Fallout Equestria

First run was a success, and the second print run would have been as far as orders went, it only fell through because of issues with Paypal.

Not doubting that - I'm just surprised that people would shell out so much. We're talking about the sort of price tag you'd expect to find on high-end RPG sourcebooks, which are often full-colour, heavily illustrated (and proofread) hardbacks.

edited 14th Apr '14 4:52:43 AM by Snipehamster

I remember that when Chapter 64 of PH was first released, there were a bunch of people complaining that it stole an idea directly from Background Pony.

...Having just read the chapter, I have no idea what those people were talking about. Anyone able to enlighten me, here?

edited 14th Apr '14 10:27:50 AM by Unknownlight

It's not so hard to believe if you look at it from a wordcount perspective. FOE is as long as lots of five or six book fantasy series, a genre not known for brevity in the first place. And people love the story.

Plus, we've established not everyone gets hung up over a few petty typos. Hell I've found them in actual 'legitimate' published books, so even on a professional level, that shit still happens.

True dat. It's even worse when the book you are reading has been translated from Danish to French and then English by a chimp who has a first-grade education in German.

Fo E is far better than that.

Recursive "Blind Idiot" Translation FTW!

Please, no.

Unknownlight:

Take this with an enormous grain of salt - since I haven't read Background Pony or the recent chapters of PH - but I might have caught some of the drama surrounding that on the IRC. I think it was something to do with the worldbuilding. Something to do with souls or the stars, at a guess. Whatever it was, the drama seems to have blown over by this point. In so far as PH drama can blow over, anyway.

I went and dug up the relevant Reddit thread out of curiosity, but there's no mention of Background Pony there.

Question: Are Homage, Littlepip, Princess Celestia or whoever built the SPP towers ever called out on setting up and/or using a giant Big Brother system? Or is FoE wholeheartedly in favor of 24/7 nationwide digital(-equivalent) surveillance?

edited 15th Apr '14 7:39:17 AM by Snipehamster

Well, Celestia was long gone by the time any decisions were made about it. And as for setting one up, you have to bear in mind that at the time the country was presumably already covered with Pinkie Sprites.

As for the present, who knew about it until the release of Littlepip's book? Sure, DJ-Pon3 clearly had some source(s) of information, but who would have figured out the source? And after the release of the BOL there were only one or two scenes.

Through the end of the main story, Littlepip didn't care, nor apparently did the rest of her party. But then remember you have two stable dwellers who probably never had any real privacy to begin with, someone who dealt with years of (probably) worse Big Brotherism during the war, someone who never disagrees with Littlepip, and someone who never talks. Also a bird. Outside of them you had what? Doctor addiction fix? It's not like he had the screen time to say much about it, and if anything he was probably on Homage's side.

edited 15th Apr '14 5:01:27 PM by IcyShake

Given it's hardly all seeing, isn't really invading privacy, and only used to warn the NCR about threats moving in or forming near their borders, doubt it.

And the occasional lightning bolt directed at someone she hates. Or a tornado if it's a group of them.

Except that she never actually uses the SPP to do that, specifically because she knows how easy it might get to abuse that power. Limiting herself to only warning the NCR of incoming threats/Bandit groups/etc... and only using the SPP's weather control to maintain the normal weather patterns.

Perhaps you could find a way to justify it in-story. Obscure technology, characters with other things on their minds, etc. What I'm getting at is its role in the narrative. It's used near-exclusively by the protagonists post-war, and mostly just 'there' during the war. We have cloud-breaking skyscrapers covered in sensors and cameras, MoM bots wandering about and recording things - that's a system ripe for abuse (not even getting into the weather-control superpowers granted by the SPP).

Even granting that the system wouldn't have 100% coverage, it's still rather creepy. The fact that the Equestrian public may not have known about the purpose of the SPP towers just makes things worse: the government wasn't just watching over them, but spying on them without their knowledge. Likewise (though perhaps to a lesser extent) in the wasteland.

I'm not sure that the moral question was ever really addressed. Indeed, as Littlepip, Homage and Pinkie's actions are presented sympathetically one might argue that the story endorses their use of surveillance.

And where is this stated? It seems rather out of character for Littlepip to suddenly become the 'watch quietly and occasionally give warnings' type, given how aggressive she is for the rest of the story.

edited 15th Apr '14 5:17:41 PM by Snipehamster

Late in the story it's revealed that Red Eye's is aware that they can be used for real-time surveillance when he uses one to watch Pip and company during one of the later fights. I don't recall that it really serves any importance in the story though; it's mostly just trivia.

Ummm, no. Not that I can recal seeing. The only thing he did with the SPP towers was cut off Homage's access to the one near Fillydelphia, which was undone. He sis have some limited control over to Spritebots, so likely could have used them for spying the same way Spike did, but that's about it, never said anything about him using the SPP to spy, or anything like that.

In fact be pretty hard for him to do it, since the only reason Homage was able to use the SPP so well to gather info was because she had access to the MAS overrides for it in Tenpony.

It's in Chapter 43.

Yeah that was talking about the Spritebots, not the SPP. They were two different systems.

Spritebots were run by the MOM, The SPP's surveillance cameras by the MAS.

edited 15th Apr '14 5:28:01 PM by Seraphem

Ah, right. I didn't read your post very closely.

It's kind of weird that he could apparently take control of that tower, but he couldn't just remove the override that they put on it.

edited 15th Apr '14 5:32:27 PM by ILSS

Well, it's never said he took control of the tower, only that he had blocked her access to it, and the whole point of an override is to, well override stuff like that.

All he had was what he could get out of the tower itself, she had all the knowledge and info from the MASEBS which gave her full control of the system and full access to all the information on how to use it. So yeah not hard to see her finding a way he couldn't easily block.

The Ask Littlepip Tumblr, which goes into a fair bit a detail about what happened during the intervening years between the last chapter and the Afterword. The Tumblr isn't written by Kkat, but the answers are based on information Kkat's provided to the author.

Kind of a cop-out. I just don't buy it.

edited 15th Apr '14 5:41:23 PM by Pannic

The override is a physical device that they attached to it. Surely he could just, you know, take it off.

Did anything ever actually come of Homage being able to spy on Red Eye?

edited 15th Apr '14 5:40:56 PM by ILSS

I thought it was a software program or something. The physical device was just what they attached to download her override into the tower's systems. At least that's how I took it. Once the uploiad was made, it wouldn't matter if you took out the USB drive it was in.

And not really, other then the morale boost it might give. Though was hardly time enough to do much, and by that point most of Redeye's efforts that would be worth spying on were at the Citadel, not Fillydelphia.

Thinking about the SPO towers, has anyone ever thought about how big the Equestrian wasteland is? There were fifty towers if I remember correctly, all placed miles and miles apart, or on the horizon, I forget. Now that seems pretty far. And then there's things like the travel from old to new Appleloosa taking two days, and the hours/days it took them to traverse Maehattens suburbs and reach Tenpony. I think saying that its pretty huge is fair, right?

Yeah pretty large, though even the show is really iffy on just how big Equestria is. So it's vague. But given 0 towers, and no two ever seem to be in sight at once, or at least rarely and having to be perfectly positioned to see two of them far off on either horizon. Yeah it's likely quite big. And we really only saw a small chuck of it.