So… I don’t know how y’all feel about necroposting around here, but this is something I’m pretty interested in and I’m just gonna right jump in on it.
I’d like to see NPC animals playing a prominent role at some point in the future. Guard dogs, saddle horses, pack mules, draft oxen… heck, let’s even train falcons to claw out zombie eyes for us. Y’all can even have your bear and moose cavalry if you want… though I’d rather play no part in such folderol.
Male work animals are usually gelded. Beyond that, you would only want them saddled/harnessed when you’re actually working them, so they’d still be spending most of their time as normal animals. How you’d code for that, I don’t know.
*Motorcycles can be driven full speed for hours on end for as long as you have enough gas and physical endurance to keep them running. It doesn’t have to be carefully alternated between walking and loping to keep from being run into the ground and killed from exhaustion (or, if a mule, from throwing you off and stomping your skull in).
On the other hand, motorcycles don’t give you much in the way of cargo space or towing capacity. You can’t hitch a team of them to a wagon or string a big train of them along behind you for long-distance treks into what’ll very quickly turn into an almost-primeval wilderness.
*You don’t have to shoot your motorcycle after it steps into a groundhog hole.
On the other hand, you can’t eat it after wrapping it around a tree.
*You can keep a motorcycle on your land and you don’t have to devote half your fieldspace to feeding it.
On the other hand, you can’t use it to plow your fields.
*Motorcycles can be maintained (short-term, at least) without rebuilding a supporting industry pretty-much from the ground up.
On the other hand, the industry they do rely on ain’t as conducive to the cottage system that’ll likely emerge in a post-apocalyptic setting. Think Howard Kuntsler’s World Made By Hand here.
(sidenote: do y’all think the Amish survived the apocalypse? I can think of some ways that they might have, and there is a rather prosperous OOA community in Maine.)
These are just a few differences that I can think of; there are plenty of others. I guess it’s okay to imagine a horse as a slow motorcycle for the short term, but even I can see that doing it in a realistic manner is going to be a challenge in terms of all the coding.
