"ARE YOU DWEEBS LOADED YET?" Gilda yelled at the top of her lungs.
"No, lance corporal! Gale's got some issue with this slug, we're going to have to shave it down."
"Put it aside," Gilda said in a milder tone, "and use another one. It's not lead we're short of!"
"Yes, lance corporal!" The two griffons pried the misshapen lump of lead out of the offending slug-thrower, and managed to get their next bullet into the barrel with only minimal hammering at it with the ram-rod. They had managed to break five ram-rods so far this morning, but since they had far more slug-throwers than powder and shot to put them to good use, it hadn't been a disaster up to now. The powder in that almost-jammed slugger was worth more to Gleaming Shield's test series than the slugger itself.
"Are we ready on the firing line now, you blue-daubed dweebs?" The griffons stood to the line drawn in the brown, stubby heather underpaw, their sluggers in their talons. They cried out in sequence, acknowledging their preparation. "LIEUTENANT MA'AM, WE'RE READY FOR TEST ROUND FIVE!"
"Ready!" came the reedy reply, distant across the clearing, emanating from a pile of sandbags in front of a wall of similar sandbags on the far side from the line of sluggers.
"PRIME!" The aiming point was a red stain on a sandbag in the wall behind and above the protective pile of sandbags under which her unicorn crouched. A mixed magenta-purple shield popped up over the pile of sandbags, turning the target-stain black as the shield obscured it.
"Take AIM!" The griffon rankers brought their slug-throwers to bear, and squinted down the steel tubes.
"FIRE!" The Territorials, unlike civilians, road agents, and thugs for hire, knew how to conduct volley fire, although the manual of arms was written for crossbow and longbow. Their fire was less the disjointed popping off that Gilda heard these days down in the city, but more a proper massed scream, like a metal plate being sheared sideways. It could have been better - the poor powder and the non-standardization of the sluggers meant that it wasn't really possible to fire in actual unison - but it was a respectable volley.
The clearing in the juniper grove filled once again with a cloud of grey-black smoke. Gilda was placed just far enough to the right of the firing line that her view of the shielded pile of sandbags wasn't initially obscured by the slugger-smoke, the shield glistening like oil in the grey afternoon light.
It stayed up! Only a little ripple, more like jellied ham repeatedly tapped by the edge of a spoon than the harbor with rocks thrown into it, or the ice-wall quivering of the original unicorn-magic shield-spell that had shattered so easily on the battlefield.
"Secure weapons! Moisten swabs! Fix swabs to ramrods! Clear barrels!" The books on artillery had been clear on this subject - the barrels had to be swabbed with dampened sponges after every round, or else they could foul and burst the gun, according to the old, deprecated muzzle-loading cannon manuals Gleaming Shield had gotten from the Royal Artillery.
They had to use the canonniers' manuals. There was no such thing as an Equestrian manual of arms for talon-held black powder weapons. They just weren't practical for pony hooves, not that anypony had shown interest in such advances in the past. As far as the pony military was concerned, ranged fire was for bowmares and unicorn magic, or bombardment by pegasi, or field artillery from the earth pony batteries.
"Oh, bugger!" came a cry out of the smoke over the firing line. Gilda could barely see all the way down the line. "Fire, lance corporal!"
"That's what the buckets are for, Gerald! Put it out before it spreads!" The heather was drier than Gustav's wit, and the primitive slug-throwers threw as many sparks as they did smoke and slugs. Their flint-and-steel triggering devices put sparks into the air as well as into the priming pans, and sprayed burning bits of black powder along with smoke and slugs down-range. Every other volley had sparked fires on the range. The heather under and in front of the firing line was now spotted with little charred spots, not that Gilda could see them at the moment.
"While Gerald and Gunter put out their fire, the rest of you break ranks and go collect the trenching shovels, my little dweebs and dweebettes! I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of having these blasted weeds catch fire under my paws.
"Don't just stand there, hop to it!"
Gilda marched out onto the range, fairly confident that nogriff was about to pick up a slugger and fire another round while she was crossing their line. It was too damn much hassle to load the blasted things. In her opinion, crossbows were less of an annoyance. At least you couldn't set fire to your own cover with a crossbow.
She crossed around behind the sandbags, and found Gleaming Shield poking her horned head up over the sandbags, looking around to see where the slugs had ended up this time.
"Lieutenant ma'am, care to evaluate round five? It looked good from this side."
"Stress was about… the same, I think?" mused the lieutenant as she climbed over the top of her sandbag pit and started picking out the bits of hot lead smoking in the turf and from one sandbag that had been outside of the shield. "The elastic recoil definitely did the trick. Each slug isn't really all that energetic when you look at its force-profile. It's just - significant when you consider it in point vectors, that force in space. Spread the shock over a hoofs-length or three and it's nothing more than somepony jabbing with a spear. Or a bunch of someponies jabbing with spears. I think I can hold that continuously."
"Was the stress from the volley, or from just holding it? Won't be any use if the shooters don't put together a volley fire, and just keep plinking away at your shield."
"No, it's definitely the weight of the rounds impacting, not holding it by itself. That was true of my use in combat of the Mark I shield, but that spell was much less efficient, I think?"
"Maybe the next test should be timed fire? One second intervals?"
"Hey! I like that. Yes, we should do that. Wait, what are they doing out there?"
"Clearing the damn heather, I'm afraid we're going to get a backfire into the powder boxes if we don't clear the range better."
"Well, your judgment call. I'm going to go take a nap under the bushes. Wake me when you're ready."
"Yes, lieutenant ma'am."
The second round of timed fire was ongoing in the clearing out beyond the POW camps, when a herd of ponies in regimentals appeared trotting down the track from the main road. Gleaming Shield's liquid shield was holding steady now despite the steady bang! bang! bang! of the griffon rankers firing in sequence. Gilda didn't hear their hoofsteps for the clatter of the sluggerfire, and jerked in astonishment when a hoof tapped her on the flank right above her left rear pannier bags.
She tore her gaze away from her officer's multi-colored shield, to find said herd of officer-ponies and non-coms staring in consternation at the scene.
"HOLD LINE!" Gilda yelled, not taking her eyes from this new complication. The firing ceased, leaving the clearing suddenly, paradoxically silent.
"Can I help you gentle-ponies," Gilda asked, mildly.
"Oh, hey, girls!" came her officer's voice from behind the griffon, along with the clopping hoof-beats of a pony in a hurry. "Gilda, these are the ponies from the new Slug-thrower Study Group that was formed last week."
"Gonne Research Group," said the large purple pegasus in a captain's uniform.
"What the hay is a gonne, Big Bell?" asked a straw-colored earth pony wearing lieutenant tabs and a thoroughly non-regulation stetson hat. "Yew know everypony's callin' them sluggers on the streets. Just because yew found some silly name in those old Morari the Maneless journals…"
"They're clearly what she was writing about. It's proper Ponish it is, the way it ought to be! Gonnes!"
"Musketoons," said a pop-eyed earth pony with a slightly scorched mane wearing the hideous green and orange dyes of the Hayward Dragoons. "One of the designers in the labs has been experimenting with projectile-type weapons that fired incendiary grenades. Wanted to call them musketoons."
"Pfft, these only set things on fire by accident, Zippo. I still say it shoulda been Slugger Study Group," sniped the tall, scrawny unicorn lieutenant with… why did that pony have black grease painted under her eyes?
"ANYways," interrupted Gleaming Shield, "you guys should definitely check this out. I've got the anti-slugger shield working, I think! Gilda, how many rounds do we have left for a demonstration?"
"We're running short of powder. I'd guess less than forty rounds total. Maybe more if they start underloading the pieces."
"Well, we can't have that!" said Gleaming Shield, broadly, playing to the audience. "Doesn't make for a proper test if we lighten the pressure of the fire."
"We can't know how common powder is among the griffons we captured these weapons from. In field they might tend to underload their sluggers if they think they're short." Gilda knew when to play Discord’s advocate.
"There's no good reason you should be short of gonne-powder," said a blue unicorn with ensign tabs. "Twi- Gleaming Shield, why haven't you been around to talk to Lieutenant Lulamoon?"
"Who?" asked Gilda's lieutenant, whose eyes had narrowed a bit at being half-addressed by that forbidden name that Gilda herself wasn't allowed to use.
"Trixie Lulamoon! You remember her! She dropped out of the School in our second year, the one who was always playing with fire. She went into the Royal Artillery, she's here in Trottingham!"
"Hmfph. Maybe I have seen her somewhere. I doubt she'd be willing to help, you know we didn't get along. When I asked the Artillery, they said they didn't stock this primitive black powder mixture. Something about savages and filthy saltpetre concoctions…"
"Ha!" laughed the blue mare. "You know Trixie. She's more flexible than you'd think when it comes to stuff that goes boom. I'm sure she'll be able to help!"
"Perhaps. But… for now, we don't want to calibrate the shields to the wrong standard. Come on, girls, we're going to show you a volley, then a display of timed fire. Gilda! Set it up with the rankers, I'm going to show my colleagues the range!"
The lieutenant scurried off in what, for her, passed for a cheerful mood, chattering at the herd of young pony officers. It was the largest group of peers Gilda had ever seen Gleaming Shield among, these young officers she'd somehow summoned to their testing range out here in the scrubland. Gilda looked away from the herd, and discovered that the blue-furred unicorn had appeared in her blind spot, eyeing the bat-hen with a strange expression she couldn't quite parse.
"Oh, don't mind me, please, order your troops as you need. We're not used to griffon troops in the provincials, you know. Just ponies in our barracks. I suppose it's rather the same as commanding pegasi, if, you know, they trusted us with commanding pegasi."
"Pegasi aren't griffons, nor vice versa, ensign ma'am."
"Oh, call me Minuette. I'm really just in this uniform for the tour of duty. Not my life, you know? Every graduate gets a reserve commission these days, and I'm sparing the rest of my class by taking my tour now, so they all can get a leg up on life when they're young and busy. So here I am, serving in the Marezonian Provincial Regiment with the girls. Boy, we've really caught it with these dang gonnes, or sluggers, or whatever you want to call them! Us and the bloody Beefeaters, we're the ones who see the mess in the streets." She waved a hoof at one of the pony officers down-range with the others, a grim-looking unicorn wearing crimson Princess's Own Griffish Rangers regimentals.
"Primitive contraptions," Ensign Minuette continued to ramble, "but don't they make a mess! The regiments in garrison and back home don't seem to understand why they're important, but you get out there, and woo! Ponies down all over town!"
A talkative unicorn. Exactly what Gilda had always wanted in life. She turned away from the chattering unicorn ensign who showed no sign of shutting up, and rattled off a quick, brusque series of orders to the firing line, directing the volley fire and timed fire steps and preparations required.
The blue mare kept rattling on, ignoring Gilda's preparations.
"...not Gleaming Shield! Mare, she was such a phenom in school, you know? Burned like dragonfire. Nopony could understand why she went for something so low-status as the Griffish Territorials. Might as well have gone into sanitary engineering, you know?" The mare showed no indication she had any idea how insulting her comparison of command in the Griffish battalions with latrine digging might have been. Not that Gilda didn't sort of agree, but it was the principle of the matter.
"I was under the impression the lieutenant ma'am attended the Military Academy, miss." If the blue mare insisted on not claiming her rank, Gilda could accommodate. "The Academy does not hoof out 'reserve commissions', or so is my impression of matters. LIEUTENANT MA'AM, WE ARE READY WHEN YOU ARE!"
"Oh, she did, but I was a student at Gifted Unicorns, you know. We shared faculty, especially when it came to the high-thaumic stuff and the greater evocations and thaumaturgies. Gleaming Shield was always first in our shared classes. Nobody could out-work her when she was applying herself, not even the Princess's Own Student. Drove ol' Moondancer absolutely around the bend." The blasted blue mare had talked right over the lieutenant's reply to Gilda, but the stream of ponies rushing off of the range and back to a safe place behind the firing line gave the bat-hen a good idea what the substance had been.
"Miss, if you could stand back behind the firing line for safety's sake. LIEUTENANT MA'AM, ARE YOU READY?"
"Not yet! Give me a moment!"
"HOLD LINE!"
"I say they're too close to the targets," grumbled the pony in Rangers regimentals. "Most of our casualties have been from snipers operating at twice this distance."
"Balls to that!" said the big, beefy pegasus mare in Maretonian khaki. "When it gets bloody, it'll get damn close, it always does. Point-blank's when your shield's gotta hold, if you're gonna be doin' unicorn witchery!"
"Close is better than far," said a third officer, male, spectacled, shaggy, and horned, wearing some regimental uniform Gilda didn't recognize. His distinctive pale 'socks' stood out against his orange coat. "They're physical thrust mechanisms, chemically driven. They will lose energy with distance. Highest stress at point blank range."
"Ready when you are!" came floating over the range, the sheen of the liquid shield appearing over the sandbags.
"PRIME!" Gilda yelled at her griffons, aware of the crowd of ponies behind the firing line.
"This is exactly the sort of madcap magic Gleaming Shield was always getting up to, you know," said the blue mare, as downrange the many-colored shield dome glistened over the lieutenant's sandbag dugout. "But leave it to Twi- Gleaming Shield to figure out a way to protect against the snipers and the ambushers. Hey, there Braeburn! Whaddya think-"
"AIM!"
"What ah think is that the question is, will ponies who ain't magical prodigies be able to put that spell to use," Lieutenant Braeburn groused.
"FIRE!" The rippling crack of the sluggers going off in semi-unison drowned out the lieutenant's friend's witterings. But Gilda had to agree with the stallion. Just because Gleaming Shield could perfect a shield, didn't mean that others could use it.
Could they?
I feel like I should recognize most of these ponies, but I don't.
9292908
If it helps, Marezona is the Equestrian province where the very, very new settlement of Appleloosa is located. Also Dodge Junction.
The more I read, the more it feels like Twi's group is going to be neigh-unstoppable.
There goes Twiggles, revolutionizing warfare. And probably screwing up handheld gunpowder weapon development.
Didn't primitive firearms pack less energy a shot than heavy crossbows or something like that?
Well, Trixie did make and even sell her own fireworks in canon () so it would make sense she would go into artillery and ballistics.
Hmm. Well, that's interesting. Indeed, for all that Minuette's rambling washed over Gilda like water off a cat's back, it has a lot of data to consider regarding both the continued militarization of Equestria and
TwilightGleaming's personal history. Especially striking is how Moondancer appears to be Celestia's personal student.In the meantime, the cushion shield seems to be the way to go for absorbing such high-speed, low-area impacts. Now there's just the question of how hard it is to cast...
9292908
Braeburn, Minuette, and Sunburst are all present, though Big Bell and Zippo appear to be OCs.
9292968
Depends how you define “less energy,” and whether that really makes a difference. Even with less energy, you’re still talking a lot of energy; even the rocket ball was capable of inflicting significant injury, despite only packing about 55 foot-pounds of energy (about as much as many modern compound bows).
“More energy than other weapons” is a lot less important than, “enough energy to be lethal,” and it goes without saying that “very deadly with some training” will always lose out to, “deadly enough with almost no training.”
9293071
In this special case, shield effectiveness. Twilight specifically mentions that the energy of the shots are not the problem, once you raise the area of the impact. So arrows and bolts become better at overloading this new kind of shield, reducing the emphasis on firearms. If this spell can be replicated by most unicorns then it would nullify personal firearms as a viable path for military development for quite some time. Not forever, as sooner of latter artillery pieces will become complex enough that their miniaturization makes for useful enough firearms, but while they're on handgonne territory, they could now be useless. And why would you care to use an extremely finicky weapon that's expensive and won't matter for more than the first volley of an ambush (that you could just as well do with crossbows in a safer and subtler way).
9293044
Big Bell:
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/0/03/Big_Bell_ID_S6E18.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/382?cb=20160903214741
and the unnamed Slapshot:
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/1/18/Slapshot_ID_S6E18.png/revision/latest?cb=20160903214810
Both ponies from Appleloosa or the provincial neighborhood of Appleloosa, who we encountered in canon as buckball athletes teamed up with Braeburn.
Zippo Raid is an OC, though.
9293117
Dang, welp, I guess this is what I get for not watching the show in six years.
9293116
Muskets and their amunition are much cheaper and easier to make than bows and their ammo. That goes for self bows, composit bows, and crossbows.
9293173
I don’t know about muskets being easier to make than self bows, since the flintlock can be comparatively quite complex, requiring springs as well as decent metallurgy, while a self bow can be made with only stone tools, and a crossbow is not mechanically more complex than a flintlock. Your statement is absolutely valid for composite bows, however, because they require a degree of timing to be effective.
A cast lead ball, however, is significantly easier to make than an arrow or bolt, and even when powder is added, the time and labor required is still less, and the gains are only compounded when manufacturing on a large scale.
And we’ve drifted horribly off-topic.
9293173
Lolno they aren't.
Muskets were expensive to make pre-industrial era. A good musket could reliably hit a target beyond 50 meters. A bad musket might blow up in the user's face and thus better used as a fire-and-forget pistol-shotgun.
Ammunition was so difficult to manufacture early firearms used rocks. Knowing how much gunpowder to use required experience and dumb luck... and if you had really bad luck the gun exploded in your hand.
Its interesting this is the one that clicks on things, and its perhaps the sane ponies that deliver it.
Twi here isn't a pony anymore, not in the sense that matters. Even pinkie, is still applying pony logic to matters, twisted, corrupted logic, but its logic thats still pony in origin.
Twi's thinking like a gryphon, ever since the bombing. She's set aside, lost, or otherwise cast that compassionate side out, save for a few matters.
And in that, it clicks. What fit, and didn't. We've two sides here, both meeting from opposing sides of the mirror.
Figures Trixie would go into artillery. If there's one thing we know Trixie can do and do very well, it's fireworks, and black powder guns are basically just a hop and a skip away from that.
Cool shield, but I'm going to guess Gleaming and a handful of other unicorns will be able to use it. If the original Shining Armor's shield couldn't keep out lower velocity changlings.
9294308
It might be much easier than it seems. Twilight's shield was breaking after every volley during the ambush and she was bed-ridden afterwards from magical exhaustion. This shield seems to be much more energy-efficient given that she doesn't even seem like she's exerting herself with this new shield even after several volleys.
Besides, Shining's shield had multiple factors against it. Firstly, it had to cover an entire city. Secondly, it had to hold off a sustained assault from an entire swarm of changelings which, while much slower than a slugger round, also have much more mass than said slugger round. Lastly, Shining himself wasn't in peak condition either, what with being brainwashed and getting drained by Chrysalis. I'm just surprised it held as long as it did!
Humm, at some point we are probably going to see bayonets, pistol and blunderbuss appear on the battlefield. Seem kind of obvious to us but people tend to be innovative at the strangest time. Or something is discovered by accident. Happen more often that we think...
The ennemy will begin to see the the advantages of using the differents variations in various situation, making this urban battlefield even more bloody.
And you are probably right in saying that the number unicorn being able to cast a shield this complex kn battle situation must be rather low.
But at the same time, this is an approach to a solution that is very unicorn like. An earth pony might try to solve the problem with bullet proof armor and helmets. A pegasus... can cast s shield and would probably dislike an armor to heavy or restricting to manoeuver. Would probably say to fly out of range, dodge the bullet, maybe to make a thick fog for cover or rain to wet the powder.
But there may be two other magival options. In season 8, chancellor Neighsay explain to the young six that unicorn magic come in the form of their Spellcraft but also in their potions and artefacts. It may give Gleaming Shield and the rest two other road to explore in order to counter the sluggers.
But of course, rather than a defence, the best solution would be to prevent the sluggers from firing at all. Something akin to an area of effect. Like for example a spell that block all clockwork from working, jamming the firing mecanism. Or a potion that cause all metal to rust? Plenty of solution to get creative with.
No mention of deaf griffins. Unintentional or light racism? With the comment comparing the regiment with sanitary engineering I would lean towards the second.
And when Minutette was talking about the Beefeater, was that a slang for Griffins or the name of a regiment? Like the guard of the London tower? Since this story is currently in Trottingham, it can be confusing.
And Trixie in the artillery. Oh the fabulous Trixie. This will be interesting. How much this war will have affected her and how much do you think she tinkers with the ammo to create a Trixie special?
9295081
It was mentioned about a half-dozen chapters back; the Princess's Own Griffish Rangers - the 'real' griffon regiment - has a uniform which features a lot of crimson, and are known pejoratively as 'beefeaters' because of their aggressiveness. Sort of like the American special forces, who are sometimes called 'snake-eaters'.
9295208
Your right, I forgot about that part since I refer to them as Ranger in my head.
9293250
Ammunition was difficult to manufacture? Didn't you just need to make a metal ball of roughly the right size? I would think the main incentive to use rocks would be the cost of the metal, which I would not expect to be prohibitive versus the cost of making a (metal-tipped) arrow.
Citation please.
9296071
Not sure if trolling.
9296071
Muskets have the anoying thing with accuracy. However, the weapon have the distignt feature of beeing able to mass produce and disprebute and one can learn how to fire in less then an miniute aka "The Miniute Man". Swords, bow and crossbow require bit more training to learn how to propperly use. Thats why when the musket got into service, it rapidly became the weapon of war.
So did she choose the territorials out of revenge or some other reason...
9296795
She'd say it was where the war was, if you cornered her. It probably was vengeance at first. If you consider ponies solely in terms of Klopler-Hoss, Gleaming Shield is the embodiment of Anger.
9296071
As far I know, it was the powder that was difficult to manufacture, and that was because the British had acquired a monopoly on cheap saltpeter (at least until the Prussians figured out how to synthetize it).
Who gave her a job in artillery?! Wouldn't have been better demolitions?
9365049
I'd have thought "Whatever the Pony version of the USO is"
Getting some information on Gleaming.
Hopefully not, ponies really don't need mot re advantages.
We have more known Ponies. And Moondancer is the new Twilight.... good for her.
Trixie.... in the artillery Corp. That..... that makes far too much sense. But what is with so many fics trying to shoehorn her into Celestia's school?
Still, time to try and learn how to deal with "gonnes", very nice reference there, while Gilda gets the joy of a talky butter bar. That said.... why are they using naval ranks?