I'm back, and I repaired my PC. Trying to get a PC repair guy to fix it was a nightmare, so I just fixed it myself.





Catastrophic hard drive failure happened, but I made backups of everything important. I also found some funny bad stick figure pics I made to win an argument over Battle Saddles I had a long time ago while searching through backups.





I was going to post a bunch of those hilariously bad stick figure pics along with memey mini-rants on the best weaps for ponies, but then I decided... Nah, it's Paint.Net time. I'll combine all that was said into one pic.





And even if "Make health potion so great it needs to be sipped, not chugged, then put it into a no-spill beet helmet" isn't an option, "Beer helmet full of health potion" still is. Magical healing would be a whole new fucking kind of game-changer and unless your foe has Invisi-Watch-carrying spies and magic instakill backstab knives, your foe isn't taking out medics who have no reason to not stick behind cover and heal teammates when necessary. Admire how much braver your troops become when the answer to being shot isn't to collapse and cry for a medic and get healed to full in 2 secs, or keep shooting anyway and get sustain-healed to full so multiple enemies would need to focus fire on you to burst you down, but to instead S U C C some health potion out of the tubes in your mouth, freeing the medic up for those rare one-in-a-million moments when he's actually needed in one place specifically. One of those "Regenerating Shields" you see in some FPS games like Borderlands would revolutionize warfare even harder, soldiers would become fine with bodily leaping out of cover to open fire until their shields are low, then they'd step back into cover and wait for their shields to recharge. Set up a system of alternating shielded gunners and your foe can either stay in cover forever as your flying snipers in bulletproof extra-armoured power armour and shields of their own team up with Unicorns riding atop bulletproof metal/stone platforms levitated by themselves/other unicorns to safely advance overhead to snipe enemies from behind, or your foe can step out and get shot by a foe who doesn't fear eight shots to the head, and can duck for cover after the ninth and be ready to facetank some shots after 4 seconds of regen.







Note: I didn't mention "Get an armoured Earth Pony, then put metal footholds on the back plus a wall to protect them so more gunners can stand and fire". Or "Unicorn looks at her Pip-Boy's enemy markers and aims spells at foes he can't see that way". Or "Unicorn picks up an enemy corpse and swings it around to make foes waste bullets, or even their whole ammo clips, or even their whole ammo supplies, on shooting it down". Or "Unicorn grabs a corpse, pulls it over, puts C4 on it, throws it at a foe, then detonates it". Or "Unicorn on a piece of scrap metal enchanted to work as a flying hoverboard zipping around at Mach Fuck while casting all kinds of nasty spells on your army and tossing all kinds of shrapnel-filled explosives and frag grenades". Or "Alternate your Upgraded regenerating infinite-use Stealth-Boy on a battery and disposable Stealth Boys for sustained invisibility as you shoot your foes from the back within enemy territory using magically-enchanted super-silenced guns and super-silenced grenades that literally make no noise at all". Or "Zone of Silence, send in the Power Armour troops to fuck shit up while your foes are sleeping and can't hear shit from the motherfuckers with Magically-Silenced Heavy Flamers".





Or "Toxic Smoke grenade, meet Animate Smoke spell that sics a deadly lethal smoke monster that can't be shot on your Raider enemies! If they don't have a Heavy Flamer they're fucked!". Or "Earth Pony bucks a metal block at a foe far away, like a cannon firing a cannonball over the horizon, then the metal block turns back into a big potentially-nuclear bomb and detonates". Or "That Unicorn Squad you just trained in sandbending has finally gotten good! Now some guys can focus on defence and block attacks while others fire reusable sand bullets that'll go through almost any nonmagical cover, even metal and building walls". Or Unicorn one scries for your location and finds you. Unicorn two silently makes a portal 5 to 50 feet behind you. Unicorns three to eight open fire with the fireball spell the Fire Cutie Mark dude taught them last week". Or "That Unicorn just cast Animate Object on a museum's T-Rex model". Or "Man I love using SATS to detect where hidden landmines, traps, and other bombs are".







Or "Oh man I sure do love having perks that make me immune to landmines and/or all traps, I can use this to lead raiders over traps that seem to be deactivated when I run through them, but are fine when it's time for them to kill raiders". Or "Oh hey, the pony army is letting in the physically/mentally inept ponies militaries would normally turn away, on the condition that they accept their new roles in the military as loyal and heroic bulletproof city-sized magically-transformed attack Dragons, and magically-altered Falcons with the power to shit acid on troops below them, and gorilla-wolf-shark-squids, and worse".







Or "Those Earth Ponies dashing towards you with guns on their hats, which also hold Health Potions and drinking straws, just dosed up on every potion that came in the three-doses Battle Readiness Kit that came with their MRE shipments and turned each pony into pain-immune speed-boosted strength-boosted reactions-boosted int-boosted demigods". Or "That Dark Magic Suicider just ran at us and yelled Cthulu Ftag'Chaos SpawnOH GOD DEMONS ARE RISING AND WE'RE MUTATING". Or "Hey this pony I'm about to fucking trickshot snipe from quite far away has an unusual tattoo on his faceOH GOD IT'S A DARK MAGIC CURSE THERE'S A DEMON IN MY EYE IT'S EXPLODING MY SOUL URAAAAAAAA-". Or "Unicorns are using sniper rifles without ammo to aim and fire line-of-sight spells from far away". Or "You fool, you foolish fool, you absolute fucking dunce, my Ghost Trooper soldier is going to phase right through the seven tanks rolling towards us and kill all their passengers and- oh fuck they have no passengers, one unicorn is controlling seven tanks and pushing them like immobile toys while manipulating their turret mechanisms and triggers to make them fire". Or "Oh god, why am I shitting blood and organs, what dark magic curse was cast upon me by a Unicorn able to get some blood I lost in a fight with her many fights ago". Or "Oh, these are pretty cool bananas- HAAAAAAAAAAAAA THEY'RE SHAPESHIFTED PONIES KILLING ME, A CORRUPT VENDOR, BECAUSE I BOUGHT THESE BANANAS FOR HALF WHAT I COULD SELL THEM FOR ALSO I SELL PONY FLESH KABOBS AND CALL IT SQUIRREL SURPRISE MEAT OH THE EQUINITY I'M BEING SHOT AND ROBBED AAAAAAA-". Or "Oh jesus, Unicorn 1 lit most of my hut village on fire with a single fireball, Unicorn 2 has got fireballs raining from the sky like deadly hailstones, Unicorn 3 just melted the ground my badass pre-war mech was standing on so they can excavate and repair it and steal it after I'm dead, and Unicorn 4 just cast an Animation spell on some flame so now grinning fire ghost thingies are flying after me, going through walls just like heat can, and tormenting me by burning bits of me before killing me! None of my guns can hurt fire creatures! I'm so many different kinds of fucking fucked right now!".







Or "Oh shit, that's a portal-Oh shit, someone just threw a nail bomb through it-OH FUCK IT'S GOT RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL IN IT, TOO!". Or "Oh no, that Pegasus poured a barrel of radioactive goo on me and my clothes and my guns! A second Pegasus sniper is probably aiming at me, waiting for me to take off my super cool magical armour that's now even more irradiated than me! OH SHIT RADIOACTIVE GOO IS GETTING IN THE BREATHING VENTS OH SHIT OH FUCK RADIOACTIVE GOO JUST GOT INTO THE ANTI-RADIATION BLOOD SCRUBBERS IN MY SUIT, OH GOD I'M BEing irradiated to death help meeeeee oh my gooooood-". Or "Oh my fucking god, I'm in Power Armour, but did that fucking Pegasus just pour a barrel of magic cement on me from miles up? Is another pony hardening that cement? Bitch please, I'll be out of this in a- OH FUCK IS THAT EARTH MAGE ABOUT TO SLAM AN EARTH CUBE TWICE MY SIZE ONTO MY HEAD- OH FUCK DID A SIZEBENDER MAGE JUST MAKE THAT EARTH CUBE FIFTY TIMES BIGGER?". Or "Oh no, a Unicorn is casting spells to turn us Enclave patriots against each other, better use this as an excuse to kill that memey stereotypical military novel CO everyone hates before my friend shoots at me while thinking I'm a delicious donut to kill and eat". Or "Oh fuck the ponies just projected their minds into Deathclaws and we can't shoot their helpless soulless bodies because they were behind cover before they used it on some deathclaws and piloted their bodies towards us".







Or "Oh holy shit ponies are levitating ponies who levitate ponies who levitate ponies to create a floating stack of damn near unhittable snipers with miles of coverage, it's like a stone snake made of angry snipers detached its segmented stone body and is shooting at us". Or "Oh great, Unicorn 1 just used Stone Wall Spell four times to make an increasingly tall stone wall, and an Earth Pony sniper was perched on top of it and he's shooting us with the superhuman accuracy and aim times granted by VATS". Or "Oh shit some killer robots just got teleported/portaled in behind us to attack us, our cover is useless". Or "Oh fuck, that Unicorn just shielded herself while her DuraFrame Eyebot With Magic Shields fires lasers into all of us". Or "Team of Unicorns in a flying zeppelin cast spells down on helpless foes below". Or "A trench? A fucking trench? These fuckers just set up a trench, except it's a long and considerably bent PORTAL TO HELL" or "These fuckers didn't even need to use their army to destroy us, they just had four silently flying Pegasus snipers and two more Earth Pony or Unicorn snipers use their magically silenced sniper rifles to cover the silent infiltration of the Invisibility Cloak-wearing Summoner who just summoned a whole lot of wild animals, horrifying monsters, magical sentient animals who can't die and can only poof back to the summon world after taking enough damage, our base is getting torn apart in this chaos". Or "Oh fuck someone just used a fucking Trebuchet to launch a collection of Frenzy Gas grenades into out base, I hope we're enclave soldiers with gas masks or filters in our armour or we'll waste our ammo killing almost all of each other before the effect wears off and our surviving handfuls get crushed". Or "Wait does this guy even HAVE supply lines to cut or has he just got his postal service portalling shit around?".







Or "Someone used earth magic to instantly build A FUCKING MEDIEVAL CASTLE WITH SNIPERS SHOOTING FROM THE STONY TOWER BITS". Or "Oh hey, waterbender 1-4 are working together to summon a water geyser- NOPE IT'S AN OIL GEYSER, FIREBENDER 1 JUST SET IT ON FIRE, AIRBENDERS 1-5 JUST THREW A TORNADO INTO IT TO SEND A FLAMING FIRESTORM OF HURRICANE ASSFUCKER GRINDING THROUGH OUR TERRITORY TO KILL SO FUCKING MANY OF US WITHOUT A SINGLE SHOT FROM THEIR LIMITED POST-APOCALYPTIC AMMO SUPPLY REQUIRED, BY THE TIME THIS FLAME TORNADO GOES OUT AND BY THE TIME IT FADES AWAY THEY WILL HAVE DOWNED ENOUGH MOUNTAIN DEW TO REGAIN THEIR STRENGTH" Or "That Unicorn just cast Animate Object on a metal toy bear he spent an hour crafting before battle and it's hopping about murdering us with its bladed arms while quoting an anime we've never seen". Or "Oh god someone magically animated the image on a body pillow they brought with them out of the vault, it's a living cartoon, it's a 2d master of death our bullets can't touch because this anime waifu's character is immune to bullets and magic, oh fuck it's like an adult horror movie version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Or "Are those fucking Pokemon? Did these mages turn rocks, knives, or each other into Pokemon before siccing them on us? OH GOD THEY DON'T HAVE TO FOLLOW VIDEOGAME RULES BECAUSE THEY'RE REAL SENTIENT BEINGS WHO CAN MIMIC THEIR ENTIRE VIDEOGAME MOVESET USING THEIR CANONICAL ABILITIES". Or "Nobody told that Unicorn you can't make one-way shield walls so he just did". Or "Oh crap, a dying and isolated badass hero pony just decided to go out in a blaze of glory by reading from a scrap of paper he brought with him, getting Darkness Powers he'll use to slaughter all of us before getting sniped by his crying teammates". Or "That Pegasus is sniping at us from within the cloud cover". Or "That Pegasus just flew onto a tall building and started sniping at us, pinning us down while her teammates unleashed more surpressing fire to cover their teammates, who have started to overrun our position and throw rocks enchanted to blow up". Or "One of our base's Unicorns figured out how to make imaginary monsters real, we can teleport them on you then bombard the area with artillery so we don't even need to magically brain-swap loyal soldiers into horrifying scribble-monsters/well-drawn hell-creatures". Or "Why is that massive block of C4 in your room- What do you mean it just got teleported there with one second on the clock?". Or "That Unicorn is using his magic to lift an Earth Pony and rapidly move him around and aim him as he fires all of the many guns attached to him at once". Or any other incredibly creative uses of magic that could net you a big advantage over the disease-ridden Raiders in bone helmets screamingly pointing shotguns that jam and running at you armed with rusty fire axes, teeny tiny switchblades, straightened shaving razors, sledgehammers, 9mms, and rebar clubs with a bit of cement or whatever on the end. Or any of the many ideas I came up with when typing this out. I decided to go with the ones that produced the best images for the pic.





In fact, dude, teleportation! Just teleportation. It would revolutionize everything about warfare. Troops no longer need to march somewhere, or drive vehicles somewhere. They can just show up behind/around a foe and ambush the enemy instantly, leaping into action with a plan they spent ten minutes planning out before intel on troops figured out by magical Sonar-Seeing Flying Robots and Scriers in basements paid to spot you from miles away and send intel on troop movements to my guys. I'm a pony now. My troops don't seem to get tired, because when they do, they get replaced by new fresh troops teleported in and equipped with whatever they need to counter whatever strategy you had planned. My troops don't care if they're shot because healing magic will heal them, healers teleported in along with thick and perfect cover to hide behind. My soldiers have no fear of death because their souls can inhabit their own corpses, or the corpses of your army's fallen, to continue killing you until every last body is too smashed-up to move and we also run out of mass-produced guns to possess and my Creation Corps out of monsters and mechanical beyond-power-armour artificial bodies to teleport in. Go ahead, give your imaginary troops the coolest shit you can think of, go the standard level of Full Militarywank and give them anti-magic armour and anti-magic auto-rifles that shoot instakill laserbullets that turn all to ash and call it a day. I just teleported a house in front of you to crush your advance scouts like grapes, snipers shoot at you from the windows and an Anti-Magic Shell stops you from casting spells while my guys outside of the shell can have the physically-existing end results of their spells enter the anti-magic shell freely, and that's if the shell doesn't just avoid affecting friends and their magic because magic. See that mountain in the distance? My snipers just got teleported atop it, along with my heaviest artillery. See that ground surrounding you? Tiny super-fast stone bullets are ripping up from it towards you as launched boulders arc at you from a few hundred feet away. Storm clouds gather and thrown tornadoes help focus the flames they channel, flames enhanced when the Waterbender Squad casts Create Alcohol to send a few meters of flammable alcohol each into the flame tornado to make it burn even bigger and hotter, while flicking flammable liquid all over the bloody place. Speaking of blood, a sniper without bullets just used his scope to aim a blood-congealing spell that killed you instantly, your ghost gets to watch the chaos around you once it's trapped within a Soul Gem some troopers are carrying. Now a pony made of flames is swinging the big sword in his mouth around, and he's a ghost made of fire so he ignores the chaos that killed you. Where did that hail of bullets come from? A gun-toting Pegasus with a time-stopping necklace-watch had all the time in the world to set up a fly-by shooting. Those boulders sent at you, the ones that finally get closer to you? Are hiding ghosts within them, ghosts who will leap out and possess you and force you to shoot yourself/get yourself shot while shooting your friends, and do the same to your friends, adding more chaos and confusion to the mess as the ground beneath you is transmuted into a poisonous swamp, which is then superheated by a firebender who realized sending a cone of hotness along the ground is easier than sending a ball of fire through the air, two tricks that both require precise temperature control. Now wank your army harder, make them a multi-planetary space empire with sci-fi magic tech, let's have some Exterminatus up in here, give it your best shot BLIP! Followed by some more taunting waveshining BLIPs! No U in spell form, that Exterminatus just got bounced back at you! Death Star? More like Dead Star! Star-Eating Death Star 2? Bet that thing generates a lot of heat, so it'd make a fine thing for a Fire Elemental to burst out of under my power! Go even further beyond? Go from wanked-military to wanked-space empire to wanked-deity? I just wrote a book about the necklace that makes you always win and magically jumped into my book, then I jumped out wearing it, so now I always win! Now you can't do that or anything bigger because if you did that you'd win, so now you can't do that because I have to win thanks to my win necklace! Bwaha, hahaha, aha-haha, I'm the greatest military genius in the world, woohoo yay, so cool x infinity, he typed while bored.





...Man, this is kind of OP. This shit really needs to be nerfed at the story's start or it's got nowhere reasonable to escalate to. And Magic Win Necklaces doesn't seem reasonable. Not for a military+deep story. Though a Soul Trap gem could be slapped onto your Dog Tags and rigged to only absorb your soul on death, letting teammates recover your Dog Tags and put them on an artificial body of some kind to pilot it. Robots, children's toys packing magic toy guns that fire real lasers, magically-gifted Twilight Sparkle clones, rocks transfigured into Pokemon or Dragons or whatever the hell, dying for your army would be the best thing for you in this army as it would grant you immortality and a lifetime of battlefield supremacy. And after the war, your gems can be taken off the giant murder bot to be implanted into an artificial fleshy body that can feel things. For bonus souls, rig your Soul Trap gems to trap your soul and put an enemy soul-trapping gem on your second Dog Tag, so you can spend those enemy souls on Stronger Enchants. If that's how the system works. How the fuck does the system work, anyway? How exactly do you "Hang a spell on" a gem? How does black magic work, how does light magic work, how does anything work? Magic works because it just does, right? So fuck it, these soldiers are gods during endgame now. But it takes a fucking long time to get there. Wouldn't be much point ending this story at the start.







I suppose you could justify Battle Saddles with "An idiotic drafted dirt farmer can have two shotguns duct-taped to him, be sent into battle, maybe kill or wound one or two foes, and die without consequence. But if a rare and talented mage who took years to train to perfection died, that's a massive resource loss. Even if there's a mandatory rule that says all ponies in the military need to have produced at least three kids to leave behind and potentially replace them in twenty years, or two years spent in a Hyperbolic Time Chamber's boot camp, dumb useless idiots with guns taped to them are just more expendable than expensive-to-train elite units in game-changingly powerful gear. Meanwhile Power Armour is considered enough of an instant advantage-creator (Even though magic enchanted zebra rifles spit Napalm Mod bullets that instakill armoured units) because any idiot can wear it after a few hours of training and become tough enough to help his allies escape from battles they lost because they don't have mages around to win fights for the grunts. Magic is tricky to learn and even the simplest tricks require some inherent magical ability to pull off while literally anyone with a straight back can keep a battle saddle somewhat on target". I don't personally see Equestria as being so callous as to prioritize protecting mages over protecting millions of earth pony grunts. Besides, the "Your shit guys dying in the thousands is better than your best guys getting a little wounded, needing to sleep those injuries off, and potentially never healing right and needing to retire" mindset just doesn't fit in a world where magic can heal anything and mechanical limbs can replace anything that magic arbitrarily can't heal. But if you put a few cartoonishly evil (and secretly paid off by the Griffons funding the Zebra army) officials in charge of what gets taught at training camps and whether battles get won or not, this unjustifiably stupid blunder can be blamed on some armchair-general sixty-star eleventy-million-medal politician bastard.





As for potions... You can mass-produce items needed for medicine right now, such as certain highly-expensive pills. But imagine being able to mass-produce an item that makes 70% of all pills and 90% of all medical procedures in field medicine, regular medical work, and even surgery unnecessary. You probably couldn't replace head-meds and antibiotics with healing potions. But the rest? Small bullet wounds can fuck you up IRL, but they're nothing in fiction when a health potion can instantly close them. Even if you retcon it so health potions will heal broken limbs wrong if taken when you've got broken limbs, and you retcon it so these potions want to return you to your baseline state and it's surgery/advanced tech that's needed to fix problems you're born with, health potions are still massively underrated. You're just carrying around a boomer-juice can of "Fuck the last two bullet wounds I just took to draw out a shooter my friend sniped". You know how you play in Fallout NV when you've got all 700 Stimpaks mapped to the 3 button and you just hit the button whenever you take too much damage? That's how soldiers with some auto-inject stimpak thing would likely fight, if they don't care about pain, are trained to resist pain, or are magically immune to that for a bit. They get a measurable "I don't care about this much damage" buffer in liquid form, they have no need to fight defensively and can happily take massive risks to take you out and try to whittle down your probably-smaller supply of healing potion. To say nothing of things like Steelflesh potions, Speed-multiplier potions, enchanted attribute-enhancing rings/necklaces/undies, fuck, even the humble stamina-restoration potion. Let's say an average horse runs at fifty miles an hour, now give him magical stamina-restoring potions. He no longer needs to take breaks to rest or stop his sprinting pace. He might still need to stop to eat, sleep, and shit, but he's still got a massively-increased range. An even bigger range if he takes a potion that boosts his speed by 50% or more. Remember the house Big Mac pulled? Let's say all well-trained male pony soldiers can pull a big bomb 80% that heavy when alone, and something far heavier when working together. They can 9/11 the buildings your snipers are hiding in with a single kick. Or a team effort of a few kicks, I guess. Either way, you're not going to beat an army with soldiers coated in forcefield-shielded rocket-sprinting power armour able to run at 75-120 miles an hour, superjump to quickscope you, ignore whatever wounds they do take because health potion IV blood-scrubbers, and fight while backed up by big bombs and teleporting backstabbers and teleported-in fortifications and all the disposable summoned/crafted bullshit in the world. And if Toon Physics are a canonical thing for anyone besides Pinkie and Rarity when imitating Pinkie, forget how much thought I just put into it and imagine comically violent and comically invincible toons making Road Runner and Coyote look like a saturday morning cartoon.

