Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

[Ironmonger]

It's a nuclear plant!
We have lots and lots of guns. Sniper positions everywhere, multiple from any angle. Heck, we even considered automated turrets at one point.
Multiple surrounding fences of various makes and degrees including maximum delay fencing (think a fence made out of razor wire, with a box of razor wire around that, and then add more razor wire), sally port lifts and concrete barriers, normal and thermal cameras everywhere with motion capture. Multiple security stations.
Microwave zones and other forms of intrusion protection :)
Bulletproof glass, barriers and fallback positions everywhere. Security even has plenty of backup batteries and generators.
Iris scans to get into the plant. Explosive detectors, metal detectors, radiation detectors... it's a lot to take care of.

Oh, and a license to kill!

...no, really. We'll shoot you if you try and break in here.

[RoboRed]

Anyone up for TF2? We need 2 more people for MVM.

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

...haha...what else is the armory for than keeping lots of stuff in? i mean yeah snipers but are ya'll equipped to take out an incursion by professional soldiers in the event of a war? naturally should the occasion pass by, the military and government would immediately move to ramp up your shit anyway... NRC... not a clue what that is short for

and on age of the plant I just wanted to know when the plant was built I know the security systems would be updated with every new toy that came out in the past 30 years....

if you're gonna use turret, make sure they are those centrifugal turrets! those things are cool

[Ketchup]

We even have countermeasures for RPGs.

Active or Passive?

[O. Hinds]

Swicked 101 time!
Computer and Electrical Engineer! Studying for a Masters in Information Security!
Currently working as a system engineer at a nuclear power plant. Nuclear and electrical worker training ftw! :D
In charge of various systems, including security! Second highest clearance (cannot get into the armory, so sad), taken multiple psych tests, passed them all!
Additional interests include poetry, philosophy, humor, storytelling, symbology, grimdark, religion and, of course, ponies. Married, have baby, will travel.

Happy, happy times

Your power plant has an armory?

It's a nuclear plant!
We have lots and lots of guns. Sniper positions everywhere, multiple from any angle. Heck, we even considered automated turrets at one point.
Multiple surrounding fences of various makes and degrees including maximum delay fencing (think a fence made out of razor wire, with a box of razor wire around that, and then add more razor wire), sally port lifts and concrete barriers, normal and thermal cameras everywhere with motion capture. Multiple security stations.
Microwave zones and other forms of intrusion protection :)
Bulletproof glass, barriers and fallback positions everywhere. Security even has plenty of backup batteries and generators.
Iris scans to get into the plant. Explosive detectors, metal detectors, radiation detectors... it's a lot to take care of.

Oh, and a license to kill!

...no, really. We'll shoot you if you try and break in here.

Wow. I had no idea that things were that extensive.

[Ironmonger]

Anyone up for TF2? We need 2 more people for MVM.

I'm in.

[RoboRed]

What's your steam name again?

[Ironmonger]

[UA] Blackjack™

[iLateralGX]

Swicked 101 time!
Computer and Electrical Engineer! Studying for a Masters in Information Security!
Currently working as a system engineer at a nuclear power plant. Nuclear and electrical worker training ftw! :D
In charge of various systems, including security! Second highest clearance (cannot get into the armory, so sad), taken multiple psych tests, passed them all!
Additional interests include poetry, philosophy, humor, storytelling, symbology, grimdark, religion and, of course, ponies. Married, have baby, will travel.

Happy, happy times

How many times, if at all, have you had to shoo someone off the premises?

[RoboRed]

Alright. Invite sent. We still need one more. Apparently Aon decided he wanted to play Tekkit instead.

[Ironmonger]

...haha...what else is the armory for than keeping lots of stuff in? i mean yeah snipers but are ya'll equipped to take out an incursion by professional soldiers in the event of a war? naturally should the occasion pass by, the military and government would immediately move to ramp up your shit anyway... NRC... not a clue what that is short for

...the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) hires marines and other mercenary groups to plan and execute attacks upon the plant (not using real explosives, but sometimes cutting fences and using this system you can attach to your guns that turns them into something akin to laser tag ones so that you're still using real weaponry, just firing blanks). We also have table top drills in which we have to prove our strategies work on paper under less than optimal conditions.

It's the commission's job to find problems, and they WILL find problems, one way or another. It's only a question of how severe they will be.

It just so happens that one career plan for my friends and I is to be mercenaries once we finish our tour of duty, so there's that off chance we'll be hired to 'assault' the plant. Interesting.

[Cptadder]

*Snip image

Thank you for your interest in our nuclear power industry, the appropriate agency will be contact soon about the details of your free complementary and mandatory vacation.

Writing my response to O.Hinds now, got some stuff to do before sleep.

[Sindri]

taken multiple psych tests, passed them all!

That is the best possible emoticon.

Your power plant has an armory?

Makes sense. Nuclear plants are tempting targets, and already built like fortresses. Keeping some firepower on site wouldn't cost much and would be a huge benefit under very rare circumstances. Probably not enough to hold off an army but if an army gets to you the surrounding countryside has bigger problems; if you can deal with whatever idiots and terrorists are likely to get a hold of, and more importantly everybody knows this, everything is a lot safer.

[tylertoon2]

Swicked is much more of a badass than I thought. And I already had high expectations of badassary.

[Icy Shake]

[quote="swicked"]

Wow. I had no idea that things were that extensive.

I've heard tell that things were somewhat more relaxed a while back. Then 9/11 occurred and the next day the national guard had occupied every nuclear plant in the country until we were properly secure.

I was always disappointed that the University of Illinois shut down its reactor; it stopped operation in the late '90s when its operating permit expired, but decommissioning began in 2004, I believe partly due to security concerns. In fairness, the building wasn't exactly defensible, what with its entrance being literally tens of feet from the road, and not far from other public buildings either.

[SilentCarto]

I WAS CAUGHT UP THIS MORNING NOW THERE'S FOUR MORE PAGES WHAT THE CHEESE?!

Hate to say it, but I kinda feel the same way. A part of me really doesn't see Blackjack making it out of this alive in the end.

Every time you say that, a cyborg dies.

And we even know the Ratio, you need one soldier for every thirty natives, it's one soldier for every twenty natives if the country has significant cultural differences so established during the successful occupations throughout history

I'm not even really talking about occupation. Imagine you and your three best friends have a M1-A1 Abrams tank. For the sake of argument, assume you have a secure supply of fuel and ammo. You roll your tank into a city you want to control. Now what? You can't see more than a few blocks in any direction. You can easily kill any solider who crosses your line of sight, but for all you know, there are enemies with antitank rockets filling up every building around you as we speak. You haven't even got around to occupying a hostile populace yet -- you can't even secure your own surroundings. There's exactly one terrain type that a tank can successfully secure, and that's a vast, flat plain, which is completely useless as a strategic objective.

[Cptadder]

Now for part sixteen in our long running drama, Getting inside O.Hinds head......canon.

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.

I remember them pulling at least one Rainboom plus two other cooperative team up special air attacks that were in the vein of the Rainboom but not the Rainboom itself. I assume pony magic is not infinite and Rainbow Dash no matter how awesome can not preform Sonic Rainbooms from dawn to dusk and is limited in some way on how many booms she can pull. We've seen many times Unicorns get tired from using to much magic I assume that a Sonic Rainboom is a Pegasus magic ability and their usage is limited to something beyond just the physical and if Rainbow Dash were asked to Rainboom then rest then asked to Rainboom again in half an hour she could only pull of a limited number of those (Lets say three) before even an hour long rest break she'd need few hours of sleep and some food in her before she could manage another one.

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.

There's such things as a hard reaction limit where you can't strip away or remove any more parts and make a device function. So maybe in head-canon land the only difference between a single use Rainboom generator and a multi-use generator is more energy. As in throwing this out here, you need six crystals in a hexagon configuration around a center crystal with at least two spark batteries per crystal to act as capacitors for the energy flow. The crystals themselves are good for thirty shots and lower quality crystals simply don't have enough potential energy for the generator to work at all. Thus why the SS becomes used over a missile because if you fit it into a missile the generator is wasteful of components.

Yes O.Hinds I purposed why your plane makes no sense because missiles are better and then purposed a way that in which I was wrong and you were right. I like speculation what can I say.

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.

Valid points, I don't have anything else to add there but to note you did raise valid issues with my points.


*Snip the mid history portion I have to come back to that later least I spend tonight thinking about it instead of sleeping.

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.)

Hold on a tick, your assuming that the Ponies know exactly what is being built. It's common in war to get a glimpse of your enemies intentions without having any idea what they are doing exactly. Allied attacks on the U-boat research facilities are an excellent example of that as are the efforts against the doomed Nazi nuclear weapons program. In the U-boats case we knew simply who some of their engineering team was and whenever we saw them or heard they were being sent somewhere we added that place to the target list despite our spies having no idea what was going on there. In the Nuclear programs case we had no flipping clue how far they were along and much of our intel about what they were doing was faulty. Lots of men and material were dedicated to a program that was doomed to failure both due to a lack of certain critical nuclear resources simply not obtainable in Germany like heavy water but because there were several fundamental fuckups in the maths the designers were using to investigate their potential weaponisation of the atom.

My theoretical what if was imaging that their lead designer came to the Caesar promising he could have something that was better than anything else in the air and because of the rainboom generator a magnitude better than everything else. After all as was pointed out numerous times in FoE, the Pegasuses were always the Zebras biggest problems. Your idea for the SS leads back into the problem of Griffin Mercs and the occasional dragon just not being enough to counter the fact that Zebra armies were fighting blind and dumb because Pegasues soldiers could deny the enemy the knowledge of the battlefield at will by taking out scouts and pickets, by launching fast raids on supply depots and being able to escape back into the sky at will.

So my assumption in trying to come up with a method by which the SS could be near enough to combat to be ready for it but not near enough to get the Thunderheads coated in laser clusters was simply that the planes development was mostly secret and the rainboom generator version was still be finished as the generator free conventional plane was throw into battle by necessity.

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

that is urban warfare...

edit: my comment has lost context

Now if you will excuse me, i must blow smoke out of my ass

[Cptadder]

I WAS CAUGHT UP THIS MORNING NOW THERE'S FOUR MORE PAGES WHAT THE CHEESE?!

I'm not even really talking about occupation. Imagine you and your three best friends have a M1-A1 Abrams tank. For the sake of argument, assume you have a secure supply of fuel and ammo. You roll your tank into a city you want to control. Now what? You can't see more than a few blocks in any direction. You can easily kill any solider who crosses your line of sight, but for all you know, there are enemies with antitank rockets filling up every building around you as we speak. You haven't even got around to occupying a hostile populace yet -- you can't even secure your own surroundings. There's exactly one terrain type that a tank can successfully secure, and that's a vast, flat plain, which is completely useless as a strategic objective.

Well if I was to take you to seriously I'll order my gunner to switch to thermal vision and start flattening every building with a heat source inside. No movement means objective secure! But seriously I understand, securing land requires boots on the ground to kick in doors, open up closets and occasionally knock on doors before kicking them open.

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

I WAS CAUGHT UP THIS MORNING NOW THERE'S FOUR MORE PAGES WHAT THE CHEESE?!

I'm not even really talking about occupation. Imagine you and your three best friends have a M1-A1 Abrams tank. For the sake of argument, assume you have a secure supply of fuel and ammo. You roll your tank into a city you want to control. Now what? You can't see more than a few blocks in any direction. You can easily kill any solider who crosses your line of sight, but for all you know, there are enemies with antitank rockets filling up every building around you as we speak. You haven't even got around to occupying a hostile populace yet -- you can't even secure your own surroundings. There's exactly one terrain type that a tank can successfully secure, and that's a vast, flat plain, which is completely useless as a strategic objective.

Well if I was to take you to seriously I'll order my gunner to switch to thermal vision and start flattening every building with a heat source inside. No movement means objective secure! But seriously I understand, securing land requires boots on the ground to kick in doors, open up closets and occasionally knock on doors before kicking them open.

ah urban warfare

[Ironmonger]

I WAS CAUGHT UP THIS MORNING NOW THERE'S FOUR MORE PAGES WHAT THE CHEESE?!

YOU'VE BEEN TROLLED HOMEY.

[OneMoreDaySK]

Swicked is much more of a badass than I thought. And I already had high expectations of badassary.

One of my favorite parts about working as a security system engineer for a nuclear plant is, when I go to a security convention to see what new technology is out there, turning down all the vendors trying to sell me pop-up light-flashing sirens and RC helicopters that shoot pepper-spray with "No thanks, we just shoot them."

So funny XD

But seriously, not a badass here. The guys who actually work in security are; I just take care of the system :P

Yeah, the system that would potentially kill everyone in the vicinity. Still not any less BA. Yeah that seems like a logical solution. It's kind of hard to accidentally break into a nuclear facility. The only way that would be happening is if you see a blue box, to be honest, but by then, you'd best be looking out for something more dangerous than the man wearing whatever's currently cool on his head.

@Rum
Ya messed up the Corrupt a Wish game, sugarcube. Would'ja kindly go and fix it? Thanks RoboRed.

[WovenTales]

I'm thinking about writing my own Fo:E sidefic, and I wanted to make sure that I'm not going to be getting any of the minutiae obviously wrong. Most important of the problematic minor details: I was thinking that the Hoof was to the westish of Littlepip's run? I'd rather go on the other side, and I was hoping that that would be to the east. That's closer to where I grew up, and I'd like to set my fic in the Appleachians. Also, and just to figure out how much I should imply in the first chapter, Silver Bell's farm wasn't the same as Pinkie's rock farm, right?

Now, something relevant to the current discussion...um...sorry, can't think of anything at this hour. If we allow semi-relevant, though, I can say that I love the way the thread of discussion seems to exist in four-dimensional (or higher) space, judging by the frequency with which it changes to seemingly unrelated points while still following an underlying logical progression.

Edit: And completely unrelated, but does anyone remember when 33 came out? I remember that I started reading PH some time around then, and while saying that that chapter was the first one that actually made me wait after finishing is certainly dramatic/poetic/it's too late, I'm not sure it would be quite accurate. I am glad that I got here before Volume 3 was released, though.

[WavemasterRyx]

@ketchup504
- Thank you, sir, I tried my best.

@SilentCarto
- Heh, I'm glad you like it. I actually drew the image on the fan to-size, so I don't have a bigger version of it right now, but I'll make a note to draw one up as soon as I can.

@guarddogjr
- I'm sure she'd love some cake flavored ice cream. I'll have to pick some up for her at the store.

[SilentCarto]

Well if I was to take you to seriously I'll order my gunner to switch to thermal vision and start flattening every building with a heat source inside. No movement means objective secure! But seriously I understand, securing land requires boots on the ground to kick in doors, open up closets and occasionally knock on doors before kicking them open.

Or to guard a refinery, or maintain a supply depot, or whatever. Occupying a city is generally a means to the end of acquiring control of a strategic resource.

I was thinking that the Hoof was to the westish of Littlepip's run? I'd rather go on the other side, and I was hoping that that would be to the east. That's closer to where I grew up, and I'd like to set my fic in the Appleachians.

You're in luck! By PH canon, Hoofington is northeast of Canterlot. (I say 'by PH canon' because it doesn't actually fit anywhere in the FOE canon map [here]... a symptom of starting PH before Kkat finished her fic.)

Also, and just to figure out how much I should imply in the first chapter, Silver Bell's farm wasn't the same as Pinkie's rock farm, right?

No, it's not. Pinkie's rock farm was probably in or near the Splendid Valley/Rambling Rock Ridge area. Silver Bell's farm is hard against the Canterlot mountain range.

Edit: And completely unrelated, but does anyone remember when 33 came out? I remember that I started reading PH some time around then, and while saying that that chapter was the first one that actually made me wait after finishing is certainly dramatic/poetic/it's too late, I'm not sure it would be quite accurate. I am glad that I got here before Volume 3 was released, though.

"Black" was posted shortly after midnight on January 22, 2012, per this post.

[O. Hinds]

Now for part sixteen in our long running drama, Getting inside O.Hinds head......canon.

Wow, sixteen?

I remember them pulling at least one Rainboom plus two other cooperative team up special air attacks that were in the vein of the Rainboom but not the Rainboom itself. I assume pony magic is not infinite and Rainbow Dash no matter how awesome can not preform Sonic Rainbooms from dawn to dusk and is limited in some way on how many booms she can pull. We've seen many times Unicorns get tired from using to much magic I assume that a Sonic Rainboom is a Pegasus magic ability and their usage is limited to something beyond just the physical and if Rainbow Dash were asked to Rainboom then rest then asked to Rainboom again in half an hour she could only pull of a limited number of those (Lets say three) before even an hour long rest break she'd need few hours of sleep and some food in her before she could manage another one.

I do seem to recall them doing some similar stuff, yes. And, yes, it probably is possible for nonphysical exhaustion to be involved here.

There's such things as a hard reaction limit where you can't strip away or remove any more parts and make a device function. So maybe in head-canon land the only difference between a single use Rainboom generator and a multi-use generator is more energy. As in throwing this out here, you need six crystals in a hexagon configuration around a center crystal with at least two spark batteries per crystal to act as capacitors for the energy flow. The crystals themselves are good for thirty shots and lower quality crystals simply don't have enough potential energy for the generator to work at all. Thus why the SS becomes used over a missile because if you fit it into a missile the generator is wasteful of components.

Yes O.Hinds I purposed why your plane makes no sense because missiles are better and then purposed a way that in which I was wrong and you were right. I like speculation what can I say.

Yes, we have rather switched places on this; now you're proposing ways to make the plane exist while I'm giving reasons why it wouldn't.

Also, in case this wasn't clear, I'm considering the plane's propellors to be integral parts of the rainboom system; the system actually generates six small rainbooms, one for each blade, and then captures the energy just long enough to blend them together and turn them into a single rainboom for the plane itself. That's how the plane can rainboom without the plane's airspeed passing Mach 1. I'm not sure how the towers work, but I'm assuming that they use something similar. Though perhaps they use a medium with a lower density so that they can run the rotors at lower speeds.

Hold on a tick, your assuming that the Ponies know exactly what is being built. It's common in war to get a glimpse of your enemies intentions without having any idea what they are doing exactly. Allied attacks on the U-boat research facilities are an excellent example of that as are the efforts against the doomed Nazi nuclear weapons program. In the U-boats case we knew simply who some of their engineering team was and whenever we saw them or heard they were being sent somewhere we added that place to the target list despite our spies having no idea what was going on there. In the Nuclear programs case we had no flipping clue how far they were along and much of our intel about what they were doing was faulty. Lots of men and material were dedicated to a program that was doomed to failure both due to a lack of certain critical nuclear resources simply not obtainable in Germany like heavy water but because there were several fundamental fuckups in the maths the designers were using to investigate their potential weaponisation of the atom.

My theoretical what if was imaging that their lead designer came to the Caesar promising he could have something that was better than anything else in the air and because of the rainboom generator a magnitude better than everything else. After all as was pointed out numerous times in FoE, the Pegasuses were always the Zebras biggest problems. Your idea for the SS leads back into the problem of Griffin Mercs and the occasional dragon just not being enough to counter the fact that Zebra armies were fighting blind and dumb because Pegasues soldiers could deny the enemy the knowledge of the battlefield at will by taking out scouts and pickets, by launching fast raids on supply depots and being able to escape back into the sky at will.

So my assumption in trying to come up with a method by which the SS could be near enough to combat to be ready for it but not near enough to get the Thunderheads coated in laser clusters was simply that the planes development was mostly secret and the rainboom generator version was still be finished as the generator free conventional plane was throw into battle by necessity.

…Um, it seems to me that you've here if anything strengthened the argument against the plane entering development. If, in addition to the plane likely worsening their situation in the war by existing, a hint of the plane being developed would lead to increased attacks… (Mind you, it might not actually have, if only because Equestria was already doing every non-megaspell thing it could to shut down Profectum, but still.)

And, again, while maybe they'd build multiple copies of the plane without the generator, for testing the airframe and such, this is in a way like the A-10 scenario: the generator isn't mounted on a plane, it had a plane built around it. Without the generator, the plane is slower than its contemporaries, likely less heavily armed, and still has extremely sensitive controls while still probably being more expensive than its contemporaries (though, without the generator's cost included not all that much more expensive).

I understand your proposal about the lead designer, but I don't think that the designer would get funding for the project.

I'm thinking about writing my own Fo:E sidefic, and I wanted to make sure that I'm not going to be getting any of the minutiae obviously wrong. Most important of the problematic minor details: I was thinking that the Hoof was to the westish of Littlepip's run? I'd rather go on the other side, and I was hoping that that would be to the east. That's closer to where I grew up, and I'd like to set my fic in the Appleachians. Also, and just to figure out how much I should imply in the first chapter, Silver Bell's farm wasn't the same as Pinkie's rock farm, right?

Hoofington is pretty clearly stated to be to the east, actually, and the best information we have on the farm issue is evidence for it being Pinkie's. Though... closer to where you grew up? What? And my map, at least... hm... well, actually, I never named the mountain range the Highlanders live in, and they might be considered separate... I suppose that you could use that. Highlander culture is rather southern Appalachian already, I think (I might be wrong, though). A minor warning, though: it's possible that the Highlanders might consider the name "Appleachians" to be an Equestrian imposition. (My map may put a national border between the two areas... but my expanded version also puts the meridian through Roam. Not that it's actually a Zebra map, but there are some reasonably clear leanings.)

[O. Hinds]

Also, and just to figure out how much I should imply in the first chapter, Silver Bell's farm wasn't the same as Pinkie's rock farm, right?

No, it's not. Pinkie's rock farm was probably in or near the Splendid Valley/Rambling Rock Ridge area. Silver Bell's farm is hard against the Canterlot mountain range.

Hm? I know that Silver Bell isn't necessarily the most reliable source of information, but what better one are you using?

[Moodyman90]

Hmmm, it could be they just developed the bloodwing talisman somewhere over the course of the 200 years gap between the megaspells going off and when we see it in action of the story.

Or it could be an adaptation of a talisman they always had but required a large amount of regular size bats to make.

[O. Hinds]

Question!
Xenith was able to make a talisman that gave her bat wings.
Is it possible that this bloodwing talisman recipe existed prior to the bombs in some form? That it wasn't an entirely new thing? Or, perhaps, that bloodwings actually predated the bombs and were a zebrica predator the zebra introduced into pony lands as part of the war?

I'm curious if kkat ever gave zebra the means to utilize some form of air force without the need for jets or alliances. Something using just their native magics.

“The war,” the dark-dust pony scoffed. “The war is on the ground. Against zebras…”

“And dragons,” Rainbow Dash reminded him. “They’re using dragons now, in case you somehow forgot. Not to mention griffin mercs.”

“And some of them have magic fetishes that can allow them to fly,” Rarity chimed in knowingly. “If you think it’s impossible for an earth-bound mare to fly her way into Cloudsdayle with the right magic, you have tragically short memories.”

The mustard-colored one spat, “Well, they wouldn’t be bringing in dragons if the pegasi had just stayed out of the war. Now I hear you’re pushing Luna’s new initiative to put even more pegasi on the front lines? You won’t be satisfied until every one of us is facing down zebra guns.”

[O. Hinds]

(My explanation, by the way, for why airplanes weren't mentioned there is that airplanes were still somewhat looked down on by Equestria; griffin mercs could take on pegasi 1 to 1, after all, while Zebra fighter planes still needed swarming tactics. Planes also need runways, have more supply requirements, etc.)

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