Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

[Caoimhe]

Bolos are also obsolete because in order for them to be actualized we'd first have to have a respectable General Motors capable of designing something that isn't a piece of garbage in the 21st century.

[Cptadder]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Bolo?from=Main.Bolo.

I personally have little love of bolos given that an adversary could simply imbed themselves into a civilian population, evade, hide among the populace, and while they could never hope to actually destroy the bolo, really they'd never need to. They could easily kill, torment, and control the civilian population. The idea of a bolo is an unstoppable war machine is pretty obsolete in today's terrorist centric environment.

Now you've wandered in one of my several areas of interest. In order to hide in the population you need a willing population that supports an insurgency. Terrorists are different from insurgents as terrorists are never long for this world especially if they operate outside their base culture. Insurgents by contrast are so effective because Bob the Insurgent is Bob the engineer at work and Bob the Insurgent building bombs in his garage. That duality is what lets them be such a long term thorn in the side of any government. Terrorists are typically "on the job" so to speak all the time.

A bolo style weapon can deal with any number of terrorists because an unstoppable machine who's only purpose is to hunt down the enemy can if need be. Without the population hiding and supporting the enemy sooner or later a supply line will be discovered or movements caculated or an attack in progress interrupt and the enemy dealt with.

Alternatively you can go Nazi on an enemy. It's hard to have a rebellious native population if there IS no native population left. Likewise the Armenian situation during WWI where the Turks fearing that the native Armenians were spying for the Russians simply moved the entire population out of the battle space and killed about a million of the two and a half million they moved.

[Cptadder]

I may be misremembering, but weren't those large, relatively slow-tracking weapons designed to attack dragons and ground targets?

Dragons are not exactly slow targets but they are plodding compared to your SS. But it feeds back to my point about the lack of counter if a Raptor is not designed to engage individual fliers at rainboom speeds then there is less chance of a full up fighter craft that travels at rainboom speeds with your theoretical crazy good maneuverability.

Regarding size, we know that pegasi can rainboom all by themselves. If it's also possible to build a machine that can make a tower generate a rainboom, I don't see why it would not, at least in theory, be possible to build one allowing a fighter with supersonic props to rainboom.

We have no idea how fast the SPP can generate a rainboom and how often. You said in your write up to the SS that it could pull 90 degree sharp turns like the kind Rainbow Dash pulled during her second Rainboom. That indicates to me every time the plane is pulling one of those turns it's rainbooming in order to generate the inertial dumps so it can pull that turn to begin with. In the various calculations of Rainbow Dash's feat one of them was the math worked out to 1670 of acceleration force to make that turn. To put that in connect that's sufficient to put a object into an escape velocity from earth. Without some kind of magical (And the Rainboom is magical) method of taking that kind of force and dumping it into the environment your going to end up with many tiny bits of airplane scattered over two miles of ground.

Which suggest to me the Sonic rain boom is either a continuous state (Which I think is what your suggesting) where in once the plane hits the Rainboom limit it just has to maintain it in order to begin pulling turns that should snap it like a child's toy without an inertia compensator. Or the alternative method that each time it pulls one of those turns its rainbooming.
So there's a point of confusion because I assumed the latter and on review I believe you were postulating the former that Rainbooming is a continuous state.

As for why not a missile, over half the reason why only one SS was built was the enormous cost of the rainboom system. Sure, a missile doesn't have to come back (assuming that it can be made smart enough to get to the target in the first place), but it also can't come back. A plane is reusable. A missile probably can't even carry out multiple strikes on the same target, and if it can, then adding a bit of extra fuel capacity could probably allow it to get back to base, turning it into a drone. A plane can also carry out multiple different types of mission, with great flexibility, and attack a variety of targets in a variety of different ways, and it can operate in concert with other planes and ground forces. Sure, you could build all of this into the drone too... but now you've basically got a full plane that's waiting for an extremely complex AI. If you're going to build one of those (and it is just one, since that's all you can afford), why wait when you can get better performance right now by putting your best pilot in the thing?

This point about plane VS missile object makes less sense depending on your answer to the above question about continuous rainbooming VS activation. A plane indeed makes a lot of sense if you can flip a switch and start giving physics the finger. Especially if you want to toss in the standard "rare power source". Because if a rainboom generator takes Type 77D Raspberry Flavored Magical Energy Gems then it makes no sense to stuff them into missiles because the number of them might be vanishingly small.

[quote="O. Hinds"]
(Note that the Zebras were, in my headcanon, developing mass-producible drone fighters (Raising the g limit to what the plane can withstand, rather than the tolerances of a flimsy meat pilot, may not be quite as much a gain as rainboom, but it's much cheaper and still quite significant. And, of course, when the AIs started getting not just "good enough" but "better than a living pilot"...), but none of them had gotten past the noncombat prototype stage at the time of the apocalypse.)

What do you mean by "each redirection requires a usage"? And yes, it is an expensive bit of kit. A very expensive one. Also, it's not sky-coaches to the SS in a decade. More like WWI-era planes to the SS in two decades.

That was spell check gone wrong. What I meant to say was that each state in development requires a reason to go further. In a war time economy if I improve my technology you spend money to advance your own and I counter. However if I run into a Science wall beyond which my materials science won't let me advance then you simply catch up and we slow down to just do useability and reliability improvements. You can see this all over the place in major wars in the 20th century when a weapon was "good enough" and the other side did not produce something better than resources got pulled to other fields. Aircraft cannons during WWII for example saw very little advancement even as air to ground weaponry exploded. It was not until post war that the hard science got done figure out that planes are very easy to shoot down if you can hit them to begin with and one gun firing VERY fast is much better than six guns firing just "kinda fast".

This issue was known but the war robbed both sides of the ability to go outside the box and start setting up lots of hard science experiments to study the problem in depth because of the war. Likewise the composition of tank armor only tends to improve during peacetime.

Part two shortly.

[Cptadder]

The lack of a counter is potentially problematic, though, yes. If Equestria could build the counter and didn't, then either the SS doesn't exist or there was some other reason (and I'm not sure what that might be). If they did build the counter... well, if they built it prior to the plane's existence, the plane doesn't exist; if they built it after, then the plane (and, since this is the bleeding edge in speed and maneuverability, pretty much all non-stealthed Zebra air power) can't do much but run when cloudships enter a battle.

...Wait.

Aha! I have a retort! If the cloudships are equipped with such a system...

Text:

...then why don't they use it, fire a few shots from their energy weapons (which they have plenty of ammo for) and disintegrate her? The only Raptor weapons described as being used were also described as being too slow to hit a glowing target in a wing-powered vertical climb. Instead, shooting DD came down to sending soldiers to chase her, and in the end they were so desperate that they used their valuable missiles. It doesn't look like Raptors have poor point defense; it looks like they have no point defense.

Now, poor, or just pretty good, point defense could mean that that was adequate for the threats faced, which would be pretty good evidence against the existence of something like the SS (not conclusive evidence, since maybe, due to the SS's late introduction, Equestria was still developing and/or deploying the system at the end of the war or something...). A total lack of point defense suggests that they were either ridiculously overconfident (which... is possible, actually, given what we've seen of the wartime pegasi) or were relying on pegasus soldiers and small vehicles for defense, operating under the assumption that the Raptor's onboard forces could deploy and eliminate any threats before the Raptor was in danger. Given that, while they're not totally stupid, the latter assumption has the minor flaw of a huge vulnerability to something as simple as a few camouflaged SAM batteries, I suspect that it's a mixture of the two. In any case, while, in this situation, the existence of the SS might be enough to make them reevaluate their strategy, I doubt that they'd have gotten from "nothing" to "PDS good enough to shoot down incoming smart supersonic bogeys that can shoot back and make right-angle turns" and then gotten that system widely installed (if they got it working well enough at all) by the end of the war.

This feeds back into my earlier statements about the lack of counter arguing against the SS... ever seeing wartime action because if one was made it would be known and it would be on the level of the 262 introduction. When the Allies ran into the 262 in combat the air wing freaked out. Here was a plane that was well armed enough to evaporate any planes it hit and was a hundred miles per hour faster than the fastest planes in level combat. Compared to a bomber stream it had something like a two hundred mile an hour advantage, much more if it was a head to head run in which case the combined closing speed was pushing nine hundred miles an hour or a a quarter mile a second or about 88 seconds from horizon until the planes would be past them.

A hundred improvisational counter-measured where run through the same month the 262 made it first combat kills. Ninety percent did not work but by the third month there were known counter measures to the 262 the most vital simply being vulching 262 on take off and landing. Vulching FYI is short hand for vulturing an airfield where planes stayed either very high or very low waiting on 262 to come land or take off and jumping them then because at low speeds the 262 had the maneuverability of a brick.

And giving the Enclave known reactions in the story, the instant they knew there was a Ghoul Pegasus that could take out Raptors they instantly changed tactics and were prepared. Unless they forgot something like the SS I'm going to again argue against it.

However if you want to argue for it I have a suggestion. Simply have the SS have no battlefield tests prior to the End. If the SS was meant to be a Wunderwaffe but the war ended before it could ever be used the lack of counter measures makes sense. You can't counter something you don't know exists except on accident.

[Kippershy]

You need a better monitor, there exist plenty of better 32 inchers out there that can do full up 1080P with nice clean resolutions. But that's personal opinion.
Also your other USB ports are 2.0, 3.0 is still not on chip native so even expensive luxury boards only offer 4 onboard.

Any suggestions? I'm currently "out've money" as it were (not enough spare to afford a new TV) but it shouldn't be long before I have the money to afford such a venture again.
I DO need a new TV since my current one is fucked as it is.

[Kippershy]

@Kipper

Spoiler:

Bought it really recently, actually. Invoice says 16th August (this year).
I could've gone elsewhere to get it even cheaper (or a higher powered machine for the same price) but wasn't aware of that.
However, the extra money I paid means that I have 3 years insurance on it and a load of free software.
The big price kicker was having to buy Win7 for it seeing as my brother doesn't have a copy of the 64 bit OS (but does have the 32).

[Cptadder]

Any suggestions? I'm currently "out've money" as it were (not enough spare to afford a new TV) but it shouldn't be long before I have the money to afford such a venture again.
I DO need a new TV since my current one is fucked as it is.

Mine is Sony KDL-32EX500 which I got for 100$ off the then 599.99 sticker price. You can find a few used in the 300$ range but if you wanted a new one good luck.
See here's the thing, TV's these days are literally on a nine month cycle. As in from the day it's introduced till the day they don't sell them in stores ever again is nine months. Not the day they never make any more which is a six month cycle but the last day you can buy a TV these days is nine months after they are placed on the market. This cause no end of headaches a technology is not advancing that fast but part distributors are. Which is why the replacement for the Samsung U6500 is actually worse than the U6400 because they swapped the main board makers for the internals and ended up with a TV just as expensive yet visually worse in the color department because the thing does not load balance them correctly and your blues look up ending very blue while your greens and reds also look blue or it will tilt the scene the other way because hey we saved 50 cents per TV switching from Honest Lee's Discount parts supplier to Honest Dee's slightly more Discount parts supplier.

[O. Hinds]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Bolo?from=Main.Bolo.

I personally have little love of bolos given that an adversary could simply imbed themselves into a civilian population, evade, hide among the populace, and while they could never hope to actually destroy the bolo, really they'd never need to. They could easily kill, torment, and control the civilian population. The idea of a bolo is an unstoppable war machine is pretty obsolete in today's terrorist centric environment.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Bolo?from=Main.Bolo.

I personally have little love of bolos given that an adversary could simply imbed themselves into a civilian population, evade, hide among the populace, and while they could never hope to actually destroy the bolo, really they'd never need to. They could easily kill, torment, and control the civilian population. The idea of a bolo is an unstoppable war machine is pretty obsolete in today's terrorist centric environment.

Now you've wandered in one of my several areas of interest. In order to hide in the population you need a willing population that supports an insurgency. Terrorists are different from insurgents as terrorists are never long for this world especially if they operate outside their base culture. Insurgents by contrast are so effective because Bob the Insurgent is Bob the engineer at work and Bob the Insurgent building bombs in his garage. That duality is what lets them be such a long term thorn in the side of any government. Terrorists are typically "on the job" so to speak all the time.

A bolo style weapon can deal with any number of terrorists because an unstoppable machine who's only purpose is to hunt down the enemy can if need be. Without the population hiding and supporting the enemy sooner or later a supply line will be discovered or movements caculated or an attack in progress interrupt and the enemy dealt with.

Alternatively you can go Nazi on an enemy. It's hard to have a rebellious native population if there IS no native population left. Likewise the Armenian situation during WWI where the Turks fearing that the native Armenians were spying for the Russians simply moved the entire population out of the battle space and killed about a million of the two and a half million they moved.

Ah, thank you, Somber. Cptadder, that could work if the terrorists were an independent group, but what about war waged through state-sponsored terrorism and cyberwarfare? The latter might be fought by AIs, true, but there'd be no reason to put the AIs in tanks. And if you're fighting by genocide, why use big, expensive robot tanks for it? There are cheaper methods of indiscriminately killing everyone in an area.


@Cptadder re airplane stuff:
I'll reply when I'm more awake.

[Valikdu]

Welcome to the world of name brand. You pay money for that brand name and in Apples case you pay a lot which is why are the richest company on the planet.

Wizard's First Rule:
People are stupid.

[Cptadder]

Ah, thank you, Somber. Cptadder, that could work if the terrorists were an independent group, but what about war waged through state-sponsored terrorism and cyberwarfare?

Then the state is a method of resupply and I'm guessing they know a lot about the terrorists if they are supplying and sponsoring them. State sponsored terrorism just means "reason to declare war on the state" if it's real State sponsored terrorism. As opposed to what Iran was doing with Iraq which was mostly just ignoring what was going on their borders and not being that stingy with the entry and exit visas. Real state sponsored terrorism is stuff like Afghanistan under the Soviets where the Americans are sponsoring "freedom fighters" not terrorists, those can't be the same people no sir. But supporting those "freedom fighters" with guns, training and intelligence. Real state sponsored stuff tends to be dramatically different in scale.

But if you suspect it's going on the best way to counter it is to go to war with the state that sponsering it. Much harder to sponsor terrorism when their government is captured, dead or hiding, their assets are frozen and the factories are now the latest in crater fashion.

The latter might be fought by AIs, true, but there'd be no reason to put the AIs in tanks. And if you're fighting by genocide, why use big, expensive robot tanks for it? There are cheaper methods of indiscriminately killing everyone in an area.

I do not understand this, what Somber was talking about was a Bolo trying to defend the civilian population against a insurgent group not killing the population.

[O. Hinds]

I may be misremembering, but weren't those large, relatively slow-tracking weapons designed to attack dragons and ground targets?

Dragons are not exactly slow targets but they are plodding compared to your SS. But it feeds back to my point about the lack of counter if a Raptor is not designed to engage individual fliers at rainboom speeds then there is less chance of a full up fighter craft that travels at rainboom speeds with your theoretical crazy good maneuverability.

Regarding size, we know that pegasi can rainboom all by themselves. If it's also possible to build a machine that can make a tower generate a rainboom, I don't see why it would not, at least in theory, be possible to build one allowing a fighter with supersonic props to rainboom.

We have no idea how fast the SPP can generate a rainboom and how often. You said in your write up to the SS that it could pull 90 degree sharp turns like the kind Rainbow Dash pulled during her second Rainboom. That indicates to me every time the plane is pulling one of those turns it's rainbooming in order to generate the inertial dumps so it can pull that turn to begin with. In the various calculations of Rainbow Dash's feat one of them was the math worked out to 1670 of acceleration force to make that turn. To put that in connect that's sufficient to put a object into an escape velocity from earth. Without some kind of magical (And the Rainboom is magical) method of taking that kind of force and dumping it into the environment your going to end up with many tiny bits of airplane scattered over two miles of ground.

Which suggest to me the Sonic rain boom is either a continuous state (Which I think is what your suggesting) where in once the plane hits the Rainboom limit it just has to maintain it in order to begin pulling turns that should snap it like a child's toy without an inertia compensator. Or the alternative method that each time it pulls one of those turns its rainbooming.
So there's a point of confusion because I assumed the latter and on review I believe you were postulating the former that Rainbooming is a continuous state.

Ah, yes, I was indeed. I was assuming that the only reason pegasi drop out so quickly is because they tire; the SS would, under this way of things, be able to stay continuously rainboomed until the fuel tanks ran dry.

As for why not a missile, over half the reason why only one SS was built was the enormous cost of the rainboom system. Sure, a missile doesn't have to come back (assuming that it can be made smart enough to get to the target in the first place), but it also can't come back. A plane is reusable. A missile probably can't even carry out multiple strikes on the same target, and if it can, then adding a bit of extra fuel capacity could probably allow it to get back to base, turning it into a drone. A plane can also carry out multiple different types of mission, with great flexibility, and attack a variety of targets in a variety of different ways, and it can operate in concert with other planes and ground forces. Sure, you could build all of this into the drone too... but now you've basically got a full plane that's waiting for an extremely complex AI. If you're going to build one of those (and it is just one, since that's all you can afford), why wait when you can get better performance right now by putting your best pilot in the thing?

This point about plane VS missile object makes less sense depending on your answer to the above question about continuous rainbooming VS activation. A plane indeed makes a lot of sense if you can flip a switch and start giving physics the finger. Especially if you want to toss in the standard "rare power source". Because if a rainboom generator takes Type 77D Raspberry Flavored Magical Energy Gems then it makes no sense to stuff them into missiles because the number of them might be vanishingly small.

Well, the power source is nothing more exotic than ordinary Cicl (Zebra turbine fuel), but the actual device itself makes heavy use of very high-quality gems and some quite complicated magicwork. Given the scarcity of such things in the wartime Zebra lands and the fact that even in Equestria the system would be quite expensive...

(Note that the Zebras were, in my headcanon, developing mass-producible drone fighters (Raising the g limit to what the plane can withstand, rather than the tolerances of a flimsy meat pilot, may not be quite as much a gain as rainboom, but it's much cheaper and still quite significant. And, of course, when the AIs started getting not just "good enough" but "better than a living pilot"...), but none of them had gotten past the noncombat prototype stage at the time of the apocalypse.)

What do you mean by "each redirection requires a usage"? And yes, it is an expensive bit of kit. A very expensive one. Also, it's not sky-coaches to the SS in a decade. More like WWI-era planes to the SS in two decades.

That was spell check gone wrong. What I meant to say was that each state in development requires a reason to go further. In a war time economy if I improve my technology you spend money to advance your own and I counter. However if I run into a Science wall beyond which my materials science won't let me advance then you simply catch up and we slow down to just do useability and reliability improvements. You can see this all over the place in major wars in the 20th century when a weapon was "good enough" and the other side did not produce something better than resources got pulled to other fields. Aircraft cannons during WWII for example saw very little advancement even as air to ground weaponry exploded. It was not until post war that the hard science got done figure out that planes are very easy to shoot down if you can hit them to begin with and one gun firing VERY fast is much better than six guns firing just "kinda fast".

This issue was known but the war robbed both sides of the ability to go outside the box and start setting up lots of hard science experiments to study the problem in depth because of the war. Likewise the composition of tank armor only tends to improve during peacetime.

I'm not entirely sure how you're relating this to the discussion (though it is some interesting information), but here's my reply to what I think you're saying; I assumed that you were assuming this too, but... well, I thought the same about the rainboom state thing. Equestrian air power didn't really have any huge advances during the war, not because it couldn't, but because it didn't, for the most part, need to. The Zebra air force, for the entire war, wasn't in a race with the Equestrian Skyguard for control of the air, it was doing everything it could to make sure that the pegasi at least didn't have total air superiority. Advances weren't "Now we're on top until they move forward again", they were "Now we can probably suffer only 25% losses per engagement and win with just 10 to 1 odds rather than needed 50 to 1 and suffering 50% losses." Zebra ejection seat technology developed pretty quickly and to a level passing modern Earth, because it was expected that one plane downed per pegasus downed was a very good day. Equestrian air power was good enough to not warrant much improvement, but, even with all of the Zebra efforts, things were still far from parity by the war's end.

The lack of a counter is potentially problematic, though, yes. If Equestria could build the counter and didn't, then either the SS doesn't exist or there was some other reason (and I'm not sure what that might be). If they did build the counter... well, if they built it prior to the plane's existence, the plane doesn't exist; if they built it after, then the plane (and, since this is the bleeding edge in speed and maneuverability, pretty much all non-stealthed Zebra air power) can't do much but run when cloudships enter a battle.

...Wait.

Aha! I have a retort! If the cloudships are equipped with such a system...

Text:

...then why don't they use it, fire a few shots from their energy weapons (which they have plenty of ammo for) and disintegrate her? The only Raptor weapons described as being used were also described as being too slow to hit a glowing target in a wing-powered vertical climb. Instead, shooting DD came down to sending soldiers to chase her, and in the end they were so desperate that they used their valuable missiles. It doesn't look like Raptors have poor point defense; it looks like they have no point defense.

Now, poor, or just pretty good, point defense could mean that that was adequate for the threats faced, which would be pretty good evidence against the existence of something like the SS (not conclusive evidence, since maybe, due to the SS's late introduction, Equestria was still developing and/or deploying the system at the end of the war or something...). A total lack of point defense suggests that they were either ridiculously overconfident (which... is possible, actually, given what we've seen of the wartime pegasi) or were relying on pegasus soldiers and small vehicles for defense, operating under the assumption that the Raptor's onboard forces could deploy and eliminate any threats before the Raptor was in danger. Given that, while they're not totally stupid, the latter assumption has the minor flaw of a huge vulnerability to something as simple as a few camouflaged SAM batteries, I suspect that it's a mixture of the two. In any case, while, in this situation, the existence of the SS might be enough to make them reevaluate their strategy, I doubt that they'd have gotten from "nothing" to "PDS good enough to shoot down incoming smart supersonic bogeys that can shoot back and make right-angle turns" and then gotten that system widely installed (if they got it working well enough at all) by the end of the war.

This feeds back into my earlier statements about the lack of counter arguing against the SS... ever seeing wartime action because if one was made it would be known and it would be on the level of the 262 introduction. When the Allies ran into the 262 in combat the air wing freaked out. Here was a plane that was well armed enough to evaporate any planes it hit and was a hundred miles per hour faster than the fastest planes in level combat. Compared to a bomber stream it had something like a two hundred mile an hour advantage, much more if it was a head to head run in which case the combined closing speed was pushing nine hundred miles an hour or a a quarter mile a second or about 88 seconds from horizon until the planes would be past them.

A hundred improvisational counter-measured where run through the same month the 262 made it first combat kills. Ninety percent did not work but by the third month there were known counter measures to the 262 the most vital simply being vulching 262 on take off and landing. Vulching FYI is short hand for vulturing an airfield where planes stayed either very high or very low waiting on 262 to come land or take off and jumping them then because at low speeds the 262 had the maneuverability of a brick.

And giving the Enclave known reactions in the story, the instant they knew there was a Ghoul Pegasus that could take out Raptors they instantly changed tactics and were prepared. Unless they forgot something like the SS I'm going to again argue against it.

Hm... Well, I don't remember them appreciably changing tactics, but, other than that (and that could just be a failure of my memory, in which case I would be obliged if you would point me to the relevant information) you've a good point. I've already both pondered and mentioned the enormous psychological impact the plane would have... but that, of course, is a double-edged sword. Sure, for the time being, even a Thunderhead captain is going to consider retreating if they see this one little plane coming towards them... but back home, the money offered to anypony who can build a good point defense system is suddenly approximately infinity bits. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few clever ponies already prepared to say "See? I told you we'd need something like this. Now here's what you need to do..." Ah well.

However if you want to argue for it I have a suggestion. Simply have the SS have no battlefield tests prior to the End. If the SS was meant to be a Wunderwaffe but the war ended before it could ever be used the lack of counter measures makes sense. You can't counter something you don't know exists except on accident.

That idea is rather seductive, but there's one problem: given the expense of the plane, it wouldn't have been built unless it was planned to be used. Why, however, would it have been planned to be used when Equestria's probable reaction would have been known to the high-level planners? Sure, it works great for maybe even as long as a year, but then even it, to say nothing of normal planes and missiles, can't get near a Raptor without getting zapped. In the interests of not provoking Equestrian advancement, the technology probably wouldn't be implemented. A Wunderwaffe suppressed because it would be too effective.

Well, thank you for engaging in this discussion with me; it has been quite interesting and enlightening, even if the result was not quite what I would have preferred.

[O. Hinds]

Ah, thank you, Somber. Cptadder, that could work if the terrorists were an independent group, but what about war waged through state-sponsored terrorism and cyberwarfare?

Then the state is a method of resupply and I'm guessing they know a lot about the terrorists if they are supplying and sponsoring them. State sponsored terrorism just means "reason to declare war on the state" if it's real State sponsored terrorism. As opposed to what Iran was doing with Iraq which was mostly just ignoring what was going on their borders and not being that stingy with the entry and exit visas. Real state sponsored terrorism is stuff like Afghanistan under the Soviets where the Americans are sponsoring "freedom fighters" not terrorists, those can't be the same people no sir. But supporting those "freedom fighters" with guns, training and intelligence. Real state sponsored stuff tends to be dramatically different in scale.

But if you suspect it's going on the best way to counter it is to go to war with the state that sponsering it. Much harder to sponsor terrorism when their government is captured, dead or hiding, their assets are frozen and the factories are now the latest in crater fashion.

Ah, you're proposing that conventional warfare is still feasible in this scenario? Then, yes, that makes sense. I was attempting to operate in a scenario where attempts at conventional warfare are generally blown up before they can be effective, leaving cyberwarfare, state-sponsored terrorism, and general irregular warfare as the normal methods of operation.

Also, I'm afraid that I'm not terribly qualified to argue on this point; it's not a tremendously big thing for me. One of my friends is quite into it, though.

The latter might be fought by AIs, true, but there'd be no reason to put the AIs in tanks. And if you're fighting by genocide, why use big, expensive robot tanks for it? There are cheaper methods of indiscriminately killing everyone in an area.

I do not understand this, what Somber was talking about was a Bolo trying to defend the civilian population against a insurgent group not killing the population.

I was replying to this:

Alternatively you can go Nazi on an enemy. It's hard to have a rebellious native population if there IS no native population left. Likewise the Armenian situation during WWI where the Turks fearing that the native Armenians were spying for the Russians simply moved the entire population out of the battle space and killed about a million of the two and a half million they moved.

Did I misunderstand you?

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

[Cptadder]

Ah, yes, I was indeed. I was assuming that the only reason pegasi drop out so quickly is because they tire; the SS would, under this way of things, be able to stay continuously rainboomed until the fuel tanks ran dry.

The fight against the Wonder bolts argues against that. They were pulling moves continuously for quite some time as well as engaging in combat against both Little pips forces and the party itself. Not saying they have a six hour run time but we got no indication how tired they were after a what fifteen minute long fight after they spend something like another ten minutes to twenty minutes chasing them down in the skycoach.

Well, the power source is nothing more exotic than ordinary Cicl (Zebra turbine fuel), but the actual device itself makes heavy use of very high-quality gems and some quite complicated magicwork. Given the scarcity of such things in the wartime Zebra lands and the fact that even in Equestria the system would be quite expensive...

This is a point in head-canon theory if consistent that the rainbooming device is made up of such a number and complexity of gems that a one shot rainboom generator takes almost the same number of gems as a multi-use generator.

I'm not entirely sure how you're relating this to the discussion (though it is some interesting information), but here's my reply to what I think you're saying; I assumed that you were assuming this too, but... well, I thought the same about the rainboom state thing. Equestrian air power didn't really have any huge advances during the war, not because it couldn't, but because it didn't, for the most part, need to. The Zebra air force, for the entire war, wasn't in a race with the Equestrian Skyguard for control of the air, it was doing everything it could to make sure that the pegasi at least didn't have total air superiority. Advances weren't "Now we're on top until they move forward again", they were "Now we can probably suffer only 25% losses per engagement and win with just 10 to 1 odds rather than needed 50 to 1 and suffering 50% losses." Zebra ejection seat technology developed pretty quickly and to a level passing modern Earth, because it was expected that one plane downed per pegasus downed was a very good day. Equestrian air power was good enough to not warrant much improvement, but, even with all of the Zebra efforts, things were still far from parity by the war's end.

See that's the thing in my view the counter to the equestrian Skyguard was Griffion Mercs and Dragons not power aircraft but we are getting out of Kkat FoE canon and into Somber territory here because the only pictured battles we've seen was the defense of the hill when the Marauders lost Stonewing. So we get into that fundamental original difference of opinion between us. I'm willing to have mind changed for something internal consistent and interesting. My head canon has zero academic credit over your head canon after all.

So I want to see in the rough outline from Zebra General, Hmm the Royal Air Guard under Celestia is bad, how do we counter the Royal Guard Pegasus complement? Is there a period in the war with Zebra canvas covered biplanes? Lead me through that transition, how did we get from temporary air power via Fetishes to the SS.

Hm... Well, I don't remember them appreciably changing tactics, but, other than that (and that could just be a failure of my memory, in which case I would be obliged if you would point me to the relevant information) you've a good point. I've already both pondered and mentioned the enormous psychological impact the plane would have... but that, of course, is a double-edged sword. Sure, for the time being, even a Thunderhead captain is going to consider retreating if they see this one little plane coming towards them... but back home, the money offered to anypony who can build a good point defense system is suddenly approximately infinity bits. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few clever ponies already prepared to say "See? I told you we'd need something like this. Now here's what you need to do..." Ah well.

The tactics were mentioned by Calamity in the lead up to the Wonderbolt fight but not implemented. Largely they consisted of using the Raptors are extra point defense craft, keeping a CAP around the Raptors and Thunderheads at all times and just being more aware to engage threats at a much longer range. The Thunderheads were made to engage ground targets, the Raptors to fight big flying targets like Dragons and ground targets of opportunity.

Also I agree that such a plane as you purpose would be a combat changer, but the Thunderhead Captain is not going to retreat once he sees a plane coming his way. He's going to start engaging anything with maxim firepower hoping for a golden BB while his power armor fly further out and fire everything they have hoping for the same golden bb.

FYI if you don't know the phrase Golden BB refers to that one in a million shot when that one gun manages to hit in just the right places to down an aircraft or sink a ship. Also refers to the long odds game of hitting certain targets with certain weapons. The Golden BB is what Afgani AA is all about... and what is Afgani AA because I keep introducing obscure military terms. Well Afgani AA refers to the only method the Mujahideen had in 1978 to fight aircraft and that was literally for everyone with a gun no matter what size to shoot at the plane and hope that one of them makes that one in a million shot. A million to one is not bad odds when you've got no other choice.

That idea is rather seductive, but there's one problem: given the expense of the plane, it wouldn't have been built unless it was planned to be used. Why, however, would it have been planned to be used when Equestria's probable reaction would have been known to the high-level planners? Sure, it works great for maybe even as long as a year, but then even it, to say nothing of normal planes and missiles, can't get near a Raptor without getting zapped. In the interests of not provoking Equestrian advancement, the technology probably wouldn't be implemented. A Wunderwaffe suppressed because it would be too effective.

Well, thank you for engaging in this discussion with me; it has been quite interesting and enlightening, even if the result was not quite what I would have preferred.

I read this in reverse order so I could give this some thought and I believe I have a solution. Simple, having the testing phase go wrong.

Imagine this if you will, a new offensive is planned. The Zebras are becoming more and more worried that Pony advancement is about to end the war via an Ender's Game gambit where in the Zebra's must surrender or the Pony's can wipe them out at will and suffer no retaliation thanks to Alicorns and city sized shielding spells. Along comes your best and most famous designer your Zebra Messerschmitt your... Zesserschmitt who promises you he can build you a plane that will not just give you parity but dominance of the sky. He tells you design work and testing will take six months plus trials for six weeks and full production by the end of the year. They can churn out SS's faster than he can produced Rainboom generators once full production is begun and they intend to retrofit them as combat allows. Better still while the Rainboom device gives it that war turning edge even without it the plane is five years ahead of any other design and by itself will come as a nasty shock.

And so Zesserschmitt gets bits, material and zebra's showered on his head to produce this wonder plane. And everything goes well for the first four months until a Ministry of Awesome special operations teams blows up Zesserschmitt's secondary production facility and puts half his design team into the grave and badly injuries the main designer and kills the Zebra Legate overseeing the work. The replacement Legate demands that testing be cut to the bare minimum to make up for lost time and Zesserschmitt obliges them and has his hospital bed hauled down to the production floor to make up for the week they lost due to the attack and the fact that Caesar has demanded the plane be ready in time for a major offensive. But something else goes wrong, perhaps it's a ground crew mess up. Maybe the fuel has been tainted but while the projector tests perfectly the plane designed to carry it suffers a secondary mishap and now the plane will for sure miss the start of the next offensive. The SS production line only waits final specifications before full scale production begins on the first gen version of the fighter and there's work ongoing for a secondary and third production facility in more well hidden locations... and then...

Then something else minor goes wrong and the Caesar turns on the project privately, SS makes it's full up test flight and preforms brilliantly even as the Caesar decides to cut the project and reassign those production facilities for existing designs... and then... I step back and stop painting the entire picture but instead leave the outline of how such a thing could exist, be combat ready and yet denied it's chance AT combat.

[RoboRed]

...What in the effervescent blue fuck?...

[Somber]

...What in the effervescent blue fuck?...

She's got the wrong number of wheels... sigh... knew she was a bad OC...

[RoboRed]

She's got the wrong number of wheels... sigh... knew she was a bad OC...

[Elexius]

I just purchased the Fallout Collection!

[tylertoon2]

She's got the wrong number of wheels... sigh... knew she was a bad OC...

Even in hypothetical pictures Blackjack still beats herself up.

Besides motorcycles are cooler!

I just purchased the Fallout Collection!

Coolio! Hope you enjoy it! Does it include fallout 3 and NV or is it the one with fo1 fo2 and tactics?

[RoboRed]

She's got the wrong number of wheels... sigh... knew she was a bad OC...

Even in hypothetical pictures Blackjack still beats herself up.

Besides motorcycles are cooler!

She should totally be able to do something like this:

[O. Hinds]

Ah, yes, I was indeed. I was assuming that the only reason pegasi drop out so quickly is because they tire; the SS would, under this way of things, be able to stay continuously rainboomed until the fuel tanks ran dry.

The fight against the Wonder bolts argues against that. They were pulling moves continuously for quite some time as well as engaging in combat against both Little pips forces and the party itself. Not saying they have a six hour run time but we got no indication how tired they were after a what fifteen minute long fight after they spend something like another ten minutes to twenty minutes chasing them down in the skycoach.

They weren't pulling rainbooms, though, were they? We don't know, of course, but I can't help but think that violating normal physics that much is unlikely to be easy. While you do argue for pegasus endurance, and therefore an ability to keep a rainboom going longer (under my system), I don't think that we can say that they wouldn't tire.

Well, the power source is nothing more exotic than ordinary Cicl (Zebra turbine fuel), but the actual device itself makes heavy use of very high-quality gems and some quite complicated magicwork. Given the scarcity of such things in the wartime Zebra lands and the fact that even in Equestria the system would be quite expensive...

This is a point in head-canon theory if consistent that the rainbooming device is made up of such a number and complexity of gems that a one shot rainboom generator takes almost the same number of gems as a multi-use generator.

Wait, an inherently one-use-only version of the device? ...I guess that that might be feasible, but it would probably just being the same device built with lower-quality components that would burn out much more easily.
...Or maybe some sort of rainboom shell? The internal generator activates, the gun fires, and the generator stays together just long enough to get the field going? Hm... You wouldn't want an actual artillery piece, though. Perhaps a missile warhead with an internal cannon, a bit like a gun-type nuclear device? Warhead fires, explodes in a rainboom, and simultaneously has the shell firing straight ahead, sort of like a directed energy weapon, with results similar to those on Applejack's old barn?
...Probably still too expensive for the Zebras, but another reason not to build the SS: definitely wouldn't want Equestria thinking of building this sort of thing.

I'm not entirely sure how you're relating this to the discussion (though it is some interesting information), but here's my reply to what I think you're saying; I assumed that you were assuming this too, but... well, I thought the same about the rainboom state thing. Equestrian air power didn't really have any huge advances during the war, not because it couldn't, but because it didn't, for the most part, need to. The Zebra air force, for the entire war, wasn't in a race with the Equestrian Skyguard for control of the air, it was doing everything it could to make sure that the pegasi at least didn't have total air superiority. Advances weren't "Now we're on top until they move forward again", they were "Now we can probably suffer only 25% losses per engagement and win with just 10 to 1 odds rather than needed 50 to 1 and suffering 50% losses." Zebra ejection seat technology developed pretty quickly and to a level passing modern Earth, because it was expected that one plane downed per pegasus downed was a very good day. Equestrian air power was good enough to not warrant much improvement, but, even with all of the Zebra efforts, things were still far from parity by the war's end.

See that's the thing in my view the counter to the equestrian Skyguard was Griffion Mercs and Dragons not power aircraft but we are getting out of Kkat FoE canon and into Somber territory here because the only pictured battles we've seen was the defense of the hill when the Marauders lost Stonewing. So we get into that fundamental original difference of opinion between us. I'm willing to have mind changed for something internal consistent and interesting. My head canon has zero academic credit over your head canon after all.

Griffins are only about as good as pegasi in combat, though, and they're both more expensive, rarer, not part of the established military structure, potentially less organized, and likely with morale penalties due to being mercs (money's no good if you're too dead to spend it, after all). Dragons are tremendously effective, but they're even rarer and less standardized, and possibly, for some dragons, much more expensive. In short, griffins and dragons help, but they can't be relied upon as the bulk of the fighting force.

So I want to see in the rough outline from Zebra General, Hmm the Royal Air Guard under Celestia is bad, how do we counter the Royal Guard Pegasus complement? Is there a period in the war with Zebra canvas covered biplanes? Lead me through that transition, how did we get from temporary air power via Fetishes to the SS.

Well, the Zebras were already using airplanes and airships for transport, surveying, etc. When the war began, the Zebras, having their own experience with war, got quite nervous about the disparity in air power (well, those in the concerned places of power did, as likely did many of the soldiers; I'm not sure that the destruction Equestria's pegasi were capable of had yet occurred to the average zebra, though.) Dragons weren't expected to get involved yet, and initially the air force sent against Equestria was composed primarily of mercs and zebras with flight fetishes. Hastily-armed (for aerial combat; I wouldn't be surprised, given some of the fauna (and, hey, maybe some of the flora) in the Zebra lands, if they already had ground attack and light bomber planes) airplanes were also sent, since every bit was expected to be needed. The airplanes were, however, kept in the initial reserve, and so, when Equstria sent only pegasus guards rather than an army mobilized from a significant portion of the pegasus population (after all, the start of the war wasn't just a case of Equestria having no idea what it was doing, it was a case of the Zebras not knowing that Equestria had no idea what it was doing; war, after all, is serious business, and surely no one would be so stupid as to jump into it with no particular plans or preparations, right?), the airplanes were held back as the griffins and winged zebras fought.

Back in Rome, while there was great relief when it became clear that Equestria was, at least for the moment, intent on waging a highly limited war, the commanders of the military were not resting easy. While on the land and sea the two sides seemed to be relatively even, the air forces the Zebras had sent north were sent not because they were expected to be enough but because they were pretty much everything available. Griffins are expensive and of relatively small numbers (and are of somewhat dubious loyalty), and the most expert fetish zebra is not much better at aerial combat than the average pegasus. Things were more or less matched at the moment, but if Equestria decided to really commit to the war... even an army of pegasus draftees would be a significant danger, and once they started gaining experience the Zebras would definitely be in trouble as things stood now. The first action taken was to work on hiring more griffins, and the nearly-simultaneous second was to see if it might be possible to make much better flight fetishes (research that ultimately did not pan out; there's only so much magic can do, and when you're a zebra draftee and your opponent has grown up flying in a flying culture with a militaristic history and a talent for destructive aerial maneuvers...). Also looked into, however, was the possibility of better airplanes. Pilots could be made from the large Zebra population, and only the least motivated of them would be fighting for only money (and if the war did escalate... well, no one at the time thought that it would go really anywhere near as far as it did, but it was still recognized that "They're invading us" is a pretty good motivation to fight). Airplanes could also be built from mostly mundane materials, without need of Equestrian gems or any particularly rare alchemical materials. Also, an airplane could be mission killed in ways that didn't mission kill the pilot, allowing them to hop into a replacement plane and get right back in the action; if something brought down a griffin or fetished zebra, chances were good that they'd be down, or at least impaired, for a while. Of course, airplanes, particularly the airplanes of the day, still weren't matches for pegasi, but there was one advantage there: airplanes didn't fight like pegasi. Fetished zebras, being equines with wings, fought pretty much the same way pegasi did, and it was quite a problem that they were nowhere near as good at it. Griffin techniques were a bit different, but they were related. Airplanes, by contrast, behaved quite differently; it would be impossible to fight with them the same way winged equines fought, and, while it seemed likely that many of the differences would be detriments, it was still thought to be worth looking into.

The first fighter prototype designs varied quite a bit, and the ones that one out in the end were the fastest and most maneuverable (heavy enough armor to provide adequate protection made the planes easy targets, assuming that they even managed to get off the ground). While they still couldn't match the maneuverability of pegasi, griffins, or even fetished zebras, they could at least come close to matching the speed (and technological developments promised, and of course delivered, planes that could not just match but greatly exceed). Endurance was also a plus; while pegasi were hardy, a cic engine without malfunctions and within operating parameters could run at constant flight power for days if it had the fuel. These, combined with the increased possible numbers of planes that could be brought to bear (a new pegasus soldier's construction has to be begun over a decade prior to the desired deployment time, and you can still probably produce n/2 (n being the pegasus breeding population) a year; in 1944 alone the US built over 30000 fighters, and they weren't actually being invaded at the time), made combat aircraft look pretty good compared to the other options.

Work on building more and better fighters and getting pilots for them began quickly, but fighters still weren't being deployed much; if Equestria still didn't want to commit to a full war, the Zebras weren't going to provoke them (and were also welcoming the extra development time, given that the fighters of the time still weren't expected to fare immensely well). While the fighting was done mostly by griffins and the increasingly-small number of fetished zebras (most of them having been either killed or reassigned, often to the pilot programs (or to serve as the enemy in wargames against fighters armed with automatic paintball guns and the like)), the airplanes that did see deployment were designs such as the Munditia (expy of the PBY Catalina), not frontline combat models. Development continued apace, however, as the threat of an expanded air war was never far from the Zebra High Command's minds (and, in addition to that, the aircraft development programs were producing useful advances for other areas).

While Equestria was aware of the work being done, they did not take it especially seriously (in part due to not being fully aware of its scope, to to a great degree just due to (not unfounded) confidence in its pegasi). They were quite surprised when the post-Littlehorn expanded pegasus forces actually encountered significantly resistance from those funny nonmagical Zebra flying metal machines that were powered by little bits of exploding liquid. Indeed, their surprise at this new foe was so great that the Zebras won the first few engagements pretty handily. This was not to last. The Equestrian forces quickly adapted and soon possessed air superiority more often than not. Airplane losses mounted, but production was high, ejector seat technology was good, and technological progress continued. Pegasi might take the air, but they wouldn't take it unchallenged.

Hm... Well, I don't remember them appreciably changing tactics, but, other than that (and that could just be a failure of my memory, in which case I would be obliged if you would point me to the relevant information) you've a good point. I've already both pondered and mentioned the enormous psychological impact the plane would have... but that, of course, is a double-edged sword. Sure, for the time being, even a Thunderhead captain is going to consider retreating if they see this one little plane coming towards them... but back home, the money offered to anypony who can build a good point defense system is suddenly approximately infinity bits. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few clever ponies already prepared to say "See? I told you we'd need something like this. Now here's what you need to do..." Ah well.

The tactics were mentioned by Calamity in the lead up to the Wonderbolt fight but not implemented. Largely they consisted of using the Raptors are extra point defense craft, keeping a CAP around the Raptors and Thunderheads at all times and just being more aware to engage threats at a much longer range. The Thunderheads were made to engage ground targets, the Raptors to fight big flying targets like Dragons and ground targets of opportunity.

Ah, thank you.

Also I agree that such a plane as you purpose would be a combat changer, but the Thunderhead Captain is not going to retreat once he sees a plane coming his way. He's going to start engaging anything with maxim firepower hoping for a golden BB while his power armor fly further out and fire everything they have hoping for the same golden bb.

Ah, good point.

FYI if you don't know the phrase Golden BB refers to that one in a million shot when that one gun manages to hit in just the right places to down an aircraft or sink a ship. Also refers to the long odds game of hitting certain targets with certain weapons. The Golden BB is what Afgani AA is all about... and what is Afgani AA because I keep introducing obscure military terms. Well Afgani AA refers to the only method the Mujahideen had in 1978 to fight aircraft and that was literally for everyone with a gun no matter what size to shoot at the plane and hope that one of them makes that one in a million shot. A million to one is not bad odds when you've got no other choice.

Interesting; thank you.

That idea is rather seductive, but there's one problem: given the expense of the plane, it wouldn't have been built unless it was planned to be used. Why, however, would it have been planned to be used when Equestria's probable reaction would have been known to the high-level planners? Sure, it works great for maybe even as long as a year, but then even it, to say nothing of normal planes and missiles, can't get near a Raptor without getting zapped. In the interests of not provoking Equestrian advancement, the technology probably wouldn't be implemented. A Wunderwaffe suppressed because it would be too effective.

Well, thank you for engaging in this discussion with me; it has been quite interesting and enlightening, even if the result was not quite what I would have preferred.

I read this in reverse order so I could give this some thought and I believe I have a solution. Simple, having the testing phase go wrong.

Imagine this if you will, a new offensive is planned. The Zebras are becoming more and more worried that Pony advancement is about to end the war via an Ender's Game gambit where in the Zebra's must surrender or the Pony's can wipe them out at will and suffer no retaliation thanks to Alicorns and city sized shielding spells. Along comes your best and most famous designer your Zebra Messerschmitt your... Zesserschmitt who promises you he can build you a plane that will not just give you parity but dominance of the sky. He tells you design work and testing will take six months plus trials for six weeks and full production by the end of the year. They can churn out SS's faster than he can produced Rainboom generators once full production is begun and they intend to retrofit them as combat allows. Better still while the Rainboom device gives it that war turning edge even without it the plane is five years ahead of any other design and by itself will come as a nasty shock.

And so Zesserschmitt gets bits, material and zebra's showered on his head to produce this wonder plane. And everything goes well for the first four months until a Ministry of Awesome special operations teams blows up Zesserschmitt's secondary production facility and puts half his design team into the grave and badly injuries the main designer and kills the Zebra Legate overseeing the work. The replacement Legate demands that testing be cut to the bare minimum to make up for lost time and Zesserschmitt obliges them and has his hospital bed hauled down to the production floor to make up for the week they lost due to the attack and the fact that Caesar has demanded the plane be ready in time for a major offensive. But something else goes wrong, perhaps it's a ground crew mess up. Maybe the fuel has been tainted but while the projector tests perfectly the plane designed to carry it suffers a secondary mishap and now the plane will for sure miss the start of the next offensive. The SS production line only waits final specifications before full scale production begins on the first gen version of the fighter and there's work ongoing for a secondary and third production facility in more well hidden locations... and then...

Then something else minor goes wrong and the Caesar turns on the project privately, SS makes it's full up test flight and preforms brilliantly even as the Caesar decides to cut the project and reassign those production facilities for existing designs... and then... I step back and stop painting the entire picture but instead leave the outline of how such a thing could exist, be combat ready and yet denied it's chance AT combat.

The problem is that it would be immediately obvious that this is going to be a very expensive plane; even ignoring everything else, the crucial components require materials and skills that are in very short supply. Moreover, the plane without the rainboom system isn't five years ahead of it's contemporaries; it's actually rather behind them. Since they'd have maybe a year between deploying a plane fitted with a combat-functional rainboom system and being, due to the plane's existence provoking Equestria to start building and use point defense, far worse off in the air than they are now, they'd have to be sure that in that year they'd be able to use the plane to get to a point where that won't matter... and even before any potential technical difficulties or before it's realized that these things can only be piloted by either the best of the best or as-yet-undeveloped robots, the number of planes that they have the resources to build without diverting away from defenses so much that they'd lose before the first one took off just wouldn't be enough to do that. (Well, the Hurricane-class cloudship I've been pondering does include a mobile mini-capitol, but that never got past the "Doesn't it look cool enough for you to give us lots and lots of money?" model stage. A world where wings of rainbooming Zebra fighters attacking Hurricane-class death stars cloudships is probably also a world with those giant Zebra-shaped robots and Equestrian beings of living magic that Blackjack was speculating about.)

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

She's got the wrong number of wheels... sigh... knew she was a bad OC...

Can't tell if serious. I thought it was a cyber funny . Blackjack with wheels seems funny.

[Caoimhe]

BJ with tank treads, stat!

[Caoimhe]

I just discovered the pregnant scootaloo tumblr. For such a bizarre concept, it's handled very well.

Once my tablet comes I'm going to start a pmspony tumblr which just responds to questions with screaming and crying and complaints about being fat.

Plus it comes with an excuse for only updating monthly.

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

odd, I tried to boot my computer from sleep mode and the power button wouldn't do shit. none of the lights were on either, so I hit the power main on the back and waited then turned it back on, nothing, hit the main again and opened the chassis and pulled the button's connector and reconnected, then hit the main, light on the wireless card came on, odd that it just cut itself off like that. any way...

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

Cao, could we have a link?

[Caoimhe]

http://pregnantscootaloo.tumblr.com/page/14 (the start)

I like the (intentional or not) allegories to single parent low income families struggling to get by, too. The author handles this quite well.

[RoboRed]

...This tumblr touches me in my emotional places...

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

it was a bother to scroll back so I could actually read the thing through

[Caoimhe]

Agreed, that's what I hate about tumblr the most. I wish there was a 'reverse order' button somewhere. Maybe some silly browser extension does it.

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