[GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

Sindri wrote:

Mister Frost wrote:I'm saying that getting killed pointlessly is the exact opposite of what would happen. They would employ tactics as well as you'd expect from guys who'd been doing it since childhood. They wouldn't need to by micromanaged, seeing as they'd all be educated in strategy and tactics such that you could simply give them an objective, they form their own plan and requisition their own materials. If they can calculate that they could wipe out a 200-man enemy group by throwing 35 suicide troops at it, they'd do so without hesitation. "Disposable" doesn't mean "walk at you like a fucking idiot, not even shooting back." It means "I don't care if they die so long as you do."

You're thinking of the clones as brainwashed people, completely loyal, willing to die, and knowing nothing but war. That's not what you'd get from what I've seen.

The blanks weren't willing to be sacrificed, they just had no concept of death or danger and thus would continue standing there while being eaten. You can program the clone troops to shoot back, but you can't instill in them the instinct for self-preservation that every real animal has. They could take cover and move carefully if ordered to, or under the specific circumstances they were programmed to do so, but they would still drop like flies on the battlefield, whether they've accomplished anything in doing so or not, because they have no will to live.
They would have the entire textbook of strategy and tactics instilled in them, yes. And thus under any textbook situation they would act in the way calculated to be optimal by the armchair generals back home. Now, find anyone who's been in combat and ask them how far that will get you. Ever hear the phrase "no plan survives contact with the enemy?" Because it's true, and the blanks would never properly adapt because they have all the perfect optimal training, but no creativity or flexibility.

They would be as bad or worse, tactically speaking, than autonomous robots. But without the advantages in armor, firepower, etc. that those robots would have, and without the option for someone intelligent to teleop them.

In that case than FoE's clones are way, way different than most fiction portrays clones. Apparently "clone" means "dribbling fuckwit", because being ejected from a vagina is the catalyst that turns the brain on, and if it doesn't happen then you're doomed to be a vegetable or a Reality TV star, as anyone born via C-Section will tell you.

If we're talking about "souls", why wouldn't a clone have one? If the soul is the result of the mating, then how do those born of artificial insemination have them? Does the mother's soul split off, a la mitosis? Does God look down and say "no, you were born in a vat, you don't get one, here's a lump of coal instead"?

How and why does the soul connect to the mind or conscience? One could make an argument for soulless people having no conscience, but having no mind would be a lot harder to sell.

...You really need to read Project Horizons.

^This.

Mister Frost wrote:

In that case than FoE's clones are way, way different than most fiction portrays clones. Apparently "clone" means "dribbling fuckwit", because being ejected from a vagina is the catalyst that turns the brain on, and if it doesn't happen then you're doomed to be a vegetable or a Reality TV star, as anyone born via C-Section will tell you.

If we're talking about "souls", why wouldn't a clone have one? If the soul is the result of the mating, then how do those born of artificial insemination have them? Does the mother's soul split off, a la mitosis? Does God look down and say "no, you were born in a vat, you don't get one, here's a lump of coal instead"?

How and why does the soul connect to the mind or conscience? One could make an argument for soulless people having no conscience, but having no mind would be a lot harder to sell.

Mister Frost did you miss the part of the story describing the method of cloning that involves raw Taint, the blood of Discord patron Saint of Discord? They are literal mindless bodies shaped from the raw material of chaos. They are not in any way shape or form traditional clones as we imagine them. To produce the army you want Star Wars style cloning, with flash trained memory, vastly reduced growth cycles (And reduced life expectancy as a result) with some super badass as a template for the clone soldiers and enough genetic tinkering to add a 2%-5% efficiency increase to allow for specialization of troops.

The ponies of Fallout Equestria did not have access to cloning vats, or flash training or any of the things you need for your hypothetical clone army soldiers. They can produce robots, robots run off magic which they already know and use. But the amount of specialization you need to produce a living thing and grow it fast enough to make it useful in the present war and then somehow train it and here is the important bit Make it loyal is not technology or techniques either sides have access to.

*Edit
The blanks of Project Horizon are considered as walking repository of organs, Boo is the smartest one we've met so far the only one with any kind of instincts at all. And I remind you again Blanks are made from farm fresh liquid chaos not genetic samples.

Frost has read Horizons, we just get so busy we forget things. Personally I tip-toe on any subject I have vague knowledge about which is why I'm looking at the clone topic on a theoretical level. In short I have not a damn clue what I'm doing.
The two of us design our own take on various aspects of the story, but we usually try to keep from conflicting with canon.

I never said blank. I said clone. You don't need a vat in FoE, you have magic.

They can regenerate bodies with magic from near-nothing. It's a very tiny step from that to making new bodies. From there, you have a blank mind-ready for a compressed memory orb or telepathic knowlege transfer full of training and indoctrination. You don't need to make them loyal, they would already be loyal because they know nothing but loyalty. The very thought of desertion would fill them with revulsion.

The fact that no one in that whole war thought of it is rather surprising.

Well, think of it this way: if there was a way to mass produce clones with souls, and thereby mass produce souls, why would it not have been used at any point to make soul jars without the normal problems?

Thus, either there is no way to make clones of the variety you're thinking of in the world Kkat wrote about, or Rarity specifically chose to abduct prisoners and torture real ponies for eternity instead of picking up a few dozen clones.

Or the technology didn't exist at the time (or wasn't known to the Ministry specifically dealing in dark secrets), in which case how would it suddenly be viable on an army-wide scale in your story?

Perhaps no one actually thought about or someone did and the project was dropped.

I'm not saying it's available on an army-wide scale in my story, I'm saying it should have been used in the war


As I exaplained, the technology could easily exist, it's just that no one thought of it. That would probably have been a better investment than powered armor, but I digress.

Caoimhe wrote:I leave to go prepare for my eminent death by hurricane tomorrow and you guys go balls out crazy. Can't leave you alone for a minute.

Anyway that pic on the last page is cute but Scotch got blue eyes. AGH it's always one little thing... :(

We here in DC are preparing for our imminent death by doing absolutely nothing.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

Vergil wrote:

Caoimhe wrote:I leave to go prepare for my eminent death by hurricane tomorrow and you guys go balls out crazy. Can't leave you alone for a minute.

Anyway that pic on the last page is cute but Scotch got blue eyes. AGH it's always one little thing... :(

We here in DC are preparing for our imminent death by doing absolutely nothing.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

The president accidentally summons the anti-christ.

Ironmonger wrote:

Vergil wrote:

Caoimhe wrote:I leave to go prepare for my eminent death by hurricane tomorrow and you guys go balls out crazy. Can't leave you alone for a minute.

Anyway that pic on the last page is cute but Scotch got blue eyes. AGH it's always one little thing... :(

We here in DC are preparing for our imminent death by doing absolutely nothing.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

The president accidentally summons the anti-christ.

If Obama is the anti-Christ, he's the least efficient one ever. Four years it's been. Where are the Marks of The Beast? Where are the executions? You're shirking your duties here, Barack.

Mister Frost wrote:
They can regenerate bodies with magic from near-nothing. It's a very tiny step from that to making new bodies. From there, you have a blank mind-ready for a compressed memory orb or telepathic knowlege transfer full of training and indoctrination. You don't need to make them loyal, they would already be loyal because they know nothing but loyalty. The very thought of desertion would fill them with revulsion.

First off when have we ever seen memory orbs being used to transfer skills to anyone, if such a technology exists why would it not be used on every soldier clones or no? That's flaw one in your theory. In FoE we know soldiers spend weeks training despite memory orbs being around for over a decade (We have Spike memories from a recollector he was wearing that is from when Luna first takes charge) So if one can use memory orbs to transfer skills no one has yet managed the trick before the war ends.

Flaw two is the regeneration issue, they can not in fact regenerate bodies from near nothing, only Rampage can do that and rampage is using necromancy and at least EIGHT souls bound to the same device to pull off the trick with indications it might be dozens more souls powering the thing. Otherwise you lose your head your dead. Healing magic accelerates the natural healing process but it can not regrow lost limbs even if it can repair separated ones imperfectly. But you can take a bit of fur and blood Water, 35 litres. Carbon, 20kg. Ammonia, 4 litres. Lime, 1.5kg. Phosperus, 800g. Salt, 250 g. Niter, 100g. Sulphur, 80g. Fluorine, 7.5g. Iron, 5g. Silicon 3g. And fifteen other elements and a healing potion poor them over a pony frame and make a clone.

So that's two flaws we have to address before producing a perfectly loyal clone pony soldiers. And they are big flaws.

Mister Frost wrote:
The fact that no one in that whole war thought of it is rather surprising.

Then there might be reason WHY what your suggestion won't work. Sometimes the reason you don't see something is because it simply does not work. It is magic after all, but it's still magic and has it's own rules, once you figure out those rules it's just a fancy bit of science.

Ironmonger wrote:Perhaps no one actually thought about or someone did and the project was dropped.

Well, in PH canon it was the first thing Goldenblood thought of when Blanks became viable, because whether a clone has a soul is the obvious question to anyone aware that souls are a real thing, and an incredibly valuable question to anyone who can use them as a high-value resource. And Rarity was far from stupid, so if there was a way to get "donor" souls that didn't leave a trail from the prison systems to her blasphemous lab, she'd take it in a hoofbeat even without the moral issues. So if the tech existed at the time, it would need to be controlled by a groups so secretive that the best governmental intelligence services, with the aid of memory magic and the mint-al enhanced Pinkie Sense, never became aware that it was even possible. Basically by introducing the clone soldiers, you're required to completely redo the background of your setting to allow for such things to exist without changing things which are already established. It seems like a lot of work, a high risk of readers calling shenanigans, and not much benefit in the end.


A story where a major conflict has an obvious and easy solution that readers see immediately and the characters never saw, when said characters are not supposed to be idiots, is generally a weak story. Because if I, with less context and experience, can solve a problem in a minute that someone supposedly smarter than me struggled with for years, that strains credibility, weakens every character who didn't think of it, and makes the author look like they didn't bother thinking things through before publishing them.

Ironmonger wrote:

Vergil wrote:

Caoimhe wrote:I leave to go prepare for my eminent death by hurricane tomorrow and you guys go balls out crazy. Can't leave you alone for a minute.

Anyway that pic on the last page is cute but Scotch got blue eyes. AGH it's always one little thing... :(

We here in DC are preparing for our imminent death by doing absolutely nothing.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

The president accidentally summons the anti-christ.

Bad End.

Cptadder wrote:Flaw two is the regeneration issue, they can not in fact regenerate bodies from near nothing, only Rampage can do that and rampage is using necromancy and at least EIGHT souls bound to the same device to pull off the trick with indications it might be dozens more souls powering the thing.

Plus she only regenerates from the talisman, so it's impossible to make more than one of her even with up to twenty+ souls running the process. And removing that talisman kills the former host.

There is quite simply no way to make two soul-ed bodies out of one person in FoE canon no matter how you slice the healing process or how much power you pump into it.

Vergil wrote:

Caoimhe wrote:I leave to go prepare for my eminent death by hurricane tomorrow and you guys go balls out crazy. Can't leave you alone for a minute.

Anyway that pic on the last page is cute but Scotch got blue eyes. AGH it's always one little thing... :(

We here in DC are preparing for our imminent death by doing absolutely nothing.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

Sounds like business as usual in Washington then!

Ironmonger wrote:What if Dawn was in the same predicament as Cyclops of the X-Men. She opens her eyes and-
EDIT: I'm seriously trying to get a topic started. I'm curious what happens when she opens her eyes.

My theory is she either has instakill basilisk eyes or cyber eyes.

Okay then, shit's about to get gross:

Take, say, ten mares and a good supply of semen. Sedate and open up the mares. Inseminate, confirm egg fertilized. Remove egg. Give it some raw material and a modified healing potion such that they grow up within hours. Lather, rinse, repeat a few hundred times (you'd need to use a biological accelerant to force more eggs to drop, but this is mad science, so you're bound to have some of those sitting around.)

Take a memory orb modified to transfer raw data. A whole education right there. Load them in, turn it on, lather, rinse repeat. Then you have a fully educated adult with full academic knowledge on how to be a soldier, who is also extremely fit. now they will need either a modified spell or several weeks of intensive therapy/training to actually get the "working their bodies" thing down, but once they've got the basics they can practice on their own time. You can expect quick progress since they feel that they're failing you every second they spend stumbling around.

Still thinking Dawn is just stoned as all hell.

Caoimhe wrote:

Vergil wrote:

Caoimhe wrote:I leave to go prepare for my eminent death by hurricane tomorrow and you guys go balls out crazy. Can't leave you alone for a minute.

Anyway that pic on the last page is cute but Scotch got blue eyes. AGH it's always one little thing... :(

We here in DC are preparing for our imminent death by doing absolutely nothing.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

Sounds like business as usual in Washington then!

I will neither confirm nor deny this.

So it seems that the conclusion is that the cloning would be impractical for our story. Moving onto another topic: one of the factions in my story, who also happens to be a single entity, is an ascended alicorn called the Iron God. He uses a very different type of magic that gives him power over mineral ore and operates a relatively large force of semi steam-driven machines. One of his more devious powers is he can possess any robot he has line of sight of, which usually requires he has an agent viewing his target. He isn't exactly evil but he is a conqueror that took over a great deal of the area north of Prancinnati to avoid huge casualties while grabbing territory. Very raw idea. Thoughts?

As I recall the first post of this thread states that this thread will be all over the place

I was never saying that we should retcon clone armies into FoE. I was saying that for all the puppy-kicking the Equestrians did as the war was going on, they never thought of it, and that's more than a little weird.

Mister Frost wrote:Okay then, shit's about to get gross:

Take, say, ten mares and a good supply of semen. Sedate and open up the mares. Inseminate, confirm egg fertilized. Remove egg. Give it some raw material and a modified healing potion such that they grow up within hours. Lather, rinse, repeat a few hundred times (you'd need to use a biological accelerant to force more eggs to drop, but this is mad science, so you're bound to have some of those sitting around.)

Take a memory orb modified to transfer raw data. A whole education right there. Load them in, turn it on, lather, rinse repeat. Then you have a fully educated adult with full academic knowledge on how to be a soldier, who is also extremely fit. now they will need either a modified spell or several weeks of intensive therapy/training to actually get the "working their bodies" thing down, but once they've got the basics they can practice on their own time. You can expect quick progress since they feel that they're failing you every second they spend stumbling around.

You'd need a few months minimum of physical therapy to build up enough muscle mass to fight with, but it should work once you have all the component bits worked out. If you can get them to fighting age without short-term medical problems, and spend a few hours running them through one memory of a kid in basic training (Littlepip's full adventure was recounted while a battle was going on, so I figure with memory magic a few hours outside per subjective month is appropriate when you're in a hurry), and they shouldn't be much worse off than your normal recruits. Better in some ways since they don't have all those pesky morals or memories of home to distract them. Maybe worse in a few because of not having anything to fight for, but you should be able to condition them hard enough to cancel that out.


Have fun with your rape factory and child soldiers.

Ironmonger wrote:So it seems that the conclusion is that the cloning would be impractical for our story. Moving onto another topic: one of the factions in my story, who also happens to be a single entity, is an ascended alicorn called the Iron God. He uses a very different type of magic that gives him power over mineral ore and operates a relatively large force of semi steam-driven machines. One of his more devious powers is he can possess any robot he has line of sight of, which usually requires he has an agent viewing his target. He isn't exactly evil but he is a conqueror that took over a great deal of the area north of Prancinnati to avoid huge casualties while grabbing territory. Very raw idea. Thoughts?

Seems to work on the face of it, at least post-Rainbows. You'll want to nail down the specifics of his power with ores and metals, but that works within the existing magical system, and his "possession" could just be interfacing with a control system (with brain implants, neural impulse reading helmet, or good old fashioned cyberpathy) and teleoperating a 'bot with his mind, Shadowrun style.

The muscle mass issue is easy to deal with by calibrating the growing process.

And hey, I never said I would do it, I'm saying the Equestrians probably could have if they'd tried. The fact that I can comfortably talk about it has more to do with me having little empathy. Just ask Monger.

Plus, the mares required could be "volunteered" from prisons.

Sindri wrote:Have fun with your rape factory and child soldiers.

For some reason this made me laugh.

The general idea was he had power over heat and ore, basically he would be a deity of industry. Past that this gets a little complicated.

Sindri wrote:Have fun with your rape factory and child soldiers.

Oh, I will. It's like a set of those little army figures.

After the war (which they'd likely have won if they'd been a little more cautious about giving access to megaspell tech to non-essential personnel like the local Stupid Good idealist) they could amuse themselves by having the clones fight each other in televised events, everything from war games (live-fire) to swordfights to Jackass-Style stunts. It's like gladiators that you don't have to go out and capture. Fun for the whole family.

Feel better Ryxykins. :(

@Frost: I believe the do gooder idealist to which you are reffering actually invented the megaspell technology, so keeping it out of her hands, or hooves rather, would have been impossible.

Edit: by invented I mean came up with the idea for, green lighted, and funded. Flutters herself probably doesn't know much about magic.

Erumpet wrote:@Frost: I believe the do gooder idealist to which you are reffering actually invented the megaspell technology, so keeping it out of her hands, or hooves rather, would have been impossible.

I find it hard to believe that Fluttershy invented megaspell tech