Thousands of years ago, a large group of ponies found themselves suddenly removed from their homes and relocated in a dangerous and foreign land beneath strange stars. They assumed it one of Discord's evil pranks at first, but quickly realized they missed their time under his rule. Inconsistent and ever-changing, he may have been, but he also offered protection and a bounty of food that this new realm sorely lacked.
Millennia later, ponykind had forgotten their sudden exodus from Equus, and all that remained of that time were myths of a great and benevolent ruler who embodied their ideals of innovation and progress. Their society, while divided, plunged forward into new fields of magic and technology at a startling rate. When an astronomer discovered an abnormality in the orbit of a distant solar system and saw the amount of magic needed to sustain it, the two massive nations controlling Eris began a rapid space-race to find their leader and explore the stars.
This story addresses the events on Eris leading to the launch of the mission to Equus. It's sequel, Beneath Distant Stars, addresses the ponies' arrival in Equestria and the events following.
My attention: You have it. It's an interesting idea.
My admiration: Earned. I like your writing style.
My enthusiasm:
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humm Ok so Discord sends a bunch of ponies to Eris on a whim then gets defeated by Celestia and Luna, stuck on a world with less magic the Erisites(Erisens?) develop more technology and with out Alicorns to unite under remained "tribalist" as 3 nations struggling over limited resources. Makes me think if they get to Equestria they will find a world where technology is much more primitive and TRY to start annexing parts of it only to receive massive magical smack down when it turns out Equestria has magic thousands of times more advanced and powerful than their own. Also the very concept of Alicorns, Ponies that are earth pony, pegasus and unicorn in one will shake the foundations of their way of life.
Heh, am I alone in noticing if the pony nations of Eris where collaborating instead of waiting to steal technology they would get this project done much faster?
Hmmm, very interesting.
Cool! So, what'll they do when they find Discord petrified?
I already want the pegasi to lose.
I'm starting to wish for unicorns to develop A-bombs
I just have a two-word nitpick: Terminal Velocity.
Will the ships have armaments?
How long till it comes out?
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Terminal velocity is the maximum speed an object can reach in air, due to the force of drag balancing the force of gravity. If they remain outside the atmosphere, terminal velocity never comes into play. I had the same concern at first.
That being said... There are other concerns, like the possibility that they mistime a teleport and slam into the planet at relativistic speed. It never became a problem here, but it's conceivable.
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If they do, nopony's said anything!
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The first chapter is already written and ready to publish, but it's not going up until Wednesday. This is partly because I suspect fewer people check this site on Mondays, but also in order to let people following this story get caught up before the sequel goes up. If you're following this story in any way, it ought to give you a notice when the other is published.
Glad you're enjoying it!
Hmmm...
Could it be maybe the earth ponies have been playing the other two against each other....to actually have both space programs advance relatively together???
Definitely looks interesting
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Terminal velocity does not apply in a vacuum.
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heck nope, it would be way slower. Eris has a very weak Harmonic field for that level of collaboration to work out as neatly as we expect ponies to work together.
holy heck this was awesome
favorited super hard!!!!
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For get the mystical aspect I'm talking the practical benefits of cooperation. It really ISN'T just some metaphysical thing. The amount of time and resources to espionage and reverse engineering of stolen tech wastes resources that could better be spent on the actual mission. You don't need to employ spies or mercenaries to steal the tech and you don't need to employ additional researches to figure out how the stolen tech works. Equestrias get practical and mystical benefits from working together, Eris might not enhance magic but the practical benefits are still there. The Eris ponies would get more done and do it better if they worked towards the same goal... just like real life were we humans get more done and do it better when we do.
A good start to what I hope turns into a great story.
This story really is quite interesting, have you tried adding it to certain story groups for more attention?
I am reminded of a certain series in which colony ships sent out in the early days of mankind's diaspora to the stars arrived after a few centuries of flight to find their descendants left behind had sent more modern FTL colony ships on ahead and set up shop to welcome them "home" on their new planet.
I like this. A scientifically advanced pony race? Cool. How they came to be that way, even cooler.
Discord was post-Founders, but I could see how harmony could fail in a high stress survival situation. Or it could ahve been some later split that created the unicorn and prgasus super-powers. Just begs the question, what happened to the earth-ponies?
Also, I assume that Enyo and Belladonna are Mars type moons, making orbital missile bases practical. The moon really isn't, it takes several days to travel there, and while the gravity is lower than Earth's it is still significant, which requires beefier launch systems. Though to have Belladonna rise, Enyo would have to be the inner moon. Making the pretty safe assumption that they're both tidally locked.
If Enyo was the outer moon, Beladonna would be in the same situation as Venus seen from Earth. It would only be visible from the cis-Eris side of Enyo, and sweep back and forth across the sky, alterately transitting and being occulted by Eris as it moves around it's orbit.
6288067 Yes. Assuming that Eris has Earth-like gravity, ~10 m/s^2, and that they were doing their repeated jumps a few hundred kilometres above Eris's surface, where the gravity would be almost the same, it would take them a year to approach lightspeed.
You could speed that up considerably if there were other, larger, bodies in the system. Use one of those, and the time reduces proportional to the increased gravity. Doing it just above the Jovian atmosphere would accelerate you more than twice as fast, and be safer for everyone who's not on the ship.
That's because there's one downside. At the end of each cycle, you have a velocity heading directly towards the object you're falling towards, which will start to approach relativistic velocities after a few months. If your teleport engine fails, your vehicle will continue going and crash into the parent body, and at relatavistic speeds, we're talking an impact of teratons of TNT equivalent.
A thousand ton spacecraft, travelling at near lightspeed, (kinetic energy = 1/2mv^2, v=c, m=1000 tons, == 500,000c^2) will equate to the energy release of 250 tons of antimatter with 250 tons of matter (Energy = mc^2, m=500 tons, == 500,000c^2) which gives 19.52 Teratons. When the Tsar Bomba isn't even a rounding error, then you know you've gotten into a scary place.
There's also ejection at the end of it. Since you're aimed directly at a planet, you need to be able to teleport past it to finally escape. Or timeskip right through it, though that might only work in KSP.
Well that explains that. There was a separate Earth pony nation and it got crushed. Probably failed to tech up fast enough.
Aerobraking. From relativistic velocities...
See my previous comment on the equivalent kinetic energy of a relativistic spacecraft. Best case scenario is that it skims through the atmosphere too quickly for any significant heating and carries on going. Worst case. KABOOOOOOWM!
There are other solutions, a lightsail or magnetic sail, basically a giant charged loop of wire that reacts against the charged particles in space and acts as a drag anchor.
9226232 One of the first examples of that was the short story 'Far Centaurus' by A E Van Vogt. A crew of four use a ship with cryo tech to make a 500 year journey to Alpha Centauri at 1% light speed. When they get there, they find all four planets inhabited by humans who got there centuries ago in faster ships.
If the main OCs in this story and the sequel were voiced, what would they sound like?
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Very much nope on that front, that'll just end up with a very nice looking trail of ionized gas where the spaceship use to be. They could just do the opposite of their acceleration plan, teleport into a vector where the planet's gravity is used to decelerate them, and repeat until they're slow enough to fall into a stable orbit. Would require 2x as much stored magic, but wouldn't get them all killed.