"Hey there, Flare Bear!"
Sunny Flare did not sigh. The breath that escaped her was not audible, ergo it wasn't a sigh. "Lemon Zest. What bout of insanity are you going to subject me to this time?"
"I figured we'd chit the chat about space travel in the modern era." The green-haired pinkskin plopped herself down next to the blue girl with violet locks. "I mean, you are interested in THE FINAL FRONTIEEEEEEER, right?"
"...Lemon, in the past few months I have grown pointed ears and a gem in my forehead, discovered a student of CHS has become a god, learned that a nation-state of colorful talking ponies live on the other side of a statue, been part of what can only be described as a sorceress's army of evil, watched the news as a mystical tyrant came to power, and read a thousand plus articles on how to handle nonhuman sophant rights."
"Yep, our world's been irrevocably changed, all thanks to blatant misuse of magic." Lemon Zest clicked her thick fingernails together. "Thanks for the expo-dump, I'd totally forgotten about all of that!"
"My point," Sunny continued dryly, "is that talking about space travel seems rather... blase at the moment."
"Ah, you're suffering from wonder-drain."
"Wonder-drain."
"Also goes by the names 'cynicism', 'disillusionment', 'seen-it-all syndrome', 'the doldrums'..." Lemon shrugged. "Basically it's the thing where there are so many amazing things going on that you can't get amazed because you've been too amazed before and now you're too tired to be amazed at anything amazing."
"...information overload, then." Sunny Flare poked at her sandwich. "I suppose I can see how that might be a problem."
"Hence why I'm here, to help you get that sense of wonder back. I mean, you are in the drama club, right?" Lemon grinned. "You need to have some fascination, otherwise how can you fascinate?"
"That argument is circular and nonsensical."
"Like a ferris wheel!"
Sunny tried, and failed, to hide her smirk at that. "Alright, I recognize the importance in having a sense of wonder about the world around us. Why space travel, though? It seems kind of distant."
"Except that magical teleportation is a thing."
The blue-skinned girl froze mid-sandwich-bite.
"Uh-huh, thought that would get your attention." Lemon Zest pulled out her phone, swiping through various articles. "See, some of the big-name scientists are trying to research magical teleportation--it's still not quite understood, but it seems to work on an artificial wormhole principle. In theory, you scale up the power enough and you can hit the moon, Ares, the next star system over."
"Mrm--hm mmnt." Sunny swallowed, clearing her throat. "Really now?"
"Yep! Of course, the math kinda precludes that." She flicked to a wall of text and numbers. "See, what we've got here suggests that the max energy a human can generate isn't enough to pull that off."
"What about what happened with... er... at the friendship games?"
"Auntie Abby's little hissy fit?" Lemon shrugged. "Yeah, I should really look into that, talk to godhorse about it, but it's kinda... personal, you know? Like... have you seen how she acts these days?"
"That she's packing and getting ready to go?" Sunny Flare rolled her eyes. "Forgive my rudeness, but after the Friendship Games that's hardly surprising."
"That's... not it." Lemon sighed. "Maybe I just notice more, since she's been coming and going my whole life, but she's... second-guessing herself. She doesn't act immediately. It's like, I was helping her clear out her office, and she pulled out a file and was about to put it back but... she stopped, and she started reading it instead."
"...Now that you mention it, she... hesitates before greeting me." Sunny glanced around. "I'm not sure it's every student, but those of us with top ten GPA... It used to be 'Hello miss Flare' and now it's 'Hello, half second pause, miss Flare.'"
"Really? For me it's Hello half second pause Lemon."
Sunny's stomach coiled, but she forced herself to calm down. "I think it might be because you're family. You get the first name basis. The rest of us, she's... debating how close she should get. She used to ask me about my studies, and now..."
There was a moment of silence.
"...and now?" Lemon prompted.
"It's... nothing. Really. So, space teleportation."
"Question: is your blatant deflection a result of issues that are seriously affecting you or just something you're embarrassed about? Cause I do want to make sure you're not going to jump off the roof or cut yourself or anything."
"They are called personal issues for a reason, I am seeking therapy, and if you ask your aunt about it I will punch you so hard you'll think your period came early."
Lemon grinned. "Ooooo, I like that threat! Creative, impressive, and tailored to the individual. Alright, I'll drop it for now. Let's get back to the magical space teleportation."
"I'm just thinking, if it's a matter of power, maybe they could build an artificial power source to fuel the spell."
"Yeah, that's been brought up, but you have to remember that everyone's still figuring out what magic actually is. Doesn't help that we have two basic forms of magic."
Sunny blinked. "Two? I would have thought, with the various aspects--"
"No no no. Those are aspects that let us use Equestrian magic, the magic that was leaking in from the other universe." Lemon clicked her fingers together again. "It runs on principles of harmony-based resonance, and it's been studied by our godhorse's civilization since long before they had a recorded civilization. But there's also the magic that, uh, already existed in our universe."
"Already existed?"
"Yeah, uh..." Lemon Zest blushed. "Apparently it's how we figured out icons."
"Oh--Ooooooh." Sunny Flare coughed. "Yeah, I can see how a religious taboo would make research a touch... difficult."
"It's not just that. Thing is, since Equestrian magic is harmony-based it's easy to access. But with Earth magic... it's not nearly so easy." Lemon tapped her phone. "From what I understand, Earth magic is more flexible and powerful then Equestrian magic, but it also pushes back. It's like Equestrian magic asks both caster and spell what they want and makes a decent compromise, while Earth magic is stubborn and won't act without a good enough bribe, and when it does it doesn't give a shit whose feelings are trampled."
"You're acting like magic's alive."
Lemon gave her a look. "Even if you don't worship her, I'd have thought you would follow Sunset's magical safety vlog."
"...Never really found the time."
"Oh. Long story short, yes, magic is alive."
"Huh. Like the Force from Star Wars?"
"You know, funny you should mention that, the first vlog Sunset did had her pull out a laser sword...."
"And the Bacon God is dating her. Or her avatar or something. Been a while since I watched that one."
Definitely looking forward to seeing where you go with this, because I haven't the foggiest idea as is.
Nice description!
Asking spells what they want? Are spells alive too?? We really don't know much about the magic system beyond the surface, like who can do what and stuff...
... IIRC, we haven't seen anyone use pure Earth magic, have we?
8122324
What is Twilight's connection with Earth Magic, actually? *shrugs*
Huh, I guess Mars is called Ares in their universe. Are all the planets switched from Roman to Greek?
Hermes
Aphrodite
Earth (Terra maybe? Earth is middle English rather than Roman or Greek)
Ares
Zeus
Chronos
Caelus (assuming the only Greek planet becomes roman in this universe)
Poseidon
Dis Pater (not considered a planet anymore but was once).
As for the power scaling, well I don't know how far magical teleportation can go but even when Twilight was supercharged with Alicorn power at best she seemed to be able to teleport over continental distances, say 2-3000 miles. You'd need about 100x the power to get to the moon, between 15000x and 75000x as much power to get to Mars and 26,000,000,000,000x as much power to get to the next solar system over... so yeah, you need a lot of power.
"... and it's favored avatar had the top GPA here until she transferred to CHS."
"..."
8122434
I find myself reminded of the solar system from Alien Legacy all of the sudden...
8122434
That depends on whether power consumption scales linearly with distance, which isn't necessarily the case if we're talking space warps and such. Is it 3,000 times easier for Twilight to teleport one mile than 3,000 miles, and 3,000,000 times easier for her to teleport five feet?
(Heck, that's not true about _normal_ space travel: since objects in space just keep going sans friction, as long as you reach escape velocity, it costs no more energy to get to Alpha Centauri than it does to Pluto - it just takes a wee bit longer. )
8122434 Eh, even if you can't simply teleport to "Mars" being able to teleport to the moon or an orbital base is a huge advantage when it comes to space travel and will help make exploring/colonizeing the solar system much, much easier. After that your civilization can concentrate on solving interstellar travel.
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Rockets leaving Earth's atmosphere never hit escape velocity, you could even leave Earth at speeds slower then a metre a year if you wanted, you just need the constant thrust working upwards.
8122434 Dis Pater? Why not just, you know, Hades?
8124273
Interestingly Hades is also Greek. Hades was the older of the two names for the same god and eventually became the name of the underworld rather than the god that ruled there.
8122434
Heck, it would be gamechanging enough just to skip all the atmosphere shenanigans. Teleporting to a stable orbit shaves all the crap you need to launch that far out off your ships.
8124054
Well, yes, but continuous thrust _does_ require constant energy expenditure. [1] And starting from a planetary surface requires enough impulse to get your ass off the ground in the first place.
[1] Are we assuming magical energy source here? Because we seem to be assuming magical energy source.
Oh oh, if you teleport to another planet you have to consider that apparently you keep your velocity and/or impulse (my physics brain just shut down). Either way earth travels with an average of 107208 km/h (66615 mph) adding in rotational speed of the planet (depending on your relative position to the equator and to the sun that varies) that is quite an impulse you got there. On the other side you have the speed of mars 86868 km/h (53977 mph). Depending on the directions of those, you'd launch youself into the not-air, scrape yourself over the surface or just go splat on the ground. So that's something that has to be taken into account. UNLESS the magic adjusts your relative speed on the start-planet to the one on the target-planet. That would be quite an easy fix. Just food for thought.
Other than that, I kinda wanna see what is going to happen to'/with Cinch after the disaster at the friendship games.
Also let the shipping commence.
One of these things is not like the others.
8122434
I'd say the initial biggest question is whether you've still paying inverse-squared costs to project power over distance to get to the target - and probably not if teleportation works on a "wormhole" effect. In fact, it's probably better than linear over distance in that case, since the basic (non-scientific, fiction-style) concept is that straight lines aren't and the reason we can't outrun light isn't so much that we can't shove hard enough against the ground as that none of our muscles are oriented to give us leverage in the right direction, so we have to take the same long way around light does. (This may be the stupidest way I've described the idea that distance and time aren't actually different things you can label graph paper axes with, but we're likely writing in the right universe for the stupidest explanations to be stone cold fact, no?) Or similarity and contagion, based on the concept that both ends of the teleportation and everything there were the same place and stuff at some point in the universe's past and still are in some sense, though that's more likely to be a way teleportation works in Equestria than in Earth.
The next fun question for space travel is if you can create paired portals whose power cost doesn't increase much with distance between them - if you've got that you don't absolutely need teleportation. You can build a regular rocket which doesn't need to lug around its own fuel (which also allows for improvements in the reaction chamber and thus even more fuel efficiency that you'd get just from negating that mass), which can be human-controlled in real-time from home, and which can deploy new destination portals anywhere that looks worth visiting. So even if you assume there are precision problems (coupled with the huge problem that due to relying on light-speed astronomical information we're guessing a bit as to what's really where right now if we look out far enough), as long as most of space is empty enough to target between teleportations in and portal-built ships we could have access to most of the known universe pretty quickly.
So the holy icons of Harmonists which have a clear Equestrian equivalent are not related to Harmony-based Equestrian magic? Weird. If anything, I'd expect it to be considered evidence of pre-existing Earth-Equestria connection. Did Harmonism exist before the portal was first opened?
For that matter, cutie marks probably came up somewhere in Sunset's vlogs; what do Harmonists think of them and of Equestria in general?
Also, some of the readers! :V
Um, wouldn't it actually be a magnetically (magically) contained blob of searingly hot plasma? Because lasers.. don't really have mass... then again Shimmy is Goddess Pony.. so screw the rules! uhhh shutting up now."
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Myself, I feel that any logical explanation of teleporting anywhere would involve the same amount of quantum retrocausality that allows hawking radiation--that is, you open a wormhole by projecting energy into the opening, and you deliver the energy there through the wormhole after it's formed. The trick, of course, would be getting a wormhole to anywhere in particular.