I was reading my copy of All Roads and notice in one of Chances flashbacks, the comic cell showed an NCR trooper on horseback, now, granted it may be an oversight by the panel artist, but does this mean Horses are part of the world? I mean, it would make alot more sense to me than every NCR trooper on foot. Like General Oliver, you'd think he'd be on horseback or an old USAF military truck.

Anywho, what are your opinions on Horses and Fallout?

I bet horses are still around in places but maybe they reason there a bit more delicate than a bramhin or Big Horner and need a bit better quality of food which is lacking without a good supply line in the desert. I for one would not really mind seeing them but then that opens the whole why can i not ride them ball of wax..

It seems likely that horses would survive. Dogs managed to survived almost unchanged, and since horses would not commonly be found in heavily populated areas maybe it's likely that they were almost unaffected by the bombs.

Thats the main reason I think they arent in. Its a shame ridable things seem to be buggy on Gamebryo (Or so common majority states, I enjoyed the horses in Oblivion.)

All in all, I like the idea of horses even if its just discussed, being in the world, it adds to the 'The War is over, we are slowly but stabley rebuilding. Not to mention it'd add to that Wild West feel New Vegas gives off in the Wastes :laugh:

"It was quite a few years ago...and Chance may have been experimenting with Jet at the time..."

Seriously, don't really have much of one other than

A: I seem to recall (and could easily have been experimenting with Jet at the time :rimshot: ) mention of horses being canonically extinct, and

B: don't really care if they are or not, so long as we don't get the standard "add [insert vehicle, horses in this instance]" wave that inevitably follows such a thought.

:shrug:

I agree .. though herbavores (spelling ehh) seem to have took it in the shorts well overlooking cows.. I would love a few Horses thrown in or a Brahmin buggy or to heh.. (kinda makes you wonder if the Amish as a whole would do a fair job of surviving a world wide meltdown)

Well you know, in Fallout and Fallout 2, they had little carts made from the trunk section of old cars. So I think thats already been done xD

"granted it may be an oversight by the panel artist"
That's what I say, I mean look at how the strip looks in All Roads then look at it in-game, they look nothing like eachother.
IMO horses are not in fallout (not in the U.S. atleast).

My feeling is that throughout recorded human history, horses have been so incredibly valuable to us as modes of transport, beasts of burden, etc - that we humans went to extrordinary lengths to keep and protect them. It was not until well after the advent of the Car that this started to change and they became mainly for pleasure. But given our absolute need for high speed, reliable transport combined with the fact that the cars stopped running would reverse this decline in importance of the horse _overnight_.

In this respect I feel the Fallout universe got it backwards; societies would go Back to being horse-driven because the food is abundant in most places of the US (radiation doesn't kill grass on a mass scale), and we would bring in feed via trade from other places where there wasn't enough grazing land. Horses are very hardy creatures in truth, they can survive the elements far better than we can. My horse "blankets" don't cover the head or legs, and they do just fine at -20. They do great at 120 too. I don't need to argue it, the history of our people for the last 3,000 years proves the point without any defense required.

Without Cars, especially in America, these towns in the game would look alot more like the old west than they do - modern wrecks yes, but horses everywhere and caravans driven by buggy. Sure some would have died in areas that were the hardest hit (like in DC itself), but go 50 miles out of that into Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia or the Carolinas and you would meet armed resistance on horse back. To think that horses are not "hardy" enough to survive or would all be shot would again be ignorant of history - horses have been used in every form of war. Sure some die, but opponents on foot facing a mounted cavalry charge have paid the price for centuries and would do so again.

Miax

After futher deleberation I think a protectatron drawn buggy would be funny as hell.. as you could walk faster your just very lazy heh or have a heavy load... or a robomutt sled dogs hmmmm

Yeah, but this is one I'll go all "Don't. Care." on- yeah they've been done, because they made perfect sense. There are dead cars in NV, and who can argue there were scads of'em in FO3- so why has nobody cut the back end off one and made a Fallout Brahmin-cart that'll carry 5-10 times the stuff with the same 1 Brahmin?

Okay, I can see why they might not have in DC- the smoking, geiger-counter-ticking holes where the first couple of people tried it.

And in New Vegas, we've got...er...wow. :ahhh: Piles of little oversize handcarts that apparently nobody ever uses...except Cassidy Caravan did use 2 of'em until...well...you know. And apparently Crimson Caravan keeps'em like trophies of every company they've bought out- look around their lot.

The grass would have almost all ahve been killed. The hardy plants such as the different mojave plants? They would have survived. Grass would not. A week after the war, a black radioactive rain fell upon almost all of the world, killing most animals and plants, and radiating others.

Besides, no one used horses for combat after WW1, where machine guns sort of made them obsolete.

You are totally incorrect on this point, the grass would Not have been killed. Look at the history of Chernobyl. If sufficient radiation were prevalent Everywhere in the US in sufficient quantity to kill All of the grass, then certainly you must realize that no larger form of life would have survived either. This is not a valid argument unless you are arguing for the death of all life on the planet. Grass is one of the hardiest and most pervasive plants in the US, and it would grow back Very fast in places you would think too strong with radiation.

Machine Guns did not make the horse obsolete, Real Tanks and motorized vehicles did. Study the history of George S. Patton Jr. if you want a good brief on the transition that is also fun to read.

Miax

Yeah I don't know if horses are extinct but aren't horses so fragile that if they break a leg one has to off them?
How would they survive a nuclear war in the first place?

So yeah I don't think they're completely extinct but they are for damn sure not existing in a large portion of america anymore.

Sure, but now place your grass comment in the Fallout world. Have you seen any grass in Fallout 1, 2, Tactics, 3 or New Vegas? I sure as hell didn't.

If I remember correctly there is a person in Fallout 1 or 2 that explains about the death of a lot of species, including horses. The only thing I'm wondering then is how in earth did the cows survive and mutate into twoheaded brahmin? Must have been some sturdy beasts.

Maybe their genetic makeup reacted differently? Or two headed horses didn't sound as cool as two headed cows.

There's grass in both FO3 and NV.

And Fallout 2, it's even greener there.

Ummm No, I have seen grass in Many places in New Vegas (in the Mojave no less), and also in Fo3. I'm not sure what game you played, but its definitely there. And again, if all grass died then that means ones of the lowest forms of plant life was totally eradicated - nothing else would survive. Yet the radiation at Chernobyl and directly around it was FAR higher than what any nuclear war will produce in a given area, and high radiation would be limited to direct blast areas. Face it - Grass Survives. Thats not even debatable - read the science of Chernobyl on what was killed, not killed and how fast nature COMES BACK. Seeds are not all killed, and grass is incredibly pervasive.

Thats why Cows and Horses would survive - there is plenty of their food around (alot more than ours I would add), and people would cherish them as they have for the last 3,000+ years of human civilization. Only in our modern times (the 20th century in fact) that this changed because of the car, but those all stopped working. Horses would not.

@GabrielDan - One can think of horses legs as critical, just as ours are, and yes when a horse looses a leg it has to be put down. But also remember; we humans have been using horses in ALL forms of warfare for thousands of years - and yeah horses do get killed. But they are also incredibly hardy, and can survive injuries that we would not - they can serious wounds and remain standing while patched-up. The thing is that horses don't think like Cats, Dogs and other domesticated animals - they can endure Alot.

For my part I fall to history, and as a student of military history (especially that of mounted warfare), history is littered with Thousands of examples of huge battles where thousands of horse-mounted warriors rode right into enemy fire of All kinds. It's the speed that wins the battle, as if a horse is charging you in battle - as a foot soldier you have the inevitable fear of being run down, and horses close distances between enemies Very fast. If a strafing fiend is hard to hit, a horse moving at 20 or 30 MPH (even with large size) is actually harder. It's why horses have been the most successful animal in the history of human warfare - and there is just no way they were all wiped out. After the apocolypse, they will be THE mode of transportation - humans will throw their own kind in front of enemeis to save a trusted mount. And don't for a second think we horse people would make armor and protect the horses as much as possible.

Like I said, the Fallout universe got the horses backwards - I don't think there were many horse-people who came up with that part of the lore. Either that, or they didn't want to hassle with the animation and coding challenges that horses present, and left them out more from practicality than from a desire Not to have horses in their version of post-apocalyptic America. I would love to debate the point with those that make the lore, but this is just a video game in the end and they've written this bit of lore (albiet wrongly) into Fallout gaming history already.

Miax

This topic has been brough up before, but I can't find it...
In that topic was a great reply that fully sums it up for me.

The gang is called the Khans...
Odds are they got the idea from a book...
Odds are that book talked about how the group they where named after used horses...
Odds are horses would fall into a major form of myth for the Khans...
Chance was high on jet when he was remembering, and might have mixed myth with reality...
Yes the horses where on the wrong side, but in his remembering he could have added them to the NCR as a means for there victory...


Wow thats a lot of odds... and a lot of periods...

Yeah I hear ya - and thats exactly what game developers who were not also horse people would think, especially when getting their nice, cozy car for the morning commute to work. The equation changes 100% the moment we humans no longer have a means of transportation - who would willingly accept "walking around" as the default mode of transport?! No one would Willingly.

It's hard for folks to get into that head-space today as we don't rely on them as we once did - the car is a whole lot easier. I can think of nothing better to outrun radscorpions and cazadors and everything else bad then on a horse (and I can shoot at em from afar too). This is how the world worked before Cars, and nothing I have seen in the gaming series suggests any Real reasons why they would not survive.

My money is still on game mechanics limitations in the earlier titles as the reason why.

Ah I got it... we all have pocket sized horses... That would explain fast travel!

I'd say there was Jet involved. Horses and cats probably went the same way after The War. Too delicious and easy to hunt to survive.

Hehehe nice.

Bottom line is that if Brahman survived (which also eat grass), horses would also. It should be reversed - a brahman cannot move at any speed and would be victim to any predator in the wasteland. A horse on the other hand, when frightened, can outrun anything I've seen in the wasteland - deathclaws included. And we see plenty of brahman around - so horses would be even moreso (because we would be riding them).

Like I said it's just a game and the makers of the game can choose any universe they want, but they did get horses completely wrong in the Fallout universe. It would be different if there were horse people on-staff making these games, but I havn't found any (yet). Thankfully Bethesda got it right with Oblivion, and I fully expect the next TES to have them as well!

There was actually a pretty big battle where cavalry was used successfully just before WW2. It was a battle between USSR and Japan with Mongolia on the USSR side using cavalry. The name of the battle is stuck on the tip of my tongue hopefully someone here knows, but from what I remember cavalry proved to hold its own but lacked the numbers to be truly effective. The battle was a decisive victory for the USSR and they might have under played the importance of the cavalry considering it was an all Mongolian division.

Also, some of the soviet divisions that entered Berlin (late stages) were on horseback lol. I remember reading an account of one of the German officers that was going WTF? REALLY? HORSEBACK???