Clap if you believe in Changeling Space Programs · 4:29am May 10th, 2018
First, many of you may be aware I’m following The Maretian, a wonderful crossover between The Martian book and Kris Overstreet’s Changeling Space Program. Both of these are well worth the reading, (I’ll admit to being a technogeek) but just in the last chapter of The Maretian, the fiend gave us a terrible cliffhanger.
Oh, yeah. I know I do that too. A lot.
Anyway, in The Maretian, there are five Equestrians stranded on Mars with one Mark Watney. They have a day-by-day fight for survival to grow enough food to survive and still manage to patch together the wrecked Equestrian spaceship. They’ve survived airlock blowouts (plural), radioactive thermal generators, and the challenge of having Starlight Glimmer in a low-magic area where she is constantly knocking herself out trying to cast spells. We’ve gotten comfortable with the characters, there’s a communication channel back to Earth and Equestria, and although it’s stressful, it seems that—
The uppermost of the three engines, complete with the smaller-than-normal bells scavenged from the MAV landing stage, slid out of its cradle in the tail assembly, surrounded by a violet glow. Steadily, effortlessly, it floated in the air well above the dusty Martian ground towards the carefully prepared test cradle, where Mark and Fireball stood ready to guide the motor down into the cradle and clamp it in securely.
And then, at that moment, the battery terminal snapped off under Starlight’s hoof. The indicators on the battery winked out. Starlight grunted softly, and then her magic winked out and she slumped to the ground.
Roughly one and a half tons of irreplaceable equipment in motion began to fall. Directly below it and in front of it, Mark stared up at it, moving slowly- too slowly- trying to get out of its way.
And then fresh magic surrounded the motor, a green balefire that wrenched the falling engine away from Mark, twisting it on its side, and dropping it, a little roughly, a couple of ponylengths to the side of the cradle.
Spitfire blinked. The whole sequence of events, from the failure of the battery to the hard landing of the rocket motor, might have taken about three seconds- less than that. But it had seemed-
Something else fell. Martian dust billowed up around an orange and white object next to the tail of Amicitas.“Mare down!”
“Dragonfly!”
Now we are faced with a changeling who has given every scrap of her energy to save Mark, hanging near death in the Martian Hab unit with the rest of her fellow astronauts/astromares surrounding her, trying to keep her alive.
Now think of this in terms of human nature. There are seven billion (or so) humans on the planet. Given modern electronic communication, nearly every one of them could find out about this disaster at the same time, and also given the same communication, it is inevitable that the electronic ‘Get Well Soon’ emails will soon flood into NASA.
What would they look like? I mean the ones from the kids.
Now, I was going to urge people to email their creations to Kris, but I didn’t want to flood him, so go ahead and post those puppies down below and I'll link it to him.
Here, I’ll start:
Hodegman Elementary School, VA
Dear Miss Bug Lady,
All of our class heard about you today in school. Our teacher says we could write you a letter and maybe NSA will send it to you and you will feel better. She says you eat hugs and I cant put a hug in my letter so you will have to just get words insted. HUG!!!!! There.
Julie Lichfield, Fourth gradeDear Dragonfly lady.
I heard you got hurt on mars and need love. Isnt that icky?
Harold Tanner, Third gradeDear Dragonfly bug-pony,
My mama says you are not real but just made up by govenmnt to get more money but I think you are real and if you need love you could jsut kiss the nice man there with you and get lots of love. You can wash after to get the icky off. Use soap.
Maurice Aaron, Third grade
Man I've been sitting on starting on these two stories for a while and you now have me ready to go full "Summer Wars"...
Dear bug-pony,
Do you poop? My friend says you don't, but I think you do! He also says that you're going to die, so he's a stupidhead. You eat love and cuddles and that's a bit weird, but maybe it's like plants? And you do photosynesthesia? So I'm drawing a picture of us hugging so that the love rays hits your holes? I really, really think you're cool, so the picture can be like a sun! Make lots and lots of sugar from the love rays!
Bao Leong, First Grade
PS: If you do poop, can you send me some? It's for my poo collection. Don't tell mommy, but I've been building it in the basement.
I've been reading those for a while. they do a pretty good job of keeping you interested
4857076
Go for it... Wait, what part of Summer Wars?
:clap:
Dear Dragonfly,
Ponies aren't very cool, but bugs are super cool! You're a bug pony, but I think you're more bug than pony which means you're really cool too. Thank you for saving the astronaut. Get better soon!
Jeremy Stein, Fourth grade.
Dear Dragonfly,
I wanted to put an image of a hug in the email but Ms. Lewis says you're internet isnt good enough for it which stinks. So Im thinking really happy loving thoughts when I send this and I hope its enough.
Stevie Pojero, fourth grade
4857123 Remember that part at the end when the world chips in.
I haven't read The Maretian because I thought the intersteller/martian movies were kind of lame IMO.
Although, given how well the main character handled the tragedy of The Martian incident it would be terrible if Interstellar was the actual sequel to it. And, I only think of them as bookend readers/watchers in the same sense Anthem (Rand) should be followed up by the Invisible Man (Elisson) because the themes can easily bleed into one another.
Ok, before the letter...
If magic (and thus love) is energy, then we can calculate the effective amount of love the Dragonfly will receive. To do this I am going to make some assumptions.
1) While we have yet to see a Changeling take love from a physical object, I will assume love acts like light. Thus it can travel through a Vacuum to its intended target yet has some effective dispersion effects. (Sadly we cannot make a love laser.)
2) The Earth and all its inhabitants can be considered a single ball of love, with an absolute magnitude of love equal to the number of children (1.9 billion). The reason for this is the love of a child is far more innocent and pure and thus clearly more like pony love, meanwhile while their will be some children that don't care, the number of adults that do should make up the balance.
3) The distance between Mars and earth at this point is 54.6 million km, which is its average distance.
So reverse the formula that works out absolute luminosity of a star from its apparent luminosity and plug the numbers in and we get...
Well effectively 1.9 billion still. The fact is the Earth and Mars are VERY close. So the question is....the love of every child on Earth flying through space at Dragonfly...
Is that equal to a single Shining Armor? Romantic love and and the innocent love of, "OMG this thing is adorable and strange and it saved a human and is dying now." are very different. Still...its possible that in this moment, Dragonfly is going to receive more love then the Queen ever has.
Now a letter.
*Reads the new chapter*
Well fuck.
Guys, I don't think operation "Letter Love" is going to work anymore.
God damn it, this is bad.
Bug Bug Come to Earth and Get those Hugs!
4857522 Them alone on the alien planet with a pod and no shotgun. (sorry, had to say it)
I beg to differ. If you want an in-depth discussion of why, I posted a number of long comments on the last few chapters of CSP about why he was making terrible decisions, and I decided not to read The Maretian as a result of the stupidity that destroyed CSP.
4857762 Well, I'm enjoying them both greatly.
4857762
wait, CSP updated?!?!
4857809
I was talking about the chapters with the stupidity around Pinkie and Luna. I don't know if there's a more recent chapter because I stopped tracking it after I heard about his moronic plans for including that horrible movie from Admiral Tigerclaw.
4857809 Well, if you consider The Maretian an update. He's doing it daily. Amazing work.
4857843
4857849
ah, that bit.
and that other bit.
i grant you it ruffled my feathers something fierce, but last i checked he toned down the Pinkie problem-solver-sue and Luna debacle to more reasonable levels afterwards. He should not have done it in the first place, but i recognize that he wrote himself into a corner when characterizing his universe's equestria and found it stomachable after he rewrote and retconned a few things.
I also thought the movie inclusion got sidelined, unless i am conflating it with something else?
My personal biggest gripe, bigger than those two incident imho, is how Kris has completely flubbed any form of consistency regarding his idea for equestria's cosmology.
4858001
He hasn't written the chapter with the movie yet. That's coming next chapter. I just know what's going to happen because he talked with Admiral Tigerclaw (who you probably know for Arrow 18) about it when he was in the area for a con so I naturally learned all about it immediately afterwards.
Beyond that, yeah. His cosmology is a mess and a huge part of the problems with the recent chapters has been him trying to retcon things in with no planning and making a bigger mess in the process. For example, the mountain of stupidity with Luna was thrown in solely to add Minmus into the story because the KSP devs decided to add another intermediate objective between the existing moon and another planet for gameplay purposes.
Considering I have actually worked real rocket science for fun (on paper, not in KSP), the fact that he managed to turn me off to the story with bad writing really says a lot about the quality of his decision making.
4858455 And yet, this is a world where alicorns raise the sun and moon, and in the comics they once lassoed the moon and walked to it by walking up the rope.
4858467
...And that inability to maintain continuity is a big part of the reason I gave up on the show years ago.
4858455
The Maretian seems a bit more serious though. If nothing else, he has to use our cosmology.