They should add horses to Fallout!

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

I always thought that the reason cats and horses are extinct was to mimic the mad max world of most wildlife being extinct/hunted to extinction due to environmental collapse. To me, horses have always seemed too, I don’t know, “elegant” to fit it the fallout universe. When I think of post-apocalypse, I don’t think of everyone going back to using horses, but using ramshackle cars and bikes. Packs of rabid dogs feel post apocalyptic, but housecats don’t really fit. Maybe if they were more mangy looking than the ones in Fallout 4 I could see it.

Oh, and at least one donkey is known to have survived up until the events of Fallout 1, so there’s that.

 

[ElloinmorninJ]

Horses in Fallout would be such a game changer that I think it would soil the style of the setting. For one the sense of scale would be changed fundamentally, and one of the things I love about Fallout is how the American West suddenly becomes a new huge fantasy map when your primary method of traversal is walking. Utah might as well be a distant and foreign land of tribals and strange creatures to California. The Mojave is a frontier. This becomes less possible when you have widespread usage of horses.

Not really. Utah’s only a couple weeks away from from California.

 

[ElloinmorninJ]

Also, they have a literal Mongol inspired tribe in Fallout’s world, yet they have no mounts. Like I said, just genetically fuck up the horses with mutation and they’ll fit

 

[Mr Fish]

@ElloinmorninJ
A couple of weeks of travel in the old west and a couple of weeks of travel in a post-apocalyptic wasteland are two completely different things though.

 

[Hardboiled Android]

Because horses are literally a game-changer. Without horses, the civilized world as we know it does not progress. Without horses, what arises are the Maya, Aztec, the Olmec, the Inca, the Iriquos, Cucuteni–Trypillia. The horse is one of the prime beasts of burden, beast of transport, and beast of war mankind could ever had hoped for; it has no equal.

The fusion cells will one day end, 'Wind vehicles' are what - sand-skimmers, maybe sail boats; and bikes and other vehicles have increasingly complex designs. It took mankind until the late 1800s to make the Bicycle, for instance.

But a horse? You feed it. You clean it. You get Equestrian girls to whisper in its ear. You can get more horses by giving horses some food and then wait. You can replace them relatively easily, as well, as they're somewhat fragile; and of course, they're dumb as fuck, but that doesn't matter overall. They are self-replicating vehicles. A bit expensive at first, sure, and if you want a strong-ass breed, become a full-time thing for a whole caste of people, but still far more cheap and accessible compared to any mechanical vehicle save, perhaps, the simplest dugouts, for even a cart with its axles and wheels needs a beast or person to move it.

Europe and Asia got to the point where nearly every farm, every man of note, had a horse. We got the electric age with horses on our side (and then killed them off due to the oil-gas car).

Without horses, the world is quite truly fucked; because their course is set. The only hope is that there's enough tech from the overpopulated, over-polluted pre-war world to leapfrog ahead to a higher civilization, but with every passing year, every expanding polity, every looted factory to provide some podunk town with power, that chance diminishes.

Without horses, you have no good chariots, no good workhouses, no barge horses, no mill horses, no mounted infantry, mounted archers, lancers, cataphracts, knights, gendarme, cavaliers, cuirassiers, vaqueros, etc. Their extinction literally cuts out a whole tree of advancement, and old-world civilization will literally never arise again.

Lets not forget that horses were only introduced to the Middle East in the mid-to-late Bronze Age. Prior to their introduction, we see the development of countless highly complex civilizations.

And while horses were certainly pivotal, civilization probably would've ultimately been OK without them, and further they're not really important when you have large centers where the fundamental principles of both internal combustion engines and electricity are understood.

 

[ElloinmorninJ]

@ElloinmorninJ
A couple of weeks of travel in the old west and a couple of weeks of travel in a post-apocalyptic wasteland are two completely different things though.

How so?

 

[Deleted member 98605]

Lets not forget that horses were only introduced to the Middle East in the mid-to-late Bronze Age. Prior to their introduction, we see the development of countless highly complex civilizations.

And while horses were certainly pivotal, civilization probably would've ultimately been OK without them, and further they're not really important when you have large centers where the fundamental principles of both internal combustion engines and electricity are understood.

I sort of left out India and Mesopotamia as they used donkeys before they got horses; Sumer already had donkey-chariots long before IEs even came their way, and if neither was available, they probably would had moved onto the camel. Meanwhile the New World had nothing equivalent - perhaps Deer, Buffalo, or Llamas if they got desperate enough, maybe if the Inca lasted 1000 more years, or the Chatokia a few more centuries as well - and Fallout has comparatively nothing.

And I disagree. Remove the Horse from Europe, what do you get? A society that is mostly based around Egypt, still, or the Old European tribes. Enough to farm all of Britain, sure, Skae Brae, Minos, Nurage. Capable of something equivalent to what we saw in the New World, but not far-reaching enough to have continental spanning empires or trade routes.

Without horses you don't have the noble class that emerged in every Indo-European society. Everything changes, from warfare to farming to transportation to social hierarchy. It's because of the horse we are here - that's not hyperbole. We are sons of the Hors; that stupid four legged thing gave us the old world and trotted over the new one.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

How so?

Well, less food, less water, more dangerous wildlife, and the threat of radiation for one.

 

[Risewild]

Well, for those civilizations that used donkeys and chariots, there are still Brahmin in Fallout universe. And we can see in the classic games that Brahmin do pull carts and serve as a means of transportation for people and goods.

Someone in this thread already mentioned that robots could pull carts too.

Over the years, there's been several interesting ways for transportation in the Fallout universe, that never made past the concept art. Like Van Buren's Caesar's chariot, or Fallout's 3 giant molerat mount:

Spoiler: Some pictures

There's even a non-canon random encounter on Fallout Tactics that has Phil the Nuka Cola guy riding a bicycle:

There's Fallout Tactics vehicles:

• APC
• Buggy
• Hummer
• Modified APC Nuke carrier
• Brotherhood Airship
• Bus (was cut from the final release of the game)
• Hellion aircraft

Spoiler: Tons of pictures

APC:

Buggy:

Hummer:

Nuke Carrier:

Airship:

Bus:

Hellion:

There's the famous Fallout 2''s Highwayman:

And there's Vertibirds since Fallout 2:

There's the restored Boomers' B-29:

Spoiler: B-29

It's also mentioned that the NCR Army has a mechanized division that uses vehicles.

I don't think that Fallout needs horses, there's already a lot of vehicles around that do a better job than horses, and it would be cooler if devs would just come up with other animals to be used instead of horses.
Like the giant molerats from the Fallout 3 concept art. There could be some breeders that would selectively breed larger, stronger, faster, etc. versions of wasteland animals/critters that could serve as mounts. I see that as a viable profession in the Fallout universe.

I can also see in the Fallout universe people with workshops using parts of robots and pre-war vehicles to make usable new ones for transportation of people and goods. Fallout has a lot of tinkers, inventors and smart people, so it wouldn't be a stretch that some would create a profession like that.

 

[Hardboiled Android]

I sort of left out India and Mesopotamia as they used donkeys before they got horses; Sumer already had donkey-chariots long before IEs even came their way, and if neither was available, they probably would had moved onto the camel. Meanwhile the New World had nothing equivalent - perhaps Deer, Buffalo, or Llamas if they got desperate enough, maybe if the Inca lasted 1000 more years, or the Chatokia a few more centuries as well - and Fallout has comparatively nothing.

And I disagree. Remove the Horse from Europe, what do you get? A society that is mostly based around Egypt, still, or the Old European tribes. Enough to farm all of Britain, sure, Skae Brae, Minos, Nurage. Capable of something equivalent to what we saw in the New World, but not far-reaching enough to have continental spanning empires or trade routes.

Without horses you don't have the noble class that emerged in every Indo-European society. Everything changes, from warfare to farming to transportation to social hierarchy. It's because of the horse we are here - that's not hyperbole. We are sons of the Hors; that stupid four legged thing gave us the old world and trotted over the new one.

First of all, you absolutely can get large polities and networks of trade without an equine beast of burden - look at the Inca, who had a society as centralized and developed as the Romans, all without either the horse or even writing.

And there absolutely were continent spanning trade routes prior to the wide-spread adoption of the horse - nearly all tin for bronze in the Bronze Age was sourced from one of two places: either Afghanistan or Cornwall, to be used in Greece, Mesopotamia or Egypt. How did they do it? Either by ships or on foot, usually with oxen-pulled (not donkey) caravans. A network that all of the civilizations you named were deeply involved with and, had it not been for the Bronze Age collapse, probably would have continued to develop.

Further while horses have certainly provided a vital role as transport for early societies (best exemplified by the successive waves of Steppe Peoples who changed the course of history from the Indo-Europeans to the Turks), in truth that is not the most important role they played: rather, they were useful in their more general application as beasts of burden providing horsepower and labor, thus saving humans time to do other things. Where you make those gains could be in terms of hours spent travelling by foot or they could be in hours saved ploughing a field or pulling a stone, but in any case the headline is moreso in the macroeconomic calculation of labor expended then in any particular use for horses.

Finally, and as others have noted, horses aren't super important for two reasons in the world of fallout. One, they do have access to a pretty able draft animal in the form of the brahmin, which seems to be a remarkably robust species. Secondly, they've sort of leap-frogged the need for draft animals because there are large parts of the post-War world that do have a good fundamental understanding of the principles behind electricity and the internal combustion engine.

While horses were certainly vital in the particular developmental route of our history, this deterministic Jared Diamond approach to history is not necessarially the correct one. History would develop and human progress would have continued absent a single given draft animal. Perhaps it would have been slowed down somewhat or gone down some different roads, but it still would have gone on.

 

[Ugly Kid]

I still think regardless of whether or not horses are necessary, it would still be cool to have wild mutated horses roaming Wyoming. Maybe at the very least only one tribe uses the horses sparingly, but then the introduction of vehicles makes them abandon that.

I would also still like a widely used animal mount, maybe not necessarily the default mode of travel, but still numerous. I mean people don't use horses for transportation anymore but they still keep them around.