bananamancer
[@Seiza-chan](/images/3032423#comment_10386694)
Yeah, I know ponies in FoE are plenty durable enough to *use* firearms with their mouths; the idea that they would design them that way, rather than with a control harness, chest mount, and head-aimed pulley/tension wire system just bothers me. The whole "light guns in the mouth, heavy guns on battle saddles" idea works at surface level, and Kkat never really expanded on the idea in the story because there was no reason to include such details in the narrative; however, I've written a story in which one of the supporting characters is an experienced gunsmith responsible for most of a region's firearms, so I wound up thinking about it a lot more than is really necessary :D
Ponies, or at least Earth Ponies and Pegasi, likely would design guns with more mechanical aids than you typically see depicted in FoE stories. Ergo, tension wires (think bicycle break wires) for pulling the trigger and aiming via moving the head with an attached bridle/harness connected to the battle saddle, and rather than the 20-30 round magazines common to terrestrial firearms, most of their guns would be designed around either belt feeding or, as technology progressed into magically-augmented mechanisms, some form of feeder system (such as the PipBuck's inventory sorting spell, which, purportedly, physically moves things around in your bags for efficient access and storage) that would take care of ammunition alignment as it transfers from a larger hopper to the feed chute.
You wouldn't have a rifle fixed permanently in place on your sides, as Calamity does with his sniper rifles, but instead a swiveling rack mount that would allow either gun to aim in a narrow cone, thus allowing fine adjustment with the head controls once you're pointing roughly at the target. In a similar vein, sidearms (pistol/SMG) could be mounted on the chest (an equine's pectoral region, between the neck and foreshoulders) and would be an ideal candidate for laser or collimator sights (WWI equivalent of the holographic dot sight).
Describing guns in terms of human design in pony stories (or artwork), rather than putting in the effort to think about things on a mechanical and ergonomic level, bothers me perhaps me more than it should. I can't help it :D
Yeah, I know ponies in FoE are plenty durable enough to *use* firearms with their mouths; the idea that they would design them that way, rather than with a control harness, chest mount, and head-aimed pulley/tension wire system just bothers me. The whole "light guns in the mouth, heavy guns on battle saddles" idea works at surface level, and Kkat never really expanded on the idea in the story because there was no reason to include such details in the narrative; however, I've written a story in which one of the supporting characters is an experienced gunsmith responsible for most of a region's firearms, so I wound up thinking about it a lot more than is really necessary :D
Ponies, or at least Earth Ponies and Pegasi, likely would design guns with more mechanical aids than you typically see depicted in FoE stories. Ergo, tension wires (think bicycle break wires) for pulling the trigger and aiming via moving the head with an attached bridle/harness connected to the battle saddle, and rather than the 20-30 round magazines common to terrestrial firearms, most of their guns would be designed around either belt feeding or, as technology progressed into magically-augmented mechanisms, some form of feeder system (such as the PipBuck's inventory sorting spell, which, purportedly, physically moves things around in your bags for efficient access and storage) that would take care of ammunition alignment as it transfers from a larger hopper to the feed chute.
You wouldn't have a rifle fixed permanently in place on your sides, as Calamity does with his sniper rifles, but instead a swiveling rack mount that would allow either gun to aim in a narrow cone, thus allowing fine adjustment with the head controls once you're pointing roughly at the target. In a similar vein, sidearms (pistol/SMG) could be mounted on the chest (an equine's pectoral region, between the neck and foreshoulders) and would be an ideal candidate for laser or collimator sights (WWI equivalent of the holographic dot sight).
Describing guns in terms of human design in pony stories (or artwork), rather than putting in the effort to think about things on a mechanical and ergonomic level, bothers me perhaps m