there's no way (yet) to replicate the ability to think, to react intelligently to a situation you've never been in before and haven't been trained for. Until we work out how to program a true Intelligence into a machine, a brain in a jar is the next best thing.

[Guest]

My random question of the day: how an human/pony brain in a computer could be better than an AI normal computer and a programmer/technician?

Well... that'd depend (heavily) on the nature of how this link was established, I expect. Are we talking "brain-in-a-jar" or "neural-snapshot-with-simulated-brain," for instance? I mean, in either case you're bound to have some serious changes occur to the brain, what with being embedded in a completely different system. To be honest, unless the feedback mechanism between the computer and the brain-bits was exceptionally advanced, I'm not sure the brain would be operational after the procedure (for PH, magic might help, if "information" is somehow coded into the consciousness/soul - this could be the ideal way to link up a pony and a computer, even). The brain would not naturally be able to make sense of the information being given to it, nor would it know how to use its new "limbs/tools." Given time, it might change to better interface with the system, but without some sort of reward/pain mechanism to promote this growth it'd probably be random and take a long, long time.

I think the ideal way would be to have mental training done before the actual operation; plug the subject into the computer for hours each day, giving them specific tasks and having them work their way around the system, and then instruct them once they got unplugged in what went wrong and what went right. This also would cut down on panic/insanity, I think, since the subject would know that they'd be returning to normal consciousness sooner or later. (Although, if the sense of time was somehow affected... that could be bad. Ever read Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt?")

As to advantages, well, theoretically the brain could interface with the computer much, much more efficiently than a person tapping away at a keyboard. It also would be able to create solutions to problems on the fly that a non-AI computer would not come up with, and have a far better understanding of humans/ponies (barring something like the apocalypse happening, anyway - that might mess things up). However, the computer parts are wired to be able to perform calculations much quicker. I see two potential ways to get around this: the brain might evolve to maximize its ability to calculate (since it no longer has to deal with stuff like keeping the heart working or moving muscles), or it might simply rely on the computer parts to feed it information - instead of thinking about the answer to the square root of 2788, it'd delegate the question to the computerized parts, like how we do with a calculator (only much, much more efficiently).

Hope that answered some of your questions, and I hope I actually made some degree of sense!

[OneMoreDaySK]

On the topic of genetics, how were males bred in 99? And what happens when a mare has a colt or twins? Infanticide?

[222222]

If a mare had a colt, the colt was put into a sort of 24/7 daycare watch program until they turned 15, and then they were put into the breeding pool and one was taken out. I'm not sure about twins. Somber?

[Caoimhe]

Apologies if this was covered somewhere (in story or elsewhere) but I have just finished every episode of the show and was curious what the the timeline from presumably the time after FiM to the events leading up to the end of days was. Seeming on the way to the beginning of the war with zebras, before the foundation of the ministries and most of the orb recordings, there was a period of technological (or magical) progress and also general events of realworld-like violence.

Did KKat and others assume that the events of the FiM show were mostly 'white washed' and behind it there was much depression, pain, violence, etc. and what fans view is a watered down view of pony life or was there a series of specific events that sort of destroyed the whole idea of Equestria being a utopia turning it into a more or less benevolent dictatorship?

[Rafafidi]

I agree that as a "pilot", a brain in a robot would be faster than a full person, but you would have to spend years training someone that could not only move in his new body, but also program and himself.
Why he would be smarter? Sure, he will make calculations faster, but that don't mean it will do the correct calculation. He will have acess to the same data he would if he still had a body. If the person didn't know about some thing, and there is no relevant data in the computer, how would he search about it? Internet? Would YOU trust YOUR BRAIN to the internet? You cath a virus and you die?
And some years later, when his body becomes obsolete, he'll have to spend months adapting to a new body, with completly different hardware and software?

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