On Equestrian Electricity · 11:34pm Jun 30th, 2017
I posted this elsewhere in a comment discussing the sensicality of the Ponyville hydroelectric power plant ("Hoofer Dam"):
...and thought I'd post it here for y'all, too, seeing as I went ahead and whipped up some headcanon which just happens to be Advancedverse canon too about exactly what that's doing there.
"How do we think all those various magical appliances we see from time to time, from table lamps to floor-standing mixers to industrial pet-hair dryers are powered without having a unicorn right there to power them? That would be just like in the bad old days when only the richest ponies could afford to keep powercorns on standby along with the pegasi on retainer to fluff their cloud beds and make their showers rain hot.
"In the modern age, however, they're powered by the work of Endless Lightning (B. Eng., Cloudsdale Institute of Meteoroturgy) and Copper Coil (M. Sc. [Physics], Royal Canterlot Academy of Natural Philosophy), who in 1722 Y.H. devised a method to create a standing atmospheric electromagnetic field (Tesla-style, for us human readers - see the Tesla towers on the powerhouse?) from which any self-guiding enchanted appliance with an appropriate receiver could draw power, allowing them to be used by anypony sufficiently close to a power transmitter, without the need for their personal energy or a horn to guide it. A clean source of power was quickly discovered in Equestria's many lakes and rivers (after some early experiments with massed powercorns, treadmills, and lightning-bucking), and today everypony can enjoy the luxuries that were once limited to the elite few, and thousands of ponies of all tribes have been freed from the drudgery of serving as little more than living batteries.
"What a marvelous world!"
Makes sense to me, up to and including the Tesla coils.
Agreed. With the combination of appliances and the lack of wires, I assumed that Equestria had a form of broadcast power.
I haven't decided powers the trains. Given that Pegasi live in the skies, I doubt they want to pollute it by having the Friendship Express burn coal.
Ah, broadcast energy transmission, that works nicely. My own headcanon regarding that dam was that it charged up gemstones with magical energy, which could then be used either as "batteries" for enchanted items or as a portable power source that unicorns could tap into when they needed a little extra oomph for their spellcasting.
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Looks like Equestrian trains do burn something, they produce smoke. Not always, though, which one could either discount as artistic oversight or as part of an even more elaborate explanation for what's going on. :)
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I figure that one of the advantages pegasi give Equestria is the ability to treat smoke and other air pollution effectively like sewage: which is to say, something you can capture (with directed air currents and vortices) and channel off somewhere to be treated. Not exactly the most pleasant job in the weather industry, I suppose, but it's honest work.
(If Fillydelphia is the fanonical big center of earth pony industry, its weather patterns are going to be... interesting. I'm now picturing a sort of cloudy, smoky halo (the "Big Smoke Ring") above the city, the super-vortex all the factory smoke gets sucked into and trapped, which in turn passes through a cloud-building at one point where they scrub out all the pollution.)
((If we feel like being referential, the presence of the Big Ring interferes with regular weather patterns enough that the Weather Service has to resort to low-level rain delivery to specific locations, and otherwise it's always sunny in Fillydelphia.))
I haven't come up with a headcanonical answer for what they're burning in the trains. It could be coal - although thinking of the eye-to-future-problems style of governance likely when it's led by immortal alicorns, I suspect they might prefer something more sustainable, and earth ponies can probably grow coppiced wood for energy with unmatched speed and efficiency. Or there's always peat, for that matter, although hydra would be an novel workplace hazard to have to deal with...
Was thinking about this problem from a different point of view earlier. If certain research into variation of microscopic oscilatory lever frequency in a gravity field is correct, and gravity is quantised to 700 Hz energy levels, then anything below 700 Hz cant escape the planet, its effectively trapped within an event horizon because a photon climbing out would red shift to zero?
Now that would be intresting. Power transfer between Earth and Moon by Near Field Communication.
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Good ideas there. Peat is basically very young coal though, and I could imagine earth ponies having the market cornered in producing all forms of coal--it's both a plant and a mineral, depending on when you harvest it.
For locomotive firewood, my vote would be for a very tough tree called Osage Orange, or Bodark. When thoroughly dry, it rivals coal as fuel. It throws a lot of sparks, though.