Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

[FeatherDust]

@FeatherDust
/)
I've tried to side with Legion...once, for storyline sake. Couldn't do it. So I just finished Honest Hearts, took Joshua's armor and TLSitD, walk straight to Ceasar, imaged that I've said something like 'Old friend sends his best regards.' And totally emptied one clip in him.

(\
I took advantage of the open roof of the command tent and introduced Ceasar to Archimedes II.

[Cptadder]

Super mega-ultra post go!

On a semi-related topic, I'd like to see more Personal Defense Weapons in the Fallout Equestria universe. I'm all for handguns and squeezing every last bit of usefulness out of them, but they are more for concealed carry. PDWs and cut-down rifles perform the role of compact defense weapon even though they aren't as invisible. Just my thoughts.
*Snip my comments
I'll keep this in mind Captain. In my fic things are expanded upon by checking out other countries to an extent. For example Germane and Prancinnati had modern technology for a long time, but Germane couldn't care less about other countries and Prancinnati just didn't want to share. I'm the kind of writer who likes to use the slightest excuse to get something done. I'm an evil bastard like that. With the whole Korea/Vietnam mindset, I expect recoilless rifles to show up somewhere.

Some followup first
Conceal them where? Remember pony's don't wearing clothing by default despite what Lyra preferred.

Pony's go naked most of the time so concealed carry won't the same way for them. Pony's don't wear clothing except in the city and that's a social thing. Workers tend to be pictured wearing belts with pouches to hold tools but for the most part clothing is an appearance thing. And without clothing concealed carry does not make much sense.

That said onto your fresh comments
Remember Celestia is pictured as the literal God Princess of Pony kind. We know from Season 3 that other ponies have their own Princesses and own lands but I don't see any of them telling the sun god that they may not have ray guns. Try telling the person who can smite you at will no and see how that works out. Even if she's Celestia rather than Trollestia or Mollestia and your not going to be spend time on the moon or worse the sun.

I'm pretty sure ponies had modern firearms before the war broke out, IIRC
anyway Celestia must've gotten so depressed when she saw the advance in weapons technology

Really? Have we seen guns in the show? We certainly saw advancement during the war but did we see anything like that in FoE pointing towards pre-war gun technology?

If they didn't they could have easily bought them from the griffins. Their entire race is presented as mercenaries and I can't imagine they wouldn't been weapons merchants as well.

Griffions are about contracts and don't mind working so that would make sense but unless they are also engineers they would have be buying the weapons from elsewhere as without a strong engineer and industrial base it's impossible to get the first stages of historical gun production up and running.

Well said. That's how Europe acquired gunpowder from the Chinese so it's entirely possible here too.

That's not the only place gunpowder originated from. It's just the first place that gunpowder was used as intended. Gunpowder was discovered all over the place but the Chinese were the first to use it as an explosive and a propellent.

*snip details about battle-saddles and pdws
Swicked, you're totally right about griffins, though - they probably had plenty of handheld (or, well, talonheld) automatic weaponry.

I have no question griffons had guns but the question is where guns pre war or a wartime invention?

Firearm size would be tricky when you factor in battle saddles. Depending on the length of the pony you would have to mount full-size rifles to avoid powder burns to the head or possibly even their sides. PDWs could work for unicorns in that they don't have a large weapon to swing around and it wouldn't get caught on anything easily.

Thing is that PDW make sense only if the Unicorn is weighed down already. Why not give a Unicorn a full up rifle if it's not already lugging around something heavy. And if it is why not stop at a pistol because anything heavy enough to force you not to carry a rifle means it's important enough to consider your combat status as a second line not front line soldier. This is balanced by the fact the earth pony's are simply stronger than other ponies and can carry much more, combined with the fact pony psychology is ideal for carrying large weights long distances quickly. A human carrying eighty pounds is near his limit while a pony could probably carry half again that much and cover twice as much ground. And that's without magical weight reduction technology.

Which means coming back to the other reason for PDW's and that's lack of room in an armored vehicle.

Heck, the griffins even had battle saddles. I wouldn't be surprised if they had the earliest versions of vertibucks, too.

Why do Pegasuses have vertibucks? To transport other ponies and large gear. They might not have had the earliest vertibucks because their enemies would be dragons and Pegasuses where it does not follow you develop a flying transport. Remember helicopter development was spurned by a lack of good airfields and the need for faster scouts that could dwell over the battlefield for longer. Meanwhile Griffions don't have those needs combined with the fact that Vertibucks require unicorn magic. There are purely mechanical flying devices and balleons of course. But why making a flying machine when you can already fly? Advancement requires a need and an opportunity, while there was plenty of pre-war oppertunity I don't see the pre-war need.

@swicked
Where would the griffins get the gunpowder for rockets? Are there Griffin Miners then?

Gunpowder is Saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal. If Griffons dig into their mountains to expanding living quarters they can run across all of those easily. Heck if they live anywhere near a volcano they can find large deposits of both with only a tiny bit of refining.

I thought te griffons were bought by the zebras to try and match pony air power?

I thought te griffons were bought by the zebras to try and match pony air power?

I'm sure some were at first. But I thought the zebra's used dragons and fetishes to grow wings to match pony air power. I could be wrong though.

I thought te griffons were bought by the zebras to try and match pony air power?

Really? I could have sworn the griffins were fighting for the ponies and the zebra were using dragons.
You'd think I'd eventually start looking things up before posting XD

No I think the zebra were suing both griffons and dragons, if the ponies bought out the griffons they would not owrry about their airpower or superiority during winter wrap up. besides both sides would have used the mercs anyway.

Pretty sure the rule was that they (Griffins) worked for whoever payed them, and they weren't supposed to attack each other (Griffins). According to Carrion, Gilda was trying to put a Griffins first clause into whatever rules that they had, but failed.

Griffions contracted out to both sides during the war, individual tribes contracted out to both Pony and Zebra forces working all kinds of jobs. As long as they were payed they were loyal and Griffon did fight Griffion because of contracts which is why Gilda wanted a first clause to ensure it did not happen again.

The only difference between the two sides was that Dragons were mainly interested in helping the Zebras either because that's where the great dragon migration ends up in Zebra lands or they have a large native populations of dragons to begin with or just there is long standing Dragon/Zebra friendship for one reason or another.

[Caoimhe]

Remember, P-21 hid things in his butt! So I'm sure a pony could conceal a weapon there...that's a lot larger than a screwdriver...that you have to use your mouth to fire... ew. Nevermind.

Controversial derail: I was late to work today because I stayed up until 3am to preorder an iPhone 5! Yay! I never knew that in this community saying you use Apple products can start a religious war. I casually mentioned my affinity for Apple products on pony IRC the other day and that lead to almost an hour of 'crApple sheeple' and 'fashion trends' arguments. Yikes!

[O. Hinds]

*snip*

I'm pretty sure ponies had modern firearms before the war broke out, IIRC
anyway Celestia must've gotten so depressed when she saw the advance in weapons technology

“Th-that’s impossible, Applejack.  Equestria has never had a real war in…”  Twilight Sparkle paused, clearly running through her vast studies of Equestrian history.  And finding nothing.   “…I don’t think Equestria has ever had a war.  At least, not in over a thousand years.”
 
“Yeah, well, we all know how mighty stubborn ponies c’n get when their livelihoods are bein’ threatened.  Only this time, Ah fear it ain’t gonna be pies they’re throwin’.  Big Mac brought home one o’ them new-fangled firearms t’ take care o’ the cockatrice that’s been attackin’ our pigs…”

=It's irritating. Where did they get the materiel to make all this stuff when they have virtually no resource bases?

What I would've liked to see is what somebody said upthread -- make Enclave armor weaker than BoS gear, but they move in numbers. For each BoS knight, the enclave can field ten guys, and if they aren't as strong individually, their massed firepower can still burn down the Brotherhood.

Well, the Enclave does have the advantage of having been making plans; they may not have known that the apocalypse was coming as and when it did, but I imagine that the oil rig had some pretty large supply stocks just in case.

The factions/villains in Fallout present interesting concepts. Even if we can't understand them completely we can at least...ahem...'scavenge' ideas from them. A union of the NCR and Legion would be incredibly effective if it were ever possible (which it likely isn't). The NCR seems to do better at running things, while the Legion is better at enforcing things.

Well, that's what Caesar said he was planning/hoping to do once he conquered Vegas and that NCR. Would he really have tried? Would he have actually succeeded? Would the result actually have been much better than the Legion as it is now? Let me state my opinion this way: I've only started one Legion playthrough, and I've not gone back to it in a while (And that one is with a melee-specialized female. (I imagine that all that "women are inferior" rhetoric gets a bit more difficult to swallow when the Legion's greatest hero is a woman who's possibly better than Lanius at hacking things to death.)).

I thought te griffons were bought by the zebras to try and match pony air power?

I'm sure some were at first. But I thought the zebra's used dragons and fetishes to grow wings to match pony air power. I could be wrong though.

Also, in my headcanon, the cutting edge in production Zebra air power at the time of the apocalypse was the Acinaces (translation uncertain), a rough expy of the F-86 (The cutting edge in non-production Zebra air power was the Sagittarius Spectralem (translation also uncertain), a rough mixture of the XF-84H and the Douglas A2D. Its supersonic contra-rotating propellors combine with an extremely expensive magical system to allow it to not only rainboom but rainboom at far lower speeds than would ordinarily be possible (since prop speed rather than airframe speed is used). Unfortunately, it suffered from the problems of its very high price tag and the fact that piloting the plane effectively (and, to an extent, just piloting it in a way that wasn't "into the ground, fast") was quite difficult. While the latter could have been addressed to a good degree by good enough robotics technology, which was being developed, the former was a result of the difficulty of manufacture and the fact that its most crucial component, the rainboom system, relied on techniques and resources not commonly found outside Equestria... which obviously was not willing to sell to the Zebras at the time. The result was that only one was ever built, and the fact that it could take on Thunderhead-class cloudships all by itself and stand a good chance of winning was more than offset by the fact that it could only be in a single place at any given time. It also came out rather late in the war, and might not have been enough to get a non-Pyrric victory even if it could have been brought into mass production. Still, really cool plane, and an absolute terror to the Equestrian forces in the engagements that it did fight in.).

[O. Hinds]

Griffions are about contracts and don't mind working so that would make sense but unless they are also engineers they would have be buying the weapons from elsewhere as without a strong engineer and industrial base it's impossible to get the first stages of historical gun production up and running.

Huh. Now who do we know had, generations before the war, at least enough industrial capacity to build the Pony of Friendship, a hostile environment, and experience, at the least culturally, with warfare?

[OneMoreDaySK]

@New Vegas Discussion
I tried not to piss anyone off while gathering info on who's who, female character. Then as soon as I got ninja armor and a stockpile of weapons (which sadly didn't include Archimedes since I rerouted the power to everyone) I decide a war with certain groups was to be had. It's hilarious to fight the Powder Gang once I was running around counterintuitively using the modded Lil Macintosh. Bangs don't matter if everyone goes dead.

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

*snip*

I'm pretty sure ponies had modern firearms before the war broke out, IIRC
anyway Celestia must've gotten so depressed when she saw the advance in weapons technology

“Th-that’s impossible, Applejack.  Equestria has never had a real war in…”  Twilight Sparkle paused, clearly running through her vast studies of Equestrian history.  And finding nothing.   “…I don’t think Equestria has ever had a war.  At least, not in over a thousand years.”
 
“Yeah, well, we all know how mighty stubborn ponies c’n get when their livelihoods are bein’ threatened.  Only this time, Ah fear it ain’t gonna be pies they’re throwin’.  Big Mac brought home one o’ them new-fangled firearms t’ take care o’ the cockatrice that’s been attackin’ our pigs…”

=It's irritating. Where did they get the materiel to make all this stuff when they have virtually no resource bases?

What I would've liked to see is what somebody said upthread -- make Enclave armor weaker than BoS gear, but they move in numbers. For each BoS knight, the enclave can field ten guys, and if they aren't as strong individually, their massed firepower can still burn down the Brotherhood.

Well, the Enclave does have the advantage of having been making plans; they may not have known that the apocalypse was coming as and when it did, but I imagine that the oil rig had some pretty large supply stocks just in case.

The factions/villains in Fallout present interesting concepts. Even if we can't understand them completely we can at least...ahem...'scavenge' ideas from them. A union of the NCR and Legion would be incredibly effective if it were ever possible (which it likely isn't). The NCR seems to do better at running things, while the Legion is better at enforcing things.

Well, that's what Caesar said he was planning/hoping to do once he conquered Vegas and that NCR. Would he really have tried? Would he have actually succeeded? Would the result actually have been much better than the Legion as it is now? Let me state my opinion this way: I've only started one Legion playthrough, and I've not gone back to it in a while (And that one is with a melee-specialized female. (I imagine that all that "women are inferior" rhetoric gets a bit more difficult to swallow when the Legion's greatest hero is a woman who's possibly better than Lanius at hacking things to death.)).

I thought te griffons were bought by the zebras to try and match pony air power?

I'm sure some were at first. But I thought the zebra's used dragons and fetishes to grow wings to match pony air power. I could be wrong though.

Also, in my headcanon, the cutting edge in production Zebra air power at the time of the apocalypse was the Acinaces (translation uncertain), a rough expy of the F-86 (The cutting edge in non-production Zebra air power was the Sagittarius Spectralem (translation also uncertain), a rough mixture of the XF-84H and the Douglas A2D. Its supersonic contra-rotating propellors combine with an extremely expensive magical system to allow it to not only rainboom but rainboom at far lower speeds than would ordinarily be possible (since prop speed rather than airframe speed is used). Unfortunately, it suffered from the problems of its very high price tag and the fact that piloting the plane effectively (and, to an extent, just piloting it in a way that wasn't "into the ground, fast") was quite difficult. While the latter could have been addressed to a good degree by good enough robotics technology, which was being developed, the former was a result of the difficulty of manufacture and the fact that its most crucial component, the rainboom system, relied on techniques and resources not commonly found outside Equestria... which obviously was not willing to sell to the Zebras at the time. The result was that only one was ever built, and the fact that it could take on Thunderhead-class cloudships all by itself and stand a good chance of winning was more than offset by the fact that it could only be in a single place at any given time. It also came out rather late in the war, and might not have been enough to get a non-Pyrric victory even if it could have been brought into mass production. Still, really cool plane, and an absolute terror to the Equestrian forces in the engagements that it did fight in.).

wait, what, I'm not so sure i recall any of these aircraft's descriptions in the Reading Material

[O. Hinds]

wait, what, I'm not so sure i recall any of these aircraft's descriptions in the Reading Material

Well, no. As I said, tis headcanon.

[Cptadder]

Remember, P-21 hid things in his butt! So I'm sure a pony could conceal a weapon there...that's a lot larger than a screwdriver...that you have to use your mouth to fire... ew. Nevermind.

Yeah but could you quick draw something up there? Somehow I don't think that a pony can quickly or comfortably pull a... "backdoor" weapon out.

Writing a response to O.Hinds now the problem comes from the quote within a quote thing that had me confused for a minute there.

Also Black Mesa Source, trying to get a copy of that now.

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

... anus fired projectile


also, perhaps the very reason for a pony to wear clithing is to conceal a weapon?

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

wait, what, I'm not so sure i recall any of these aircraft's descriptions in the Reading Material

Well, no. As I said, tis headcanon.

ahh well the viability of a single seat fighter taking out a raptor is just dumb... a thunderhead is outright. this isn't the rebels versus the empire here.

[Cptadder]

*snip*

I'm pretty sure ponies had modern firearms before the war broke out, IIRC
anyway Celestia must've gotten so depressed when she saw the advance in weapons technology

“Th-that’s impossible, Applejack.  Equestria has never had a real war in…”  Twilight Sparkle paused, clearly running through her vast studies of Equestrian history.  And finding nothing.   “…I don’t think Equestria has ever had a war.  At least, not in over a thousand years.”
 
“Yeah, well, we all know how mighty stubborn ponies c’n get when their livelihoods are bein’ threatened.  Only this time, Ah fear it ain’t gonna be pies they’re throwin’.  Big Mac brought home one o’ them new-fangled firearms t’ take care o’ the cockatrice that’s been attackin’ our pigs…”

Okay so at the outbreak of war there are guns of some kind, they are new guns of a type unknown. By Kkat canon we are therefor starting the war with guns. Guns of some kind. A fire arm after all can be a match lock rifle or a g36 after all.

=It's irritating. Where did they get the materiel to make all this stuff when they have virtually no resource bases?

What I would've liked to see is what somebody said upthread -- make Enclave armor weaker than BoS gear, but they move in numbers. For each BoS knight, the enclave can field ten guys, and if they aren't as strong individually, their massed firepower can still burn down the Brotherhood.

Well, the Enclave does have the advantage of having been making plans; they may not have known that the apocalypse was coming as and when it did, but I imagine that the oil rig had some pretty large supply stocks just in case.

Simply stockpiling in anticipation of a major offensive could answer that. Read up on the American production numbers during WWII and you see the literal mountains of goods stockpiled in England in anticipation of D-Day. In the military you plan for twice what you think you need for half as long as you need to. So 200,000 troops get four weeks of supplies for the actual 125,000 troops for a two week assault and you stockpile 6000 calories per day per solider in food because that's what you need in extreme conditions and contentious fighting.

So if the Enclave was simply stockpiling resources for an expected incursion into Zebra territory and the bombs fell that easily explains vast warehouses of goods ready to go. After all if your stockpiling goods for 500,000 earth, unicorn and Pegasuses ponies and suddenly your stockpile needs fall to 60,000 Pegasuses and your not longer expecting constant contact you've just increased your month of combat supplies to half a year easily.

The factions/villains in Fallout present interesting concepts. Even if we can't understand them completely we can at least...ahem...'scavenge' ideas from them. A union of the NCR and Legion would be incredibly effective if it were ever possible (which it likely isn't). The NCR seems to do better at running things, while the Legion is better at enforcing things.

Well, that's what Caesar said he was planning/hoping to do once he conquered Vegas and that NCR. Would he really have tried? Would he have actually succeeded? Would the result actually have been much better than the Legion as it is now? Let me state my opinion this way: I've only started one Legion playthrough, and I've not gone back to it in a while (And that one is with a melee-specialized female. (I imagine that all that "women are inferior" rhetoric gets a bit more difficult to swallow when the Legion's greatest hero is a woman who's possibly better than Lanius at hacking things to death.)).

Caesar allowed slavery so Caesar had to die as he allowed the horribly short sighted prisoner of war style slavery which just used people up which breed in the notion that human beings are disposable trash. That will not breed a long standing or long lasting empire.


Part 2 in a little while

[Meleagridis]

The problem with Fo3's ending wasn't that there was an unrelentingly "good" end -- it was that they refused to let you use the obvious resources at hand the solve the problem without suicide. It wouldn't have been so terrible if Fawkes's total immunity to radiation hadn't been a MAJOR PLOT POINT just a few hours earlier, when retrieving the GECK. (Sgt. Gutsy is also a valid choice -- if he gets destroyed by radiation, well, that's sad -- but he's a ROBOT, not a person, and I'm not being a bad-karma dickhead for sending him in.) When it comes down to it, the problem with the ending of Fo3 was that it made "sacrifice" the only acceptable solution for a problem that just didn't require it. It felt contrived.

For the most part, I'm glad they took out the alignment restricted companions in NV. However, it does make a passable excuse for Fawkes here- the only type of person that Fawkes would travel with wouldn't force him into that chamber. But his karma destiny blah blah blah doesn't really convince me personally. So we leave this to a real philosopher to put it as simply as possible:



(It's RL-3, if that link didn't work right.)

But honestly, it comes down to Fallout having as much flawed writing as buggy quests. Perhaps this just wasn't the right set-up for the 'lone' wanderer.

[Katarn]

IIRC with Broken Steel you can ask Fawkes to enter chamber and he WILL enter.

[Cptadder]

Also, in my headcanon, the cutting edge in production Zebra air power at the time of the apocalypse was the Acinaces (translation uncertain), a rough expy of the F-86 (The cutting edge in non-production Zebra air power was the Sagittarius Spectralem (translation also uncertain), a rough mixture of the XF-84H and the Douglas A2D. Its supersonic contra-rotating propellors combine with an extremely expensive magical system to allow it to not only rainboom but rainboom at far lower speeds than would ordinarily be possible (since prop speed rather than airframe speed is used). Unfortunately, it suffered from the problems of its very high price tag and the fact that piloting the plane effectively (and, to an extent, just piloting it in a way that wasn't "into the ground, fast") was quite difficult. While the latter could have been addressed to a good degree by good enough robotics technology, which was being developed, the former was a result of the difficulty of manufacture and the fact that its most crucial component, the rainboom system, relied on techniques and resources not commonly found outside Equestria... which obviously was not willing to sell to the Zebras at the time. The result was that only one was ever built, and the fact that it could take on Thunderhead-class cloudships all by itself and stand a good chance of winning was more than offset by the fact that it could only be in a single place at any given time. It also came out rather late in the war, and might not have been enough to get a non-Pyrric victory even if it could have been brought into mass production. Still, really cool plane, and an absolute terror to the Equestrian forces in the engagements that it did fight in.).

My personal head canon conflicts hard with yours because conventional jet engines require a whole MESS of things in order to get right and take decades to get right. We still had planes blowing up on the tarmac into the late 50s despite starting in 1939. A dependable reliable fighter plane would come along until we had the F-4 Phantom as even the F2 Bansee had flame out on start problems off an on.

Plus with the prevalence of self powered flying units fighter jets don't fulfill a need. With Unicorn magic anti-grav it makes even less sense because then your fighters are trying to tangle with things that can be armed and armored enough to be a ground instillation. Even if it makes for a nice mental image of top gun ponies battling it out with evil all black Griffon merc planes... I just don't see a need for direct one for one from pony to human combat. There does not need to be a pony version of the Sherman in my headcanon for me to be happy. I'm quite happy with pony's learning the wrong lessons and designing something like a Red Alert Mammoth tank with two barrels and all equal armor. It gets even worse if you've got magically backed tungsten pen-aids going up against armor bypass shells. The kinds of differences in Equestria lead to different developments of different types of weaponry combined with the different pony technology which is why we have floating cloud fortresses in FoE... something we lack in real life.

[O. Hinds]

wait, what, I'm not so sure i recall any of these aircraft's descriptions in the Reading Material

Well, no. As I said, tis headcanon.

ahh well the viability of a single seat fighter taking out a raptor is just dumb... a thunderhead is outright. this isn't the rebels versus the empire here.

Usually, of course.
The Sagittarius Spectralem can rainboom.
When in the rainboom state (still haven't thought of a good name for that), it's fast and, in the hooves of its pilot, maneuverable enough to evade a Thunderhead's guns (unless the sky is so filled with flak that there's literally no space left for the plane; I didn't say that the SS was certain to win).
The SS can rainboom pretty much at will.
Thunderheads are held up by clouds.
Rainbooms clear clouds.
If the plane can get next to the Thunderhead, it can send it towards the ground without firing a shot. Even if the first rainboom doesn't bring it down, subsequent ones probably can. And, again, this is without using any weapons other than the plane itself. Bring in missiles or rockets, especially if they're balefire tipped and they can also be somehow accelerated by the magic system (still not sure about that, but even the guns would have remarkable performance if they could be tied in), and you can probably start trying out different methods of bringing down Thunderheads just for variety.

In an air war where speed and maneuverability are probably the most important things for all non-cloudship or dragon combatants, a plane that can make right-angle turns at supersonic speeds has some pretty formidable advantages.

That said, the aforementioned "fill the sky with flak" plan will at the least force the plane to turn away (though, on the other hand, if you're pointing that many of your point defense weapons in this one plane's direction, what aren't you pointing it at, and can that kill you?), and there's always the danger of a lucky shot.

[Cptadder]

I thought rainbow was a magical phenomenon and not just raw speed.

Also O-Hinds your forgetting the greatest enemy of aircraft
Lasers
Can't dodge a laser in an atmosphere.

[Kippershy]

IIRC with Broken Steel you can ask Fawkes to enter chamber and he WILL enter.

Charon too. Not sure about RL-3 though.

[Somber]

You guys are incredible. I just can't keep up...

As far as factions go, yeah. The Legion is just too over the top. I sided with them once for the achievement, botched the surgery and finished with Lanius for the other. There really is nothing redeemable about them. They're Vipers or whatever little raider gang x1000 playing romans. I don't see them having any kind of real scientific or technical base and Arcades is right. Once Caesar dies so does his legion. So really, it's stupid.

One of my biggest beefs with NV is that you have all these factions, but you have no real effect on any of them. There's Cass' quest where you expose the Van Graff and Crimson Caravan, but we never see it actually matter. The Brotherhood either stays reclusive, hands over their bunker to the NCR, or gets wiped out. I would have loved if, once you had Caesar's ear, you could change the dynamics of the faction. Show the player had a real effect. What if you could convince the Legion and the NCR to make an accord establishing the colorado River as a border? You'd still have to kill Lanius in the end for a boss fight. Probably house too... but it shows that the game is more x win, y loses, z gets screwed.

My big problem with the Enclave in FO3 is much the same. They swoop in from no where. I'd love it if you got quests from an enclave operative; gathering intelligence, rescuing some of their scientists, helping them take Evergreen Mills and Paradise Falls out. Then, when you find out about the FEV plot, you now have a moral choice. Do you commit genocide with a germ weapon or not? You know the Enclave has the tech and the audacity to restore civilization. It would have been awesome to be able to try to either reunite the outcasts or to convince them to join the Enclave.

Either way, I think it would have been more interesting...

[Cptadder]

You guys are incredible. I just can't keep up...

Nine way conversations are like that.

As far as factions go, yeah. The Legion is just too over the top. I sided with them once for the achievement, botched the surgery and finished with Lanius for the other. There really is nothing redeemable about them. They're Vipers or whatever little raider gang x1000 playing romans. I don't see them having any kind of real scientific or technical base and Arcades is right. Once Caesar dies so does his legion. So really, it's stupid.

To be fair to Caesar once he controls an area he does move in and start rebuilding just like the NCR. The thing is he does rebuilding with slaves and the food raised goes to feed his army with just enough left over for the slaves to keep working. He is establishing a civilization and support an economy of sorts.

*snip examples
Either way, I think it would have been more interesting...

It would be more interesting but the problem with Bethesda is they don't have a great internal culture when it comes to finishing off quests. There are markee main quests and then lots of stuff farmed out to a handful of people to come up with X quests in Y area.

They need to take the people in charge of decorating homes and put them in charge of questing, there are literally two guys who goes behind the main team and their only job is to decorate places. Every burned out book, every tin can they set up it's crazy.

[O. Hinds]

I thought rainbow was a magical phenomenon and not just raw speed.

...Yessss, which is what that extremely expensive magical system I was talking about is for.

Also O-Hinds your forgetting the greatest enemy of aircraft
Lasers
Can't dodge a laser in an atmosphere.

Given what we've seen of Equestrian beam tech, though, you can cover degrees of sky faster than the beam's tracking system. If they've got a gun ahead of you and try to move it back to where you're going to be, don't be there. Rainbooming means being able to make pretty much 90 degree turns.

Look at Rainbow Dash in Sonic Rainboom. Now imagine that you're trying to shoot her down, and she knows this. Now imagine that she doesn't have to slow down for about half an hour, is armed, and can see where you are. If the guns weren't using either targeting talismans or remote aiming, they'd have a morale problem trying to shoot the plane down before the other problems even came into play.

You guys are incredible. I just can't keep up...

As far as factions go, yeah. The Legion is just too over the top. I sided with them once for the achievement, botched the surgery and finished with Lanius for the other. There really is nothing redeemable about them. They're Vipers or whatever little raider gang x1000 playing romans. I don't see them having any kind of real scientific or technical base and Arcades is right. Once Caesar dies so does his legion. So really, it's stupid.

One of my biggest beefs with NV is that you have all these factions, but you have no real effect on any of them. There's Cass' quest where you expose the Van Graff and Crimson Caravan, but we never see it actually matter. The Brotherhood either stays reclusive, hands over their bunker to the NCR, or gets wiped out. I would have loved if, once you had Caesar's ear, you could change the dynamics of the faction. Show the player had a real effect. What if you could convince the Legion and the NCR to make an accord establishing the colorado River as a border? You'd still have to kill Lanius in the end for a boss fight. Probably house too... but it shows that the game is more x win, y loses, z gets screwed.

My big problem with the Enclave in FO3 is much the same. They swoop in from no where. I'd love it if you got quests from an enclave operative; gathering intelligence, rescuing some of their scientists, helping them take Evergreen Mills and Paradise Falls out. Then, when you find out about the FEV plot, you now have a moral choice. Do you commit genocide with a germ weapon or not? You know the Enclave has the tech and the audacity to restore civilization. It would have been awesome to be able to try to either reunite the outcasts or to convince them to join the Enclave.

Either way, I think it would have been more interesting...

It's been said before, but if you could work on Fo4, or maybe 5, or something...

[Cptadder]

...Yessss, which is what that extremely expensive magical system I was talking about is for.

Missed that, my bad.

Given what we've seen of Equestrian beam tech, though, you can cover degrees of sky faster than the beam's tracking system. If they've got a gun ahead of you and try to move it back to where you're going to be, don't be there. Rainbooming means being able to make pretty much 90 degree turns.

Look at Rainbow Dash in Sonic Rainboom. Now imagine that you're trying to shoot her down, and she knows this. Now imagine that she doesn't have to slow down for about half an hour, is armed, and can see where you are. If the guns weren't using either targeting talismans or remote aiming, they'd have a morale problem trying to shoot the plane down before the other problems even came into play.

You can play the probabilities game and coat a Raptor in enough apertures because even if you can pull a ninety degree turn in mid air unless it's
Also targeting talisms on robots seem to be just enough to get the job done. They are not designed to engage targets at 2 kilometers going sixty kph let alone something pulling 700 kph at 15 kilometers. A dedicated anti-air tracking talisman could manage it considering the existence of the missile designs. The only problem is getting one to react fast enough because the amount of movement required engaging something at the 22 kilometer horizon is far less than the amount required to dodge that laser.

The only reason we are building F-35 these days is because we don't have a reliable deathray we can put on a truck bed because we certainly can build a chassis to swing around fast enough to track planes at that distance easily. In fact there are secret squirrel type things I've heard about a Russian system that can paint a cockpit with a laser powerful enough to blind a pilot and accurate enough to hit the cockpit. The only reason it's not in wide use is that you can't see the cockpit of a plane from the ground and it loses a great deal of accurasy once it's in the air because flying is inherently a non-stable platform.

[Kippershy]

You guys are incredible. I just can't keep up...

As far as factions go, yeah. The Legion is just too over the top. I sided with them once for the achievement, botched the surgery and finished with Lanius for the other. There really is nothing redeemable about them. They're Vipers or whatever little raider gang x1000 playing romans. I don't see them having any kind of real scientific or technical base and Arcades is right. Once Caesar dies so does his legion. So really, it's stupid.

One of my biggest beefs with NV is that you have all these factions, but you have no real effect on any of them. There's Cass' quest where you expose the Van Graff and Crimson Caravan, but we never see it actually matter. The Brotherhood either stays reclusive, hands over their bunker to the NCR, or gets wiped out. I would have loved if, once you had Caesar's ear, you could change the dynamics of the faction. Show the player had a real effect. What if you could convince the Legion and the NCR to make an accord establishing the colorado River as a border? You'd still have to kill Lanius in the end for a boss fight. Probably house too... but it shows that the game is more x win, y loses, z gets screwed.

My big problem with the Enclave in FO3 is much the same. They swoop in from no where. I'd love it if you got quests from an enclave operative; gathering intelligence, rescuing some of their scientists, helping them take Evergreen Mills and Paradise Falls out. Then, when you find out about the FEV plot, you now have a moral choice. Do you commit genocide with a germ weapon or not? You know the Enclave has the tech and the audacity to restore civilization. It would have been awesome to be able to try to either reunite the outcasts or to convince them to join the Enclave.

Either way, I think it would have been more interesting...

That it would've been more interesting.
Though, there is one thing I know that you'd most likely like to hear.

Liberty Prime. I'm going to guess that you (or at least Hinds) have a problem with how back pre-apocalypse, the best minds of the day couldn't figure out how to solve the power issue, but as soon as some wasteland scientist comes along 200 years later, she has it up and running in about three days?
(Or less, if you're fast. I say three days if you're going to go "realistic" with it.)

Anyway -- here's a kicker you'd have loved.

They originally had a reason why she got it up and running... and a reason why she [Dr.Li) was on the council...
You were meant to sneak into Rivet City and take their power core.
As in, yes, the thing that kept R.C up and running.

There was a big quest where you snuck in (or fought your way in) and stole the power core, fought your way back out and then it was installed into Liberty Prime, making him fully functional.
THEN you took back P.Purity.




but, nope. that would've been far too grey morally, too much fun.

[IncoherentOrange]

Controversial derail: I was late to work today because I stayed up until 3am to preorder an iPhone 5! Yay! I never knew that in this community saying you use Apple products can start a religious war. I casually mentioned my affinity for Apple products on pony IRC the other day and that lead to almost an hour of 'crApple sheeple' and 'fashion trends' arguments. Yikes!

The thing with Apple is how pricey their hardware and software generally are when compared to their competitors. In the case of the iPod Touch/iPhone1-5, it's the fact that they keep releasing the same product again and again, with almost no difference from the last iteration. Then charging say, four hundred dollars for it. And Macs. Oh, Macs. The OS ain't so bad, (other than the fact that you can't run a significant number of games on it, but Windows emus exist, don't they?) but they cost as much as two PCs in many cases, and don't think about upgrading--it'll leave you sour.

Then there's their legal stance, which is quite aggressive. People just don't like 'em. But, as someone who has never owned an Apple product, I can't judge.

[Ketchup]

Also O-Hinds your forgetting the greatest enemy of aircraft
Lasers
Can't dodge a laser in an atmosphere.

As we've discussed a few times, railguns could also be used against aircraft. The closest thing we have to lasers in AA capability would be in my opinion the various CIWS. As the name suggests, they are rather short ranged, especially when compared to potential lasers or railguns.

[O. Hinds]

...Yessss, which is what that extremely expensive magical system I was talking about is for.

Missed that, my bad.

Ah, right then.

Given what we've seen of Equestrian beam tech, though, you can cover degrees of sky faster than the beam's tracking system. If they've got a gun ahead of you and try to move it back to where you're going to be, don't be there. Rainbooming means being able to make pretty much 90 degree turns.

Look at Rainbow Dash in Sonic Rainboom. Now imagine that you're trying to shoot her down, and she knows this. Now imagine that she doesn't have to slow down for about half an hour, is armed, and can see where you are. If the guns weren't using either targeting talismans or remote aiming, they'd have a morale problem trying to shoot the plane down before the other problems even came into play.

You can play the probabilities game and coat a Raptor in enough apertures because even if you can pull a ninety degree turn in mid air unless it's
Also targeting talisms on robots seem to be just enough to get the job done. They are not designed to engage targets at 2 kilometers going sixty kph let alone something pulling 700 kph at 15 kilometers. A dedicated anti-air tracking talisman could manage it considering the existence of the missile designs. The only problem is getting one to react fast enough because the amount of movement required engaging something at the 22 kilometer horizon is far less than the amount required to dodge that laser.

The only reason we are building F-35 these days is because we don't have a reliable deathray we can put on a truck bed because we certainly can build a chassis to swing around fast enough to track planes at that distance easily. In fact there are secret squirrel type things I've heard about a Russian system that can paint a cockpit with a laser powerful enough to blind a pilot and accurate enough to hit the cockpit. The only reason it's not in wide use is that you can't see the cockpit of a plane from the ground and it loses a great deal of accurasy once it's in the air because flying is inherently a non-stable platform.

Well, the missiles are much less maneuverable, much less smart, and, therefore, much easier to hit. Also, we've no information on the details of Equestria's missile defenses (or how targeting talismans actually work, even); it's possible that whatever better targeting system they use couldn't be mounted on a Raptor or Thunderhead even if they are good enough to hit a jinking SS. If the cloudships have defenses that good, why haven't we seen them in action?

[Kippershy]

I will never understand bootcamp for Macs.
First, you're buying two OSs, unless you steal it, but even then:
PC: cheaper, more powerful and variable/swappable hardware with a less than secure OS
Mac: more expensive, less powerful and restrictive hardware with a more secure OS

What I see in bootcamp is a person willingly deciding to take the weakest part of both computer options and paying through the nose for it.

I used to have an iPhone and switched to droid so that I could have more options without having to void a warranty. No offence to apple users, but if you buy their products then bend over backwards to get around their OS... I just don't get it.

This. Especially when even how less secure the windows OS is, all you need to do is run some decent, trusted A.V program & A.S program and don't be stupid about where you're looking online/what you're downloading.
It really, really isn't hard.

And guess what, like Swicked implies - easier to "hack" for YOUR OWN BENEFIT with MORE results and no violation on warranty! (Unless you're overclocking... then it depends on who you're with.)

[OneMoreDaySK]

@Fallout3
There weren't many morally ambiguous things in there. Even the FEV was more of a one sided thing once you realize that you yourself would be considered "infected" Tenpenny Towers was just stupid, so I never finished the quest. It hilariously contradicts with my 100% completion obsession.

@Apple
All I have is an Ipod. Don't really like their control architecture though. So many restrictions. Out of curiosity and possible future purchases, what would be a good alternative to Ipads?

[Kippershy]

@Fallout3
There weren't many morally ambiguous things in there. Even the FEV was more of a one sided thing once you realize that you yourself would be considered "infected" Tenpenny Towers was just stupid, so I never finished the quest. It hilariously contradicts with my 100% completion obsession.

@Apple
All I have is an Ipod. Don't really like their control architecture though. So many restrictions. Out of curiosity and possible future purchases, what would be a good alternative to Ipads?

Notepad laptop.
Unless you're going for the touch-screen effect, a notepad is probably what you'd be best off with. Something small with enough power to do the basic things while not costing an arm and a leg and not taking up all the carrying room you have.

[IncoherentOrange]

I tried to find a Mac with similar specs to my computer (current market value ~900CAD). Which is...

Spoiler:

The closest one costs three times as much, has a slower CPU, a superior video card (but, mine's two years old, so...), a larger SSD, and a bigger monitor. But still, three times as expensive as mine.

[Sponsored content]