After looking at a post on Reddit about a battle saddle design I was suddenly inspired to come up with the history of Equestrian and Zebra firearms. I appreciate any comments and corrections y’all might have.

Black Powder has been around since at least the the end of the Lunar rebellion, where is was first recorded being used in fireworks in the celebration of the anniversary of the end of that war. Since then it has been used in much the same way, more of an alchemical curiosity than anything utilitarian, until about a hundred years before the Return of Luna. It was then that a machine shop deep in the Zebra bush country created the first firearm.

It was a simple matchlock musket, designed to defend against the many dangerous beasts that roamed the zebra home land. Matchlocks quickly gave way to flint lock, then to spark gems; a magical gem that, when struck, spouted a little gout of flame to ignite the gunpowder. Spark gems would become the main source of powder ignition right up until Return of Luna. Trigger mechanisms were almost exclusively designed by zebras up until this point, and took advantage of their bipedal stance and balance. Almost all pre-Luna zebra rifles used a lever trigger that was pushed down to cock the weapon and pulled up to fire. This made it difficult for most earth ponies to fire as they don’t have nearly the bipedal coordination zebras do and pegasi found the recoil from these large beast hunting weapons too much for their light frames. Unicorns however had no trouble with those early firearms and started the first Equestrian marksman and gun clubs around them.

One member of these gun cubs, a jeweler named Diamond Dust, designed and built the first self contained cartridge and a breech loaded, single shot rifle to go with it. She designed it as a practical way to improve the accuracy and consistency of her shots during tournaments by having consistent powder loads for all her shots. A zebra at one of these tournaments, a buck named Azari, bought the design off the mare for an undisclosed number of bits. In the following year the .44 Azari, the modified version of Diamond Dust’s rifle, became the Zebra nation’s most popular firearm, especially with bush guides, for its ease of loading and light recoil. The one shortcoming of this rifle was the anemic stopping power of the .44 round, now know as the .44 special; this led to the development of the .44 magnum, a similar round that could fit into the .44 Azari, but had more punch to it.

The .44 Azari came out two years before the return of Luna. By her return the Equestrian guards in towns that bordered the Zebra Empire were armed with the .44 Azari. This was mostly due to zebra travelers and merchants carrying the rifles into Equestrian towns, and the guard wanted something at least equivalent. Tensions grew after the Return of Luna, fueled by Equestrian patriotism and Zebra superstition. A few small gunfights erupted along the border, mostly drunken fights and personal feuds, but it was enough to cement in the minds of pony and zebra alike that guns were no longer the tools of wilderness survival or marksmanship, but as weapons. This time also marked a fork in the road of firearm development between the two nations.

The zebras developed the first advancement; a zebra mare named Mozara developed the first tube fed lever action rifle. The lever was pulled down to eject any cartridge in the chamber and replace it with a new cartridge from the under barrel tube magazine. The lever was then pulled up, loading the new cartage. The lever was released and it sprang down and the next pull up would fire the weapon. Safety and decocking mechanisms were added later to make the rifle safer and easier to use; but the rifle she made for the .44 magnum became a template for all lever action repeating rifles to follow. They were light, easy to carry around, and came in a variety of calibers from the tiny .22 short, a round mostly used to at plinking booths at carnivals, to the monstrous .45-70 used to take down bears. They were known collectively as the Mozara rifles.

The ponies, or more accurately the unicorns, went a different route with Diamond Dust’s next design, which she sold to the Ironshod steel company (now Ironshod firearms), the Ironshod Model 1 Straight Bolt Rifle was a leap forward compared to the awkward trapdoor design of the .44 Azari that she previously designed. Now there was a bolt that was pulled straight back to eject the cartridge and pushed forward again to load a new one. The new rounds were fed into the action by a box magazine, with each round stacked one atop the other. The trigger remained the same in the Model 1 as it did in the Azari, but this changed six months later when a pegasus named Hawkeye modified the tigger into a bit, creating the world’s first mouth fired firearm. This innovation was quickly adopted, read: bought, by the Ironshod Steel Company and used in the Ironshod Model 2 Straight Bolt Rifle. The bit trigger became standard on all Equestrian, and later zebra, firearms.

Both the Mozara and the Ironshod rifles had one major design flaw: black powder. While fine for simple single shot rifles, the new innovations in the actions of these new generations of firearms caused them to have a great number of very precise moving parts. These parts often got fouled up from the residue from black power. And another nasty side effect was that the residue corroded the metal in the action and the barrel if it was not cleaned out. A movie and camera film manufacturer from Manehatten, Snapshot, solved this problem by developing a smokeless gun powder from one of the more volatile ingredients used in the process of making film. This new powder was cleaner, almost smokeless, and more powerful than the traditional black power used up until that point. It replaced black power almost overnight, with more than a few accidents due to overfilled cartaged. Diamond Dust herself lost an eye using an overfilled cartridge in one of her guns.

Zebra rifles stayed mostly the same up until the beginning of the war after the advent of smokeless powder. The ponies on the other hoof welcomed the more powerful powder and started to develop new bottlenecked cartridges to send smaller bullets at faster velocities. One famous, and extreme, cases of this was the Ironclad Marksman Rifle that fired the powerful .338 Luna round. It was a short lived rifle with a two-step bolt design, first rotate the bolt by a handle to unlock it then move the bolt back to eject the cartridge, that was claimed to be stronger than the straight bold design, but when fired it would often seize the bolt into place, requiring a hammer to get it open. The two-step bolt design was later used in the anti-machine rifle to fire the .50 AMR(Anti-Machine Rifle) round. These new bottlenecked cartridges became popular among the zebras as well when a box magazine version of the Mozara that was capable of using the new cartridges was introduced. The change from tube to box magazine was due to the more pointed nature of the bullets on bottlenecked cartridges that might set off the round above it if was stacked in such a magazine. These new Mozara rifles were nicknamed “Medicine Sticks” or “Big Medicine” due to their ability to remedy most problems.

Semi-automatic rifles came next, the first was developed by a crafty bunch of pegasi from the Fillydelphia School of Engineering known as the “Wiz Kids.” They developed the rifle to be used by pegasi on shooting saddles. While the rifle itself only remained a prototype, its designs were copied by almost every firearm manufacturer in Equestria, and some in the Zebra Empire as well. The Wiz Kids would go on help engineer almost every small arm equestria used during the Great War. They were later recruited into the Ministry of Awesome for other projects.

After the famed rescue of an equestrian trade ship from zebra pirates, the Equestrian military decided they needed to adopt a standard rifle and cartridge for the equestrian military in preparation of hostilities with the Zebra Empire. The rifle was the Automatic Rifle Number 1 or AR-1 and the cartridge was the .308. The AR-1 was long, heavy, powerful and deadly accurate semi-automatic rifle with a detachable box magazine. Unicorns could manage it without too much trouble, pegasi could strap it to a battle saddle, and earth ponies needed to prop the damn thing up to fire it accurately, or use a battle saddle. For ten years it served as Equestria’s main battle rifle with modifications being made here and there to improve performance.

The zebras also developed a new rifle, but not until about 5 years into the war. Until that point the zebras fought mostly with conscripts that would provide their own weapons, mostly Mozara rifles. Problem was that by the start of the war there were over 30 different cartridges that the Mozara rifles could fire and keeping efficient supply lines to units that used many different types of ammunition was a problem. The solution came from a zebra engineer named Mikale who designed the the now famous Zebra Rifle, it fired the 5.56x45mm cartridge. The cartridge that would later also be adopted by the Equestrians due to its accuracy, weight, and lethality. The Zebra Rifle was light, easy to manufacture, easy to maintain, had legendary reliability, and would come in variants that shot three round bursts and fully automatic. The design could be scaled up and down as needed. There were marksman, heavy and belt-fed versions that fired the .308, and also short sub-machine gun versions that shot a variety of automatic pistol cartridges. The rifle became an icon of the Zebra military.

During the early war years of the war, before Littlehorn, other weapons were being developed. Belt-fed machine guns were developed off another design thought up by the Wiz Kids. Revolvers were designed in the very first years of the war for unicorn officers to defend themselves with; Later, with the advent of the double-action revolver (the hammer is cocked by the pull of the trigger), earth ponies and pegasi also start using them, but automatic pistols become much more popular later on due to their ease of loading. Shotguns were originally designed as beanbag guns for crowd control, but later slugs and shot replaced the non-lethal loads. They became much more popular later in the war because of the pulse slugs used to down robots.

After the attack on Littlehorn there was a surge in all types of weapon development. Adoption of the 5.56mm round by the Equestrian forces brought forth a host of new weapon systems from the many manufacturers funded by the Ministry of Wartime Technology; including assault rifles, carbines, machine guns, and even a battle saddle mounted mini-gun. Sub-machine guns and automatic pistols started show up around this time, used by the Equestrian police forces to stop zebra infiltrators and to arm a civilian forces in the case of invasion. Once the use of robots on the battlefield started to rise automatic and pump shotguns, armed with matrix disrupting pulse slugs, became extremely popular.

After the development of the Steel Rangers by the M.W.T. firepower escalated quickly. It started with the 40mm single shot grenade launchers, then grenade machine guns, and personal carried missile launchers. The anti-machine rifle was developed by Ironshod Firearms, a weapon powerful enough to punch clean through Steel Ranger armor, the zebras had their own within a month. Then came the enchanted firearms and magic bullets, a Ministry of Awesome project headed by the Wiz Kids, first used by the Shadowbolts to take out tanks, artillery and field equipment; a few months later the same technology was being used by the zebras. Some of the enhancements included penetration, freezing, recoil reduction, weight reduction, poison, and the most feared incendiary; used to great effect against the Steel Rangers in the last months of the war.

The most frightening thing about these weapons was not their ability to kill and rend the flesh of ponies and zebras, it was the scale of their manufacture. In the days before Littlehorn, the number of weapons was small, as was their militaries. Most of the Mozara, Azari and and Ironshod Straight Bolt Rifles were assembled by hoof, made in small factories for sport and wilderness safety. But by the end of the war, it could be said, without exaggeration, that between the two armies you could arm every buck, mare, and foal on the planet with two guns and enough ammunition to wage the war twice again.

This war in the Equestrian Wasteland has proved me right. At least I get to see Celestia's sun again.

-Ironclad,

former owner of Ironclad Industries